People like to say that dead people look asleep, and maybe she would have bought that under different circumstances. Ahunna had looked asleep, but after all she had died in her sleep, so sleep and death had blurred together for her, and when they buried her the next day, she had taken peace down with her. But Kavita had already seen a different dead Vivek: the one on her veranda, the clotting blood, the flopping foot—they couldn’t trick her with this cleaned-up version, they couldn’t bring a peace that was never there. Not that they hadn’t tried, dressing him in his favorite white traditional, his feet as bare as when he’d knocked over the flowerpot by the front door. Kavita burst into tears, her body folding in on itself, and Ekene rushed to catch her before she hit the floor. He put his arm around her and guided her weight back up to her room, murmuring nonsense that even he knew made no difference.
She came down later, this time with Chika, and they stood by the casket for a long time.
“Where’s his necklace?” Chika finally said.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t on him when I found him.”
“He was always wearing it. Are you sure it didn’t fall off at the embalmer’s? Or that they didn’t steal it?”
Kavita’s face was set, hammered hard with pain. “I’m sure, Chika. It wasn’t on his body.” She could tell he wanted to argue, but she knew he couldn’t. She had refused to move from the body after she had found it; she had run her hands over Vivek’s face and wailed with her cheek on his chest. Besides, his body had been stripped naked. If the necklace had been there, Kavita would have seen it.
“He should be buried with it. It looks somehow that he’s not wearing it.”
Kavita agreed and patted Chika’s arm. He needed something to fixate on now that the repainting was done, now that his grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it. They all knew what would happen when that time came: it would slice behind his knees and knock him down and he would fall back into that same dark place he’d gone when Ahunna died.
“We’ll find it,” Kavita said, accepting the fixation with both hands. “It has to be somewhere. He may have taken it off.”
“He always wore it.”
“He might have taken it off to clean it.”
“Yes,” said Chika. “To clean it.”
They stood there, the room empty around them, before the wailers and the mourners arrived, just the two of them with their son.
* * *
—
Ekene had been watching them from the doorway, careful not to intrude, unwilling to break the veil of grief that had woven itself around the tableau. Eventually he left them there and went back to his house, where Mary was.
“You’re not going to the wake-keeping?” he asked her.
“I’ll go later,” she said. “Shebi they’re doing it all night?”
“The relatives, maybe. I doubt Kavita will stay the whole time. It’s too painful for her.”
Mary nodded. “And she won’t like to be around all of them. She and Chika like to keep to themselves.”
Ekene agreed, and it was close to midnight when Mary slipped out and went to join the wake-keeping. Along with the female relatives, cousins of cousins and whatnot, they covered their heads and sang gospel songs till dawn. Kavita and Chika stayed upstairs, drifting in and out of consciousness, weeping in private. One of the women brought up some food, but it stayed untouched on the tray in their room, oil congealing at the top in a lonely skin.
The Nigerwives arrived en masse in the morning, flocking around Kavita like protective birds, extending and interlocking their wings. Chika and Ekene watched them, shaking their heads.
“Maybe she will feel better with them here,” said Ekene. Chika grunted in reply and his brother squeezed his shoulder.
Mary was downstairs coordinating the women who were cooking in the back. The Nigerwives’ children—the ones who had come, the girls who were actually friends with Vivek—were milling about downstairs. It was only when Osita arrived that they followed him into the parlor to see Vivek’s body.
Osita stood beside his cousin’s casket and stared down, the wailing around him like static in the air. He felt Juju slide her hand into his, pressing her shoulder against him.
“I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “Should we say something?”
Osita’s eyes didn’t move from Vivek’s face. “There’s no point,” he said. “He’s not in there anymore.”
“Osita! Don’t say that!”
“It’s true na. What’s the point?” His voice was rough with dammed-up tears, but as angry as he sounded, he didn’t step away from the casket. Juju squeezed his hand and said silent things to the body of her friend. Beside her, Olunne was praying quietly; Somto stood with them, one arm pressed across her stomach, a hand to her mouth, eyes wet.
