The Re-union1

"Is there anyone you'd like to call?"

A thousand thoughts race through her mind as she holds on to the dining chair, her knees, suddenly seem unable to bear the weight of her rubbery legs.



"Madam? Is there anyone you'd like to call?" He asks again.

She shakes her head in denial, seeing and yet unseeing the three strangers in her dining room. Her grip on the chair shakes as she wobbles on her feet. One man immediately grabs her from behind.

"Take it easy, madam," they chorus as the man helps her to one of the chairs.

They wear a forlorn mien plastered with furrowed frowning faces like people whose inhalation of the putrid smell of stinking fart, affect. Her expression is vacant as she stares back at them, their images so blurring and blending into one another that she thinks it is a dream; a very bad dream that if she shuts her eyes and opens will go away. She does this but the men are still there, staring back at her with solemn faces.

"I'm so sorry..."

The eldest-looking one among them speaks but she cannot understand through the haze that is settling over her soul. She tries to listen to him but deep down she does not believe all he is saying. She does not want to believe it.

He speaks of details that are like a buzz in her brain, of arrangements to be made. But it is all lost on her.

They leave and she is alone in the house she and Nduka rented when they newly got married. The house they had saved for, painted and decorated together. The house they had planned to welcome their child in, together.

She hears her own keening as she collapses on the floor by her front door. Lying on her side, she gathers herself into a ball in defense and denial.

Nduka cannot be dead. He is young and healthy. He is coming home and they are having his favourite soup, ofe onugbu for dinner. Slowly, the words of the men that had left begins to seep into her brain.

...a mistake, the taxi driver hadn't seen him coming.

He had been on full speed and everything changed forever. One instant of time and the man she loves, the father of her unborn child, no longer lives.

There are no tears, not yet. They are massed into some kind of hard, hot knot inside her. The grief is so deep, tears cannot reach it, the ache in her chest, searing. She can only lie curled up on the floor with wounded animal sounds pouring out of her throat.

It is dark when she pushes herself to her feet, swaying, light-headed and ill. Nduka, somewhere in her brain, his name still, over and over.

She has to make a call, she has to call his parents to tell them what has happened. Oh God! Oh God! How can she tell them?

She gropes through the darkness of the flat, looking for her cellphone. The one Nduka bought her on her birthday last year. The piece of contraption she disliked on sight and argued that she would lose. But he had met her criticism with gay laughter and playfully called her 'a bush girl'.

She searches for the phone on the top of the chest of drawers where it perpetually lies and finds it. No matter all that had happened in the past between Nduka and his family; the disagreements and uprising that had followed his decision to marry a girl of the 'osu' caste, their disowning him and then the couple's elopement to escape the family's wrath. They are still Nduka's family and they deserve to know what has happened to their only son, she reasons.




To be contd.
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