Freshwater(7)

“It’s not your fault,” Saachi repeated.

The Ada said nothing, but she didn’t believe her. Duties were duties. We agreed with her on this. Over the years that followed, we (the Ada and us) became good at protecting A?uli, except for a terrible oversight in which we failed, for a very long time, to protect her from ourself.

At the hospital, they cast the amen’s leg in plaster of Paris. They used a mechanical blade to cut the cast open every time they had to change it, then dressed the wound with sugar and honey. The first few times, they gave her narcotics to kill the pain, but then they had to stop, and she would scream and scream until the dressing was done. When it was over, she laughed. She was, to our surprise, not a being that the brothersisters could break so easily.

Saul’s family came up from Umuahia to the hospital to see her, and old women in the ward drifted from the other beds to stand by A?uli’s.

“Chai,” they said dolefully. “What a beautiful child!”

“Ewo!”

“What a shame.”

After about a week of this, A?uli turned to Saachi and asked if she was going to die. The human mother stared at her, this little girl who spoke of death so comfortably. We were not surprised, though. Had it not brushed past her on the bloody tar of that road? She was not afraid. Our brothersisters had touched her and she had lived. She asked Saachi that because she thought the visitors were there to mourn her approaching death, and we were impressed by this concept, to grieve the loss of breath while it was still in the body. After all, since we had been born to die, the Ada’s life was a placeholder, an interlude; it made sense to start mourning it now.

The Ada became a precocious but easily bruised child, constantly pierced by the world, by words, by the taunts of Chima and his friends as they mocked her body for being soft and rounded. Reality was a difficult space for her to inhabit, unsurprisingly, what with one foot on the other side and gates in between. We wriggled deeply in her, reliving the blood of the backseat over and over again till the red was painted all inside. You must understand that A?uli’s accident was a baptism in the best liquid, that mother of a color, then a clotting movement, a scrambled look at mortality and the weakness of the vessel. With our swollen new eyes, we saw the blood and knew it was a mantle.

We waited.



Things had not been easy for Saachi. They never are when you are the type of woman who gets chosen—just ask any other mother who has had a god grow inside her before spitting it out into a wild world. When A?uli was first born, Saachi became sick. The Ada was focused on her private mischiefs then—drawing on the walls and destroying the deep brown leather cushions by tugging on their threads. Chima was in school; he’d started Primary One down by Faulks Road. Saachi was drowning in anxiety. It rattled her chest and surged up her throat; it made her hands shake and then she cried and could not breathe. Saul did not help. He was an impatient man, a blind man. The children were always more Saachi’s than his.

“I can’t stay with you in the house!” he told his panicking wife. “I have work to do. If you have mental illness, then you’ll just have to go to London.”

That was it. Saachi had to turn to her friends, the women who had been born in other countries and who, like her, had accompanied their husbands to this small, violent town. Her friend Elena came by to check on her and Lisa’s mother sent a girl in the evenings to stay with her, because A?uli was just a baby and Saul would not stay home and Saachi was drowning. Our brothersisters had known this, had known where the weak points in the Ada’s family were, where to best apply pressure for a breaking. This was at Number Seventeen, at the red brick, and the next day, Saachi collected her three children and took them to Elena’s house. She left them there and went to the hospital, where she stayed for two nights.

The doctors told her not to ingest any stimulants, and when they left her room, one of them, a woman, remained and asked Saachi kindly and quietly if everything was okay at home. Because it was strange, you see, the panic attacks and the way Saul was not there. Saachi said everything was fine. We do not know if she was lying, but the doctor prescribed medications to slow her heart rate, and after the second night, Saachi checked out, collected her children, and went back to Number Seventeen. She told herself that she would never be in that state again. Every day for a month, while the Ada and Chima played by themselves, Saachi would put A?uli down on a woven mat, then lie on the sofa and cover herself with Chima’s akwete blanket, all the way over her head, making a dark cave. The anxiety curled up on her chest like a cat and purred through her bones. She hid and hid, and Saul did not find her because he, as he had made clear, could not be at home with her and therefore was not looking.

It’s like we said—things had not been easy for her. As she was drowning, the years slid past and the Ada’s family moved down the street to Number Three. Then there was the truck and the amen and the impact and the blood. When A?uli could walk again, Saachi said that she would need plastic surgery, skin grafts for the river of glossy scar tissue running down toward her foot. She took A?uli back to Malaysia to consult with some doctors; she left the Ada behind. While on the trip, Saachi spoke to a nursing agent who offered her a job in Saudi Arabia.

There are many ways of breaking a family and isolating a child—our brothersisters knew this. Saul, for example, cared more about himself, so he was never going to protect the Ada and he was too human to be any kind of threat to the brothersisters. After career setbacks in London, he had been happy to end up in Nigeria, where he was hailed as a big man, coming from abroad with his Benz with the customized plates. He needed people to see him glow; he desired the glory of something. When Saul got his chieftaincy title, it was like he’d been dipped in silver, like he was finally as shiny as he wanted to be. He spent a lot of money on new things for himself, money that he refused to spend in other ways, like on his family. Saachi had to sew her traditional outfit for the ceremony out of an old sari. They’d fought over this and other things, like Saul refusing to buy things needed for the household. As his clinic struggled, Saachi kept transferring in money from her accounts in London. Immediately after the chieftaincy ceremony, instead of hosting the visitors who came to congratulate Saul, Saachi took the children to Onitsha to visit a friend and left a note for her husband.