Freshwater(23)

We should have saved her for a god.





Chapter Nine


Mgbe nnukwu mmanw? p?ta, obele mmanw? na-agba ?s?.




Ada

I don’t even have the mouth to tell this story. I’m so tired most of the time. Besides, whatever they will say will be the truest version of it, since they are the truest version of me. It’s a strange thing to say, I know, considering that they made me mad. But I am not entirely opposed to madness, not when it comes with this kind of clarity. The world in my head has been far more real than the one outside—maybe that’s the exact definition of madness, come to think of it. It’s all a secret I’ve had to keep, but no longer, not since you’re reading this. And it should all make sense; I didn’t want to be alone, so I chose them. In many ways, you see, I am not even real.

When they speak so contemptuously of humans, I’m never sure if they mean me as well. Sometimes I wonder if there even is a me without them. They talk about Ewan, the man I married, as if he was nothing, because he was only flesh. But I loved him and that made him more than human to me. Love is transformative in that way. Like small gods, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really believe. So in loving Ewan, he somehow became a god. I don’t mean that in a good way—he made me suffer but I still cast idols in his name, as people have done for their gods for millennia. It didn’t end there. When the years accumulated and exposed Ewan’s cracks, I covered them in gold and bronze. That’s what you do for the idols you make. But I loved him, I really did, and he loved me, and that was the danger—is there any story of a human loving a god that ends well? I was so busy pretending I was normal back then, I didn’t know enough to think of that. So maybe he made me suffer, but how much can flesh really hurt spirit? Who do you think will be bruised more in the end?

You see, you’ve gone and caught me. I’m talking as if I’m them. It’s all right. In many ways, I am not even real. I am not even here.





Chapter Ten


Do you feel real when he touches you or do you still feel dead?




As?ghara

I wasn’t born when Ada met Ewan, but I can tell the story anyway. And I’m even glad I wasn’t there. It’s good that Ada had that for herself, before the rest of us got to her.

Like me and Soren, Ewan happened in Virginia. It was winter and there was a party at the tennis house, bodies pressing in a crush downstairs and music thudding against the plaster of the walls. Ada had gone upstairs to one of the bedrooms, where the noise faded away into strains of reggae and blue light filtering through a computer screen. Ewan was sitting on the bed with his back to the wall, but she had no idea who he was; she’d never seen or noticed him before that night. A friend introduced them and Ewan was easy, charming, comfortable. Soon Ada was sitting next to him, both of them chatting as people came in and out of the room, smoke softening the air around them. Ewan was Irish, green-eyed, the star of the tennis team. When they tentatively held hands, Ada smiled nervously. She was only eighteen and she was still sweet.

“My mother thinks my palms are rough,” she said. Ada didn’t feel delicate—she never had. At fourteen, she couldn’t fit into dresses Saachi wore when she was twenty-five.

Ewan ran his thumb over her life line. “No,” he said, looking at her as if she was wedding crystal. “They’re very soft.”

Ada blushed. She stayed with him until the friends she came with were ready to leave. The next day was a Saturday and, as usual, everyone ended up at Gilligan’s. Ada kept looking around for Ewan as the night wore in and around, but he didn’t show up and her heart sank. It began to climb again, cautiously, when she ran into one of his roommates as the club was closing out, and, giddy with luck, caught a ride back to the tennis house. She hung out with them upstairs, trying to seem casual when she was really waiting and hoping. Finally, Ewan wandered into the room and smiled to see her.

“I had a feeling it was you,” he said, and took her down to his room, where she taught him to play cards with Maxwell playing in the background. It was four in the morning, but Ada had gotten what she wanted, to see him. She always got what she wanted, even before I showed up. There was a framed photograph of a girl in a graduation gown on his dresser, but Ada didn’t ask any questions. She knew enough to avoid certain answers, and the moment with Ewan was too significant to disturb with whatever his actual life held. All that mattered was that he made her laugh and that there was so much peace with him, she could almost see it in the air. When he leaned in to kiss her, she tasted sharp smoke in his flesh and she could see the starkness of his skin against hers. It was her first time kissing a white person, and briefly, she wondered why he didn’t have any lips. He didn’t seem real, from the thick richness of his voice and the weight of his rolled consonants to the things about his life that sounded as if they were pulled from the Frank McCourt memoirs she’d read as a child. He felt like an escape, so Ada spent the night wrapped up and tucked in his arms while he played Al Green to her. We’re dying today, she thought. I could do this for almost forever.

She went back to her dorm room in the morning. It was finals week, so she continued studying, and in the afternoon, she ran into Ewan in the library. He leaned out of his carrel to share his earphones with her.