AMID SECRETS - CHAPTER 31
*Maduka’s POV*
A savage jab wakes me up abruptly. Pain blooms in my chest and I roll off the bed, disoriented in the darkness. Reaching out for the switch beside my bed, I partially illuminate the room in two seconds max.
What I see nearly breaks my heart.
Nwanyieze is furiously kicking no one in particular. Her eyes are still closed. She murmurs an angry “No” and kicks out again and again, before curling herself back into a ball and saying, “Please” in a small voice. The sheets are bunched up at the lower corners of the bed. I notice that the shirt clings to her back, glued by sweat and the hem has hiked up, revealing black cotton P@?tî??. My shoelace, the one she had used to secure her puff, is nowhere to be found.
She is reliving those horrible moments with her adoptive father.
Slowly, I move back onto the bed and hold her close with my good arm. She struggles against me, murmuring “No”. She is so tense, her muscles so stiff that they vibrate.
“Nwanyieze, it’s just a bad dream,” I whisper into her ear. “Wake up.”
“Don’t take them off. You’re hurting me. I h@?? you.”
“Wake up, baby girl. Wake up. It’s Maduka.”
“Maduka,” she sighs before slowly relaxing, her shoulders lowering.
“I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
“Always…be…here?”
“Always.”
“Are you sure?” She asked?
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
She immediately falls back into a deep sleep, and I doubt she will remember ever speaking to me. I get up and turn on the air conditioner. By the time I return to the bed, she is spread-eagled on it and I don’t want to disturb her. After spreading a spare sheet on the floor and removing a pillow from the bed, I settle on the floor.
Sleep eludes me, and in its place are memories. When it eventually comes, it is fitful and sparse. Day breaks almost too soon and I lie on my belly, watching Nwanyieze sleep. She has rolled over to the edge, towards where I lie and is also on her belly. Her hand is off the edge and on the floor, a few inches from mine.
Still fast asleep, her hair standing up in dark tufts, lips parted, and her skin illuminated by a slice of the morning sunshine, she is a beautiful sight. I lie still, watching, taking in the details, not wanting to move for fear that even the disturbance of the dust motes in the air between us will awaken her.
I remember watching her sleep the next few months after Sister Benedicta had placed us in the orphanage, standing over her cot and just staring, because she was a miracle, and she had fascinated me, and I couldn’t understand how she could not have been able to fascinate her parents. Coming from a loving family, the concept of babies without parents was a new thing to me.
She had led me to a new family, had paved the way for me to become who I am today. It feels like I owe her, like I have to set things straight not just for myself but for her, too. For me to tell her everything about myself and our first meeting, I have to first take a bold step towards my redemption.
Her eyelids flutter, then they rise. She blinks a few times and squints in the light before focusing on me.
“Good morning,” I greet her. I want nothing more than to wake up beside her everyday. I want those lovely eyes to look at me first before anything else in the light of each sunrise.
Nwanyieze smiles and croaks a good morning, then sits up and rubs her eyes. After a few seconds of stretching, she realises that the hem of my shirt is high up at her waist, which means that her thighs and a part of her rounded bum are exposed. I notice some stretch marks, beautiful as the stripes on a tigeress, lighter than the chocolate of her skin. I had wanted to remark on them that day at the beach with Somto’s children, but I’d thought against it. She quickly tries to cover up, embarrassment written all over her face.
“Don’t.”
She freezes, her eyes on me.
“They’re beautiful. I mean it.”
She sits still as I move towards the bed, her hands still holding on to the hem of the shirt. She seems to have no idea how beautiful she is, sitting underneath the rays of sunlight in my shirt and giving me an amused smile, hair uncombed, skin glowing. I add this scene to my list of wants, my endless list of wants where she is concerned.
“What are you doing?” She questions with a laugh even as I kiss her leg. But her toes curl, her head tilts back a bit, and she makes a small sound that does who-knows-what to my brain.
“Adoring you.”
“Maduka-”
“I won’t do what you don’t want me to do.” A flick of my tongue on the back of her knee, a gasp from her. “Did you like that?”
