They lied to me.

In the beginning, I believed these lies, grew up with it and wore it like a second skin. It was a sword I brandished when I met strangers whom I liked well enough to become friends with. But social constructs demanded we stripped ourselves bare by exchanging basic family history. The lies were mnemonics I mastered, reciting them mindlessly. They were shields I used to defend myself from onslaughts of unsolicited pity people loved to dish out. The pity never quite went down well with me. I would shrug like it didn’t matter and drop the sentence glued to my tongue for as long as I could remember.

They fell sick and died.

It didn’t happen at the same time. It would have been romantic had it been so, or had a year come in between the two deaths for one to point fingers at heartbreak. They left five years apart. Father’s epileptic homecoming once or twice a month didn’t exactly turn them into Bonnie and Clyde.  

Father was an illusion I hero-worshipped. Flitting memories of someone who never existed. I remember being cradled on his lap, sipping a mixture made from malt and milk, while I quivered from fever. I remember hiding under his bed so I didn’t have to go to school and towards the mountain of a man that always stood between us and G’s long whip. They said I looked like him. Born two weeks after the death of his mother, my grandmother, he called me Nne, or “mother.” It was a superstition. Father had dark skin made darker from working too long under the sun. He was an Iroko of a man with a sonorous voice that arrested you. His long absences made me long for his presence. He was a kind man, they said. The kind of man who gave you the cloth off his back if he could, and then some. But it was his Achilles heel that brought about his doom and by extension the untimely death of a weak and frail light-skinned beauty whom I called mother.

First term of JSS3, seated in a class of over fifty bright-eyed students, we were asked to write an essay on our favorite parent. As expected, almost everyone wrote about their mothers. I had nothing good or exciting to say about mine, and so I wrote about Father. 

The most distinct memory I have of Mother is a poorly-lit room, chaotic toddlers, the burly figure of Father and me, two or three years old, climbing a full-length mirror, crashing, and then bleeding. Before our house help, N, who was more of a big sister to me, scooped me up and ran to the pharmacy at the end of our street, I thought about Mother who didn’t come with us, and who lay on the floor, her face turned away. Why wouldn’t she carry me? She was right there when I fell. Father says something to Mother and taps her. My two-year-old sister and I continue crying. Mother joins in, too. The mind is a tricky place. It preserves even the most mundane memories. 

In 2021, during my first visit to a dentist, the doctor diagnosed me with lateral hypodontia, also known as a congenital missing tooth. I didn’t lose the tooth I thought I did all those years ago when I fell because it was never even there to begin with. Whose blood was that, then? Whose tooth was on the floor?

Mother’s was the first corpse I ever saw. She was ashen. Wrapped in white like the eerie ghosts we saw on Ishawuru, she was laid on a cloud of white satin. Her hands were firmly beside her like a soldier at attention, with two cotton balls stuck inside her nostrils to prevent air from entering or leaving her body. The air in the room was clogged with the smell of wrongful death, of one taken too soon. I wanted to trap her essence in my childlike arms and offer them as warm consolation to my younger sister whenever she missed our mother. But like death which comes and goes as it pleases, this essence floated away from me, leaving me bereft and empty.

Noise. A cacophony of them. Wailing aunties. Gigantic iron pots clambering for space in the yard where smoldering mounds of firewood aided the scent of ofe onugbu that made you forget you were supposed to be crying for this person you didn’t really know, this woman you would learn to not miss. Pounding pestles landed on akpu like a thief being lynched. Breasts hung limply from naked chests. Decency was not something meant for the Umuada from whose breasts titled chiefs had suckled. 

Vultures circling. 

They are known as birds of death and they only come where there is a corpse. But most men are already halfway dead. Zombies, dressed in their finest, chattered. Who did the vultures really come for? The strangers who came disguised as mourners to offer forced sympathies that assured them a plate of food? Who cared about the children left behind? We were simply afterthoughts, souvenirs that would soon be shared round amongst relatives.

I don’t remember seeing Father, not in that room they locked us in to spend the night with Mother in order to say goodbye, not when our tiny little souls clustered in front of a hole so deep I felt like it would swallow me up with her. Not when we were given aki inu and charged not to spit out the bitter taste as it would protect us from ndi ajo mmadu who wanted to poison us. I knew he was there. I was almost certain of it. 

