Freshwater(54)

“Stay with me,” he said urgently. “Stay with me, Ada.”

I was gone, inside my head, and I turned to my others. What does he mean, I asked. I’m not going anywhere.

They frowned. We’re not sure. Even if you faint, you’ll wake up.

“Stay with me, please,” he begged.

He doesn’t know what to do, I told them, and they nodded.

Something has to be done, they said. Pick one of us.

I looked at them and it was the same as looking at myself. As?ghara, I said. She was older now, less brutal but still efficient. When she stepped forward, I stopped crying.

“I need to call my mother,” she said, using my mouth. I was already learning what this new balance could feel like, where I controlled how we moved. More and more, I realized how useless it had been to try and become a singular entity.

“Won’t your mother be worried?” the painter asked.

As?ghara shook our head. His mother would panic, but Saachi was different, she was a selected human. She wasn’t the type to fall apart just like that. When she picked up the phone, As?ghara spoke between my gasps for air and kept her voice level. “I’m having a panic attack and I don’t know what to do. Hyperventilating. Feel like I’m about to faint.”

Saachi replied with matching calm, her voice focused. “Have you eaten today?”

“No.”

“Your blood sugar is low. Where are you?”

“At a friend’s house.”

“Okay. You need to lie down, but first you have to eat or drink something. Right now, understand?”

I was drifting too fast. It took As?ghara a few moments to find my mouth again, and when she spoke, our voice was faint. “I don’t know.”

Another mother might have let worry show in her voice, but Saachi had nearly had me die on her. This was nothing in comparison. “Is your friend there?” she asked.

“Yes. You want to talk to him?”

“Yes, put him on the phone.”

As?ghara handed the phone to the painter and fell back into the marble. It was too much to sustain, keeping a functional self in front. I could hear the painter’s voice as he spoke to Saachi, his tone anxious and respectful. After he hung up, he brought me a glass of water and watched me as I sipped it.

“What do you want to eat?” he asked.

As?ghara tried one last time. “I should lie down,” we said, but when I tried to stand, my legs were nothing. I couldn’t walk; my body was too far away. I started crying again and the painter picked me up and carried me to his bedroom. When he put me down on the bed, the hard foam of the mattress felt like ground. I turned on my side and pressed my cheek to it. The skirt I was wearing fanned out over the bed and cinched at my waist.

“Breathe,” he was saying, bringing his face close to mine. His hand was on my skin. “Breathe.”

It felt so much easier not to. It seemed outrageous to expect my body to put in that much effort just to draw in air. For what?

Just stop, my others suggested. You could just stop breathing. It feels so easy.

They were right, it did. I held my breath, but it didn’t feel like I was holding my breath, it felt like there should never have been breath. It felt like the entire concept of breath had been something I imagined. After all, my body was never meant to move like this. These lungs had to have been built for show. They should never have expanded and I should never have been alive.

The painter shook me, but my eyes felt heavier than cold mud. I fumbled to unzip the side of my skirt and the pressure on my diaphragm eased, but I was still drifting. It wasn’t until he put a cold towel on the back of my neck that the gray moved away, almost reluctantly. The fading stopped and I fell asleep.

The next morning, I was back in my body and the painter was relieved.

“It’s one thing to talk about your spiritual matters,” he said. He knew about the sections of my mind, my tongue and scales. “It’s another thing to see it.”

I was confused. “What do you mean?”

He gave me a look. “Come on, Ada. You almost went to the other side last night.” I scoffed but he was serious. “That’s why I kept telling you to stay.”

“I would have come back,” I said.

He shook his head and I could see residual worry on his face. “You don’t know that.”

I fell silent. Maybe he had a point.

“And you know what was the scariest part?” he continued. “I looked into your eyes and you weren’t afraid. You knew you were slipping away but you had peace in your eyes.”

I kept listening, and he searched my face from the pillow next to me.

“It’s like your people were calling you and you were listening to them. So I kept telling you to stay.”

I smiled to reassure him and touched his cheek. “Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been afraid for me. I also knew it wasn’t by chance that this had happened while I was looking for answers to these questions I was afraid of. The historian was right—there was nothing else anyone could tell me.

I knew the brothersisters hadn’t been serious about trying to drag me over to the other side the night before. The thing about Ala is that you don’t move against her. If she turned me back from the gates and told me to live, then I would have to live, ?gbanje or not. Even the brothersisters weren’t reckless enough to try and disobey her, which meant that they were just trying to scare me, or warn me. It sounded like the kind of thing they would do. If the wooden gong gets too loud, you tell it the wood it was carved from.