“How come we haven’t been seeing you around, beta? Did you hear back from the American schools? I sent your mother the application forms. You sent them in, yes?”

I had no idea what forms she was talking about; I’d never seen them. “Sorry, Aunty. I didn’t get into any of the schools.” I tried to look ashamed, which wasn’t very difficult. “I was afraid you’d be disappointed in me.”

“Oh, Osita!” Aunty Kavita hugged me tightly. “What are you going to do now?”

“I applied to some universities here just in case. Those ones went well. My father wants me to go to school in Nsukka.”

She smiled and patted my cheek. “Well, at least you’ll be close to home. Vivek is starting his applications soon. Fingers crossed for next year!”

My mother interrupted us, gathering the family to take a group picture. Her eyes met mine briefly, and I wondered how much she had overheard, how much she was hiding. I wasn’t interested in digging up her secrets. We stood next to each other for the photograph; I still have it now. I’m wearing deep blue robes and looking sullen, a tassel hanging over my face.

Vivek isn’t even looking at the camera. His eyes are cast off to the side and his chin is lowered. Aunty Kavita has her arm around his waist; she only reaches his shoulder. My father and uncle are standing next to each other, brother by brother. My mother is smiling so widely you can’t help but look at her, like she’s determined to crack her face in half. We fit easily in the frame, all of us together.

After I started attending university in Nsukka, my trips back to my home in Owerri grew less frequent. I didn’t go to Ngwa either. A full year passed, maybe two, before I saw Vivek or his parents again. I wrote them letters, even called a few times after they installed a landline in their house, but I missed Vivek’s graduation, his eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays, and it was only later I found out that he never went to America. No one told me why. According to my mother, he enrolled at Nnamdi Azikiwe instead. One term later, De Chika pulled him out—and still no one would tell me what was going on.

“Since when did you start caring about your cousin?” my father said when I asked. I flinched at the censure in his voice. He’d never commented on our rift, but clearly he’d noticed, and it sounded like he blamed me. I wanted to argue, but my father walked away without waiting for my answer, leaving me ashamed in his wake.

“Don’t worry yourself,” my mother said. “Focus on your books. The boy will be fine. His parents are just spoiling him.”

“But what’s happening?” I asked. “Why did they remove him from uni?”

She hesitated, then flapped her hand in a vague gesture. “He’s not well, but don’t worry. God will take care of it.”

By then, my father had reduced his hours at work so he could spend more time at my grandmother’s house in the village. “I’m getting old,” he said, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did. The house had been renovated into a duplex and he’d put in a phone line. My mother and I joined him some weekends, like small holidays away from Owerri. The village was expansive—a world of land and farms and nature, not like the towns or cities, where everything was cramped and loud. We were finding escapes everywhere.

One evening at the village house, I picked up the phone in the upstairs parlor and heard De Chika speaking to my mother. I should have hung up, but instead I lowered myself to the floor next to the sofa, pressing my back against the leather and covering the mouthpiece with my hand so they wouldn’t hear me breathing.

“You know Osita came down with us,” my mother was saying. “Maybe it’s a good time to bring Vivek around. You remember how close they were as boys.”

“Mary, I don’t know. I don’t know what is happening to my son.” De Chika sounded worried. “Do you know he stopped cutting his hair? If you see him now, just looking like a madman . . .”

“We will pray for him,” my mother countered. “The forces of darkness will not triumph! No, he is not lost. He cannot be lost.” I could already feel her beginning to whip herself up into a holy frenzy.

“I’m not worried about his soul, Mary,” De Chika snapped. “I’m worried about his mind. Kavita has stopped sleeping. She keeps checking his bed, but the boy doesn’t even sleep there anymore. He wanders around the house. He goes and lies down on the veranda with the dogs. Sometimes he climbs the tree in the backyard and just stays there.”

“Ah-ahn!” My mother was surprised enough to pause the spiritual momentum she’d been gathering. “Have you asked him what exactly he thinks he’s doing? You can’t just leave university to come and behave like this.”

“He said he can’t sleep. That the dogs don’t disturb him and he can feel breeze better from the tree, some rubbish like that. When we asked him to start making sense, that’s when he stopped talking. Mary, I don’t want the neighbors to see him like this.”

“Ei-yah! Poor Kavita. So it’s the three of you that are coming, abi?”

“Yes oh. I can’t leave either of them alone, and she won’t leave him alone. You know she slapped him the other day?”

“Ehn, she told me. She said she was feeling guilty. I told her a boy who does not respect his mother enough to behave like a normal human being in her house should be prepared to accept some discipline. Didn’t you people beat him as a child?”

“That was different. He was small, he was obedient. Kavita didn’t tell you she was afraid?”

My mother perked up. “Afraid? Did he raise his hand to her?”

I flinched. She was wondering if he was like me. The last time she tried to slap me, I caught her wrist and forced her arm down. It was only through the veil of my anger that I finally saw the pain and fear in her eyes.

“Tufiakwa!” De Chika said. “How can? No, it’s just the way he looked at her after she slapped him, as if he hated her. And I mean really hated her, from the bottom of his heart. And then the thing just went away, fiam! His eyes became as empty as a bucket—that’s how she said it. She started crying and crying and he just continued looking at her.”

My mother tsked over the phone. “Chai, you people are suffering! Oya, come and stay with us and maybe the air here will clear his head. You know that’s why Osita likes to come also. He says everything is cleaner here than in Owerri, that the air is fresh.”

“?d?nma. We will drive down tomorrow morning. Greet Ekene for me.” De Chika hung up, then so did my mother and so did I. A few minutes later, she called me downstairs and assigned me a list of chores to prepare for their arrival.

* * *

—

That evening, we all sat around the dining table, eating garri and oha soup.

My father poured himself a glass of Guinness. “What time are they arriving tomorrow?”

“They said they will leave Ngwa early,” my mother answered, spooning out more soup for him. “So unless they meet traffic, around nine a.m.?”

“Did you prepare the guest room for your aunty and uncle?” he asked me. “Your cousin will share your room with you.”

I nodded. He glared briefly at me before turning to my mother to mutter something about how children of nowadays didn’t know how to use their mouths and talk to their elders. I molded a ball of garri in my hand and thought about the last time Vivek and I had been in the village together. It was maybe five years ago, before the thing with Elizabeth, when he came back from his boarding school for Christmas. They had shaved his head while he was up there, and I joked that he looked like a refugee from Niger, one of those children always begging in the markets. We went to the river to swim, and when he took off his shirt, there were small round scars dotting his ribs. I asked him what happened, and he looked at me as if I wanted to fight him. Cigarettes, he said. From the senior boys. And then he jumped into the water and splashed me even though I was still dressed. We swam until my clothes dried on the banks.

Now, it felt like something that had never happened.

I went out running the next morning, before Vivek and his parents arrived. My shoes were filled with sand by the time I got back, so I emptied them outside the door, then entered the house in my socks. My parents were sitting in the parlor and my mother was holding Aunty Kavita’s hands, praying quietly but urgently. De Chika was pouring a bottle of Star beer into a glass, even though it was still early. My father was drinking coffee. I bent my head and mouthed a greeting that De Chika acknowledged silently as he waved for me to move on. We all knew not to interrupt my mother’s prayers.