Children are ruthless. They have no filter and won’t hesitate to use a carefully guarded secret to best you in a fight. Eleven and naïve, I had told my then-best friend, K, about Mother and how I dreamt about her. The dreams started shortly after her burial. Mother always appeared dressed in the attire she was buried in. Maybe that’s what scared me about it: the way her arms flew out, reaching for me. In the dream, I abandoned whatever I was doing and ran. The dreams always ended with me wandering aimlessly into the bushes or around the room. Other times, Father would be right there, eager to scoop me up and shield me from whatever ghost chased me. I never woke up where I slept. G must have been tired of fetching me from the field I wandered off to, or bolting the bedroom door so I wouldn’t saunter off. It was M.E, our Deeper-Life-Church-going neighbor, who suggested her ‘powerful pastor.’ It must have worked because the dreams and sleepwalking/talking stopped. 

A stupid pencil caused the fight between me and K. A few shoves and mean insults later, she announced to the entire class that I was a somnambulist. That night, the dreams returned. With G not around to restrain me, the dreams multiplied. Soon after, I earned the title of amosu or “witch.” I woke up in the hostel courtyard, lips moving, eyes hidden in the darkness staring daggers into my back. To dream is to hope, and hope untamed can be deadly, so I learned how to curtail my hopes for a false reality. I tied my hopes neatly in a bag and threw them into the river of loss, to be swept away with the innocence of childhood. 

Enugu harmattans were harsh. Gusts of winds fooled you into thinking you didn’t need a bath. They dried up your nose so that your lungs felt sharp icy pangs when you breathed. The wind that shriveled our skin also blew in B.D, Father’s elder brother. Home for the mid-term and running ourselves ragged with childish pranks and whatnots, we were oblivious to the sudden melancholy B.D brought with him. It was no surprise the news flew right over my brother’s head and his lack of interest grated at him. 

“Your father is dead,” B.D said. 

B.D saved us. He was a retired barrister and scholar who believed that one could only amount to something if one put education first. Having experienced first-hand the horror of living with the wrong relatives, he provided the next best thing. 

We ended up at the hotel with G, a spinster now in her 50s, saddled with the incessant whining of kids. A retired nurse, she had tended to wounded soldiers during the Nigerian Civil War. When she arrived at my school to tell off my hostel mistress for letting other students call me a witch, my tormentors left me alone. I always wondered what she said to the hostel mistress. Sometimes, a mother can be found in the body of one who trades her dreams and aspirations for runny nose and sloppy kisses. Like a sinner held by the obligations of penance, I would spend the rest of her days loving her loudly.

It was almost two decades later, in my second year in the university, that I found I’d outgrown needing mothers and pining over fathers. Mother’s Day hurt, but I had learned to squish that feeling into a shapeless ball so that it had no face and lacked meaning to me. In my nubile phase of oversized glasses and delirious puppy love, I thought I had successfully buried my feelings. When I visited A.C, my mother’s younger sister, she said I had grown to become a spitting image of Mother. I didn’t see it, and if I did, I refused to acknowledge the irony. Our conversation washed away the years of silent resentment I carried in my chest. Her revelation was in a great sense, closure. 

Father had HIV. He gave it to Mother. He was a driver who slept with everything on the road and came back to pour the dregs into her, she said. Like all women beaten and stripped of choice, Mother took and took and took until it sucked the life out of her. 

Why did I ever think Mother weak? She was porcelain, tall, and wispy like a dream. A.C said Father caught that dream and snuffed out the light in it.

I didn’t believe her immediately. Of course, I had my doubts, after so many years of living a lie. I asked my eldest sister. She was a closed drum that stored all these memories of our mother, but like everyone else, she had shut the lid and sat on it. Surprisingly she told me. No, A.C wasn’t lying. No, the blood wasn’t from my broken tooth. Yes, they both died of HIV/AIDS. Mother first, from neglect. 

I still suffer from insufficient memories of Mother. The ones I do have are distorted and uncertain. I’m not sure that I can trust them. Did she rock me while I slept? Did she laugh at my childlike whimsy and breathe her dreams into my lungs? Did she pray to stay alive and teach her daughters to not let any man crush them with the weight of their own insatiable desires? Did she leave an imprint of her lips on my wrist and hope that I see her when I look in a mirror? 

Two months ago, I visited her mother, my maternal grandmother who called me Ebele, my mother’s name. I couldn’t decide what the warm feeling spreading through my chest meant. But as I lay on her lap, I breathed in the scent of my mother and let her welcome me home. 

About the Author:

Uche Anaekwe is a book reviewer and aspiring book editor. She writes over a hundred reviews yearly and works closely with some publishing houses in Nigeria, like Masobe and Narrative Landscape. When she isn’t reading and sourcing for her next read, she spends her day flying around Nigeria as a flight attendant. She lives everywhere but has shelter in Lagos, Nigeria.