Freshwater(11)

Blood and belief. This is how the second madness began.





Chapter Five


Can you pray into your own ear?




We

After she named us in that second birth, we felt even closer to the Ada. This is not normal for beings like us; our brothersisters tend to have little or no affiliation to the bodies they pass through. The Ada should have been nothing more than a pawn, a construct of bone and blood and muscle, a weapon against her mother. But we had a loyalty to her, our little container. If we had been asked to take a piece of chalk and draw where she stops and where we start, it would have been hard. We did not know then how much of a betrayal this was to our brothersisters.

Our third birth happened in Virginia, after the Ada had moved to America. There was a song that followed us there, into the mountains, into the next split. It started in Sweden, and then it was flattened into a CD and bought in Germany, packed into the cool of a suitcase and carried into the humidity of Nigeria. Lisa unpacked it there and slid it into a CD player in her house in Aba, next door to her father’s hospital where A?uli had been operated on. Lisa and the Ada listened to the song over and over again. The singer was a girl called Emilia and her voice went through the air of Lisa’s room like a wing. When the Ada moved, she brought the song in a suitcase and she played it out loud in Virginia.

In another world, our third birth would have happened in Louisiana, among those swampy spirits, in the mouth of an alligator. There was a school there that gave the Ada a full scholarship, but Saachi diverted us from that path, swerving to avoid a cemetery, and she sent the Ada to Virginia instead. It was a smaller school, it would be quieter, and she thought the girl would be safer there. When she was making these choices, Saachi had tried to sit down with Saul in their dining room, under the painting of a grief-eyed christ, to plan the future of their children, which programs they would go to, which countries they would be lost to. But Saul had turned his back a long time ago—we could have told Saachi that.

“Why are you not interested in making college plans for them?” Saachi asked, hurt and frustration seeping out of the cracks in her voice. She wanted to include Saul; she was tired, ripped from her family, and she wanted him to care, to help. But Saul was an unforgiving man.

“What for?” he said. “I don’t have the money.” It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn’t even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.

Saachi had been in Saudi for seven years by then—seven years of leaving her children, seven years alone. In all that time, Saul had never called her. Saachi would watch as the other women she worked with picked up their phones and broke into smiles at their husbands’ voices, then she would leave quietly and cry to herself in her bedroom, before picking up the phone to call back home because she had not forgotten her children were still there, sacrificed and sad. She made their university plans alone, moving Chima to Malaysia to stay with her family there, then returning two years later to collect the Ada. They traveled to America together, stopping over in Addis Ababa. The Ada was excited because she knew Saachi always flew through Ethiopia—it was part of the human mother’s other life, where she ate grapes reclining on embroidered cushions, acid-washed denim hidden under her abaya by yards of black cloth. When Saachi and the Ada flew through Addis, however, they spent only a few hours in the airport and it meant nothing, it felt like nothing. We were not surprised—many things are like this.

The Ada went to Virginia, to the slopes of grass and the marrow-red buildings of the school, heavy doors and creaking heaters throughout. It was winter when we arrived with Saachi and our body. There is a photograph of them, of Saachi and the Ada standing on a gentle incline with a church settled behind them and the ground suffocated in snow. Saachi’s arms are lost in a black leather jacket and an oatmeal turtleneck wraps her neck like a large fist. Her hand is resting on the Ada’s shoulder and they are both tightening their eyes against the sun. The Ada’s legs stretch out from underneath an oversized fleece, dull mint green slinking over her wrists, and her hair is sticking out in tufts from under her woolen hat.

She is only sixteen, and the way she smiles, you can’t tell we’re in her, that we’re puzzled by the snow and the cold and the damp roaring ocean between us and the red mud we came from, the drifts of white sand, that one palm tree that feels generations old, the one that wavers on the side of the road when you drive down from Ubakala Junction, before you pass all the seven villages, like sliding down the gullet of our mother, past the screaming gates of her teeth. It’s not the first time we’ve been away, but it’s the first time we don’t know when we’re coming back. We had no idea then that the song had followed us.


It was later, years later, when everything had changed, or before or right around, that the Ada lay in a narrow dorm bed in Hodges Hall next to a boy from Denmark and they both looked up at the ceiling. It was springtime and the room was quiet as the boy sang Emilia’s song into the silence, the first two lines of the chorus. I’m a big big girl in a big big world. The Ada didn’t pause, not a beat, and she sang the next two lines softly. It’s not a big big thing if you leeeaave me. The boy sat up on his elbow, pleasantly surprised that she knew the song, asking her how, when, where. The Ada smiled at his delight and told him about Lisa’s house and the pop CD from Germany, and yes, now we recall, this was before it all went rotten. It was only later, much later, that we discovered the staggering breadth of things this boy would do to the Ada. The first few weeks of America were cold and the snow fell thickly, like it was being shoveled out of the sky. It was the Ada’s first winter and she made a snow angel because that’s what she’d waited for, to lie with her arms flung and her legs wide, to flap and fly until sainthood spread beneath her. Saachi stayed for two weeks before she flew to see Chima, before returning to Saudi, again with a stopover in Addis, leaving the Ada more alone than she had ever been.