I used to tell people my mother gave birth to a thousand books and one girl.
They would chuckle, believing I was attempting to be humorous. I wish I were. Now that she’s dying, I find myself clinging to a particular childhood memory: I am six years old, and my scalp is pulsating from a headache triggered by taut cornrows. I am sitting on the cool floor tiles outside of my mother’s home library and, desperate for comfort, I knock, pleading for her to let me in, but she is too engrossed in a one‑ sided, animated conversation with the author of the book she’s reading to hear me. She has imagined this author, as she often does, and for the time being, he is her beloved child, my phantom sibling. I fall asleep waiting and dream of her pulling me into a deep hug and pressing my head into her bosom, into her scent of fresh basil, and together, we sway to the rhythm of her laughter until I startle awake and realize it’s been hours. I knock again, and this time, there is a pause from inside, a brief consideration of my persistence, before the resumption of her occupation. Eventually, our housemaid, Ada, discovers me huddled on the floor and sends me to my room.
It’s been nearly thirty years, and I’m still haunted by this memory.
My mother was readmitted last week to a private ward in a hospital in Port Harcourt and has been sleeping since I arrived. I must admit that sitting this close feels unnatural, difficult. I can smell her breath, and every expulsion from her partly slackened mouth warms the air between us with the odor of antibiotics and sulfur. I used to take ref‑ uge in that green padded chair by the door of her hospital room, in filling the chasm between us with practiced smiles and delicately rehearsed responses. It was a pragmatic choice, easier than sitting close enough for her to see the pain of her childhood rejection still etched on my face.
But today is different.
Today I’d like for her to witness the scars stinging my face, to (and this seems unfair in the face of her distress) afflict her with some of the trauma I’ve recently suffered. I fear it’s the only way she’ll understand why I must pry the relics of my buried past out of her grip.
She stirs, and I pitch forward.
“Mum?” I whisper. “Are you awake?” Her bald scalp reminds me of the small retractable head of an aged tortoise. Her fists huddle the bedsheet at the sides, but she says nothing. I suspect she knows I am here; that she is, as usual, taking her time.
Her eyes snap open. “Your face,” she says, her own gaunt, weath‑ ered face austere with the silent analysis of recollection as she considers the lines etched under my chin like a signature, the cruel Y‑shaped welt crawling along my jaw. “Dad said you had an . . . accident,” she says. “What happened?”
“I lied,” I say. “It wasn’t an accident.” A pause. The lacerations are slowly disappearing, but the memory of being whipped in a fertility ritual my mother‑in‑law organized continues to torment me. I couldn’t look in the mirror for days after. Sometimes I still can’t. Sometimes, in the night’s stillness, when my husband, Ken, is asleep, I hear a whip, a vicious crack in the air, and I startle, catch myself.
I ball my fists to control the shaking in my hands. “I’ve been think‑ ing,” I say haltingly, “about—”
“That’s a stack of bloody good books.” She nods at the pile of nov‑ els on the wooden table beside me. “Pass that blue‑covered one, will you? The one with the bookmark?”
She’s expecting me to deflect, to bow under the weight of her gaze, but I hitch my chair nearer, back straight. “I realize it may be uncom‑ fortable, me asking about a sixteen‑year‑old document, but I need it.” I bring my hands together, a forced plea. “I wouldn’t have flown over if you’d replied to my emails or texts.”
She presses a finger to the control panel on the handle of her bed so that it tilts upward with a whirring sound, and when her face is level with mine, she licks her lips, the tip of her tongue tinged yellow and textured like aged cheddar.
“Tia,” she says, voice soft. “Your dad is around. I can’t talk about this now. Give me some time. I just recovered from another infection. My novel?”
“I need a moment,” I say, rising and hurrying out of her room, past a woman retching in the next ward, past the line of nurses’ stations. It’s not until the elevator pings open that I realize I forgot my handbag. I dash back and halt at the cracked‑open door. My mother is speaking to my aunty on the phone, on a video call, as they often do, and in a voice so serious and penetrating that I am compelled to eavesdrop.
“You are asking me not to tell her?” my mother is saying. “To carry this secret to my grave? No, Beatrice. Let me die in peace. Let me explain why she can’t have the documentation she’s—” My aunty interrupts, her voice high‑pitched and garbled like a cassette tape on fast‑forward. I listen, eyes on my distorted silhouette reflected in the foil‑tinted window of the opposite ward, a hot tingle filling every crevice of my body. I am struggling to grasp on to their fragmented conversation, to slot piece after piece in to make an entire portrait of my past, but they carry on back and forth, piercing me afresh with the sharp edge of each discovery until my aunty’s voice falls to a mumble that no longer rises and I can no longer wait in this excruciating anticipation for the glue that binds the fragments of the words—“it’s too late” and “she will never forgive you”—together.
So I push the door open and walk in.
My mother immediately ends the call with a feeble jab of her fin‑ ger, her face contorting into a strange, anguished expression. We stare at each other: both of us trapped on this island fenced with decades of bitterness and spite, with the thorns of this fresh revelation sprouting around its barbed edges.
“You lied to me.” My mouth forms the words, but I am not sure I utter them or if I am merely thinking of speaking. “You told me—”
“Not here, Tia,” she says. “Give me time to be ready.”
“How could you?” I yell, feeling stuffed with shattered things.
“How could I? Tia, please.” She has the audacity to blink back tears, to look away. “Everything was to protect you,” she says. “Your future was—”
“Stop it!” The shattered things in me accumulate, filling me with a strident noise. It rides up my throat and into my mouth, and I am forced to stuff a fist in, to choke on it. In the silence, my breathing aligns.
My mother turns to look at me. “Sometimes, Tia,” she says, “we toss ourselves the lifeboat of lies to save us from drowning. You were drowning. You’re still struggling to keep your head above water after all these years. Does your husband know about your relationship with Boma?”
Silence. Cowering beneath the intermittent beeping of a machine and my thudding heart.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you stop by to visit him before coming here.”
“My marriage is none of your business,” I say when I find my voice.
She closes her eyes, shutting me out. “Your father will be away at a business meeting next Wednesday. We can talk then.”
My father materializes from the doorway as if summoned, a paper bag full of meds scrunched up in his grasp. He stops at the foot of my mother’s bed, catching his breath. “Is everything all right with my girls?” He peers at the book my mother was reading as though we in‑ scribed the condition of our collective state of mind on its fancy blue cover. “How are you both?”
“I need to get back to Lagos,” I say, my pulse thumping in my ears. “Now?” my father asks.
“She will be back on Wednesday,” my mother says, her miserable smile an unstable curve digging into the gaunt hollowness of her cheek. She has arranged her face into a controlled recalcitrance because she knows I have no choice. That she’s right makes me want to scream. Something acrid rises in me, and as I walk away, I decide to return one last time to hear what she has to say, and afterward, I will conduct a wretched funeral for her in the graveyard of my heart.
Wednesday will be the end of us.
__________________________________
From AND SO I ROAR by Abi Daré, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Abi Daré.
