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

Chapter 5

Moving Ayomide was like moving a wild thing. She had not left that room in years. When we walked her out to the van, she flinched at the sun like it was a blow, and she gripped my arm with a strength that surprised me, and she whispered the water is coming the whole way. But she came. That was the first miracle.

I set her up in a small room in our flat in Lagos, across from Tola’s room, and I took three weeks off work, and I did what I knew how to do — the thing I had been trained for, the thing I had run to Lagos to become. I bathed her. I fed her small meals and did not mind when she refused them. I sat with her in the dark when she screamed at midnight, and I held her hand when she whispered about the water, and I told her over and over, in our private word, that she was safe, that I was here, that the water could not reach her anymore.

Kunle did not understand at first. None of this made sense to him — the sister who had been dead, the mother who had hidden her, the boys and the river and the secret word. He stood in the doorway of Ayo’s room one night, watching me spoon soup into my sister’s mouth, and he said, quietly, “Temi, are you sure this is really her?”

“It’s her,” I said. “She used the word. No one else could know it.”

“But the word —” He hesitated. “You said you told me. So other people could know it, if you told them.”

I looked up at him, and something cold touched the back of my neck. “I have never told anyone that word, Kunle. Not you. Not my mother. Not a single soul in ten years.”

He went quiet. And then, because he is a good man, he said, “Then she’s your sister. And whatever she needs, we give her.”

Tola was the one who broke through. That is the thing about children — they do not understand grief, so they do not fear it. My daughter, with her mother’s eyes and her missing aunt’s heart, walked into that room one afternoon when I was not looking, and I found her sitting on the floor with Ayo, showing her a drawing. A drawing of a family: a mother, a father, a girl, and — with careful crayon strokes — a fourth person she had never met, labelled *MY AUNTIE.*

“Mommy says you are her soul,” Tola said, in the fearless way of six-year-olds. “So you are my soul too.”

Ayo stared at the drawing. Her hand, thin and trembling, came up, and her fingers touched the paper, and then — I will remember this until I die — she laughed. It was a small sound, broken and rusty, like something that had not been used in ten years, but it was a laugh. The laugh of the girl who had once raced me to the mango tree. The laugh of the girl who had shared my womb.

For three weeks, that was the only time she laughed. But it was enough. It was more than enough.

The first time she spoke clearly was on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting at the window, watching rain fall on the city. I was folding laundry on the bed behind her, and she said, without turning around, “I used to watch the rain from my window in the village. There was no window. That was the worst part, Temi. Not the room. Not the water. There was no window.”

I crossed the room so fast I nearly knocked over the laundry basket. I knelt in front of her, and I took her face in my hands, and I looked into her eyes, and there was a person looking back at me. A person. My sister.

“Ayo,” I breathed. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

She looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears, and she said, in a voice that was entirely hers, “Temi. I need to tell you what happened that night. I need to tell you who else was there.”

And that was when my sister, in the first full sentence she had spoken in ten years, told me the truth that my mother had been too afraid to believe.

“Dare brought me to the river,” she said. “He said he wanted to talk. He said he loved me. And then he said he was sorry, but it had to look like an accident. I fought him. I scratched him — I scratched him so hard, Temi, I remember the blood under my nails. And then I heard it. A splash. A boat. And a voice from the reeds saying, ‘Finish it now, before she makes noise.'”

My hands had gone numb. “Who?”