Freshwater

by Akwaeke Emezi

  “Maybe because it was him?” I was guessing. “Maybe you didn’t even know when you sent me away, but I swear, I didn’t know how to find you.” The guilt was too much. One simple promise—you will never have to feel them move in you. I will be there. I will be the one they push into because they cannot hurt me.

  And now Ada had gone and fallen in love with a man who had the power to send me away. He was going to destroy her.

  “He can’t make us leave,” said Vincent, because he could see through the back of my open brain. “We’ll always be here with you, Ada. And if we sleep a little more because you have him, maybe that’s a good thing. Even if he leaves, we’ll be here to pick up your pieces. We’ll always be here, yeah? We promise. Right, Asụghara?”

  I nodded because my throat was too tight for words. This felt too much like the day I was born, the way she had been entered and hurt.

  “You’re safe now,” I managed to say. “We’re never going to leave you.”

  I knelt beside her and held her hand tightly in mine.

  “Breathe,” said Vincent.

  It must’ve gotten better. I don’t remember much—I was sleeping more, just like Vincent had predicted. I was giving Ada a life because Ewan made her happy, and honestly, the girl deserved a little happiness. He left Texas and moved outside Boston to be with her. They got their first apartment together there. He proposed in a library in Cambridge and they got engaged and Saachi was furious, but she thawed after she met him and realized that Ada was going to marry him whether Saachi approved or not. So Saachi flew herself and Añuli to Ireland to meet Ewan’s family, who was throwing an engagement party for him and Ada. When they returned to the States, Ewan and Ada quietly got married in Manhattan, at City Hall, and Ewan had tears in his eyes when he said his vows. They moved to Brooklyn, enrolled in graduate school, got a cat and named it The Prophet Jagger.

  I left Ada to her new family. When she came to sit with me in the marble, we talked like old friends, as if we’d never planned to kill each other.

  “He wants us to be equal,” she told me.

  I crossed my legs and frowned. “Like how?”

  Ada blushed. “Like during sex.” I stared and she lifted her shoulders, then dropped them and hugged her knees. “You know, on plain footing. With no one having more power over the other.”

  I laughed. “But that’s impossible.”

  Ada shrugged again and fiddled with a broken nail. “Who knows,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Ada, not when the clothes come off.”

  “You mean, not when you’re there.”

  Oh. I hadn’t realized I was still helping her with that, but it made sense. I was automatic at that point, a shell she could drag over her, whether I was asleep or not. “I guess I’m always there when the clothes come off,” I said. “The promise must be holding.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We can’t change that?”

  I shook my head and took her palm. “You’re just not capable of it, sorry. Or rather, we’re not capable of it.” Ada watched my nails slide between her fingers as I massaged her hand. All my bones were slightly longer than hers.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  I gave her a look. “I’m fine. I come when you need me, like now.”

  Ada looked a little ashamed. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around that much.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “As long as you remember that we can’t be separated, Ada. Without us, you’re nothing—you won’t feel anything, you won’t see anything, you won’t write anything. You have to be at peace with us, you hear? We’re you.”

  “Yeah, I know I have to remember,” she said. “Otherwise I wake up not knowing who I am.”

  “Exactly.” I patted her hand. “We’re the buffer between you and madness, we’re not the madness.”

  She nodded. “Where’s Saint Vincent?”

  “He’s sleeping. Do you want me to call him?”

  “No, let him rest.” She watched as I cracked her knuckles one by one. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said, her voice small.

  “Biko, how many times do I have to tell you? We’re not going anywhere.” She made a face and I rolled my eyes. “Ada, stop feeling guilty about being happy with Ewan. We’re fine.”

  She blushed and looked down. “He wants me to give myself to him completely.”

  I looked at her, confused. “What?”

  “Completely. You know. All of me. Like how he’s given himself to me.”

  I didn’t like how she said it, with a tinge of hope, so I tried to be gentle. “Me, I don’t think that’s possible, sha.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re in love?”

  I groaned and dropped her hand. “My friend, it has nothing to do with love.”

  She frowned. “What is it then?”

  I looked at her, and I swear, if I could’ve freed Ada right then and there to love and be happy and normal, I would have. But I didn’t start any of this and I didn’t know how to stop it, only how to finish it.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  I took a deep breath and hoped for grace. “Look, you can’t give yourself to him because you’re not yours to give. That’s it. I’m sorry.”

  It took a minute for Ada to understand, to realize that she was locked away, that all those parts of her he wanted, the parts she wanted to give, the parts that would complete the love they had—all those parts were gone. Or if they weren’t gone, they’d been put somewhere so far away that not even Ada could touch them, let alone Ewan. I watched her face fall, and when she started crying, I held her and whispered apologies for what felt like forever.

