What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(11)

Then my aunt resumed her tirade, and I returned to watch. “Don’t let me break this window, Chi-Chi. If I break this window, next thing I will break you, do you hear me?”

Chinyere must have believed the threat, because she finally shut off the engine and opened the door. As soon as she did, Auntie Ugo was on her. She held my cousin by a twist at the shoulder of her dress while her free hand went to work. Chinyere absorbed it all, not one finger raised in defense. I pulled away from the window once more. This wasn’t a memory I wanted.

The boy was awake again. When he caught me looking at him, he held up his arms, a whine blooming in his throat. The front door slammed and we both jumped. I soothed him before whimper turned to full cry. That’s how Chinyere found me, sitting on her bed, her son nestled in my lap.

We were both still in our party clothes, but her dress was torn at the collar. Her makeup was streaked and her tears had irrigated most of it to her neck. She looked like she’d been crying since she left the fund-raiser. I couldn’t tell how much of her face’s puffiness was due to the tears and how much to her mother’s open palm.

The boy had begun to bounce when he saw her, twisting to get off my lap. I tried to hold on to him, as Chinyere appeared in no shape to deal with a child.

“Leave him,” she said, and the boy waddled over to her. He seemed content to just grip her leg.

“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequate as the words felt.

She neither accepted nor rejected the apology but moved to sit by me, pulling the boy onto her lap. He tried to mush our heads together. Chinyere settled for leaning her head on my shoulder, stiff at first, then relaxing into it. I curled my arm around her. When I felt her tears on my neck, I tightened my grip. The boy touched her face and babbled comfort, the last happy sound we would hear for a while.





LIGHT




When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.

Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda Layout. The girl’s mother is in America reading for a master’s in business administration. She has been there for almost three years, in which her eleven-year-old bud of a girl has bloomed. Enebeli and the girl have survived much in her absence, including a stampede at the market that separated them for hours, shoppers fleeing a commotion that turned out to be two warring market women who’d had just about enough of each other’s tomatoes. They survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who could take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, where she proved to be as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.

Three long years have passed. Now the girl is fourteen and there is a boy and he is why Enebeli is currently seated on a narrow bench meant for children, in what passes for the lobby of the headmaster’s office, a narrow hall painted a blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers, but let’s be serious. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever cuts the boy’s hair often misses a spot, so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused about the girl’s attention as everyone else.

The headmaster calls Enebeli in and hands him the note. This one reads, “Buki, I love you. I will give you many sons,” and it takes everything Enebeli has not to guffaw. Where does the girl get all this? Not from her mother, whose personality and humor are of a quieter sort, and not from him, who would be perfectly content sitting by a river, watching the water swirl by. He promises to chastise the girl, assures the headmaster that it will not happen again. It happens two more times before the girl learns to pass notes better. And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.

The girl’s mother attempts to correct the girl, but much is lost in transmission over the wires, and her long absence has diluted much of the influence a mother should have. It is one of the things Enebeli and his wife disagree on, this training up of the girl, and it has widened the schism between them.

The first month wife and mother had gone to the States, the family called and spoke to each other several times a day. The mother and girl would have their time, full of tears and I miss yous, and the husband and wife would have their time, full of tears and I miss yous as well, but full of other things too, like my body misses you and all I need is thirty minutes max and when are you coming home.

She’d returned the first long holiday, Christmas. Enebeli memorized her scent and the feel of her hair. He’d often find himself staring at her. They slept very little, making up for lost time. When her return to the States was fraught with delays and visa issues, they made their first big mistake, deciding that she should not risk traveling back to Nigeria again for the duration of her studies. There was some noise made about how the girl should accompany her mother—she had barely left her side the whole visit—but Enebeli vetoed it and his wife relented. They knew that of the two of them, she might be able to soldier on without her daughter, but Enebeli would shrivel like a parched plant.