Page 42 of The Death of Vivek Oji

“She’s organizing it?”

Ekene gave his brother a look. “Who did you think was taking care of it? Kavita?”

Chika ducked his head in shame. He’d assumed one of the women was handling those things; he hadn’t even asked his wife about it. These days he found it hard to look at her, to see his grief magnified in her eyes.

Ekene softened his voice. “Mary is your sister,” he said. “Kavita is in mourning, and you for some reason have decided to repaint the whole house. Of course she’s taking care of it.”

“I didn’t even know they were talking again.”

Ekene laughed shortly. “They’re not, not really.” He shrugged. “You know how women are.”

“Please tell me that her church is not involved in this.”

“Ah, no. She tried but I stopped that one. Kavita would kill her on the spot if she brought anyone from there. We’re getting a Catholic priest to come to the compound.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been more involved in these plans,” said Chika. “Everything feels so strange around me.”

“Focus on the house.” Ekene was grateful that the repaintingwas animating his brother, even to these sleepless lengths. He still remembered what had happened after their mother died. “We will handle the rest.”

—

The day before the burial, the repainting was complete. Ekene sent a group of young boys to the local embalmer. They returned with Vivek’s body in a casket, balancing it in the back of a bus with the seats taken out, holding it steady as they trundled over bumps and potholes. When they arrived they carried it into the downstairs parlor, setting it on a table in the center of the room. Kavita watched them from the staircase. She had been coming down before they jostled in through the door, shouting at one another to hold the casket steady. Seeing it, she sank slowly, her hands gripping the banister posts, her eyes staring through them. She heard the gentle thud as they set it down, Ekene’s voice, the smack of their slippers against the tile as they filed out, some of them casting curious looks at her.

After he closed the door behind them, Ekene came and squatted on the step below her. “Kavita? Do you want to see him?”

She raised her eyes to him and he held out a hand. Heart shaking, she took it and allowed him to pull her to her feet and lead her into the parlor. The casket was still closed. Ekene let go of her hand and went to lift the lid, then stood at the head, waiting for her to walk forward. Kavita’s hair was plaited into a single long braid down her back, and for a moment sheimagined it was rising in the air, pulling her toward the door—because, if she didn’t look inside, then maybe she could pretend that none of this was real, that Vivek was somewhere else and they’d just gotten the whole thing very wrong. But instead she walked forward and curled her fingers around the polished wood of the casket’s edge. Vivek was lying inside, his hands draped along his sides, his eyes and mouth closed, his hair fanned out over a satin pillow, just as she had asked. She noticed it looked dry, his hair, and she ran her hand over it, wondering if she should pass some coconut oil through it, like she used to do.

People like to say that dead people look asleep, and maybe she would have bought that under different circumstances. Ahunna had looked asleep, but after all she had died in her sleep, so sleep and death had blurred together for her, and when they buried her the next day, she had taken peace down with her. But Kavita had already seen a different dead Vivek: the one on her veranda, the clotting blood, the flopping foot—they couldn’t trick her with this cleaned-up version, they couldn’t bring a peace that was never there. Not that they hadn’t tried, dressing him in his favorite white traditional, his feet as bare as when he’d knocked over the flowerpot by the front door. Kavita burst into tears, her body folding in on itself, and Ekene rushed to catch her before she hit the floor. He put his arm around her and guided her weight back up to her room, murmuring nonsense that even he knew made no difference.

She came down later, this time with Chika, and they stood by the casket for a long time.

“Where’s his necklace?” Chika finally said.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t on him when I found him.”

“He was always wearing it. Are you sure it didn’t fall off at the embalmer’s? Or that they didn’t steal it?”

Kavita’s face was set, hammered hard with pain. “I’m sure, Chika. It wasn’t on his body.” She could tell he wanted to argue, but she knew he couldn’t. She had refused to move from the body after she had found it; she had run her hands over Vivek’s face and wailed with her cheek on his chest. Besides, his body had been stripped naked. If the necklace had been there, Kavita would have seen it.

“He should be buried with it. It looks somehow that he’s not wearing it.”

Kavita agreed and patted Chika’s arm. He needed something to fixate on now that the repainting was done, now that his grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it. They all knew what would happen when that time came: it would slice behind his knees and knock him down and he would fall back into that same dark place he’d gone when Ahunna died.

“We’ll find it,” Kavita said, accepting the fixation with both hands. “It has to be somewhere. He may have taken it off.”

“He always wore it.”

“He might have taken it off to clean it.”

“Yes,” said Chika. “To clean it.”

They stood there, the room empty around them, before the wailers and the mourners arrived, just the two of them with their son.

—

Ekene had been watching them from the doorway, careful not to intrude, unwilling to break the veil of grief that had woven itself around the tableau. Eventually he left them there and went back to his house, where Mary was.

“You’re not going to the wake-keeping?” he asked her.