My Daughter Came Home With Glasses Tied In Red Cloth — When I Learned The Truth, I Wished I’d Burned Them

Chapter 2

Morning came with Annabel’s small hands shaking me awake, her voice her own again, her eyes clear. “Mummy, I had a bad dream.” She had no memory of the mirror or the glasses. The glasses were gone from her room — gone from the whole flat — though the drawer where I had locked them sat open, untouched.

I called in sick and took the address from the school register. I drove to the Adeyemi house in Ikoyi.

It was a big gated colonial house, frangipani spilling over the wall. A maid showed me into a sitting room that smelled of old wood. Then Mrs. Adeyemi came in — tall, thin, in black — and looked at me the way I had been looking at the glasses.

“Miss Obi. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Your daughter gave mine a pair of glasses,” I said. “Wrapped in a red cloth. With your husband’s name scratched inside the frame.”

The silence had weight. Her face did not move, but something behind it did — a door slamming shut.

“My husband is dead, Miss Obi. Two years now. His glasses are in his room, where I put them the day they brought him home.”

“Then the ones your daughter gave mine,” I said slowly, “did not come from her bag.”

“She gave your daughter nothing,” Mrs. Adeyemi said. “My daughter is forbidden from touching her father’s things.” Her composure cracked, just for a hairline. “Unless the old woman—”

The door opened.

An old woman stood there, ancient and shrunken, wrapped in indigo almost black, with her son’s eyes. I understood that this was Mama Aina.

“So,” the old woman said softly. “The lawyer has come.”

I stared. “You know me?”

“I know the name that killed my son.” She walked slowly into the room, her voice barely a whisper but filling the whole house. “Two years I waited. I tied his glasses with the red cloth, three knots, so his spirit would not wander. But my foolish, gentle granddaughter took them from the shrine. She carried them to school. She gave them to her little friend — to the daughter of the woman who buried him.”

The world tilted again. “I don’t understand—”

“You will.” The old woman stopped three feet from me. “The spirit that sleeps inside that cloth has found its way to the child of its enemy. The knots have bound him to her now. Three nights she sleeps. On the fourth morning, he will take her with him to his rest.”

“Take her—” My voice cracked. “She is a child. She is seven years old.”

“And my son was forty-one when you buried him in paperwork and legal fees.” The old woman’s eyes were wet and terrible. “Bring the glasses back to me before the fourth morning, lawyer. Bring my son home. Or your daughter will become his grave.”

She turned and walked out, and the door closed on the whole world.