What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(15)

I was in the living room, waiting till it was time to pick up Udoma from the airport. She’d spent two summer months with my aunt, whom I disliked for her utter disinclination to put up with my bullshit. It was close to time for me to leave and I just kept flipping through TV channels till I fell asleep.

I woke to my mother’s yelling. “You mean you are still here? I get a call from the airport police because they think your sister is abandoned, and you are here? I thought something happened to you!”

Her urgency chased away the grogginess and I was suddenly alert and apologetic. A quick glance showed that I was almost four hours late and panic flowered in my stomach. I knew my mother was beyond common fury because she tossed her Bible on the couch like it was a dime-store novel. She shoved her phone in my face, the one she turned silent every Wednesday night so that she didn’t get distracted at Bible study, and there were almost thirty messages. I had violated her cardinal immigrant rule: Live quietly and above the law.

“Every time, Uche, every time I ask you to do a simple thing you cannot do it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry, you’re sorry. Always sorry. No.” She cut my response off at the knees. “What you are is disappointing. You are so disappointing. You are disappointing.” The last iteration was said not with calcifying anger but an abrupt sadness that underscored the truth of it. In that timbre resonated my every fuckup. Every tantrum I’d pulled, every item I’d stolen, every time she must have cringed at having to introduce me as her daughter.

I ran out to the patio and slammed the door so hard it cracked, the sound of splintering glass taking the edge off my hurt. My mother started up again, shouting as she grabbed her keys and went to pick up Udoma.

I never told my father about our last exchanged words, nor Udoma. Not even the therapist at that place who dug and dug because he knew I kept something from him. The secret of it settled a cloak of guilt on me I will wear for the rest of my life.

Now, when no frantic knocks sound, I begin to feel the sheepishness of a child who has hidden whom no one cares to find. I emerge to see my father where I left him, oblivious to the missing photograph. Someone has put a blanket on him. The clang of kissing pots comes from the kitchen and I know who is there. She glances up at me when I enter but returns to the task at hand, a bouquet of ingredients to turn into soup.

“Why won’t you let yourself enjoy this?” my mother says, and it echoes Udoma’s Why can’t you let me have this so closely I suspect a conspiracy. When I say nothing, she turns to me, naked hen in hand, and asks a question whose answer has thorned my side.

“Nnwam, what do you want from me?”

I want you to boil the chicken with onions and salt. I want you to melt the palm oil on medium heat and sizzle ogbono till it dissolves. I want you to cough when the pepper tickles your throat. I want you to sprinkle in crayfish so tiny I believed, at age four, they’d been harvested half-formed from their mother’s womb. I want you to watch the ogbono thicken the water and add the stockfish and the okra and the spinach and the boiled meat and the salt you never put enough of and call us when it’s ready and say grace and be gracious and forgive me.

The answer I give: the lopsided shrug I manage when I can’t find words.

She turns back to chopping and I leave when the onion gets to her eyes. When I enter my room, I try to conjure happier memories, but all that comes to mind is five minutes ago and the last time we spoke. I crawl into my old bed, still half covered in items I promised to sort, and hug a skein of yarn to my chest, hoping for the temporary erasure of sleep.

—

She is gone in the morning. The kitchen holds her remains, a turned-over pot in the dish rack and the scent of okra. I find my father on the couch, showered and dressed. His eyes are red and swollen, but he is smiling. Udoma sleeps on the settee close by. They must have spent the night talking.

My father checks the slot on his phone case and sighs, like he never expected the picture to still be there. The picture. It should be in the pocket I frantically pat, then turn inside out. I run to my room and check the bed, tossing aside wool and books and purses long out of style. When I can’t find it, I tear the sheets off, sending everything to the floor. Then I see the photograph, almost unrecognizable for the crumpled state it’s in. I try to smooth it out, but it’s almost torn in two, my mother’s face split open in a paper imitation of the accident’s aftermath. I unravel to those many years ago, to Alabama, and only now can I utter the words that have haunted me.

“I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.”





WINDFALLS




The first time you fell, you were six. Before then, you were too young to fall and had to be dropped, pushed, made to slip for the sake of authenticity. You learned to fall out of self-preservation as your mother pushed too hard, dropped from too high a height. You have been living off these falls for years, sometimes hers, but mostly yours. A sobbing child garners more sympathy than a pretty but aging mother of one.

There is a science to it, falling. One can’t just trip over one’s own foot, land on one’s face, and expect a payoff. First, find (or create) a puddle of some sort. Pierce one or two shrink-wrapped containers of chicken and discreetly allow the draining fluid to pool on the floor. When the fall begins, think of it as a dance: right leg up (two, three, four), left leg buckle (two, three, four), land askew, and await the attention of an audience. Cry silent tears at first that build to anguished wails as all efforts to remain stoic come to naught. Have one’s child cry along for effect, or better yet, drop her during the fall, let her slip off the hip. As an added bonus, her injuries will be real.