She swung again and again, ignoring him, and Chika just stared, too shocked to try and restrain her. Kavita was grunting and crying—more in anger than grief, it felt like—and the gravestone chipped under her onslaught. She was aiming at the inscription now, and he cringed as he realized it.

“We—can—at—least—get—one—thing—correct!” she snarled between swings. Tiny cracks blossomed across the surface of the gravestone; chips littered the grass. Chika took a step back to avoid one flying into in his eye. He folded his arms and decided to let her get it out of her system. She swung until her arms were tired, then stopped, panting; the long handle of the hoe hung from her hands, banging gently against her knees. Her face was covered in sweat and her hair stuck wetly to her cheek.

“Are you finished?” he said. There was a small wound in the gravestone now, open and fragmented around the edges. Kavita whispered something and Chika took a step closer. “What is it?” She looked up at him and he wrapped his arms around her, the pain in her eyes wild and pounding. He was surprised when she didn’t pull away.

“You have to fix it,” she whispered, her voice thick and clotted. “You have to fix it.”

Chika held her tightly. “Of course,” he said, though he was confused by what exactly she meant. “I’ll fix it. Of course I’ll fix it.”

It was only when they got home, and he made her some tea and sat with her on the veranda listening to the birds from the plumeria tree, that she finally explained what she wanted: their last gesture for their dead child, their belated apology. “He might still be alive,” Kavita said, “if he’d felt safe enough to be himself in our house, instead of walking around like that. How could we protect him if we didn’t know? And he told them not to tell us because he couldn’t trust us, and he was right not to. Can you imagine what we would have done?”

Chika’s jaw clenched, but he knew she was right. If Vivek had been alive, he would never have conceded her point, but when you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.

“Besides,” Kavita added, too calmly, “you owe me.”

Eloise hung between them and Chika bowed his head, knowing he had lost. Kavita had stated her price, and his choice was clear: pay it or lose her.

He called the contractor and ordered a replacement headstone with a new inscription. He didn’t tell anyone in the family about it, but he knew they visited the grave, so when Ekene called him and said, “Better late than never,” Chika accepted it. He said nothing more to Kavita about his shame, or the new headstone, or the photographs. Kavita said nothing to him when she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.

Twenty-three

Osita

I went to Vivek’s grave on his birthday, very early in the morning.

I knew Uncle Chika and Aunty Kavita were going to arrive later that day and spend the night, so I came the day before and slept in my grandmother’s room. When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open, I went out into the compound and stood in front of his grave, with the new marker Aunty Kavita had forced Uncle Chika to put in. He hadn’t had much of a choice after she tried to destroy the old one.

The air around me was damp, dew clinging to the grass and the leaves, and at the head of the grave the small star fruit tree, struggling out of being a seedling. I wasn’t sure why Aunty Kavita had picked a fruit tree that would feed on Vivek’s body. Uncle Chika probably would have selected something else, like a palm tree. Did she look forward to the day when it would actually have star fruits hanging from its branches? Would she pick them and eat them as if she was absorbing him, bringing him back inside where he’d come from? It would be something like Holy Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around, giving life to things even after he’d run out of it himself.

I squatted next to the grave, my legs still tired from sleep, then gave up and sat down on the marker after looking around to make sure no one was there. I had brought a black-and-yellow polythene bag with me, knotted firmly. Sitting on my cousin’s grave, I started to work the knot loose. It was tight; I had wrenched it closed with shaking hands, planning to burn it, certainly never to open it again. Then it had stayed under my bed in my room for months. Sometimes I would bring it out and hold it to my chest, fighting the urge to rip it open. I always put it back. But today; today’s own was different.

It took me a few minutes and the application of my teeth for me to get it open, and then I parted the plastic mouth and folded the bag back. Lying inside was a dress, made of soft cotton, except for the parts that had stiffened with old blood. I had folded it carefully when I put it into the bag, and now I smoothed the square it made in my lap. It was a deep blue, like what I imagined falling into the sea would look like if you kept trying to find the bottom. There were red hibiscus flowers splashed all over it, yellow dots quivering at the stamens. They hadn’t been printed to scale; these hibiscus were smaller than real ones would be, so that more of them could fit into the blue. It had been Vivek’s favorite dress.

He was wearing it in one of the pictures Juju was going to show Aunty Kavita, but I had taken it from her room the morning after we all met at the sports club, so that one never made it to Aunty Kavita. Juju was still asleep when I left and I didn’t wake her up. Saying good-bye would have been too much, too somehow, given what had happened that night. So I had walked quietly across the bedroom floor to pick up my boxers and trousers, balancing carefully as I put them on, then wearing my crumpled shirt and singlet. Juju’s bag was lying on her dressing table and I reached inside it with a delicate hand, fishing out the photo envelope. I flicked through the pictures quickly, looking for the one I’d seen at the sports club. The girls had seen that particular picture, too, but they knew Vivek and they would have thought he was just playing around, as he often did with us. Maybe it was my guilt making me paranoid, but that photograph felt like exposure, and I couldn’t let my aunt see it. God forbid. If she told my parents about it, I couldn’t begin to imagine the consequences.

In the picture, Vivek was wearing the dress, a wraparound tied on the left of his waist. The neckline fell into a V, showing the bone of his sternum. His hair was down and falling around his face. Juju had combed and plaited it with gel into a hundred small plaits, then let them dry and released them into many small waves cascading down his body. He was sitting in my lap with his legs crossed, the dress riding high on his thighs, his torso leaning forward as he laughed into the camera. One arm was around my neck and I was looking at his face. My expression made me cringe. It was, for lack of a better word, adoring. Unfettered. As if there was no danger of anyone seeing me gaze at him like that. As if we were alone and I wasn’t afraid and we weren’t cousins and any of this wasn’t terrifying.

Vivek had shaved his chest and legs—he did that often in those last few months—and his toes were painted a red that matched the flowers on his dress. I remembered the first time I saw him in that dress; I was surprised at its long sleeves and shoulder pads. It would have been almost demure if not for the neckline, which he would cover with his hair. But he spun around to show it off, and for once he looked happy and not tired, not like he was dying or suffering. I couldn’t help but be happy for him. I had surrendered by then, you see, and we were in Juju’s house, in our bubble where everything was okay and the outside world didn’t exist. Sitting on his grave with the dress in my hands, I felt the weeping churn in my chest.

Everything would have stayed okay if he hadn’t left the bubble. If he hadn’t felt the need to start going outside and putting himself at risk. How were we supposed to protect him if he wouldn’t stay inside?

On the day the market burned, I had gone to Juju’s house to look for him. She told me he’d gone out again. I had shouted at her, unfairly, as if I didn’t know she couldn’t stop him. No one could stop him—we had all tried already, many times. I went out, jumped on an okada, and set out to look for him. I knew he liked to visit one woman near the market who sold puff-puff, so I told the okada man to go down Chief Michael Road. We had just passed the first junction when we heard the noise and saw the crowd in the distance. My okada swerved to the side of the road and stopped.