Everything Good Will Come (44 page)

I noticed the mobile phone in her hand, but mine were shaking too hard to make a call. I asked her if she would.

On the way to the hospital, Mrs. Williams kept talking to herself, “I hope the police don't stop us. You know, these checkpoints... ”

Her windscreen wipers hypnotized me. They tore the rain apart each time and I hugged myself, not because I was cold, but because my mother was lying in the back of her van, wrapped in white bed sheets. Above us the rain beat proverbs on the car roof:

Let our tears help us see clearer

He who denies his mother rest will not rest himself

Below us the rain beat the earth.

“I knew there was something,” Mrs. Williams murmured. “There had to be something. The rain, pouring like this, coming so early.”

My mother had been dead a day. Going through her medicines later, I discovered a batch which appeared to have been re-dated. I did not know where she'd purchased them, or how long they had expired. I imagined she'd bought them because they were cheaper.

Mrs. Williams washed her. The nurse's aide in the hospital would not.

“There are others,” she said. “She will have to wait.”

“But she's waited too long,” Sheri said.

Sheri was anxious; Moslems buried within a day. The nurse's aide shrugged. Her eyes were like a dead fish's, sunken and gray. Too much, they were saying. I've seen too much, can't you see? Whatever your story is. I don't care.

“Is there someone else?” Sheri asked.

“Only me,” the aide said. “Only me is here.”

Irritation crept into her voice. She was shifting, wanting to resume her task. Who were these people? Coming down to the mortuary, getting in her way?

Sheri turned to Mrs. Williams. “What will we do?”

I stood by the door with Niyi. I'd been waiting upstairs for three hours. Niyi arrived first and Sheri after him.

“I can wash her, ” Mrs. Williams said to me.

I felt Niyi's hand. He led me into the corridor outside.

A week later we buried my mother, in Ikoyi cemetery next to an angel with broken wings. The cemetery was filled with decapitated statues. Thickets grew higher than the head stones. It was where my brother was buried, but the plots next to his had been filled. I paid the local council for a plot by the entrance. During the funeral the pallbearers we'd hired to carry her casket refused to carry it further until we'd paid their money.

“You will burn in Hell for this,” our priest told them.

“Reverend Father,” said the stocky man who'd snatched the money from Niyi. “Hell and Lagos? Which is worse?”

He squinted as he counted the notes. One of his mates yawned and scratched his crotch.

For two days after my mother's funeral, I stopped eating. On the third day Niyi accompanied me to my pre-natal check up and at the end of it, the doctor told us, “I don't like what I'm seeing. This baby isn't growing properly.”

“Enitan hasn't been eating,” Niyi said.

“Why not?” the doctor asked.

“She's lost her appetite,” Niyi said.

“How can we get it back?” the doctor asked. “Can't her mother cook her something nice?”

He was an old man and tended to talk to people as he pleased. Normally I didn't mind because he was also one of the best ob-gyns in Lagos. Niyi began to explain but I tapped his arm. I could barely form the words because my mouth was dry.

“My mother is dead,” I said.

We arrived home and Niyi headed straight for the kitchen to cook a meal. I was lying in bed when he brought it to me. Fried plantain. They were golden brown and cooked right through, unlike the charred, half-raw pieces I usually handed to him. He picked one up and carried it to my mouth. He pried my lips open with his forefinger and thumb. The plantain slithered into my mouth, warm and sweet. I shut my eyes as it clung to the roof of my mouth, pulled it down with my tongue and began to chew.

As a child, whenever I had malaria, I would have a bitter taste in my mouth, after my fever broke. I hated that bitter taste. It tainted everything that went into my mouth, but the bitterness meant that I was cured: no more bouts of nausea, no more pounding headaches. I did not like the taste of the plantain in my mouth, but I began to eat from then on.

My daughter Yimika was born on the morning of August 3. Between the time crickets sleep and roosters wake, I tell her. After my water broke, I begged to be gutted like a fish. Then I saw her. I burst into tears.

“She's beautiful,” I said.

Like a pearl. I could have licked her. I had only one wish for her, that she would not be disinherited in her lifetime. I chose Sheri as her godmother. She would understand. Following Yoruba tradition, Yimika could have been called “Yetunde,” “mother has returned” to salute my mother's passing, but I decided against it. Everyone must walk their own path unencumbered. Hers wouldn't be easy, born in a motherland that treated her children like bastards, but it was hers. And I didn't worry that she wasn't born in a more fortunate place, like America, where people are so free they buy stars from the sky and name them after their children. If you own a star from the day you are born, what else is there to wish for?

