were in our rooms studying, according to our schedules. I was drawing pregnant stick images on the inner flap of my Introductory Agriculture for Junior Secondary Schools when he came into my room. His eyes were swollen and red, and somehow that made him look younger, more vulnerable.
'Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from school. She will be fine,' he said.
'Yes, Papa.' I looked away from his face, back at my books.
He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions. 'Stand up,' he said.
I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.
Mama came home the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot 505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she got to it. 'Umu m,' she said, hugging us. 'My children.'
She wore the same white T-shirt with GOD is love written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their life fragments inside. 'There was an accident, the baby is gone,' she said.
I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure the baby was gone?
I was still staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi's cheekbones were so high they gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you, laughing at you, and you would never know why. 'Good afternoon, Madam, nno,' she said. 'Will you eat now or after you bathe?'
'Eh?' For a moment Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. 'Not now, Sisi, not now. Get me water and a towel.' Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel.
The etagere had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to reach out and straighten her wrapper. 'Nne, this is your study time. Go upstairs,' she said.
'I want to stay here.'
She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs raised high in the air, before she spoke. 'Nne, go.'
I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes. Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For Mama's forgiveness. And on Sunday, the Sunday after Advent, we stayed back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with holy water. Some of the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or me beginning to drift off at the thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for.
The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read them. Even as my first term exams approached, even when we started to do class reviews, the words still made no sense.
A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker, the wife of Papa's editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that loud before.
'They have taken him! They have taken him!' she said, between throaty sobs.
'Yewande, Yewande,' Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.
'What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my breast! How will I raise them alone?' I could hardly her words; instead, what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then Papa said, 'Yewande, don't talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you. Ade will be fine.' I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of the Standard. His car was abandoned on the roadside, the front door left open. I imagined Ade Coker being pulled out of his car, being squashed into another car, perhaps a black station wagon filled with soldiers, their guns hanging out of the windows. I imagined his hands quivering with fear, a wet patch spreading on his trousers. I knew his arrest was because of the big cover story in the last Standard, a story about how the Head of State and his wife had paid people to transport heroin abroad, a story that questioned the recent execution of three men and who the real drug barons were. Jaja said that when he looked through the keyhole, Papa was holding Yewande's hand and praying, telling her to repeat 'none of those who trust in Him shall be left desolate.'
Those were the words I said to myself as I took my exams the following week. And I repeated them, too, as Kevin drove me home on the last day of school, my report card tightly pressed to my chest. The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures: '2/25.' My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, 'Kambili is intelligent beyond her years, quiet and responsible.' The principal, Mother Lucy, wrote, 'A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.'
But I knew Papa would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first. Nobody had spent money on his own schooling, especially not his Godless father, our Papa-Nnukwu, yet he had always come first. I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me that I was fulfilling God's purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.
Mama opened the door even before Kevin stopped the car in the driveway. She always waited by the front door on the last day of school, to sing praise songs in Igbo and hug Jaja and me and caress our report cards in her hands. It was the only time she sang aloud at home. 'O me mma, Chineke, o me mma…'
Mama started her song and then stopped when I greeted her. 'Good afternoon, Mama.'
'Nne, did it go well? Your face is not bright.' She stood aside to let me pass.
'I came second.'
Mama paused. 'Come and eat. Sisi cooked coconut rice.'
I was sitting at my study desk when Papa came home. He lumbered upstairs, each heavy step creating turbulence in my head, and went into Jaja's room. He had come first, as usual, so Papa would be proud, would hug Jaja, leave his arm resting around Jaja's shoulders. He took a while in Jaja's room, though; I knew he was looking through each individual subject score, checking to see if any had decreased by one or two marks since last term. Something pushed fluids into my bladder, and I rushed to the toilet. Papa was in my room when I came out. 'Good evening, Papa, nno.'
'Did school go well?'
I wanted to say I came second so that he would know immediately, so that I would acknowledge my failure, but instead I said, 'Yes,' and handed him the report card. He seemed to take forever to open it and even longer to read it. I tried to pace my breathing as I waited, knowing all the while that I could not.
'Who came first?' Papa asked, finally.
'Chinwe Jideze.'
'Jideze? The girl who came second last term?'
'Yes,' I said. My stomach was making sounds, hollow rumbling sounds that seemed too loud, that would not stop even when I sucked in my belly.
Papa looked at my report card for a while longer; then he said, 'Come down for dinner.'
I walked downstairs, my legs feeling joint-free, like long strips of wood. Papa had come home with samples of a new biscuit, and he passed the green packet around before we started dinner. I bit into the biscuit. 'Very good, Papa.'
Papa took a bite and chewed, then looked at Jaja.
'It has a fresh taste,' Jaja said.
'Very tasty,' Mama said.
'It should sell by God's grace,' Papa said. 'Our wafers lead the market now and this should join them.'
