“Nne, Kambili, nne.” It was Aunty Ifeoma’s voice; her face appeared next to Father Amadi’s. She had held her braided hair up, in a huge bun that looked like a raffia basket balanced on her head. I tried to smile. I felt woozy. Something was slipping out of me, slipping away, taking my strength and my sanity, and I could not stop it.
“The medication knocks her out,” Mama said.
“Nne, your cousins send greetings. They would have come, but they are in school. Father Amadi is here with me. Nne…” Aunty Ifeoma clutched my hand, and I winced, pulling it away. Even the effort to pull it away hurt. I wanted to keep my eyes open, wanted to see Father Amadi, to smell his cologne, to hear his voice, but my eyelids were slipping shut.
“This cannot go on, nwunye m,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.”
“It has never happened like this before. He has never punished her like this before,” Mama said.
“Kambili will come to Nsukka when she leaves the hospital.”
“Eugene will not agree.”
“I will tell him. Our father is dead, so there is no threatening heathen in my house. I want Kambili and Jaja to stay with us, at least until Easter. Pack your own things and come to Nsukka. It will be easier for you to leave when they are not there.”
“It has never happened like this before.”
“Do you not hear what I have said, gbo?” Aunty Ifeoma said, raising her voice.
“I hear you.”
The voices grew too distant, as if Mama and Aunty Ifeoma were on a boat moving quickly to sea and the waves had swallowed their voices. Before I lost their voices, I wondered where Father Amadi had gone. I opened my eyes hours later. It was dark, and the light bulbs were off. In the glimmer of light from the hallway that streamed underneath the closed door, I could see the crucifix on the wall and Mama’s figure on a chair at the foot of my bed.
“Kedu? I will be here all night. Sleep. Rest,” Mama said. She got up and sat on my bed. She caressed my pillow; I knew she was afraid to touch me and cause me pain. “Your father has been by your bedside every night these past three days. He
has not slept a wink.”
It was hard to turn my head, but I did it and looked away.
MY PRIVATE TUTOR came the following week. Mama said Papa had interviewed ten people before he picked her. She was a young Reverend Sister and had not yet made her final profession. The beads of the rosary, which were twisted around the waist of her sky-colored habit, rustled as she moved. Her wispy blond hair peeked from beneath her scarf. When she held my hand and said, “Kee ka ime?” I was stunned. I had never heard a white person speak Igbo, and so well. She spoke softly in English when we had lessons and in Igbo, although not often, when we didn’t. She created her own silence, sitting in it and fingering her rosary while I read comprehension passages. But she knew a lot of things; I saw it in the pools of her hazel eyes. She knew, for example, that I could move more body parts than I told the doctor, although she said nothing. Even the hot pain in my side had become lukewarm, the throbbing in my head had lessened. But I told the doctor it was as bad as before and I screamed when he tried to feel my side. I did not want to leave the hospital. I did not want to go home.
I took my exams on my hospital bed while Mother Lucy, who brought the papers herself, waited on a chair next to Mama. She gave me extra time for each exam, but I was finished long before the time was up. She brought my report card a few days later. I came first. Mama did not sing her Igbo praise songs; she only said, “Thanks be to God.”
My class girls visited me that afternoon, their eyes wide with awed admiration. They had heard I had survived an accident. They hoped I would come back with a cast that they could all scribble their signatures on. Chinwe Jideze brought me a big card that read “Get well soon to someone special,” and she sat by my bed and talked to me, in confidential whispers, as if we had always been friends. She even showed me her report card—she had come second. Before they left, Ezinne asked, “You will stop running away after school, now, won’t you?”
Mama told me that evening that I would be discharged in two days. But I would not be going home, I would be going to Nsukka for a week, and Jaja would go with me. She did not know how Aunty Ifeoma had convinced Papa, but he had agreed that Nsukka air would be good for me, for my recuperation.
Rain splashed across the floor of the verandah, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide.
“Kambili, do you want a mango?” Obiora asked from behind me.
He had wanted to help me into the flat when we arrived earlier in the afternoon, and Chima had insisted on carrying my bag. It was as if they feared my illness lingered somewhere within and would pounce out if I exerted myself. Aunty Ifeoma had told them mine was a serious illness, that I had nearly died.
“I will eat one later,” I said, turning.
Obiora was pounding a yellow mango against the living room wall. He would do that until the inside became a soft pulp. Then he would bite a tiny hole in one end of the fruit and suck it until the seed wobbled alone inside the skin, like a person in oversize clothing. Amaka and Aunty Ifeoma were eating mangoes too, but with knives, slicing the firm orange flesh off the seed.
I went out to the verandah and stood by the wet metal railings, watching the rain thin to a drizzle and then stop. God had decided on sunlight. There was the smell of freshness in the air, that edible scent the baked soil gave out at the first touch of rain. I imagined going into the garden, where Jaja was on his knees, digging out a clump of mud with my fingers and eating it.
“Aku na-efe! Aku is flying!” a child in the flat upstairs shouted.
The air was filling with flapping, water-colored wings. Children ran out of the flats with folded newspapers and empty Bournvita tins. They hit the flying aku down with the newspapers and then bent to pick them up and put them in the tins. Some children simply ran around, swiping at the aku just for the sake of it. Others squatted down to watch the ones that had lost wings crawl on the ground, to follow them as they held on to one another and moved like a black string, a mobile necklace.
“Interesting how people will eat aku. But ask them to eat the wingless termites and that’s another thing. Yet the wingless ones are just a phase or two away from aku” Obiora said.
Aunty Ifeoma laughed. “Look at you, Obiora. A few years ago, you were always first to run after them.”
“Besides, you should not speak of children with such contempt,” Amaka teased. “After all, they are your own kind.”