My milk took me in a tackle, tugging on my shoulder, and tearing through my chest. I sat up in bed and unbuttoned my nightgown. Yimika's tiny mouth snatched my nipple and dragged. Bluish-white milk spurted from my free nipple. I covered it with a tissue from the box on my bedside table. The air-conditioner blasted cold air over my face; I lay back.

As my breast softened in her mouth, I eased it out and transferred her to the other. Yimika grabbed it with the same hungriness and I bit my lip to overcome the pain. Her palms traveled up my ribs. Her own ribs were separated from mine by her soft pink cotton romper. I wriggled her toes.

The night she was born, I was too tired to do anything but hold her. The day after, I was overwhelmed by visitors in my hospital room. The day after that, I braved my sutures and came home. “We won't need to press this one's head,” my mother-in-law said. “It's round already.”

She suggested that we wash her the traditional way, smothering her with shredded camwood and stretching her limbs. I refused and settled her in a crib by my bed; gave her a top and tail instead. Afterward, I checked her ears. They were as dark as my hands, which meant that she'd taken after me. I traced down her spine where Mongolian spots had left her skin black and blue. I dressed the mush on her navel, felt the pulse under her ribs. I imagined her heart pink and moist and throbbing. There was a tiny bald patch on her head, which worried me, though her doctor said it was nothing but a birth mark. I told him to be sure, because if anything happened to her, my faculties would close down and there would be no begging me out of that state.

I remembered my mother. There were times I still felt tearful, and I found that if I placed Yimika against me, she soothed me. She was tiny, but as heavy as a paper weight on my chest. I stared at her face for hours. She had taken her father's eyes, shaped like two halves of the moon. I knew she would shine.

Niyi shuffled in wearing his pajamas. He was sleeping in the spare room because Yimika was keeping him up at night. He scratched his shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

“It hurts,” I said. “My whole body hurts, like she's sucking out my marrow.”

“Why are you smiling then?”

I'd heard that some women cried for days after childbirth, because their bodies were out of control. But I had not shed a tear. If women cried, perhaps it was because we were overwhelmed by the power granted to us.

Niyi sat on the bed and began to stroke Yimika's head.

“She's tiny,” he said.

“Too small,” I said, opening her fingers one by one.

“Fatten her up for her debut.”

I pressed her closer. It was four days to her naming ceremony. I touched his cheek. “I can't believe this is happening. We must make sure we behave ourselves from now on. We will be the best family.”

For a while, he watched as if he were supervising.

“Is Sheri coming again?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“She's really helped.”

“She's good with children.”

“I feel so bad. The things I've said about her.”

“Really?” I said.

He shook his head. “Nope.”

He had to go to work. Sheri arrived when the hairdresser who had come to undo my braids was almost through with her task. She brought pounded yam and okra stew from her family's restaurant.

“Your hair has grown,” she said.

The hairdresser pulled another braid and began to poke it loose with a comb. Her price had increased since the last time, but so had the price of food, she said. The veranda floor was littered with hair extensions. Yimika slept in a pram stationed next to Sheri. Sweat trickled down my back and I shook my gown down. I studied my reflection in the hand mirror and was surprised by how long my hair had grown, and by how much my face had changed. I had a shadow over my cheeks from where my skin had darkened.

The hairdresser loosened the last braid. I lifted my hand mirror to inspect her work.

“Oh-oh,” I said.

Sheri edged forward. I lowered the mirror as she inspected my hair line.

“You have white hair,” she confirmed.

“I'm only thirty-five.”

“I've had mine since twenty-nine. Dye it.”

“I won't dye it,” I said. “Why should I?”

The hairdresser pulled my hair back. She hadn't said a word since she started her work, but it was obvious she was enjoying my discomfort.

I paid her and she left. Yimika cried in her pram and I hurried over to check her. She was still asleep, smiling too. I preferred to think she was having a good dream, but Sheri had told me that it was wind. There was sweat in her hair. I couldn't help but pick her up. Whenever she was sleeping, I missed her. Her arms flopped over my hands and her mouth opened.

“
Alaiye Baba
,” I whispered. “Master of the earth.”

She looked like one of those plump empresses who had slaves peeling grapes for them. I bent to kiss her. Her lashes unlocked.

“Our friend is awake,” I said.

Sheri came over and eased her out of my arms. She made clucking sounds and began to rock her. We were standing by the bed of purple hearts and I surveyed them as though I'd just planted them. A red-head lizard slithered across the veranda floor. It slid between two pots of mother-in-law's tongue and disappeared into the garden.

“Congratulations, mummy.”

I turned around to see who had said that. It was Grace Ameh.

From the moment she stepped into my home, her eyes were darting around. “I went to your office to look for you. Then they told me about your mother. My sincere condolences. I'm terribly, terribly sorry.”

I felt shy now that she was on my turf. We were like strangers who'd been forced to use the same bathroom.