* * *
—
Out back, Kavita stood on the veranda and watched as a group of men dragged a goat in on a length of frayed rope. She had asked to be called when it was time to kill the animal, and she watched as its legs were tied and a small hole dug in the ground. They laid it on its side and its bleating rang through the backyard. A knife was produced, with an old wooden handle and a sharpened although nicked blade. They pulled back the goat’s head until its neck was curved, then ran the knife, almost casually, across it. Blood spouted, red and thick, pouring into the small hole in the earth. Kavita watched silently as the goat’s sounds faded into gray silence. She thought of the blood on her hand when she found Vivek’s body, and a wave of revulsion sent her running into the house to vomit into the nearest toilet. She heard faint laughter from the men outside and knew they were laughing at her. Maybe they didn’t know she was the dead boy’s mother, but it didn’t matter; no one knew what it was like, what it had been like to find him.
She still had nightmares about it, though: dreams where she rushed out and there was nothing on the veranda except a widening pool of blood still enough to capture her reflection. Where he opened his eyes and laughed when she pulled back the cloth, where it was all a trick, a joke. Where she lifted his head up and he dissolved into dust in her hands, leaving her with nothing but that akwete cloth. Leaning against the porcelain of the toilet, she wondered what would have happened if someone hadn’t brought Vivek back to the house, if they had just left him wherever he died. Would he have rotted there? Would anyone have cleared his body? She thought about what she owed to whoever had brought him. It killed her not to know who it was, what had happened.
Outside, she heard the crackle of the fire starting. The goat meat would be ready by the time the burial service was over that afternoon. They would make pepper soup from the entrails. Kavita flushed the toilet and closed the lid, her horror washing away in a whirlpool of blue water.
When the priest arrived, the boys who had brought the casket closed it and carried it into the compound, where a grave had been dug next to Ahunna’s. They put it down on top of two lengths of rope, then stepped back as the priest began a short service. The mourners sat on rented plastic chairs, or stood behind them. Kavita listened as the priest read scripture, letting the chant of the words filter over her; she watched, numb, as he performed the consecration of the grave. They were preparing to take her child away, to weigh him down under so much soil. The grave was a red yawn in the ground; the pile of dirt next to it matched Chika’s skin. If Chika stripped down and lay in the grave, and she looked down into it, what would she see? Would he just soak into it as if he’d been made of clay all along, molded together with a little water, animated for her behalf so they could have a child only to bury him?
She looked down at her hands, at the funeral program someone had designed and printed. Probably Ekene and Mary. She almost wished she could forgive them for the church incident. The program was full of pictures of Vivek as a small boy, a baby; none of them looked like him now. It was as if whoever had selected the pictures had decided to end the timeline before Vivek had grown his hair out. Kavita didn’t know whether to be relieved that he was frozen in time this way, or annoyed that they wanted to pretend he was someone else. She had already heard comments, whispered things that floated up the stairs because no one really knew how to whisper: people asking why his hair hadn’t been cut, why his parents would allow him to be buried like that. They blamed it on Kavita, said that she was the reason Chika was allowing things like this. She wanted to be angry, but all she could muster was a bit of wonder that they could speak that way with his body still under the roof.
The young boys came forward again, four of them, and grabbed hold of the ropes stretched under the casket. Straining till their muscles shone, they started to lower the casket into the ground. Kavita heard Chika make a choked sound and she fumbled for his hand, tight and sweaty. The ropes jerked and slid as the casket was swallowed, the red earth blocking its dark grain. Once it hit the bottom, they dragged the ropes out from under it and took them away, coiling them up. Chika and Kavita got up to throw clods of soil into the grave, whispering their good-byes through their tears. Mary and Ekene followed them, then Osita and Vivek’s friends. When everyone had done their own, the boys started to shovel the earth into the grave, filling it. Kavita walked back into the house and went upstairs. Chika stayed downstairs, fielding the visitors who pressed sympathy into his hands until his fingers felt dead.
* * *