The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  Juju called Elizabeth.

  “I didn’t think I was going to hear from you again,” Elizabeth said when she picked up.

  Juju ignored her. “We have to tell Aunty Kavita the truth,” she said. “It’s time.”

  Nineteen

  Osita

  Juju called to say we were meeting at the sports club on Sunday. She and Elizabeth were already there when I arrived, sitting far enough apart to tell me they were still quarreling, even though their bodies were unconsciously angled toward each other. Juju was tapping her foot against the grass, her legs crossed. Elizabeth was barely moving. I could feel the anger layered quietly inside her as she sat in the plastic chair, staring into emptiness.

  Ever since that day in the boys’ quarters, Elizabeth and I had tried not to be around each other too much. When she and Juju got involved, it got harder to avoid each other, since we were all connected by Vivek—who she forgave a lot faster than she forgave me, by the way. But no wahala. I stayed in Owerri and minded my business and everything was cool. Besides, the Elizabeth I’d been with was very different from who she was now, with her shaved head and thick eyeliner. Other girls would have worn big earrings and lipstick to compensate for cutting their hair, as if they were still in secondary school, but Elizabeth clearly didn’t care. Sometimes I wanted to tell her she looked like such a lesbian that it was a miracle Aunty Maja hadn’t realized she was knacking her daughter—but, again, I was minding my business.

  Juju stood up and hugged me when I got to their table. She held me for a little too long and I saw Elizabeth’s eyes narrow. “Thank you for coming all that way,” she whispered. I had stayed in Owerri after Aunty Kavita collected me from Port Harcourt. I couldn’t go back to Vivek’s house, but the grief had stretched to mine anyway. My mother cried a lot, though I never knew if it was because he’d died or because she’d let him slip out of her hands. I never asked. My father walked around, age drawing down the skin of his face, barely even talking to my mother. I knew he wanted to be there for Uncle Chika and it was killing him that their wives had dug this gaping gutter between them.

  “We are brothers,” he had said once, when I asked how he was, wonder and disbelief in his voice. “We are still brothers, yet he won’t talk to me.” I almost said I knew how it felt to lose a brother, but it was too complicated a feeling to put into words, so I kept it inside my chest.

  “You said it was important,” I reminded Juju as we broke our embrace.

  Juju sniffed and wiped her nose. “It is. We’re just waiting for the others.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said in greeting, nodding at her.

  “Osita.” She flicked her eyes at me and smiled tightly with her lips closed, her tone spiked. “Glad you could make it.”

  By then, I figured Juju must have told her about my relationship with Vivek. I wasn’t surprised by her hostility, and I didn’t care enough to make noise about it. What was there to fight about? The boy was dead. I sat down and waited, glancing over at Juju. She looked exhausted. She’d taken her light brown hair out of its usual braids and tied it into a rough bun; she had bags under her eyes, no lip gloss, and yet she was the most beautiful I could remember seeing her, even looking like she was about to break. It was strange—the next thought I had was, Vivek would want me to take care of her. “How have you been?” I asked.

  “She’s fine,” Elizabeth snapped. I almost snapped back at her, but then Somto and Olunne arrived and we were all greeting one another, rearranging chairs, passing around menus. Juju and Elizabeth had to move their chairs closer to make room for Somto and Olunne, overriding the little force field between them, and in that absence they fell back into their old comfort, their voices lacing together like one fabric. We put in our order with the waiter, then Olunne turned to Juju. “Okay,” she said. “What’s this about? Why did we bring Osita all the way from Owerri?”

  Juju and Elizabeth looked at each other and Elizabeth gave her a small nod. “Show them,” she said.

  Juju reached inside her bag and pulled out a colorful envelope, bright stock-photo faces smiling all over it. “I got this developed the other day from Vivek’s camera,” she said, handing the envelope to Somto, who was sitting next to her. “I—I think we should give them to Aunty Kavita.”

  Somto opened the envelope and inhaled a soft, quick breath. She looked at Juju, upset.

  “You took pictures of him like this?”

  Juju’s jaw tightened. “He wanted them. Was I supposed to tell him no?”

  Somto closed the flap of the envelope without looking at the other photographs inside it. “So you mean the people at the photo place also saw these?”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Use your brain,” she said. “Of course they did. And so what?” Olunne reached across the table and took the envelope from her sister. “You’ve already seen them, Elizabeth?”

  “I went with Juju to pick them up.”

  Somto looked furious. “You shouldn’t have taken these pictures, Juju. I don’t care if that’s what he wanted. What if someone finds them? What if someone at the photo place made their own copies?”

  “Didn’t you hear her?” Olunne was sifting through the pictures; her voice was gentle, almost amused. “She wants to show them to his mother.”

  “You dey craze,” Somto said to Juju. “Do you hear me? Your head is not correct. Aunty Kavita must never see these. Can you imagine what it will do to her?”

  “I think she should know.” Juju sounded uncertain, afraid.

  Elizabeth put a hand on her arm. “You knew him best,” she said.