She nods, lower lip between her teeth. My baby girl is quite the kitten, although she doesn’t show it. I flip her over, and she looks at me over her shoulder, puzzled. The stretch marks are in full view.
“I saw you trying to hide your stretch marks.”
“I’ve always been shy about them,” she confesses. “At the beach with the children… I temporarily forgot about them.”
“I love everything about you. Those things you’re shy about, they make you. Physically, mentally, emotionally. There is no other Nwanyieze like you.”
“Only you would say that.”
“Maybe because there is no other Maduka like me,” I chuckle.
“He’s about to be cheesy again,” she jokes.
Lowering my head, I kiss the sides of her bum, where the stretch marks lie. A tigress, that’s what she is. Fierce and passionate, beautifully marked with what she thinks are flaws, but all I see is perfection.
“I’d have farted, if I had the chance,” Nwanyieze tells me.
“You just like to ruin moments.”
“That’s what I live for.” She turns onto her back and pulls me down, onto herself, hands on both sides of my face. That sad look is back again, and the feeling that something isn’t right creeps back into my heart.
It’s going to be difficult. Leaving you.
For the life of me, I have no idea why she would say that to me. I don’t want to hear anything pessimistic about us, and so I tell her what I have thought about, what I have stayed up all night turning over in my mind.
“I’m going home, Nwanyieze. I’m going to my ancestral home.”
___
The road is a bit bumpy, a ribbon of red sand dotted with watery potholes and flanked on both sides by little houses, which used bushes and trees as fences.
Umuaku has changed since my childhood: there are more houses than before, more cars on the red road, and more shops on the landscape. I see the path to the stream I had played in as a child, and I find myself smiling at the memories.
Running naked with my mother’s angry screams fading behind me, running to the stream and splashing in the water only to have her come a few minutes later and drag me out by my ear for being disobedient.
Beside me, Nwanyieze is silent, taking in the surroundings. Her hand rests on my thigh, offering courage, but I can tell she is also anxious. I briefly glance at her and it feels like my chest is swelling, swelling with gratitude that I have her in my life.
Her face is turned towards the window beside her. Her hair has been made into neat cornrows with some extensions, the ends flowing down her back. One spaghetti strap of her black top hangs off her shoulder, but she doesnt seem to notice. Hope sparks in my heart, that things will be straightened out and I can finally tell her the story of how we first met.
“It’s so serene,” she finally speaks. “I can imagine you growing up here.”
“It was a no-hassle life. I climbed trees, swam in the stream, listened to tales by moonlight. But my father ensured I went to school. He took me to school everyday on his motorcycle.”
My chest constricts at the memory of holding tight onto my father’s torso during those rides. I had insisted on sitting behind and not in front, because I was a big boy, and some of my classmates had teased me for sitting “like a girl” on the motorcycle. Nwanyieze senses my distress and rubs my thigh.
“Take deep breaths, Madi.”
I park the car close to the bushes and nod. It feels like I’m falling into a deep hole, or walking into a dark cave without the knowledge of what is inside. A small voice in my head tells me to reverse, take a U-turn, and drive away from this village, take Nwanyieze away from here because I don’t want to take any chances. But am I sure, really? Am I sure about what happened way back, to my parents?
Once again I feel grateful that she had insisted on coming with me. After I’d made the announcement to her, I’d began making plans. Flight tickets, car arrangements, accommodation. It had taken me three days, during which I had taken off my cast. The night before my departure, Nwanyieze had showed up at my door with a bag.
“Did you think I would let you go alone?” She’d asked, amused.
I didn’t want her to come, because I was scared for her.
“Don’t you have school?”
“I just finished my exams.”
“It won’t be interesting.”
But she had already dropped her bag on the couch, was already pulling me into her arms and rubbing her lips against mine. And her eyes had that look in them, the one that told me that she was not going to change her mind.
“I want to be there for you, too,” she’d whispered, her eyes locked on mine. And then I’d kissed her, and embraced her.
