Kavita frowned. “I didn’t know that. Since when?”
The girl shrugged. She had braided cornrows that crawled into two large plaits dropping down her back. “Since he came back from uni. We invited him that day when we came to your house for the first time. His favorite part was flipping the pancakes. When we first tried to teach him how to do it, everything just splattered on the floor. It was such a mess!” She gave a small laugh that quickly trailed away. “But then he got really good at it. I can’t . . . I can’t believe he’s gone.”
The girl broke into tears and all Kavita could feel was drained. It was interesting, she thought, how people mourned Vivek. Somehow she felt like they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son who had died? Was it them that had held that baby on the day he was born? No, it was just the two of them together in the hospital as Ahunna died, just Kavita and her child in that bed, all mixed up in love and uncertainty, Chika beside them like an afterthought. She regretted what had happened next—the depression that followed, when she pulled away from her child in grief. She should have held him tighter, as the world was whirling around them. It had always been her and her baby.
The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something. They’re still children, Kavita tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping their tears in their bedrooms, among their own complete families. But still she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt belonged to her and only her.
She even had trouble sharing it with her husband, but it was easier with him because he’d fallen into that same darkness that had taken him when his mother died. Chika’s grief dragged down every centimeter of his skin, pulling muscles and bones along with it, making it hard for him to stand up. He took time off work, lying in bed in a singlet that grew dirtier every day. Once in a while, when she issued a tired command, he’d drag himself out of bed, wash himself with blank eyes, and climb into bed again. Kavita didn’t feel inclined to try any harder to get him out of it. She knew about him and Eloise—he wasn’t intelligent enough to hide it from her, and he’d been faithful up till then. It was so obvious when he stopped; all the little changes were stark and loud. She didn’t mind what his grief was turning him into. Part of her felt like he deserved to go mad: while she had been pouring herself into their child, he had been pouring himself into her friend.
She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it.
Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew. She wouldn’t have picked up the phone at all, except for the chance that it could be one of the girls calling with information about Vivek, something they hadn’t confessed to her yet. She also hung up when Mary or Ekene called. To Kavita, they were now the same person, and she would never forgive them for what had happened at their church. Chika had insisted on inviting them to the burial, but once that was over, as far as Kavita was concerned, so were they.
While Chika lay in their bed, Kavita stayed in Vivek’s room. She ran her hands over the walls, over the posters he’d ripped out of pop magazines Eloise had brought back from the UK. The woman’s interest in her child seemed false and ugly now; perhaps it had all been a way to get close to Chika. Kavita reminded herself that it didn’t matter. Eloise could have Chika if she wanted. Nothing mattered. Her eyes ran over the pictures without really registering them: Missy Elliott. Puff Daddy. En Vogue. Backstreet Boys. He had put them all up before he went off to uni. Kavita wondered why he hadn’t taken them down afterward, once he’d changed. Or maybe he hadn’t changed as much as it seemed. At night, now, she slept in his bed and cried. Sometimes she thought she could hear Chika crying, too, through the wall, but she never went to him.
Sitting across from Somto in Rhatha’s sitting room, Kavita watched the girl cry and thought how ridiculous it was that she could still look so pretty even while sobbing. There were no inelegant strings of mucus swinging from her nose, no shiny saliva pooling in her mouth when she opened it to wail. Somto wept mostly with tears, gleaming against her skin as they fell. She dabbed at them with the hem of her dress, the skirt full and wide, leaving enough material to cover her thighs even as she bent to reach her face.
“I’m sorry, Aunty Kavita,” she said. “I know this must be terrible for you.”
Terrible, Kavita thought. What a word. Did it feel like terror? More like horror, actually. Terrible sounded like it had a bit of acceptance in it, like an unthinkable thing had happened but you’d found space in your brain to acknowledge it, perhaps even begin to accept it. Then again, horrible sounded the same way. The words had departed from their origins. They were diluted, denatured. She looked up and realized that Somto was looking at her, sitting there in silence.
“I just want to know how this happened,” Kavita said. “What time did he leave here?”
Somto thought for a bit. “Maybe around twelve o’clock? He didn’t say where he was going. We all assumed he was going to see Juju.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say? What of Olunne? Maybe she’ll remember what he said.”
Somto looked at Kavita, a bit concerned. “Aunty, you can just ask Juju. I know she saw him that day, but I don’t know if he went straight from here.”
“Where is your sister? I want to ask her also.”
“She’s not here. She went out with our mum.” Somto stood up. Kavita could see the discomfort wafting off her. “But I’m sure Juju is at home with Aunty Maja. You can go and ask her.” Somto must have known she was being rude, but she didn’t seem to care. “I have to go and run some errands,” she added. “My mum will be angry if I don’t finish them before she gets home.”
Kavita stood up, already thinking of what she could ask Juju and Maja. “Tell your mother and sister I’ll come back another time to ask them,” she told Somto, who made a mental note to avoid Kavita for a while. She would tell her mother about Kavita’s questions, and perhaps Rhatha wouldn’t force her or Olunne to sit through this kind of questioning, as if it was their fault that something had happened to their friend.
“Yes, Aunty,” she said, though. “I’ll tell them.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
Kavita picked up her bag and started to leave. “It’s important.”
“I know, Aunty.” Somto closed the door and leaned against it, exhaling in relief.
Kavita stood outside and looked around the yard, trying to imagine how Vivek would have seen it on that his last day, when he was leaving: the sky wide above him, the orange tree spilling over the fence. He might have stood in front of this door, looked up at the clouds and seen shapes in them, as he had when he was a child. Kavita folded her arms around herself and walked to where she’d parked the car. She drove to Maja’s house in a partial daze, slow enough that cars around her kept blasting their horns. A few of the drivers leaned out of their windows to insult her. She didn’t hear any of it.
* * *
—
Maja greeted her at their front door with a tight hug. Kavita tried to return it, but her arms were tired and limp. She let Maja lead her into the sitting room and pour her some tea. “Drink it,” Maja said, and Kavita held the cup in both hands, feeling the warmth seep into her palms.
“I just came from Rhatha’s house,” she said.
“You should be resting, my dear.”
“Her daughter said Vivek was there on the day he died. And then he came here.”
Maja gazed at her friend sadly. “What are you doing, Kavita? You can’t keep going over this. It’s not good for you.”
“Did he come here?”
Maja sighed. “I was at work all day that day. He might have. He usually did.” She put a hand on Kavita’s knee. “Why are you asking all this?”
“I have to know what happened. My son can’t just die like that.”
“It was an accident, no? That’s what Chika told Charles. It was a car accident? And someone brought him to the house?”
Kavita looked up at her friend slowly, a frown tightening her forehead. “An accident,” she said.