  “He’s not here!” shouted Somto. Elizabeth glared at her and she lowered her voice. “He’s not here,” she repeated. “They buried him already. What’s the point of showing her these?”

  Olunne handed me the photographs and I took them, my heart beating fast. I already knew what I would see, that it would hit me in the chest like a lorry. I hadn’t seen a picture of him since the burial.

  “You don’t see what she’s like,” Juju argued. “She’s been asking questions all the time. She won’t stop. She wants to know what happened to him.”

  “We don’t know what happened to him,” said Olunne.

  “Well, she thinks we do. Or at least that I do, just because he was at my house last.”

  “She was coming to our house, but she’s stopped,” Somto said.

  “Yes, because it’s me that she’s disturbing!” Juju retorted. “Do you know she and my mother quarreled about it? Mumsy even said she shouldn’t come to the house anymore—after all these years they’ve been friends. So now she just calls our landline all the time, begging me to remember something that I’m not telling her.”

  “And it’s this you want to tell her?” Somto’s eyebrows were raised and mocking. “You don’t think these will cause more questions?”

  Juju shrugged. “They’re the truth. She knows he was hiding something. Why don’t we just show her?”

  “Because the woman is nearly mad, Juju.” Olunne said it like she was stating a gentle fact. I kept looking through the photographs, the gloss slipping off my fingers. There I was in one of them, smiling for the camera. I remembered that one. Juju had taken it in the late afternoon when the sun was setting and had become a line across her bedroom wall. Light cut through my face severely, casting my smile in shadows. I put the photo at the bottom of the pile and continued looking through the rest as the girls argued.

  “Elizabeth, please come and collect your girlfriend,” Somto said, throwing her hands up. “She won’t stop talking nonsense.”

  “No, but seriously.” Olunne turned to Elizabeth. “Do you think we should tell Aunty Kavita?”

  Elizabeth bit her lip. “Look,” she said, “eventually all secrets come out. It’s just a matter of time. And the longer it takes, the worse it is in the end.” She lifted and dropped one shoulder. “We all know this from
experience, abi?”

  I almost felt Juju wince and knew she was thinking of her father. Or maybe the secrets she’d kept from Elizabeth.

  Somto wasn’t convinced. “How will she find out?” she asked. “Na you go tell am? In fact, apart from all of us here, who even knew about it?” No one said anything. “Exactly. So unless one of us decides to go and start opening their big mouth, there’s no reason Aunty Kavita should know. You people don’t have any respect. Let the woman remember Vivek the way she knew him, haba! What’s your own? Am I the only one with sense here?”

  Olunne folded her hands and nodded. “Why cause trouble?” she said.

  Juju and Elizabeth looked at each other. “Two against two,” Elizabeth said, and they all turned to me.

  “I think Osita should decide,” said Juju.

  Somto sucked her teeth. “Why him?”

  My heart sped up. Was Juju about to tell them about us?

  Olunne smacked her sister’s arm. “Idiot. Vivek is his cousin. It’s his family we’re talking about.”

  Juju nodded. “She’s your aunt. You decide.”

  Elizabeth’s mouth curled into a snarl. “Yes,” she said, her voice saccharine. “He was your cousin.” She was looking me straight in the eye; I could see her disgust. I wondered how much Juju had told her, or if it even mattered at this point.

  Juju glared briefly at Elizabeth, then turned to me again. “Should she know?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but then our food came and I swallowed the words. We all fell silent for a bit, shifting things around to make space on the table.

  After the waiter left, Juju took a piece of fried yam and waited for my answer. Elizabeth started eating her suya, her eyes on my face. The sisters blew on the bowl of pepper soup they were sharing, and I stared down at my plate for a moment, looking at the oil-slick ugba and the blackness of the fried snail. The smell was rich and thick in my nostrils.

  “Show her,” I said, surprising even myself.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Somto.

  Juju coughed on a piece of yam. “Wait, really?” She hadn’t expected me to agree. She thought I’d want to hide him.

  “Show them to her,” I repeated, closing the envelope and handing it back to Juju.

  “You people are going to kill that woman,” said Somto. “Wallahi.”

  I ignored that. “You’re right,” I said to Juju. “She needs answers. We’re all pretending he wasn’t killed. As if Vivek dying was a normal thing.”

  “But we know why he was killed,” muttered Olunne, poking her straw into her glass.

  “Exactly,” I said. “We know. But she doesn’t. So show her, so that she can understand. So she can stop asking questions.”

  “If you think that’s going to stop her from asking questions, you’re mad.” Somto picked up her spoon and swirled it in the pepper soup.

  “No, she’ll continue asking questions. But she’ll ask different ones. And maybe they’ll be questions we can answer.”

  Juju looked like she was about to cry. “Thank you,” she said. “I just can’t be lying like this.”

  “Jesus,” said Olunne. “This is going to be crazy. If you tell her, all our parents are going to know. That means they’re going to ask us questions. All of us. Why we allowed it. Why we didn’t tell them.”

  “It wasn’t their business,” said Juju.

