“Shh—it’s okay,” I said, climbing back on the bed and wrapping my arms around her. “It’s okay.”
“I want to go home,” she sobbed.
“No wahala. Come.” I took her hand, then led her off the bed and through the door. Vivek was curled up on the sand below, with his hands pressed to his face, hyperventilating. “Don’t mind him,” I said as we passed. “His head is not correct.”
I escorted her out to the main road and she entered a taxi without looking back at me, slamming the door so hard that the frame of the car rattled. I watched it drive away, spluttering black fumes from the exhaust. She was never coming back, I thought in that moment; our relationship was over. I dug my hands into my pockets and walked back to the house, dragging my feet.
When I got back, Vivek was sitting on the landing, his back propped against the door frame.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he saw me, trying to stand up quickly. “I don’t know what happened—”
“You know what happened,” I said. “I don’t even care again. I’m tired. Every time with this your thing.”
“Osita, please—”
“I said I’m tired.”
He ran a hand over his head, distressed. “What do you want me to do? Should I go and say sorry to her?”
“Don’t fucking talk to her,” I snarled, and Vivek flinched. I shook my head and raised my palms, backing away from him. “It’s enough,” I said. “It’s enough.” I didn’t look back as I walked away. I threw my clothes into a bag, then caught a bus back to Owerri, knowing I’d miss the SAT class the next morning. I didn’t care.
My mother stared at me when I walked into our house. “You’re home,” she said, frowning. I hadn’t been back in a while. Usually she would shout at me for being away so long, but this time she just looked up at me, her shoulders rounded and tired. She was sitting in the parlor with a tray of beans in her lap, picking out the stones, and she looked like maybe she had been crying.
I put down my bag. “Yes,” I said. “I’m home.”
Four
Vivek
I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them.
So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?
Five
After Vivek died, Osita went to Port Harcourt and drank until the days were sabotaged in his memory. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and when he got there, no one cared about where or what he had come from. He was tall and immaculately dark-skinned, muscled and handsome and generous with drinks, so the oil workers he fell in with were more than happy to spend time with him. There were hotel rooms and some women, and a memory of dirty glasses stacked high and teetering before they crashed into a sink and broke, then the warped sound of people laughing. Osita watched the glass bounce. He felt carpet against his back and tasted a vileness in his mouth, as if someone had vomited into it. A girl straddled his hips and lowered her face to his, but it blurred to nothing.
Then he was floating on an inflation tube in someone’s pool, his hands and feet trailing in the water. A bald woman was treading water next to him. “You’re crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. It was evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words.
She laughed. “It’s not raining.”
“It’s raining inside me,” he said, and a wave of darkness took over. When he woke up, he was lying on a pool chair on his stomach, his head turned to the side. There was a small pile of sand on the cement next to him, thrown over his drying vomit. No one else was by the pool. Osita sat up and found a bottle of schnapps that someone had left on the floor. It was still a quarter full.
He drank some more.
He was gone for a few weeks, and they only found him because his aunt came to Port Harcourt looking. One of the Nigerwives there connected Kavita with a taxi driver who knew everyone in town.
“He’s tall,” she told him. “Very black. Gorimakpa. And one of his front teeth is broken.”
After two days, the taxi driver took her to one of the hotels. The receptionist quickly allowed her upstairs because she was Indian and angry and demanding things in a raised voice. When they unlocked a door near the end of the corridor, Kavita walked in to find Osita lying on the bed, snoring loudly, his breath gurgling in his chest. She flinched at the smell of the room and shoved his shoulder. Osita jumped up, grunting in alarm and rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days; stubble spread from the curve of his skull to his face.
“Aunty Kavita? What are you doing here?”
“Put on your clothes,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”
He stood up, obeying automatically, even as his head swam. “Give me five minutes,” he said, stumbling to the bathroom in his boxers as Kavita watched him. It was impossible for Kavita to see Osita without seeing her son, Vivek—the two of them as boys, sitting together at the dining table, running through her house with their wrestling toys, fighting on the parlor carpet. When she started looking for the small charm Vivek used to wear around his neck and couldn’t find it, Osita had been the first person who came to mind.
The charm had been missing since before the burial, but Kavita hadn’t wanted to look for it properly then. If she found it too soon, she would’ve had to bury him with it; even Chika had noticed it was missing. If she found it afterward, she could keep it for herself. She went through Vivek’s room looking for it after the burial, but it wasn’t there. She called Maja and Rhatha and Ruby and told them to ask the children if any of them had seen it. All of them said no. The only person remaining was Osita, but since Kavita wasn’t talking to Mary, she made Chika call Ekene and ask for him.
“We haven’t seen him,” Ekene said. “We’re even a bit worried. He said he was going to Port Harcourt for work but we haven’t heard from him since. It’s not like him to behave like this. Mary says he was drinking heavily before he left. I don’t know what’s going to happen to that boy.”
Chika had said it was ridiculous to go chasing after Osita. “He’s twenty-three, he’s not a child anymore,” he said. “Leave that man alone.” Kavita ignored him and went to Port Harcourt anyway. She had to find that charm.
Now, standing in her nephew’s hotel room, she felt a little jealous. If she could have run away and fallen apart like this, doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who, she would have done so in a heartbeat. But she had a husband, and useless as he was, he was something she didn’t want to leave, not now.