  It was only a matter of time after that. Ewan wanted what any man in love would: a wife who could withstand tenderness, who didn’t have the core of her locked away inside a dark ocean. He wanted a soft moon in his hands and he got a scalding sun. Ada didn’t have a choice—she would have given him everything if she could, just to make him happy. He had stopped drinking for her, stopped smoking, stopped the drugs, everything. But I had made her a promise and we were both trapped inside it, doomed to play our roles without release. It broke her heart and I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain, so I took over and I took her away, because their marriage was burning and I was trying to protect her. It took Ada and I years to realize that I fucked it up, that keeping her walled off from Ewan killed any chance they had at making it out together. By the time Ewan was begging her, she was long gone and I refused him. But honestly speaking, even if she and Ewan had fought more, they probably still would’ve lost. The only thing that could’ve saved them was if I had never existed, if Ada was not divided up the way that she was, if she had been able to control me. We can stand here and list impossible things all day long.

  By the time Ewan moved out of their apartment, he was drinking again, smoking packs of cigarettes, and snorting coke in small bathrooms in the West Village. He dropped out of school, leaving Saachi with a huge loan she’d cosigned for him, and then he fled the country. That was when I knew I had been right, that he had been weak the whole time, that it was a good thing Ada couldn’t give herself to him, because he would have ruined her; he was nothing more than a fucking useless human.

  It was time for me to come back and make it right. I had let Ada have her time in the sun. She had known love, she had tasted happiness, and it had gone bad. That was fine, that was life, abi? No wahala. But I still carried a larger truth, a better truth. It had been good to be flesh. It would be better to go home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Nwa anwụna, nwa anwụna’: nwa nwụọ ka anyị mara chi agaghị efo.

  Ada

  My mother does not sleep at night.

  She worries. This is the way of things

  when cold gods give you a child.

  I sleep like swollen opium.

  She worries. This is the way of things.

  I went mad so young, you see.

&n
bsp; Sleeping like swollen opium,

  screaming on my better days.

  I went mad too young, you see,

  they couldn’t wait to ride me.

  I only scream on my better days,

  crippled in meat and hot skin.

  They couldn’t wait to ride me,

  to drink from my terrible depths.

  Crippled in meat and hot skin,

  I tried to die from this body.

  I drank from my terrible depths,

  my mother cannot keep me safe.

  I tried to fly from this body,

  now clawed shadows follow her.

  They slaver at the foot of her bed.

  When cold gods give you their child,

  make sure you keep her alive.

  My mother does not sleep at night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Your graveyard looks like a festival.

  Asụghara

  After Ewan left, I was tired, so I let Saint Vincent step to the front a little more. He dressed Ada in skinny jeans from Uniqlo, thick cotton T-shirts, and a binder—a tight black vest that flattened our chest into a soft mound of almost nothing. Saachi was frantic.

  “You’re in a dark place,” she said over the phone. “You’re unstable.”

  Ada laughed and ignored her. Saint Vincent went to clubs with satin-padded walls and red velvet curtains, where he kissed women with Ada’s mouth. I calculated that if one tablet of the cyclobenzaprine prescribed for Ada’s sciatica could knock her out for thirteen hours, then a whole bottle of them would easily take her home. Things started to tumble with an alarming speed. Ada checked herself into a psychiatric ward and I made her check out the next day. Chima flew into New York.

  It was strange to see the bulk of him in Ada’s small yellow kitchen. Ever since I was born, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ada’s flesh siblings; my brothersisters were far more interesting. But Chima and Añuli mattered very much to Ada and she was always involved in something with them, one small hot conflict or the other. She wanted Chima to save her, like a big brother, to protect her better than I was doing. She thought he was there because she’d been in the hospital, and in a way, he was.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said. “Mummy and I thought it was better if you heard it in person, since you just got out of the hospital.”

  Ada sat at her unstained Ikea kitchen table and looked across at her brother. I watched lazily, relaxed now that we weren’t locked up in a fucking psych ward anymore. He was calm; Chima was always calm.

  “Uche is dead,” he said, and Ada’s heart staggered.

  Uche was Ada’s cousin, the only son of De Simon, one of Saul’s older brothers. When Ada was a child, before the rest of us woke up, she loved going to Umuahia, back to where she was born. One of her clearest memories there was of being summoned by the old men who sat under the tree by the road that turned into the family compound. They had examined her face closely, moving it to catch the light, veined hands directing her jaw.

  “It’s true,” one of them said. “This one resembles nwa Simon.”

  The rest nodded in agreement and Ada felt warmth spread in her chest. Looking like Uche meant she belonged somewhere. It was like they were saying—we can see our blood in your face, you’re one of ours. All the stories Ada knew about Uche had come from Chima in their childhood, what he overheard from Saul or Saachi, or pretended to know as the oldest child. That Uche lived in London. That Uche dated men. That Uche and De Simon had not spoken in over ten years. That Saachi didn’t like how Uche and De Simon didn’t speak.

  When Ewan’s family threw that engagement party in Dublin, Uche had flown in from London with his partner, a quiet Danish man called John, who worked with astronauts. I was dormant then, just watching Ada be happy. Once Saachi and Añuli arrived from the States, Añuli and John clicked right away. The two of them spent the engagement party blowing bubbles together in a corner. Uche was older now; his face was sharp with cheekbones and he had eagle eyes set under his eyebrows. Ada didn’t look like her cousin anymore—the old men must have been thinking about when he was a child—but she and Uche danced together on the wooden spread of the dance floor, and later that year, he flew to the States and visited with Saachi and Añuli in the desert of the Southwest. After Ewan left, after everyone found out that Ada was dating women and flew into fits, Uche was the only one in the family who really understood, who loved her and said he was proud. He was meant to visit again, that November, he said, to New York, to see Ada, but he had a pulmonary embolism and fell down in London in October and died.