  “Is that so? I want to be there when you tell that to your mother. I’m sure she’ll understand.” Olunne dumped her straw in the glass and folded her arms. “This is going to be a disaster. They’re going to kill us.”

  “At least we’re alive,” Juju said. “Vivek isn’t.”

  The table fell silent. Then Somto put her face in her hands and groaned. “I can’t believe you’re going to make us do this.”

  I stared at my food, my appetite gone, my chest tightening from seeing his pictures. “I have to start getting back to Owerri,” I said, standing up. The girls looked up at me, surprised.

  “You’re not staying with Aunty Kavita?” Somto asked.

  I shook my head. “I told my mother I’d come back tonight.”

  “You should stay,” Olunne said. “It’s not safe to travel all the way to Owerri this late.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve done it before.”

  Juju stood up. “I’ll walk you out,” she offered. I said good-bye and watched Elizabeth watch her as we left the table. We walked through the front building and the lobby, stopping just outside the gate.

  “Are you sure you have to go?” Juju asked.

  She was standing close to me but I didn’t want to step back. “I’m sure Elizabeth will be happy I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Don’t mind her. She just had a hard time when she found out, you know?”

  I didn’t really know what to say about that—her girlfriend finding out about my relationship with my cousin—so we just stood in the pool of the security light for a few minutes.

  “If you don’t want to stay with your aunty and uncle, I understand,” Juju said. “I wouldn’t want to sleep there without Vivek, either. You know you can always come and stay at my house for the night.”

  I laughed. “Imagine what your father would say to that.”

  “He’s traveling for work. Actually for work this time. And Mumsy knows you, and you’ve stayed before. It’s not a problem.”

  “Thank you, but I’m okay. I should start going.”

  Juju hugged me and I hugged her back, tightly. Again, the thought came: Vivek would want me to take care of her. But I wasn’t him, and I couldn’t replace who he’d been to her. I didn’t fit into this particular jigsaw. She waved to me after I let her go, and I waved back as I walked to the main road. I knew she was still standing there, alone under the light, watching me leave her behind.

  At the bus stop, I bought a sachet of pure water and drank it slowly. It was stupid to worry about her, I told myself. She’d been coping just fine before I showed up, just like all of us. As if Vivek’s parents’ lives hadn’t stopped, at least in every way that was important, even as they had to wake up in the morning and watch the sun move across the sky. Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option.

  Suddenly I felt exhausted, completely sapped. I sat on a bench and stared out at the busyness around me. My bus came and went and I sat there, the conductor’s calls of Owere! Owere! ringing in my skull. After its lights disappeared into the night, I reconciled myself to the fact that I’d made a decision, and I took an okada to Aunty Maja’s house. It dropped me off outside the floral fence and I used the section near the gate that didn’t have things growing all over it to jump the fence. I texted Juju from the back door: I’m downstairs. It took only a few minutes before the padlock clicked as she unlocked the iron protector and opened the door for me.

  “Take off your shoes,” she whispered, as she locked up again. Holding them, I tiptoed after her and we climbed the stairs, barely breathing until we were safe in her room and she’d locked the door behind us. “I’m glad you came back,” she said.

  I didn’t reply. I was looking around the room, wondering why on earth I’d thought that Uncle Chika’s house would be too painful a reminder of Vivek when the other memories were here in this house. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” I said.

  “Well, it’s too late.” She climbed into the bed, wearing a cotton nightgown that ended above her knees. “You might as well get some sleep while you’re here.”

  I hesitated. “What about the guest room?”

  Juju sat against the pillows and wiped her face with her hand. “Osita. Please. I can’t—” She opened her palms and collapsed them onto the bedspread. “I just can’t.”

  Her eyes filled and I stepped out of my trousers, unbuttoned my shirt, and climbed into the bed in my singlet and boxers. Take care of her. She looks so lone
ly. “I’m sorry,” I said, pulling her against my chest. “Shh, it’s okay. I’m sorry.”

  She broke into sobs, muffling them against me so they wouldn’t slip under the door and crawl into her parents’ room. I didn’t say anything. I just held her as she shook with grief, and I cried, too, but quietly, my tears wetting her hair. It was impossible not to miss him when I was with her; it was as if someone had driven a shovel into my chest, then levered it out again, taking up all it could hold, leaving a screaming mess behind. The pain thickened until I was sobbing as well, trying to shove it in the space between her neck and shoulder, my arms wrapped around her as if to save myself, not just her. I lost time inside it, plagued by the memories of the three of us there, when he was alive and happy; even of Olunne and Somto and Elizabeth there with us, when we’d all played Monopoly and Vivek cheated; when he taught us how to play solitaire with real cards; when he danced and the girls danced with him and I thought, God forgive me, I really love him, I really do; when he was bright and brilliant and alive, my cousin, my brother, the love of my sinful life.

  * * *

  —

  It was deep into the night when I came out of it with a hiccup. We must have cried ourselves to sleep, or into some sort of stupor. Juju sniffed and sat up, her face streaked and her eyes red.

  “You look terrible,” I said, sitting up next to her.