“Why are you so good to me?”
“Jesus said we should be good to everyone,” she’d replied with a laugh.
I was surprised to see that she had booked her flight ticket already, for the next day. And when I asked her, she recalled one of our phone call conversations during which I had told her about the airline I was using.
“Wow, you’re something else,” I had said, amazed.
“You’d be surprised,” was her reply with a smile on her face.
The flight had been a smooth, cosy one with her beside me as thankfully, the passenger who was meant to sit by my side had cancelled at the last minute.
I haven’t told my family about what I’m doing, because I’m not sure of their reaction at the moment. Only this woman beside me knows, and it makes everything all the more intimate.
“You’ll be fine,” she tells me now.
“What if they don’t recognise me?”
“And what if they do? You’ll gain a family. Your origins will be confirmed. You’ll finally reconnect yourself with your past.”
This makes me feel sad for her, that she is very likely to never know where she comes from. Her life, to her, had begun in the garbage, and would have ended if a hungry orphan had never decided to search for food in the discarded heap.
I take her hand and squeeze it before planting a kiss in the middle of her palm. “I can’t thank you enough, baby girl.”
She says nothing, but I can see it there in her eyes, the truth she knows and her hopes that I can find redemption for myself.
My father’s compound is still the same, with the wide expanse of red sand preceding his small bungalow. Trees on both sides, under which sat wooden benches with leaves dancing lazily around them in the breeze. The front yard is so big, and I remember him discussing plans to build a bigger house with my mother. Three hens and two goats roam around in the compound, clucking and bleating respectively. Some children are playing around, their happy sounds reaching my ears.
My eyes fall on two large tiled rectangles on the ground, white and conspicuous between two mango trees. I suddenly have this suffocating feeling, and it’s like everything else disappears except for those two graves. I feel Nwanyieze’s hand grip my thigh and then slide away; she knows what is about to happen and has given me the space.
It takes me all of ten seconds to leave the car and stride towards the final resting place of my parents. Twenty years since I last saw them alive, twenty years since the last night I had told them goodnight, and all I see are two monuments bearing testament to their bones six feet below.
Grief can’t be described properly, even by those who feel it. Helplessness crushes me like an iron fist, and I wonder, for the umpteenth time, why it had to be me.I don’t know how long I stand there, but I feel Nwanyieze’s presence beside me and grip her hand when she slides it into mine. She says nothing, but her head leaning on my arm tells me that she shares my grief, that she’s going to be by my side but will still give me wh@??ver allowance I need to handle this on my own.
“Good afternoon oh!”
We both turn towards the voice.
A woman is approaching from the bungalow, dressed in a bright yellow blouse and a black maxi skirt. I recognise her even before she is within a good distance to see her features clearly. A cheerful face with small eyes partly hidden by round cheeks, her body now burdened by weight gained over the years. Hair perpetually in a low cut, skin light in complexion and dotted by skin tags. I had loved this woman after my mother.
Daa Ndidi.
She freezes when our eyes lock. We stare at each other, with her tilting her head in confusion at the possibility that I could be here, alive, after twenty years. I know she recognises me, I know she can’t believe her eyes. Her hand rises to her chest, her small eyes go as wide as they can, her jaw drops. I wait patiently for her to find her voice while replaying her cries in my ears: Maduka, nwa m, lota biko!
“Maduka?” she states at last.
“Daa Ndidi.”
She starts to scream.
We rush towards each other and I let her embrace me. She smells faintly of firewood and ofe Owerre; nostalgia comes flooding in. My throat, already constricted, tightens further.
“Maduka. Maduka nwa m,” she sobs uncontrollably.
Because I am bent to allow her to hug me, I feel her warm tears on the side of my neck. I know, that wh@??ver might have happened to my family, DaaNdidi had no hand in it. The love I feel pouring out of her at the sight of me is pure, like a mother who has seen her long-lost child.
“DaaNdidi, a lotala m. Maduka a lotala.” (I’m back. Maduka is back.)