What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

by Lesley Nneka Arimah

  I didn’t dare turn down the offer at this late hour. Besides, it would serve Chinyere right to return and not find me. I followed the woman to the edge of the red carpet, where a gleaming black Range Rover pulled up. A young man stepped out and opened the back door. The woman settled in, then pulled out a bottle of water and sucked at it, the plastic crackling.

  She gave the driver directions, which I tried to memorize just in case. Then she watched me till I started to fidget. The wine must not have passed out of my system because I couldn’t help myself.

  “What?” I said rudely. My mother would have slapped my mouth.

  “You look just like him. I didn’t see it before, but you do,” she said, opening a small tin of Vaseline and moistened her lips. “We were supposed to be married, you know.”

  My father, a man I had never really thought about, at least not in this way. A man with a past.

  “You could easily have been my child. I don’t have any girls.”

  She looked me up and down, lingering at my shoes.

  “Your dress is nice.”

  “My mother picked it.”

  I hoped the response would hurt her. Instead she laughed.

  “You are very clever. You get that from him, too.”

  She began to ask me questions typical of adults when they’re trying to be polite. How is school? Are you enjoying your trip? How long are you here for? She followed up with talk of her sons—one my age, two younger. She didn’t mention Chinyere. I relaxed, surprised to find myself liking her, this woman who had been my enemy short minutes ago.

  It was not long before we pulled up to my aunt’s gate. As we waited for the maiguard, she took my chin in her hand and studied my face.

  “You are everything I would have expected his child to be.”

  I wavered between being flattered and being aware that this styled, polished girl was not really me.

  “Thank you.”

  Then the maiguard opened the gate, and we drove through.

  Auntie Ugo was on the front steps, dressed in a wrapper and head scarf. No doubt she thought it must be Chinyere and me returning for the night.

  I expected their encounter to be hostile and it was, but in a different way than I anticipated. My aunt was deferential, calling the woman “ma,” while the woman called her Ugo and answered her chattiness with as few words as possible. It was clear she just wanted to leave.

  She soon did and Auntie Ugo changed back to her irritated self the moment the gates closed.

  “Where is Chinyere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does this girl have your phone?”

  I nodded.

  I expected her to start shouting but she remained calm, putting her cell phone to her ear as she walked into the house.

  “Chinyere, my dear, how are you? Are you enjoying yourself?” Her sugary tone should have set off Chinyere’s warning bells but I could hear my cousin chattering on the other end.

  “And Cousin Ada, is she well?”

  More chattering.

  “Let me talk to her.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but my aunt held up her finger and gave me a look of such fury that I shut up.

  “Oh, she’s in the bathroom? Well, she won’t be long I’m sure, I can wait on the line.”

  More chattering as Chinyere dug a hole deep enough to be buried in.

  “She’s talking with someone else now? That’s a funny something, because Grace Ogige just dropped her off at the house.”

  The chattering stopped. I imagine Chinyere’s heart stopped, too. Auntie put her fury into words now. The intensity of her shouting drove me from the room and traveled up the stairs with me, past the old photos of Chinyere. I stopped in front of the one of us together, arms slung around each other’s waists. At thirteen, I’d been taller than her at fifteen, and I remembered her mother teasing her about it.

  Through the door to my cousin’s room I could see the boy rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I sat on the bed and pulled him into my lap, cradling his head under my chin. He fiddled with the neckline of my dress, then settled. I stroked his head, trying to will the night away. A glance at the clock showed it was past midnight. I wouldn’t have blamed Chinyere if she stayed away till morning.

  Almost two hours later, I heard the gate creak open and shifted the boy off me and went to the window. Chinyere came through the gate at a modest, almost penitent pace, as though she’d already begun to beg forgiveness. Auntie Ugo ran up to the car and pulled on the driver’s-side door, but Chinyere had locked it, so she started banging on the window, shouting the whole time. I couldn’t make out all of the words, but she punctuated each one with a slap to the glass, an unsatisfying substitute for Chinyere’s face. My cousin sat in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead. This continued for a good ten minutes. Suddenly Auntie Ugo settled for pointing her finger at the house. I pulled back from the window for a moment in case they looked up and saw me, not that it mattered. Everyone in the neighborhood must have been awake and listening.

  Then my aunt resumed her tirade, and I returned to watch. “Don’t let me break this window, Chi-Chi. If I break this window, next thing I will break you, do you hear me?”

