Mama was going to say something, but then she stopped, her hand flew to her mouth, and she hurried into her room. I stayed to hear the sharp groans of vomiting from deep in her throat before I went into my room.
Lunch was jollof rice, fist-size chunks of azu fried until the bones were crisp, and ngwo-ngwo. Papa ate most of the ngwongwo, his spoon swooping through the spicy broth in the glass bowl. Silence hung over the table like the blue-black clouds in the middle of rainy season. Only the chirping of the ochiri birds outside interrupted it. Every year, they arrived before the first rains came and nested on the avocado tree right outside the dining room. Jaja and I sometimes found fallen nests on the ground, nests made of entwined twigs and dried grass and bits of thread that Mama had used to plait my hair, which the ochiri picked out of the backyard dustbin.
I finished lunch first. "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Mama." I folded my arms and waited until everybody was done so we could pray. I did not look at anybody's face; I focused instead on the picture of Grandfather that hung on the opposite wall. When Papa started the prayer, his voice quavered more than usual. He prayed for the food first, then he asked God to forgive those who had tried to thwart His will, who had put selfish desires first and had not wanted to visit His servant after Mass. Mama's "Amen!" resounded throughout the room.
I was in my room after lunch, reading James chapter five because I would talk about the biblical roots of the anointing of the sick during family time, when I heard the sounds. Swift, heavy thuds on my parents' hand-carved bedroom door. I imagined the door had gotten stuck and Papa was trying to open it. If I imagined it hard enough, then it would be true. I sat down, closed my eyes, and started to count. Counting made it seem not that long, made it seem not that bad. Sometimes it was over before I even got to twenty. I was at nineteen when the sounds stopped. I heard the door open. Papa's gait on the stairs sounded heavier, more awkward, than usual. I stepped out of my room just as Jaja came out of his. We stood at the landing and watched Papa descend. Mama was slung over his shoulder like the jute sacks of rice his factory workers bought in bulk at the Seme Border. He opened the dining room door. Then we heard the front door open, heard him say something to the gate man, Adamu.
"There's blood on the floor," Jaja said. "I'll get the brush from the bathroom."
We cleaned up the trickle of blood, which trailed away as if someone had carried a leaking jar of red watercolor all the way downstairs. Jaja scrubbed while I wiped.
Mama did not come home that night, and Jaja and I had dinner alone. We did not talk about Mama. Instead, we talked about the three men who were publicly executed two days before, for drug trafficking. Jaja had heard some boys talking about it in school. It had been on television. The men were tied to poles, and their bodies kept shuddering even after the bullets were no longer being pumped into them. I told Jaja what a girl in my class had said: that her mother turned their TV off, asking why she should watch fellow human beings die, asking what was wrong with all those people who had gathered at the execution ground.
After dinner, Jaja said grace, and at the end he added a short prayer for Mama. Papa came home when we were in our rooms studying, according to our schedules. I was drawing pregnant stick images on the inner flap of my Introductory Agriculture for Junior Secondary Schools when he came into my room. His eyes were swollen and red, and somehow that made him look younger, more vulnerable.
"Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from school. She will be fine," he said.
"Yes, Papa." I looked away from his face, back at my books.
He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions. "Stand up," he said.
I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.
Mama came home the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot 505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she got to it. "Umu m," she said, hugging us. "My children."
She wore the same white T-shirt with GOD is love written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their life fragments inside. "There was an accident, the baby is gone," she said.
I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure the baby was gone?
I was still staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi's cheekbones were so high they gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you, laughing at you, and you would never know why. "Good afternoon, Madam, nno," she said. "Will you eat now or after you bathe?"
"Eh?" For a moment Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. "Not now, Sisi, not now. Get me water and a towel." Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel.
The etagere had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to reach out and straighten her wrapper. "Nne, this is your study time. Go upstairs," she said.
"I want to stay here."
She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs raised high in the air, before she spoke. "Nne, go."
I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes. Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For Mama's forgiveness. And on Sunday, the Sunday after Advent, we stayed back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with holy water. Some of the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or me beginning to drift off at the thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for.
The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read them. Even as my first term exams approached, even when we started to do class reviews, the words still made no sense.
A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker, the wife of Papa's editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that loud before.
"They have taken him! They have taken him!" she said, between throaty sobs.
"Yewande, Yewande," Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.
"What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my breast! How will I raise them alone?" I could hardly her words; instead, what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then Papa said, "Yewande, don't talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you. Ade will be fine." I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of the Standard. His car was abandoned on the roadside, the front door left open. I imagined Ade Coker being pulled out of his car, being squashed into another car, perhaps a black station wagon filled with soldiers, their guns hanging out of the windows. I imagined his hands quivering with fear, a wet patch spreading on his trousers. I knew his arrest was because of the big cover story in the last Standard, a story about how the Head of State and his wife had paid people to transport heroin abroad, a story that questioned the recent execution of three men and who the real drug barons were. Jaja said that when he looked through the keyhole, Papa was holding Yewande's hand and praying, telling her to repeat "none of those who trust in Him shall be left desolate."