  I was furious. It was as if staying alive just gave everyone else time to leave you. Chima stayed in New York for a few days and came to therapy with Ada.

  “Do you know you haven’t cried?” he said there. “You just keep smiling.”

  Ada smiled politely at him and the therapist. I kept my fingers hooked to the corners of her mouth until Chima left.

  Later that year, Ada was at her girlfriend Donyen’s apartment in Flatbush, speaking on the phone with Saachi. The Christmas presents Saachi had sent were spilling out of Ada’s satchel, peanut M&M’S on the hardwood floor and a stocking full of fluffy mice and feathered sticks, toys that Saachi had sent for Ada’s cats.

  “I’m not wrapping up presents for pets,” Ada was telling her mother, holding the phone to her ear with the lift of her shoulder. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Just hang up the stocking, lah,” Saachi replied. Her voice crackled over the line. “Open it on Christmas Day.”

  Ada laughed and I smiled inside her. The whole conversation was silly, but sometimes even I felt reassured by how familiar Saachi’s voice was, by how Ada could pick out her handwriting at a glance, how Ada’s own handwriting was often mistaken for Saachi’s, as if their connection showed in the ink.

  “Were you the one who used the phone card?” Saachi asked, switching topics. All the children had the PIN for the card, for when they needed to make international calls, to Saachi’s mother in Kuala Lumpur, to Saul back in Nigeria, wherever.

  “It’s not me,” Ada said. “I think I used it last to call the UK.” She crumpled some paper from the parcel. I yawned and stretched in her mind. “Wait,” she continued, “actually, have you called Uche? You were supposed to. Did you call Uche?”

  There was a pause on Saachi’s end. “You mean John,” she said.

  I could feel Ada’s shock in her throat. The last time she’d heard Uche’s voice was when he was in the desert making fun of Añuli’s fashion choices. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten that he was dead, instead of being out there somewhere with their shared blood under his face.

  “Yes,” she managed to choke out. “I meant John.”

  Ada dated Donyen until the end of the following summer. She still lived in the flat she’d shared with Ewan when they were married, exposed brick in the bedroom, high ceilings, a fuchsia accent wall. She had interesting new friends: people who could see past flesh; people who prayed to gods, were ridden by them; people who heard transmissions even if they didn’t particularly want to listen in. Her friends began to tell her things.

  “We’re afraid for you,” they said.

  “It’s like you’re on this thin line between being alive and being dead, like one small shift could send you in either direction.”

  “The first time I met you, I told another friend that you were lovely, but that I had this feeling you would die soon.”

  I was impressed. It was nice to be seen. None of them could save Ada, sha. She was done for; she was mine. I would’ve killed her sooner, except that her grief over Ewan was a little addictive. She ran from it, and everywhere she ran was somewhere I loved, so I let her live. Donyen had loved her, but it was nothing like Ewan’s love, and Ada had realized that the grief would find her whenever she was alone. So she drank a lot of tequila, pouring the golden burn of it down her throat till it held her from the inside out, tighter than anyone’s arms ever could. She paid attention to t
he acid in a lime and the feel of rough green skin against her lips, the glow in her thighs when the alcohol took hold, the taste of blood orange and ice. In the bathrooms, she reeled and caught her palm on the walls as she squatted to pee, her vision unsteady, her smile shaken out as if her teeth were rattling seeds. I watched her laugh in the mirror as she washed her hands.

  “You’re sooooo drunk,” she slurred, leaning into the mirror. I looked back out at her and laughed, delighted. We pushed the bathroom door open and disappeared into thumping beats on the dance floor. Another night, Ada sat at a bar where her friend worked, and this friend kept refilling our glass with the dregs of the drinks that had been mixed for other customers. Ada ended up riding the uptown train alone at two in the morning, and she was so gone that I had to force her to keep her eyes open—I knew we’d black out the moment she let them close. Still, being wasted felt wonderful, like I was drifting away from reality, floating in a separate and better space.

  Back at her apartment, Ada broke open disposable razors to get to their flimsy blades. She cut her arm next to the old scars and watched the thin red lines form, the leaking full drops that suspended from her skin until she flicked them up with her tongue. She threw glasses against the wall and they shattered into thousands of fragments shining with angry points, a better future than being whole. It was all so much better than the grief.

  When she sat in the marble with me, we looked more identical than we ever had, so close that Saint Vincent excluded himself from our conversation. Ada and I were drunk on homemade margaritas, using empty milk bottles as glasses.

  “I’ve never understood,” she said, “back when I was little, why Yshwa wouldn’t come down to hold me, you know?”

  “Oh, I know this one,” I said, closing my eyes to feel the softness in my blood. “Because he’s a useless asshole.”

  She ignored me. “Especially when he knew that I didn’t have anyone else.” Ada didn’t sound sad, just matter-of-fact.