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

Chapter 9

We went back to Araromi for the first anniversary of her second life. Not for the funeral we had held in an empty coffin, and not for the churchyard, and not for Mama — though we stayed with Mama, and Mama held her daughter and wept for the first time since the day the fisherman brought her home. We went back, the two of us, to the river.

Odo-Alaro looked the same. Brown and patient. Older than the oldest tree. It did not know that it had once tried to take one of us, or that it had failed, or that the girl it had reached for was standing on its bank now with her hair growing out dark and her eyes clear and her hand wrapped in mine.

Ayo knelt at the water’s edge. She looked at her reflection in the brown surface — the face that was my face, ten years older than the face that had gone into the water, ten years more alive. She reached down, and she cupped water in her hands, and she let it run through her fingers.

“It took a girl,” she said quietly. “But the girl came back.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked. “Coming back here?”

She shook her head. “I used to be afraid of this water. I used to think it held the worst night of my life. But it doesn’t hold anything, Temi. It just flows. The river doesn’t remember us at all.” She looked up at me, and her eyes were bright. “That’s the secret. It was never the river that was keeping me. It was me — I was keeping myself in the water, every day, in that room with no window. And you, Temi. You were the one who reached in and pulled me out. Again.”

I knelt beside her in the red earth, and I took her hand, and the two of us sat at the edge of the water that had once tried to take her, and we did not speak for a long time. The sun went down beyond the mango trees. The village lights came on behind us, one by one. Somewhere behind those lights, in a compound with three children, a woman was raising her family without a husband for the first time. Somewhere further, behind prison walls, two men were living with what they had done. And here, at the water’s edge, two women with the same face were sitting together, breathing, alive.

“I used to think,” Ayo said at last, “that I survived the river for a reason. That God kept me alive so that something could be fixed, or avenged, or explained. But that’s not why I survived.”

“Why did you survive, then?”

She squeezed my hand. “Because you were on the bank. Because somebody in the world was saying my name every year, standing in this exact place, refusing to let the water keep me. You didn’t know you were pulling me back, Temi. But you were. Every year, every visit, every word you whispered to this river — that was the rope. That was the line you threw to a girl you thought was gone.”

I could not speak for a moment. The tears came, and I did not fight them.

“You’re my Ẹmi mi,” I said. “Half of my soul was in the water that night, Ayo. And a soul cannot drown. It can be hidden. It can be locked in a room with no window. It can go grey at the temples and whisper about the water in the dark. But it cannot drown, and it cannot be buried — not even in an empty coffin, with a stone and a name that never belonged to the person in the ground.”

Ayo laughed, that small broken laugh that is becoming less broken every day. “So what do we do now?” she asked. “What does a twin do, when she gets her twin back?”

I thought about it. I thought about the ten years of grief, and the ten years of hiding, and the ten years of blackmail and silence and empty coffins and scratches on a man’s chest. I thought about my mother, who had done a terrible thing out of a mother’s terrible love. I thought about Emeka and Dare, and I found that I could think about them without the blade twisting in my chest anymore. They were in prison. The law had done its work. And I had my sister back, and that was the only justice that had ever really mattered to me.

“We live,” I said. “That’s what we do. We live, and we laugh, and we eat Tola’s terrible drawings of us, and we teach you how the city works, and we go to the market together and drive the sellers mad because they cannot tell which one of us they are bargaining with. And we are never, ever quiet about each other again. No more locked doors. No more empty coffins. No more secrets that keep the people we love out.”

“Deal,” Ayo said.

She held out her hand, and I took it, and there at the edge of the water that had once tried to take her, my sister and I made the oldest bargain we had ever made, the one we had made at seven years old, lying on a mat in the dark.

One soul. Two bodies. Always.

We stood up, and we walked away from the river together, my hand in hers, her hand in mine, our two shadows stretching long behind us in the last of the evening light. Two women, the same face, the same heart, walking home.

And behind us, Odo-Alaro flowed on, brown and patient, older than the oldest tree — carrying nothing but water now, because everything that mattered, it had already given back.

*The End.*