Kavita wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t approve of secrets, but she also knew it was dangerous to tell another woman how to raise her child. She’d barely survived an argument in her own family when she and Chika decided not to tell Vivek that he was born on the same day that Ahunna died. The convergence had made his birthdays difficult—the way everyone kept trying to smile past the grief clotting inside them. They didn’t want to tell Vivek because they didn’t want him to think it was his fault they were always sad on his birthday, as if his arrival had caused her death. Kavita had thought the pain would fade over the years, but it had multiplied instead, like a load getting heavier and heavier on your head the longer you walked with it.

Finally, when Vivek was seven or eight, Ekene challenged them over it. “He deserves to know,” he insisted. “This is his history, our family history. He needs to know what happened!”

“Is that so?” Kavita had folded her arms and glared at her brother-in-law. “How do you explain something like that to a child?”

Ekene fell silent.

Strangely, it was Mary who did it—Mary, before she became the woman she was now. She’d sat down with Vivek on her lap, his little legs kicking idly through the air, his hair dropping into his eyes. They hadn’t started cutting it short yet, that came with secondary school.

“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman, Vivek,” she told him. The boy didn’t look at her, busying himself with a Hulk Hogan action figure he was turning over in his hands. “On the day you were born, she went up to Heaven and became an angel so she could look down on you and protect you.”

He raised his eyes to her, with those long eyelashes. “She went to Heaven?”

“Yes, nkem. She went to Heaven on your birthday. So sometimes your mummy and daddy feel sad, because they miss her very much. You remember when you came to stay with us in Owerri for the first time and you missed your mummy and daddy and you were crying?” Vivek nodded. “Well, they feel like that sometimes, too. But they are also very happy because they got you, so it’s a happy-sad feeling, you know?”

Bittersweet: that was the word for his birthday, though he was too young to know it then. Sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour and bitter notes scraping through the rest of the mouth.

Kavita and Chika got better at perfecting their smiles until he couldn’t see through them; they pressed down their pain to protect him. What had changed? Nothing, really.

Kavita looked at Maja, who was doing the same thing, after all. Burying her hurt so her daughter wouldn’t see it, trying to keep her safe. They were all trying to keep their children safe. She sat with her until the rest of the Nigerwives arrived, some bringing food because that’s what they did, because it saved Maja the bother of having to cook for her family, or what was left of it. Kavita stood up and let them flock around Maja, hearing the story again, gasping and clucking and raining curses down on Charles, that useless bastard of a man. Kavita said nothing about Vivek and what had happened at the church in Owerri. It wasn’t the time or the place, and besides, there was a tendril of shame unfurling into a leafy plant inside her. She was the one who had allowed Mary to do this to Vivek, when she should’ve known better. All the Nigerwives liked to make fun of what they called the fanatic Christians, always catching the Holy Ghost and convulsing on carpets, but Kavita had pretended they hadn’t infected her family, as if she didn’t know who Mary was. As if Mary was the same girl she’d known all those years ago when Ahunna was alive.

A sob caught in Kavita’s throat. Ahunna would have known what to do about Vivek. She would’ve known exactly how to deal with Mary, what to say. Kavita took a deep breath and arranged her face properly. She had spent years learning how to push aside thoughts of Ahunna, of her uncle, thoughts that could paralyze her with grief. She had a child; she couldn’t afford to fall apart. Chika had felt the same way, too, after Ahunna died, after the two of them nearly gave up on being parents and Ekene and Mary had to step in to help. “Never again,” Chika had said, when the worst was over. “We can’t self-destruct like this ever again. We have Vivek now. We have to be stronger.” So Kavita was strong.

After another hour or two with Maja and the Nigerwives, Kavita went home and walked into the bedroom she shared with her husband. He was changing out of his work clothes, his white vest covering his chest and stomach. Kavita sat at the edge of the bed and told him what happened in Owerri, how Mary and her church members had beaten Vivek. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her voice level the whole time, even as Chika turned to her, a furious incredulity spreading over his face.

