“Emi ree,” she said as you ran to your own room. “Mummy!” she screamed after you. She was on to you. If not that night, one day the ẹlẹmi-eṣu would come for you.
It was a week before Easter, your third year with Joy, when Yinka got a job interview in Abuja. He didn’t dwell on the details, having gone for numerous interviews already, all of which had been unsuccessful; he wanted to temper his hopes. It was an impromptu interview for a managerial position at a telecom company with several offices in Lagos. In Abuja he’d be meeting with the executive director of the company at a conference. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you had heard him tell someone over the phone. The way he spoke, he could have been referring to either the interview or the job.
At first, you didn’t want him to leave you in Lagos, not with that girl, not with Joy. But you knew how important the interview was to him, and so in the morning on the day he was set to leave, you made him promise to come back home that very night. He explained that flights between Lagos and Abuja were unpredictable and unreliable, but you made him swear he would try. He wanted to know why you were frightened; he confessed to you, as a way of easing you, that he had a good feeling about this particular interview: his former boss had recommended him, had reached out to the ED on his behalf. Things were about to change for the better. But ki lo dẹ de? He wondered why his saying all of that had not put your mind at rest. You told him not to worry, he wouldn’t understand. Things had been strange for a while between the two of you and he wanted to talk once he got back, to smooth things over were the words he used. You realized that he meant this sincerely and it occurred to you then that Christmas Eve could have been a lie, something Joy put together to throw you off-balance. It felt unfamiliar as you said it but you told Yinka that you loved him, and although he looked perplexed he said he loved you too. You wanted to tell him everything then, about that night with Joy, the keg of acid, how she cackled as you ran back to your room, but instead you wished him a safe flight and asked him to call you once he had landed. He said he’d tell you all about the interview when he got home that night.
“Ṣe iyẹn wa okay?” he asked, teasing you with the present tense. It was the happiest you had seen him in a while.
“Ẹhn mo ti gbọ,” you replied. Just come back home tonight.
Ever since that night with Joy, you kept your distance from her. That was what Bola, the only person you shared your fears with, advised. On Joy’s part, you explained to Bola, she acted as though that night had never happened and this only made her more sinister, an ẹlẹmi-eṣu, true-true. As soon as Yinka left for the airport, you decided that no longer was Joy going to be allowed anywhere near you and your family. You moved her things to an old room behind the house, so that she would no longer sleep inside the same building as you. Unsatisfied, you called Mama Lateef, telling yourself you didn’t care if it would upset Yinka; men, you and Bola had agreed, never understand these things until it’s too late. Even when Mama Lateef tried to persuade you to take another girl, you let her know that you had had one house girl too many, though you never explained what you meant.
All you said was, “We don’t know where these girls are from, who they are, what animosities they carry inside of them; we can never really know. Yet we invite them into our lives, we leave them with our babies, we let them cook for us, claim we can trust them — what if they turn out to be bad people?”
“Joy isn’t a bad girl,” Mama Lateef said. She insisted she knew the girl. At the last place she worked, the children refused to eat if Joy wasn’t around; she brought the parents so much luck they would have paid triple the amount you paid to keep her, but it was Joy who left. “Joy likes you. Mi o mọ reason ti o fi like yin, but she does. She said to me, the first time she saw you, that she must live with you. She thinks you are the most beautiful woman she has ever seen.” At this, Mama Lateef laughed. “Ṣe yẹn wa jọ ọmọ buruku? Haba!”
You decided you couldn’t blame Mama Lateef for Joy, you made it clear you blamed yourself, all of it was your own fault, you who had enabled a society in which girls like Joy were forced to exist, you who had once relished such a society.
“Ẹ ma binu,” you told Mama Lateef finally. “We just think we can manage by ourselves. We don’t want Joy anymore.” And you looked forward to Easter Sunday, when Mama Lateef was coming to take her away.
That evening, you got a call from Yinka. He wanted you to know that his interview had been moved to the following day, which meant he wouldn’t be able to make it home that night. You were standing by the window, watching the children in the compound next door. They were playing Catcher. All day, there had been no light at home and you told Yinka what you had learned that afternoon, that the generator that powered your house had packed up. Your security guard had blamed the diesel on which the generator had been running. He claimed the diesel that had been in the house was a bad batch that had been mixed, it seemed, with kerosene. Most likely the person who sold the diesel had tampered with it. As a result, the engine, he said, had knocked. You told Yinka the guard had been out all evening looking for a mechanic. Yinka groaned over the phone but you had an odd feeling that things were going to be fine. You felt strangely lightheaded and the horizon had never seemed so promising. So you told Yinka not to worry; to focus on his interview; this time next year the two of you would be looking back with Sesan — Sesan, you suddenly wondered, where was he? “Hold on,” you told Yinka. You walked over to the other end of your bedroom, to Sesan’s cot, and he wasn’t there. You searched your own bed, threw the sheets across the room, and your baby wasn’t there. He wasn’t across the corridor in Yinka’s study. He wasn’t downstairs in the living room or in the room that was formerly Joy’s (you went downstairs because he was crawling now, and you knew he wasn’t good at climbing stairs yet, so you hoped he hadn’t tried to and failed). It wasn’t until you left your bedroom that you realized you could smell smoke, and only when you arrived downstairs did you see the smoke was coming from the kitchen. You ran there, opened the door, and the backdraft sent you crashing into the cabinet where you kept some porcelain ornaments. You ran to the front door, already screaming for help, but the front door, too, was locked. So you dashed upstairs to your bedroom, evading the fire, but for how long?
Back in your bedroom, your phone was on the windowsill, propped against the burglary-proof bars that separated you from the window’s glass. Yinka was asking: “Bisi, are you there?”
You ran to the phone, meaning to respond, but something in the other compound caught your attention. It was Joy, playing Catcher with the other children. She was holding your son against her waist; your son, whose first word, you remembered, had been her name. The children stopped playing for it had become obvious that the house next door to them was burning. Then they started running, shouting, “Fire! Fire!” All except Joy, who knew your window and stood glaring at it, at you. She stood there, watching. On her index finger was a key ring and affixed to that ring, a bunch of keys you watched Sesan playing with idly. You didn’t even have time.
“Joy,” you screamed. “My baby! Joy!” All that came to you while screaming was that September when Joy stood in that same bedroom half-naked, when she showed you who she was and you thought it safer to doubt her. You tore your lungs weeping as people gathered to watch your house, hands tucked underneath their arms, heads shaking, mouthing, Omaṣe o.
Is this me? you wondered. Is this my life? By the time you remembered your phone, Yinka was saying, “Never mind, I’ll call you later. Darling, I have to go.”