  Chinyere must have believed the threat, because she finally shut off the engine and opened the door. As soon as she did, Auntie Ugo was on her. She held my cousin by a twist at the shoulder of her dress while her free hand went to work. Chinyere absorbed it all, not one finger raised in defense. I pulled away from the window once more. This wasn’t a memory I wanted.

  The boy was awake again. When he caught me looking at him, he held up his arms, a whine blooming in his throat. The front door slammed and we both jumped. I soothed him before whimper turned to full cry. That’s how Chinyere found me, sitting on her bed, her son nestled in my lap.

  We were both still in our party clothes, but her dress was torn at the collar. Her makeup was streaked and her tears had irrigated most of it to her neck. She looked like she’d been crying since she left the fund-raiser. I couldn’t tell how much of her face’s puffiness was due to the tears and how much to her mother’s open palm.

  The boy had begun to bounce when he saw her, twisting to get off my lap. I tried to hold on to him, as Chinyere appeared in no shape to deal with a child.

  “Leave him,” she said, and the boy waddled over to her. He seemed content to just grip her leg.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, inadequate as the words felt.

  She neither accepted nor rejected the apology but moved to sit by me, pulling the boy onto her lap. He tried to mush our heads together. Chinyere settled for leaning her head on my shoulder, stiff at first, then relaxing into it. I curled my arm around her. When I felt her tears on my neck, I tightened my grip. The boy touched her face and babbled comfort, the last happy sound we would hear for a while.

  LIGHT

  When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.

  Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda Layout. The girl’s mother is in America reading for a master’s in business administration. She has been there for almost three years, in which her eleven-year-old bud of a girl has bloomed. Enebeli and the girl have survived much in her absence, including a stampede at the market that separated them for hours, shoppers fleeing a commotion that turned out to be two warring market women who’d had just about enough of each other’s tomatoes. They survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who could take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime
scene of the girl’s first period, where she proved to be as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.

  Three long years have passed. Now the girl is fourteen and there is a boy and he is why Enebeli is currently seated on a narrow bench meant for children, in what passes for the lobby of the headmaster’s office, a narrow hall painted a blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers, but let’s be serious. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever cuts the boy’s hair often misses a spot, so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused about the girl’s attention as everyone else.

  The headmaster calls Enebeli in and hands him the note. This one reads, “Buki, I love you. I will give you many sons,” and it takes everything Enebeli has not to guffaw. Where does the girl get all this? Not from her mother, whose personality and humor are of a quieter sort, and not from him, who would be perfectly content sitting by a river, watching the water swirl by. He promises to chastise the girl, assures the headmaster that it will not happen again. It happens two more times before the girl learns to pass notes better. And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.

  The girl’s mother attempts to correct the girl, but much is lost in transmission over the wires, and her long absence has diluted much of the influence a mother should have. It is one of the things Enebeli and his wife disagree on, this training up of the girl, and it has widened the schism between them.

  The first month wife and mother had gone to the States, the family called and spoke to each other several times a day. The mother and girl would have their time, full of tears and I miss yous, and the husband and wife would have their time, full of tears and I miss yous as well, but full of other things too, like my body misses you and all I need is thirty minutes max and when are you coming home.

  She’d returned the first long holiday, Christmas. Enebeli memorized her scent and the feel of her hair. He’d often find himself staring at her. They slept very little, making up for lost time. When her return to the States was fraught with delays and visa issues, they made their first big mistake, deciding that she should not risk traveling back to Nigeria again for the duration of her studies. There was some noise made about how the girl should accompany her mother—she had barely left her side the whole visit—but Enebeli vetoed it and his wife relented. They knew that of the two of them, she might be able to soldier on without her daughter, but Enebeli would shrivel like a parched plant.

  So the girl stayed with him and they learned to survive, but for one relationship to thrive, the other must not, and Enebeli saw this dwindling in the conversations the girl had with her mother via Skype. They were friendly conversations, filled with the exchanging of news and the updating of situations, but there was a whiff of distance, as though the girl was talking to her favorite aunt whom she loved very much but would not, say, tell about a boy.

  At fourteen the girl is almost a woman, but still a girl, and her mother is trying to prepare her for the world. Stop laughing so loud, dear. How is it that I can hear you chewing all the way here in America? What do you mean Daddy made you breakfast, you are old enough to be cooking. Distance between mother and daughter widens till the girl doesn’t enjoy talking to her mother anymore, begins to see it as a chore.

