She pulled away from him so hard that she stumbled backward. Ebenezer saw her skirt flutter in the air, covered in small red flowers, but then he was past them and they were behind him and he couldn’t hear anything over the noise in his head and the air.

When he got closer to the mob, he slowed to a quick walk, trying to keep to the side. People bumped his shoulders and he was pushed a few times, but no one really disturbed him. They were focused on wherever they were going. Later he learned that most of them were heading to the area near the mosque, in the main market on Chief Michael Road, where a group of Hausa people plied their trade as shoemakers in a little market. An altercation there between a Hausa trader and an Igbo customer, a prominent shop owner, had escalated until the Hausa trader slapped the shop owner. In moments a crowd had gathered, coiled and furious, ready to make every other Northerner pay for that one man and his impertinence. This was not their town—they couldn’t talk anyhow here and expect to get away with it.

Ebenezer waded through whole sections of the market, now in ruins, the air full of smoke from the parts that were still burning. The muddy alleys were strewn with bolts of colorful fabric trampled by many feet; vendors scrambled about, trying to salvage them from the muck, crying and swearing and afraid. The smoke was worse by the time he got to Chisom’s shop, where she sold buttons and needles and sewing machine parts and thread. This area was already deserted. Some of the stores had been locked in haste, as if that could protect them from fire. Others had goods tossed about in front of them, discarded by traders who had tried to carry their merchandise away but found their arms overfull. He reached the wooden door to Chisom’s shop, with its flaking light blue paint, and coughed as he called her name. Particles of soot had settled on the white fabric draped for sale in the doorway.

“Chisom!” he shouted.

“Ebenezer?” She emerged from the back, her face marked with dried tears, but calm. “You came!”

He rushed forward and embraced his wife, who stood numb and shocked in the circle of his arms. “You came all this way,” she said, disbelieving.

“Are you all right?” he asked, patting her face.

Chisom nodded. “I was packing up the things as fast as I could.”

“Forget the things, jo! Can’t you smell the smoke? You want to stay here and wait for the fire to reach you?”

“I’ve almost finished. I just didn’t know how to carry them out. We can’t afford to lose the merchandise.”

Ebenezer looked at his wife and the determination hammered into her face. Her tenacity, he realized, was something he could learn from. How to stand in the face of actual fire and not run, how to do what it took for them to survive because she’d decided to. She could have been hurt, could have been killed, but she had done it anyway. Ebenezer felt ashamed at how hard he’d been fighting her about seeing a doctor. She had packed up the things, not knowing how she could carry all of it, simply because she was ready to handle that part when the time came. Now the time had come and he was there, as he should have been, as he always should have been. Why should she be carrying anything by herself when he was her husband?

“I’m here now,” Ebenezer said. Chisom gave him a small, unsure smile and he embraced her one more time. “Let’s go,” he said. He carried most of the Ghana-must-go bags she’d packed and they made their way out of the market, stumbling slightly but together. They flagged down an okada who recognized Ebenezer, and together they climbed aboard, balancing the bags awkwardly as they left the market behind.

Most of the market burned to the ground that day. It was years before the government got around to rebuilding it.

Seventeen

Vivek

Here is one of my favorite memories with Osita. We are in my bedroom. My parents are out and we are alone. I am lying with my head on his bare stomach and he’s playing with my hair, pulling on the curls and watching them spring back. Sometimes he rubs my scalp and I turn my head to kiss his ribs.

“I had a dream,” I tell him.

He looks down from the pillows surrounding him. “Tell me,” he says, in that way where I know he’s genuinely interested, he wants to hear my dreams, my stories.

“I dreamt that I was our grandmother,” I tell him. “I looked in a mirror and she was there, just like the pictures, and she spoke to me in Igbo.”

“What did she say?”

“Hold my life for me.” I wait for his laugh, but it never comes. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I ask him.

“I’m not sure my belief matters,” he says. “If it is, it is, whether I believe it or not.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

My cousin gives me a small smile and twists some of my hair in his fingers. “They talk about you and her in the village, did you know?”

I have never heard this before. I sit halfway up, leaning against his body.

“They talk about how she died the same day you were born,” he continues, “how my father got into an argument with your dad about your name. But you weren’t a girl, so . . .” Osita shrugs, lets the story die off.

“What do you think?” I ask him.

My cousin looks at me with a gentleness he shows to no one else. “Who are we to define what is impossible or not?”

“You’re just saying that,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “I mean it. You know what’s been happening in your head. You’re the only person who knows. So ask yourself if it feels right, and somewhere, deep inside of you, there’s a compass that will tell you whether you’re right or wrong.”

I smile at him. “Is this how you make decisions?” I tease.

His eyes sweep over both of us, naked on the bed, and he doesn’t smile back. I feel a thrill as his gaze touches me; I know it is a precursor to his hands, his mouth, the marvelous rest of him.

“Only the important ones,” he replies, and then he reaches for me.

Eighteen

Three months after Vivek died, Chika tried to force Kavita to stop asking people about him. She didn’t listen to him, of course. She thought it was a ridiculous thing to ask—as if she could stop, as if there was any reason on this earth why she should stop. Her son was dead and buried in the village, in Ahunna’s compound, next to her grave. Chika had put a concrete slab over the ground where Vivek’s body was; Kavita tried not to imagine it crushing him. She would have spent all her time beside it, but the answers weren’t there. They had carved an inscription into the concrete. VIVEK OJI, it said. BELOVED SON.

Chika had wanted to add more, but he didn’t know what else to say and Kavita had other things on her mind, like finding out what had happened to him, so the two of them left it like that. Besides, it said everything—he was beloved, by his parents and his friends—and that, Kavita supposed, was why none of those friends were talking to her, even though all she wanted to know was what had happened to her son.

Just that morning, Vivek had had breakfast with them. He had stayed at home the night before, instead of running off to Maja’s or Rhatha’s or Ruby’s house. Kavita was delighted. In the morning, Vivek had tied his hair in a bun on top of his head, twisting it up tightly, then taken a bath and brushed his teeth. Kavita had watched him spoon heaps of powdered milk over a bowl of cornflakes, then tilt a thermos of hot water over the bowl and stir it around, and she had smiled. This had been his favorite breakfast since he was small. Of course he picked out his three cubes of sugar, let them dissolve into the milk; of course he ate the cornflakes quickly—he’d never liked them soggy—then tipped the bowl to his mouth and drank the sweetened milk. Kavita remembered every second of it as if she was back at the table with him: the last time she would ever watch her child feed himself. That act of putting nourishment into his body—it was such an alive thing to do.

In that same day, only hours away from the breakfast table, Vivek would be lying on the veranda, his body cooling in her arms. How can? It wasn’t possible.

He’d told her that morning that he was going to see the girls. She didn’t know which house he meant; by then, the girls had blended into an amorphous group, Juju and Elizabeth or Somto and Olunne or any other combination. Their houses were the only places he visited. Even before the burial, Kavita had asked them all if they’d seen him, if they knew anything about what happened.

“He came to our house first,” Somto told her. The girls lived with their parents in a white duplex in a residential area near the glass factory. “We were making pancakes for breakfast.”

“But he’d already had breakfast,” Kavita said, her eyes swollen from weeping. She was twisting one of Chika’s handkerchiefs in her fingers, the damp cotton taut against her skin. Somto smiled a little. She’d been crying, too. “It was pancake day, Aunty Kavita. He always comes for pancake day.”