Freshwater(40)

It was only a matter of time after that. Ewan wanted what any man in love would: a wife who could withstand tenderness, who didn’t have the core of her locked away inside a dark ocean. He wanted a soft moon in his hands and he got a scalding sun. Ada didn’t have a choice—she would have given him everything if she could, just to make him happy. He had stopped drinking for her, stopped smoking, stopped the drugs, everything. But I had made her a promise and we were both trapped inside it, doomed to play our roles without release. It broke her heart and I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain, so I took over and I took her away, because their marriage was burning and I was trying to protect her. It took Ada and I years to realize that I fucked it up, that keeping her walled off from Ewan killed any chance they had at making it out together. By the time Ewan was begging her, she was long gone and I refused him. But honestly speaking, even if she and Ewan had fought more, they probably still would’ve lost. The only thing that could’ve saved them was if I had never existed, if Ada was not divided up the way that she was, if she had been able to control me. We can stand here and list impossible things all day long.

By the time Ewan moved out of their apartment, he was drinking again, smoking packs of cigarettes, and snorting coke in small bathrooms in the West Village. He dropped out of school, leaving Saachi with a huge loan she’d cosigned for him, and then he fled the country. That was when I knew I had been right, that he had been weak the whole time, that it was a good thing Ada couldn’t give herself to him, because he would have ruined her; he was nothing more than a fucking useless human.

It was time for me to come back and make it right. I had let Ada have her time in the sun. She had known love, she had tasted happiness, and it had gone bad. That was fine, that was life, abi? No wahala. But I still carried a larger truth, a better truth. It had been good to be flesh. It would be better to go home.





Chapter Fifteen


‘Nwa anw?na, nwa anw?na’: nwa nw?? ka any? mara chi agagh? efo.




Ada

My mother does not sleep at night.

She worries. This is the way of things when cold gods give you a child.

I sleep like swollen opium.



She worries. This is the way of things.

I went mad so young, you see.

Sleeping like swollen opium,

screaming on my better days.



I went mad too young, you see,

they couldn’t wait to ride me.

I only scream on my better days, crippled in meat and hot skin.



They couldn’t wait to ride me, to drink from my terrible depths.

Crippled in meat and hot skin,

I tried to die from this body.



I drank from my terrible depths, my mother cannot keep me safe.

I tried to fly from this body,

now clawed shadows follow her.



They slaver at the foot of her bed.

When cold gods give you their child, make sure you keep her alive.

My mother does not sleep at night.





Chapter Sixteen


Your graveyard looks like a festival.




As?ghara

After Ewan left, I was tired, so I let Saint Vincent step to the front a little more. He dressed Ada in skinny jeans from Uniqlo, thick cotton T-shirts, and a binder—a tight black vest that flattened our chest into a soft mound of almost nothing. Saachi was frantic.

“You’re in a dark place,” she said over the phone. “You’re unstable.”

Ada laughed and ignored her. Saint Vincent went to clubs with satin-padded walls and red velvet curtains, where he kissed women with Ada’s mouth. I calculated that if one tablet of the cyclobenzaprine prescribed for Ada’s sciatica could knock her out for thirteen hours, then a whole bottle of them would easily take her home. Things started to tumble with an alarming speed. Ada checked herself into a psychiatric ward and I made her check out the next day. Chima flew into New York.

It was strange to see the bulk of him in Ada’s small yellow kitchen. Ever since I was born, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ada’s flesh siblings; my brothersisters were far more interesting. But Chima and A?uli mattered very much to Ada and she was always involved in something with them, one small hot conflict or the other. She wanted Chima to save her, like a big brother, to protect her better than I was doing. She thought he was there because she’d been in the hospital, and in a way, he was.

“I have something to tell you,” he said. “Mummy and I thought it was better if you heard it in person, since you just got out of the hospital.”

Ada sat at her unstained Ikea kitchen table and looked across at her brother. I watched lazily, relaxed now that we weren’t locked up in a fucking psych ward anymore. He was calm; Chima was always calm.

“Uche is dead,” he said, and Ada’s heart staggered.



Uche was Ada’s cousin, the only son of De Simon, one of Saul’s older brothers. When Ada was a child, before the rest of us woke up, she loved going to Umuahia, back to where she was born. One of her clearest memories there was of being summoned by the old men who sat under the tree by the road that turned into the family compound. They had examined her face closely, moving it to catch the light, veined hands directing her jaw.

“It’s true,” one of them said. “This one resembles nwa Simon.”