  And speaking of chores, father and daughter share them, each somewhat inept, each too intimidated by their sullen house girl to order her around. She spends most of the day watching Africa Magic, mopping the same patch of tile till it gleams, and when she isn’t pretending to clean, the house girl talks to the girl in whispers and Enebeli isn’t concerned because they are in the house and how much trouble could they get into. Talk is just talk. This is what he tells his wife, but his wife is horrified and worried that the girl is learning all the wrong ways to be in the world and she badgers and badgers till Enebeli sends the house girl back to her village. The girl becomes sullen with her mother after this and waits with arms crossed for the Skype calls to end, and the mother becomes more nitpicky, troubled that her daughter cannot see she is trying to ease her passage. What is this the girl is wearing? The girl should be sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles. Why is the girl’s hair scattered like that, when was the last time she had a relaxer?

  Enebeli shrugs at the hair questions and his wife sighs, then says she’s calling her sister. Enebeli balks at this. His wife’s sister is a terrifyingly competent woman with three polished, obedient sons and the wherewithal to take on another child. She’s been trying to get her hands on the girl for years. In a fit of spite and panic, Enebeli buys a box of relaxer and does the girl’s hair himself, massaging the cream into her scalp like lotion, and the smell of it makes both their eyes water. When they wash it out, half the girl’s hair comes out with it, feathery clumps that swirl into the drain like fuzzy fish.

  His wife’s sister doesn’t say a word about the overprocessed mess, or about the scab forming on the girl’s forehead, but when she brings the girl back, her hair is shorn close to her scalp, and she turns her head this way and that, preening, and they all, even her mother, agree that her skull has quite the lovely shape and, yes, she looks beautiful. But then her mother ruins it by adding that she can’t wait till it grows out so she can look like a proper girl again. This starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at first, but then it peppers and there is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they’re arguing with a stranger.

  The girl stops talking to her mother, and for a week his wife pleads with him to soften her and he agrees. But really he enjoys having the girl like this, as angry with her mother as he is, and so he does nothing. It doesn’t matter; the girl holds a grudge as well as she holds water in her fist, and soon she is chattering away. But the space between mother and daughter has widened to hold something cautious, an elephant of mistrust and awkwardness. The girl feels it, doesn’t want it, and in a bid to close the distance, confesses to her mother about the boy. She strings his virtues out like Christmas lights—he’s shorter than her, so he has to obey her, he’s finally learning how to kiss well—and her mother silences her by saying, sadly, that she didn’t think she’d raised that kind of girl. This is the first time the girl becomes aware that the world requires something other than what she is. It dampens her for a few days that worry Enebeli, and then she returns, but there is a little less light to her.

  And when his wife says that she has been offered a job in the States, management at a small investment firm, Enebeli says nothing. They promised each other at the beginning of all this that when she got her degree, she would come back and find a snazzy job as a returnee where she would be overcompensated for her foreign papers.

  Later, even knowing what it will do to him, she will request that he send the girl to her in America, where her mothering hand will be steadier. He will fight her. He will use vicious words he didn’t know he had in him, as though a part of him knows that his daughter will never be this girl again.

  But before all this, before the elders are called in, before even his own father sides with his wife, and his only unexpected ally is his wife’s sister. Before he bows to the pressure of three generations on his back. Before he sobs publicly in the Murtala Muhammed airport, cries that shake his body and draw concern and offers of water from passersby. Before he spends his evenings in the girl’s room, sitting with the other things she left behind, counting down the time difference till they can Skype. Before she retu
rns from school and appears on his screen more subdued than he’s ever seen her. Before he tries to animate her with stories of the lovelorn boy who keeps asking after her. Before she looks offscreen as though for coaching and responds, Please, Daddy, don’t talk to me like that. Before she grows cautious under the mothering of a woman who loves but cannot comprehend her. Before she quiets in a country that rewards her brand of boldness, in her black of body, with an incredulous fascination that makes her put it away. Before all that, she is eleven and Enebeli and the girl sit on the steps to the house watching people walk by their ramshackle gate. They are playing azigo and whenever the girl makes a good move she crows in a very unladylike way and yells, In your face! and he laughs every time. He does not yet wonder where she gets this, this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out.

  SECOND CHANCES

  Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she’s stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent. Ignore for a moment that she is wearing an outfit I haven’t seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when she was pregnant with my younger sister, though not yet showing, and fell down the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh. Ignore that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn’t sat on a mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he’d like to crawl in with her. Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.

  My father avoids the look I give him and I’m glad there are beds around because I collapse onto one, unable to stand. When I grab my father’s wrist—I cannot at this juncture imagine touching her—he twists away from me. I follow him but he refuses to be cornered, so I walk up to my mother and ask, “What the hell are you doing here?”