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

Chapter 5

The window was empty. The curtain moved. I gripped her hand and I did not look.

“He says he’s sorry,” Annabel whispered. “He says he’s sorry, but his mummy is angry. He says his mummy ties him up at night so he can’t leave.”

A cold thread ran down my spine. “Baby, what man? Tell me what he looks like.”

“He’s wearing a big black coat. And his hand is all covered in red.” She turned her head, and her eyes were her own again, huge and afraid. “He says you know him, Mummy. He says you know his name.”

I did. I knew his name. I had known it for two years and had buried it.

I did not sleep at all that night. I sat in the plastic chair and held my daughter’s hand and watched the hours crawl toward the third night, and I thought about Tunde Adeyemi, forty-one years old, standing three feet from a valve that should have been replaced, while somewhere in the boardroom of a company that never wanted to pay him, a young lawyer with everything to prove picked up a report and chose not to ask the questions she was paid not to ask.

I called my mother’s sister before dawn. Aunty Ngozi, who had raised me when my own mother died too young, who believed in the church and the old ways and everything in between, and who had come running the moment I told her Annabel was sick. She arrived at the hospital with a thermos of tea and her Bible, and she sat with me, and she did not ask questions, because she was the kind of woman who knew when asking was useless.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said gently.

“Maybe I have,” I said.

“Then it’s time to deal with the living.”

So I did. I asked the hospital for a patient named E. Yusuf. I called Ijeoma and asked her to sit with Annabel, because there was something I had to do and I could not do it holding my daughter’s hand. I changed into the grey suit I had worn to my own mother’s funeral, because I wanted armor that meant something. And I walked out of the children’s ward into the sharp morning light, and I did not look back.

Because the third night was coming. And I was done being afraid of it.

In the morning, I went to see Clara.

She was at school, in the playground, sitting alone on a bench, drawing in the dust with a stick. I had made sure the school let me see her — I was the mother of the friend she had given her father’s glasses to, and the teachers had been careful with me, the way you are careful with someone whose child is dying of nothing.

“Clara,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Do you remember me?”

She looked up. Her eyes were her grandmother’s eyes — old and deep in a child’s face. “You’re Annabel’s mummy.”

“Yes.” I took a breath. “Clara, can you tell me about the glasses you gave Annabel?”

Her chin trembled. “Did she get in trouble?”