I peek into his bedroom before leaving for school. He’s cleared all the ballerinas and plastic flowers off the desk. His suitcase is out in plain sight. Is he staging his departure to make me feel bad? I grab my coat from the rack in the hall and run down the stairs. I’m afraid that if I stop for even a second at the mirror by the front door, I’ll remember how I used to primp and preen in that exact same spot fifteen years ago, trying to be whatever it was I thought Kayo wanted. I wore men’s suits and cut my hair short, shaved the nape of my neck. I lived on an apple a day.
These days the bones in my wrists still protrude, but at least my arms are the arms of a normal person, not a ghost. I’ve gained ten kilos since my Paris days. My hair is shoulder-length now, and I use a ballpoint pen to put it up in a bun, the way Anna did during the last phase of our friendship. The only thing Kayo still likes about my looks is the way I dress. I still shop at vintage stores — sometimes for elbow-length gloves, sometimes for men’s suits. The gloves are straight out of My Fair Lady, but the suits are proof of his lingering influence. If I can survive without Kayo the way I survived without Anna, then I’ll be truly free.
I take the metro to school. I scan the platforms for potential escape routes, passages that aren’t being monitored. There are cameras everywhere. And our plan hangs by a thread: there’s no central committee controlling things, just whatever collective telepathy steers us to a certain place, to this electrified now. I’ve got copies of our proclamation tied up in a tube and tucked into my scarf. I bend down as if to brush something off my shoe and shove the tube under the seat. Right before I get off at my stop, I slice the string with a knife and the proclamations roll all over the floor, a torrent of colored paper. I guess I did learn something after all, flying on magic carpets and playing Little Wizard.
“My mom says you should call her.”
Daphne hands me a business card with both cell and land lines, of which there are four: home, work, a number in Paris, another that must be a summer house on some island. The card is warm from the girl’s sweaty palm; it practically breathes.
“Thank you, Daphne. Now go and draw with the other kids.”
“What should I draw?”
“Whatever you like.”
She plops down on her stomach and sticks her tongue out at Natasha, who, terrified, quickly draws a rainbow at the top of her page, over the family she’s been drawing, as if to protect her creation. Daphne turns her back on Natasha, hides her paper with one hand so the other girl can’t see, and starts to draw, speaking all the while in a sing-song: “Look at the lightning, colored rain, the little kid cries, waaa, waaa. .”
She’s starting to pique my interest.
“Come on, little kid in the cave, pick a big leaf from the tree so you don’t get wet, hmmm, hmmm. .”
Natasha is straining her neck to see, even more curious than I am.
“Walk on the grass and mud in the big brown field, plaf, plaf. Hide, hide in the cave. The big witch finds you and says, Do you want to be a witch like me? Yes, yes, la la la. . And the big witch says: eat these crickets and then we’ll see. Mmmm, mmmm, yummy in my tummy, the little witch says. We’ll take lightning and make the crickets turn blue, la la la. We’ll sell them and make lots of money.”
“That’s stupid. Who would want to buy crickets?” Natasha asks.
Daphne looks at her imperiously. “All the vampires and ghosts will buy crickets and then at night they’ll come to your bed and eat you, too! Mmmm!”
Natasha shrieks. My eyes, meanwhile, have filled with tears.
“What’s that on the kitchen table?” Kayo asks. He’s opened his suitcase back up and put his little plastic animals back where they belong. He even made onion soup to butter me up.
“A drawing Daphne did.”
“I guess things are getting serious.”
“I brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.”
“What do you think you’re going to learn from it?”
“What goes on in their house.”
“Don’t you think you’re overestimating yourself, Maria?”
Not at all. If there’s anything I know how to interpret, it’s children’s drawings. I’ve read a lot on the subject, but more importantly, I remember. I remember the kind of need that drives you to draw caves and rain. Sure, I may have talked to her about caves and witches who eat crickets, but she was the one who thought up the lightning that slices across the page like tiny swastikas. And she added those reddish-brown splotches of mud — as if the landscape had come down with the chicken pox.
Daphne draws the way her mother did, with sweeping gestures, practically tearing the page as she goes. She’s not afraid of the color gray. She made the witch enormous and the witchlet microscopically small, suggesting a certain balance of power. A strong female presence in the family — who else but Anna? And the cave, symbolizing protection. I imagine a house ruled by underground terror. Either there’s no father at all or he’s completely powerless, since there’s no sign of him in the drawing. No siblings, either. The mother witch and the little daughter witchlet. They climb onto their magic carpet and head off to help the poor. Another witch, flying by, reaches out a hand and shakes the carpet. The witch and the witchlet grab hold of the tassels just in the nick of time. Come here, my pretty. You thought you could escape me, but you can’t.
“What’s wrong, child? Did a bakery burn down?”
That’s how Mom scolds me for my long absences. It’s a common enough idiom, but the subtext to her irony is that I only come to see them when something’s gone wrong in my life. She’s a busy woman now, fairly well-known as a children’s writer, but she still plays the stereotypical Greek mother to perfection.
“I just missed you guys, that’s all.”
The house on Aegina, behind the fish market, was built in the ’70s. The yard is like a faint memory of Nigeria: a well instead of a goldfish pond, pistachio trees instead of banana trees. On the veranda — rain or shine — a wrought-iron table with a marble top, just like the one we had in Ikeja. I have no idea how they managed it, but as soon as I set foot in the house, I’m half expecting Gwendolyn to appear, and I’m surprised to see Dad sitting there in his armchair. He was always at work. Now he folds his newspaper and gives me a thorough once-over, from my face down to my shoes.
“Did you wipe your feet on the way in?”
“Yes, old man.” I kiss him on the top of his head, the way he used to kiss me once I’d reached the age when you’re too big to be carried, but still too little for an adult to bend down as far as your cheek. It’s as if he shrank. Of course he’s sitting down, and curtseying isn’t my thing.
The living room smells like incense and lentils. Mom is waving her censer in front of her icons and whispering something, as always, to the Holy Virgin and the saints.
“Mom made you lentils.”
“What, no biftekia?”
“Are you mocking me?” Mom says, not turning to look at me, the censer dangling in midair.
It takes me half an hour to calm them down. When the complaints and the cross-examination are finally over and they pull out the old family albums from Africa, I know the moment has come for me to kick off my shoes and curl up on the sofa. Mom keeps it covered so that the upholstery doesn’t get ruined, but I push the sofa cover away with my hand, just a tiny bit at the edge, then lean my cheek down and inhale the only bit of concentrated Africa I have left: Gwendolyn’s sweat, spills from Mrs. Steedworthy’s tea, the acrid metallic smell — drin! drin! — of my bicycle bell.
We pore over the photographs for the thousandth time. Mom in pointy heels with a striped kerchief on her head. “What a beautiful wife I had!” Dad brags.