Page 50 of The Death of Vivek Oji

She nodded. “Enter,” she said, and I climbed up behind her, carefully, sitting far back enough so Nnemdi could fit. We sped off.

“Anyangwe Hospital,” I called out to the driver. “Do you know it?” It was just around the corner from Uncle Chika’s house, walking distance. I could run and get them while the doctors took care of Nnemdi. The driver nodded and I bent my face to Nnemdi’s, wind whistling past us. “Wake up,” I begged. “Wake up for me.” We wove through cars and I kept my arms clutched tightly, her knees draped over the crook of my elbow. Her shoes fell off and I didn’t care. When we reached thejunction of a side road leading to the hospital, a giant pothole filled with water blocked most of the road. The okada stopped at the edge.

“My bike no fit enter that one,” she said. “E go spoil my engine. We can go around by the main road. Abi the hospital is just there?”

“No wahala,” I said, carefully climbing down. “I can walk from here. Ego ole?”

She waved her hand. “Forget the money. Go and make sure your wife is all right.”

I nodded, tears solid in my eyes, and she drove away as I waded through the edge of the puddle. The side road was a shortcut, small and narrow, unpaved, shadowed by trees. I knew this small road well—there was a side gate from Uncle Chika’s compound that opened up into it. When Vivek and I were still in secondary school, we had broken the rusty padlock and cleared a path so that we could use the gate to sneak out of the compound. I got through the puddle, legs wet to my calves, and I was passing the gate when I looked down at Nnemdi and stopped.

There was something new in her face. It didn’t look like her anymore. Hurrying, I knelt down and laid her on the ground to check her neck for a pulse. There was nothing. I held my hand in front of her nose. Nothing. My sleeve and shirt were soaked in blood. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes blurred and I felt as if I was going to faint. I shook her, called both her names, as if it would do anything. We were under a flame-of-the-forest tree. An orange flower fell down and landed on her chest.

I knelt there, close to the fence, no one else on the road with me. I put my hand on her face and called her names again. It felt as if I was imagining the whole thing.

I was there on the road with my cousin’s body in front of me.

Someone was going to see me.

The thought took precedence and adrenaline shot through me. I can’t tell you why I did what I did next, except that Uncle Chika’s house was right there, and I knew the hospital was now useless, and I didn’t know how I would answer any of their questions if I walked into either place. Vivek had always told me and Juju, “Make sure my parents don’t find out. They already have so much to deal with. Make sure they don’t find out about Nnemdi.”

So I did what he would have wanted me to do.

I untied the bow the dress was fastened with, and I stripped it off her body, crying the whole time, my hands shaking, my head scattered. I took the material I had used to soak up the blood and unfolded it. It was akwete, in a red-and-black pattern. I used it to cover my cousin and I picked her up again, and I walked to the side gate—the lock was never fixed—and pushed it open with my foot. I ran through the backyard, along the side of the house to the veranda, where I laid Nnemdi down by the welcome mat. There was so much blood, all over both of us. I couldn’t stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.” I stroked some hair off her face and pressed my forehead against hers, my tears falling on her nose and mouth. My uncle’s voice sifted through the window.

“Did you hear that?” he was asking my aunt.

“Someone is at the door?” she replied.

I choked back a sob, sniffed, and held my cousin’s face in my hands, kissing her lips. “I have to go,” I told her. “Please, forgive me. I have to go.”

I reached around her neck and unfastened her silver chain, the Ganesh pendant still warm against my palm. I clenched my fingers into a fist around it.

“I love you,” I said to her silent eyes. Then I got up and ran, bent in half so I couldn’t be seen through the windows. I ran away, through the back, through the side gate, pausing only to close it behind me. I ran down the side road and picked up the dress from the ground, shaking off the orange and yellow petals that had accumulated on it. I ran down to the main road, past the hospital gates, and people stared at me, but the grief on my face must have looked familiar this close to the hospital, as if I had lost somebody there. I asked a woman selling oranges at the side of the road for a polythene bag. She stared at the blood on my clothes in alarm, but she gave me a black-and-yellow bag and handed me a sachet of pure water.

“Clean your face,” she said. “G?n? mere g??”

“I was in an accident,” I said, as I rinsed myself, pale red water in my hands.

“Chineke! Are you okay?”

“Yes, Ma. I’m just trying to reach home.”

“There’s plenty blood on your shirt.”

“It’s not my own.”

“It’s not good to be walking around looking like that.” Shecalled out to a woman selling clothes in a kiosk next to her, gaudy bedazzled T-shirts and ankara dresses hanging off bone-white headless mannequins. “Vero! Biko, nyem shirt for this boy.”

The woman stuck her head out of her kiosk. “Fifty naira!” she called back. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a hundred, handing it to the orange-seller. She looked at me in surprise, then waved it at the other woman, who nodded and came out with a black T-shirt that had a bedazzled crown on it. “This one will enter him,” she said. The orange-seller gave her the hundred naira and received fifty back. She tried to give it to me but I shook my head. “It’s okay, Ma.” I put the bag between my knees and took off my shirt right there on the road, pulling on the black one. It was a little tight but it fit. I put my bloody shirt and Nnemdi’s dress into the bag, and when I looked up, both women were staring at me.

“That’s how you just naked yourself outside your house?” said the clothes-seller.

“Mind your business,” the orange-seller told her. “Get home safe, you hear?” she said to me, and I nodded.

“Daal?, Ma.”