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

Chapter 9

And Mama Aina — that fierce, ancient, wonderful woman — did something none of us expected. She started coming to my flat. She came once, to see Annabel. Then again, to bring us food. Then again, just to sit.

“You remind me of my daughter-in-law,” she told me once, stirring a pot of egusi in my small kitchen. “Stubborn. Proud. Too much heart for your own good.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I think.”

She laughed — a sound I had never heard from her, a warm, rumbling sound. “It was not a compliment.”

And that is how it happened that, three months later, my flat in Surulere held two little girls in it — Annabel and Clara, sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with a pair of toy eyeglasses that Clara’s mother had bought them at the market, the plastic kind with no lenses at all.

“Mummy!” Annabel called. “Look! Clara gave me glasses!”

I felt my heart seize, just for a second. Old habits. Old fears.

Then I looked at Clara’s face — open, happy, watching her best friend with nothing but joy — and I looked at my daughter, giggling, putting on the plastic glasses, making a silly face, and I let the fear go.

“What do you say to Clara?” I asked.

“Thank you!” Annabel beamed. “I love them!”

And that was that. Because some red cloth is meant to protect, and some is meant to trap, and it is a mother’s job to know the difference — and to teach her daughter to know it too.

And that same year, Mama Aina did something she swore she would never do. She took the red cloth — the same cloth, washed and pressed and folded as neat as a promise — and she tied it, one knot only, around the frame of her son’s photograph on the shrine. Not three knots. One. “One knot for remembrance,” she told me. “That is all a mother is allowed. The other two belong to him now.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She looked at the photograph, at the gentle, laughing face of her boy. “I will miss him every day for the rest of my life. That is what it means to love someone. But he is not in the cloth anymore, lawyer. He is in Clara’s laugh. He is in the way Annabel sets the table when she visits. He is in us now, where the living keep their dead.”

She reached out and squeezed my hand, and her eyes were bright. “And you are in us too. You came to me on your knees. That is a thing a mother does not forget.”

That night, I sat on the edge of Annabel’s bed, the way I had sat on the edge of her bed eleven days ago, when the world was a different shape.

“Baby,” I said, “do you remember the man in the black coat?”

She nodded, serious suddenly. “He was sad. He missed his mummy.”

“Yes.” I smoothed her hair. “And do you know why he went away?”

“Because Grandma untied the cloth.” She looked up at me with those clear, innocent eyes. “And because you said sorry, Mummy. He told me you said sorry, and that you were going to make it right.”

I felt my throat close. “You heard me say sorry?”

“In my dream,” she said. “He showed me. He was proud of you, Mummy. He said you were a good lawyer after all.”

“Was I a good lawyer, Mummy? Before?”

I thought about the courtroom, the report, the young woman who had turned away. “I was a good lawyer, baby. I just was not always good for the right people. But I learned.”

“What did you learn?”