Five

After Vivek died, Osita went to Port Harcourt and drank until the days were sabotaged in his memory. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and when he got there, no one cared about where or what he had come from. He was tall and immaculately dark-skinned, muscled and handsome and generous with drinks, so the oil workers he fell in with were more than happy to spend time with him. There were hotel rooms and some women, and a memory of dirty glasses stacked high and teetering before they crashed into a sink and broke, then the warped sound of people laughing. Osita watched the glass bounce. He felt carpet against his back and tasted a vileness in his mouth, as if someone had vomited into it. A girl straddled his hips and lowered her face to his, but it blurred to nothing.

Then he was floating on an inflation tube in someone’s pool, his hands and feet trailing in the water. A bald woman was treading water next to him. “You’re crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. It was evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words.

She laughed. “It’s not raining.”

“It’s raining inside me,” he said, and a wave of darkness took over. When he woke up, he was lying on a pool chair on his stomach, his head turned to the side. There was a small pile of sand on the cement next to him, thrown over his drying vomit. No one else was by the pool. Osita sat up and found a bottle of schnapps that someone had left on the floor. It was still a quarter full.

He drank some more.

He was gone for a few weeks, and they only found him because his aunt came to Port Harcourt looking. One of the Nigerwives there connected Kavita with a taxi driver who knew everyone in town.

“He’s tall,” she told him. “Very black. Gorimakpa. And one of his front teeth is broken.”

After two days, the taxi driver took her to one of the hotels. The receptionist quickly allowed her upstairs because she was Indian and angry and demanding things in a raised voice. When they unlocked a door near the end of the corridor, Kavita walked in to find Osita lying on the bed, snoring loudly, his breath gurgling in his chest. She flinched at the smell of the room and shoved his shoulder. Osita jumped up, grunting in alarm and rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days; stubble spread from the curve of his skull to his face.

“Aunty Kavita? What are you doing here?”

“Put on your clothes,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”

He stood up, obeying automatically, even as his head swam. “Give me five minutes,” he said, stumbling to the bathroom in his boxers as Kavita watched him. It was impossible for Kavita to see Osita without seeing her son, Vivek—the two of them as boys, sitting together at the dining table, running through her house with their wrestling toys, fighting on the parlor carpet. When she started looking for the small charm Vivek used to wear around his neck and couldn’t find it, Osita had been the first person who came to mind.

The charm had been missing since before the burial, but Kavita hadn’t wanted to look for it properly then. If she found it too soon, she would’ve had to bury him with it; even Chika had noticed it was missing. If she found it afterward, she could keep it for herself. She went through Vivek’s room looking for it after the burial, but it wasn’t there. She called Maja and Rhatha and Ruby and told them to ask the children if any of them had seen it. All of them said no. The only person remaining was Osita, but since Kavita wasn’t talking to Mary, she made Chika call Ekene and ask for him.

“We haven’t seen him,” Ekene said. “We’re even a bit worried. He said he was going to Port Harcourt for work but we haven’t heard from him since. It’s not like him to behave like this. Mary says he was drinking heavily before he left. I don’t know what’s going to happen to that boy.”

Chika had said it was ridiculous to go chasing after Osita. “He’s twenty-three, he’s not a child anymore,” he said. “Leave that man alone.” Kavita ignored him and went to Port Harcourt anyway. She had to find that charm.

Now, standing in her nephew’s hotel room, she felt a little jealous. If she could have run away and fallen apart like this, doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who, she would have done so in a heartbeat. But she had a husband, and useless as he was, he was something she didn’t want to leave, not now.

Kavita heard the water start running from the showerhead, then the louder hiss of her nephew urinating against the inside curve of the toilet bowl. She looked around the room, at the clothes and underwear scattered on the floor, at the empty bottles and condom wrappers, grimacing when she saw a used condom lying next to the bed. Mary would have a fit if she saw this, she thought. Sometimes Kavita missed her sister-in-law, but whenever that pain showed up in her chest, she reminded herself that the Mary of today was not the same Mary she’d known all those years ago. You lost that sister a long time ago; she’s gone, just like Ahunna. The only difference is that her body is still walking around.

The sounds of water from the bathroom turned off, and a few minutes later Osita came out dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Kavita watched him collect his scattered things and stuff them into the suitcase. His embarrassment was palpable as he picked up the condom wrappers and the used condom, tossing them in the wastepaper basket, but his aunt didn’t say anything and so, gratefully, neither did he.

“I’m ready,” he said, zippering the suitcase and levering it upright. Kavita nodded and Osita looked around the room one more time as they left.

* * *

—

    As they drove out of Port Harcourt, Osita rested his head on the window and fell in and out of sleep, slivers of memory glimmering in his head. The fact of the hotel room was strange—he couldn’t remember checking into it in the first place. He’d been relieved to see the condom wrappers, but he only had vague memories of using them. Things had gotten even stranger when his aunt appeared, barely seeming real, but he had followed her as if she was salvation, and now they were going home.

Osita pressed his forehead against the glass of the window as a blurry memory tried to push forward. There had been a man. He rubbed his eyes and tried to place the image. Yes, there had definitely been a man, in that same hotel room. Short and stocky, with hairy muscles. Lebanese. Osita vaguely remembered the man undressing him, then removing his own shirt to expose a firm potbelly. His unfamiliar voice calling Osita beautiful, so black and so beautiful. Osita had been silent, his head swimming, his limbs clumsy. Slivers of memory: The man’s sweat matting the hair on their chests as he ground against Osita, a fog of raised voices. Osita’s cheek pressed into the mattress, a hand forcing the back of his neck down, the man’s hips pushing, seeking. The sound of heavy grunting, a stab of pain, a flare of rage.