“She did what?”

Kavita tightened her jaw. “It was part of their deliverance nonsense.”

“No, no. This has gone too far.” Chika got up, hands on his waist, and paced the room. “You see? When I told Ekene that that church was corrupting her mind, did he listen? Of course not. He always thinks he knows what he’s doing because he’s the senior. Osita stopped coming home because of all that, and still, Ekene won’t hear word. It has gone too far, you hear me? He needs to control his wife! What kind of bush animals beat a young man in the house of God?”

Kavita took a deep breath and went over to her husband, resting her hands on his chest. “It’s all right,” she said. “I told Mary to stay away from us. We don’t need that kind of nonsense in our lives. I’ve handled it.”

Chika removed her hands, shaking his head. “I still have to talk to Ekene. Whatever happened between you women is between you, but my brother and I need to sort this out.” He walked out of the room. Kavita watched him leave, then listened to his raised voice a few minutes later as he and his brother broke things even further. It was how he always did nowadays, pushing her aside gently, not listening to her. Sometimes it felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago, and she just hadn’t noticed. Like they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.

* * *

—

After Vivek died, their worlds drew even further apart. Chika didn’t want to ask any questions. Kavita, though, was made of nothing but questions, hungry questions bending her into a shape that was starving for answers. They quarreled now, every day, from morning to night.

“Will it bring him back?!” Chika finally screamed at her one night, after dinner, standing in the kitchen. “All these your questions, what will they do? My son is dead!”

“Our son!!” Kavita screamed back, throwing a plate at him. He ducked and it shattered against the wall. “Our son! Our son!”

He had stared at her, then walked out of the room, but Kavita didn’t care. She wasn’t like him. She wasn’t going to give up and sink into whatever trough of grief Chika wanted to fall apart and wallow in. Her questions were real. Who had returned Vivek’s body to their door? Who stripped off her child’s clothes, wrapped him in akwete, and delivered him like a parcel, like a gift, a bloody surprise? Who had broken his head?

It took the police several days to get around to making any kind of report. They blamed it on the riots that had happened the same day Vivek died, the market coughing black smoke over that side of town. “We had a lot of casualties there, Madam,” the officer had said. “This is what happens when touts take over a town.” He leaned back in his chair, his eyes bloodshot. “My condolences to you and your family. We will continue investigations.”

“They won’t continue anything,” Chika said dully, as he and Kavita left the station. “Vivek was probably robbed.”

“Then who brought his body home?” Kavita asked. “How did they know where we lived?”

Chika turned his flat eyes on her. “At least someone did. At least we have a body to bury.”

He said it as if that was enough. As far as Kavita was concerned, that made him a liar, just like everyone else. Just like the police officer who told her weeks later that there was nothing more they could do for her. Just like Vivek’s friends who kept telling her they didn’t know what happened. It didn’t make any sense. In those last few weeks of Vivek’s life, his friends had been with him almost every day. Someone had to know something. They were just refusing to tell her. Kavita was sure of it.

She didn’t care if all the Nigerwives thought she had gone crazy, because she wouldn’t just bury her son and shut up. If it had happened to them, they would be behaving exactly the same way. They had no idea what it was like to know in your marrow that someone had an answer to your questions, that someone around you was lying. They had no idea how every breath for her was hell. She was going to find the truth, even if she had to rip it out of his friends’ throats. Someone had to know what happened to Vivek.

Nine

Osita

Iknow what Aunty Kavita wants to know. I want to tell her that she is not prepared for the answer, the same way I was not prepared. That it will hit her like a lorry, spilling its load over her chest and crushing her. But I also know that I’m afraid of what she will find out, if someone will tell her what was happening, if Vivek told someone else what was happening.

If someone saw me that day.

Stop looking. I want to tell her to stop looking.

Ten

Vivek