SHE DROWNED THE NIGHT I WAS FIFTEEN — TEN YEARS LATER, A PHONE CALL USED THE SECRET WORD ONLY MY TWIN KNEW

Chapter 3

I left Dare Owolabi kneeling in the dust of his own compound, and I walked the road to my mother’s house on legs that did not feel like my own. The village slid past me like a dream I had once lived in: the same rusted signboards, the same goats nosing at the same rubbish heaps, the same old men on the same benches who looked away when they saw me coming. I had come home a thousand times in ten years, and every time I had been someone’s daughter from Lagos, a mourner who sat by the water and talked to a ghost. This time I was something else. This time I was coming for the truth.

My mother was on the veranda, as if she had been expecting me for a decade. She sat on the wooden bench with a glass of tea in her hand, the way she had sat on every veranda of my childhood, and she did not startle when I appeared in her yard. She looked at me, and I looked at her, and for a long moment neither of us moved.

“Mama,” I said. My voice came out thin. “Is Ayo alive?”

Her hand froze around the glass. Tea trembled at the rim, a tiny shaking that was the only crack in her perfect stillness. She set the glass down very carefully, and when she looked at me her eyes were wet in a way I had never seen them — my mother, who had not cried at our father’s funeral, who had held our hands at the edge of an empty grave with the face of a woman made of iron.

“Temi, my child,” she said, and her voice broke on the second word. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I should have told you.”

I did not ask her to explain. I think I already knew, in the way your body knows a thing before your mind will admit it. She stood, and she took my hand, and she led me around the back of the house to a room I had never once thought about — a small room behind the kitchen, its door reinforced with a padlock the size of my fist. I had walked past that door a hundred times. I had assumed it was storage. I had never once asked what was behind it.

She worked the key, and the padlock fell away with a sound like a jaw unclenching, and she pushed the door open into the smell of camphor and old air and something else — something sweet and wrong, the smell of a body that has lived too long indoors.

And there she was.

Ayomide. My twin. My Ẹmi mi.

She was sitting in the corner of the room on a thin mattress, rocking, rocking, rocking, her arms wrapped around her own knees. The face was my face. The exact face I saw in the mirror every morning, a fact I had always leaned on — that wherever in the world I went, there was another face like mine, breathing somewhere. But this face was thinner than mine. The cheekbones cut too sharp. The hair, which we had both worn long and black, had gone grey at the temples and on the crown, grey like an old woman’s hair, and she was only twenty-five. Her eyes were open and hollow, fixed on something only she could see, and her lips moved in a whisper I could not hear at first, and then I could.

“The water is coming,” she whispered. “The water is coming. The water is coming.”

“Funke—” I almost said the old name, the name from the story we no longer share, and I caught myself. “Ayo. Ayo, it’s me.”

She stopped rocking. Very slowly, her eyes travelled up from the floor, up my body, up my throat, and finally found my face. For one heartbeat — one single, fragile heartbeat — there was a flicker behind her eyes. Recognition. A door opening a crack. Her lips shaped a word, and I swear it was Ẹmi mi, my soul, before her face contorted and she flung herself back into the corner, screaming.

“Stay away! Stay away, they will hurt you too! The water is coming! The water is coming!”

Mama grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room and slammed the door and worked the padlock back into place with hands that did not shake at all. I fell against the wall of the house and slid down it and sat in the red dust and wept.

“What happened to her?” I sobbed. “Mama, what happened to my sister?”