Page 17 of The Death of Vivek Oji

“Goodness, no. She kicked him out, and good for her! It’sone thing to have an affair, or even a mistress, but a whole family?” Rhatha clicked her tongue. “Are you going to come?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’ll see you there.” As soon as she hung up, Kavita grabbed her purse and left for Maja’s house, though the meeting wouldn’t begin for hours. Maja was her best friend; it was ridiculous that she was hearing this news through the grapevine—from Rhatha, of all people.

Maja burst into tears as soon as she opened her front door. Kavita dropped her purse, pulling her into a hug.

“Oh, my dear! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” Maja sobbed against her neck. “It’s just—you have so much going on with Vivek, I didn’t want to disturb you....”

“Shh.” Kavita stroked the woman’s hair. “I’m here now. It’s going to be okay.” She pulled back and wiped the wetness off Maja’s face. “Come sit down and you can tell me everything.”

The story was even worse than Kavita had expected. Charles not only had another family, but his child with the other woman was a boy, his first and only son. And it wasn’t just an affair: he wanted to marry the woman, to take a second wife.

“You can’t mean it,” Kavita said, aghast.

“He’s serious.” Maja dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “He says I can’t blame him, that no one would blame him for taking another wife when his first one has failed to give him a son. The woman’s child is his namesake.”

Kavita covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, Maja, I’m so sorry!”

“He agreed to leave because I was making such a scene, but he says he’ll be back, Kavita. He says he’s going to bring the womaninto our house. That I can’t do anything about it. I told him I’d take Juju and leave, and he said I should try it.” Tears tracked down her swollen cheeks. “I would leave, I really would, but I can’t find our passports. I think he’s hiding them. And I don’t even know how to tell my parents, you know, because they warned me. They warned me African men were like this, and they told me it was foolish to come here with him, to bring Juju here. He said Juju is not enough, that she’s not a boy. What if she heard him say that? As if she means nothing, as if she’s nothing?”

Kavita held Maja’s hand tightly. “Have you told her yet?”

“No!” Maja’s voice was spiked and loud. She pulled it back down, shaking her head. “No, I can’t tell her. I have to figure something else out. She can’t know he did this, that he’s like this. It would destroy her, and he’s already caused enough damage. She thinks he’s away on a business trip.”

Kavita wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t approve of secrets, but she also knew it was dangerous to tell another woman how to raise her child. She’d barely survived an argument in her own family when she and Chika decided not to tell Vivek that he was born on the same day that Ahunna died. The convergence had made his birthdays difficult—the way everyone kept trying to smile past the grief clotting inside them. They didn’t want to tell Vivek because they didn’t want him to think it was his fault they were always sad on his birthday, as if his arrival had caused her death. Kavita had thought the pain would fadeover the years, but it had multiplied instead, like a load getting heavier and heavier on your head the longer you walked with it.

Finally, when Vivek was seven or eight, Ekene challenged them over it. “He deserves to know,” he insisted. “This is his history, our family history. He needs to know what happened!”

“Is that so?” Kavita had folded her arms and glared at her brother-in-law. “How do you explain something like that to a child?”

Ekene fell silent.

Strangely, it was Mary who did it—Mary, before she became the woman she was now. She’d sat down with Vivek on her lap, his little legs kicking idly through the air, his hair dropping into his eyes. They hadn’t started cutting it short yet, that came with secondary school.

“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman, Vivek,” she told him. The boy didn’t look at her, busying himself with a Hulk Hogan action figure he was turning over in his hands. “On the day you were born, she went up to Heaven and became an angel so she could look down on you and protect you.”

He raised his eyes to her, with those long eyelashes. “She went to Heaven?”

“Yes, nkem. She went to Heaven on your birthday. So sometimes your mummy and daddy feel sad, because they miss her very much. You remember when you came to stay with us in Owerri for the first time and you missed your mummy and daddy and you were crying?” Vivek nodded. “Well, they feel like that sometimes, too. But they are also very happy because they got you, so it’s a happy-sad feeling, you know?”

Bittersweet: that was the word for his birthday, though he was too young to know it then. Sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour and bitter notes scraping through the rest of the mouth.

Kavita and Chika got better at perfecting their smiles until he couldn’t see through them; they pressed down their pain to protect him. What had changed? Nothing, really.

Kavita looked at Maja, who was doing the same thing, after all. Burying her hurt so her daughter wouldn’t see it, trying to keep her safe. They were all trying to keep their children safe. She sat with her until the rest of the Nigerwives arrived, some bringing food because that’s what they did, because it saved Maja the bother of having to cook for her family, or what was left of it. Kavita stood up and let them flock around Maja, hearing the story again, gasping and clucking and raining curses down on Charles, that useless bastard of a man. Kavita said nothing about Vivek and what had happened at the church in Owerri. It wasn’t the time or the place, and besides, there was a tendril of shame unfurling into a leafy plant inside her. She was the one who had allowed Mary to do this to Vivek, when she should’ve known better. All the Nigerwives liked to make fun of what they called the fanatic Christians, always catching the Holy Ghost and convulsing on carpets, but Kavita had pretended they hadn’t infected her family, as if she didn’t know who Mary was. As if Mary was the same girl she’d known all those years ago when Ahunna was alive.

A sob caught in Kavita’s throat. Ahunna would have known what to do about Vivek. She would’ve known exactly how to deal with Mary, what to say. Kavita took a deep breath andarranged her face properly. She had spent years learning how to push aside thoughts of Ahunna, of her uncle, thoughts that could paralyze her with grief. She had a child; she couldn’t afford to fall apart. Chika had felt the same way, too, after Ahunna died, after the two of them nearly gave up on being parents and Ekene and Mary had to step in to help. “Never again,” Chika had said, when the worst was over. “We can’t self-destruct like this ever again. We have Vivek now. We have to be stronger.” So Kavita was strong.

After another hour or two with Maja and the Nigerwives, Kavita went home and walked into the bedroom she shared with her husband. He was changing out of his work clothes, his white vest covering his chest and stomach. Kavita sat at the edge of the bed and told him what happened in Owerri, how Mary and her church members had beaten Vivek. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her voice level the whole time, even as Chika turned to her, a furious incredulity spreading over his face.

“She didwhat?”

Kavita tightened her jaw. “It was part of their deliverance nonsense.”

“No, no. This has gone too far.” Chika got up, hands on his waist, and paced the room. “You see? When I told Ekene that that church was corrupting her mind, did he listen? Of course not. He always thinks he knows what he’s doing because he’s the senior. Osita stopped coming home because of all that, and still, Ekene won’t hear word. It has gone too far, you hear me?He needs to control his wife! What kind of bush animals beat a young man in the house of God?”

Kavita took a deep breath and went over to her husband, resting her hands on his chest. “It’s all right,” she said. “I told Mary to stay away from us. We don’t need that kind of nonsense in our lives. I’ve handled it.”