There are these two mad Twins who always stand at the front of my house, telling me that “I’m their Real Mother, and I should not deny them”. My name is Rebecca, married to Isaac, and I have just a daughter, Rachael

Chapter 3

The hospital smelled of bleach and stale medicine and fear. Rachael lay on the narrow white bed with a drip taped to the back of her small hand, and the machines around her breathed in slow, patient beeps, as if they had all the time in the world. Her eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell so faintly that I kept pressing my fingers to her wrist to feel the pulse I could not trust.

I wore a path into the corridor floor, pacing, praying, bargaining with a God I had neglected for years. Isaac sat in the plastic chair with his head in his hands, and when he finally looked up at me, his eyes were rimmed in red, and I saw fear in them — real fear, the kind that makes a strong man small.

“Rebecca, what happened to her? She was laughing at breakfast. She was asking for extra jollof. How can a child go to sleep and just — not come back?”

“Isaac, I don’t know.” My voice cracked. “I walked into her room and she was lying there like she’d fallen asleep and forgotten the way back.”

The door opened and the doctor came out — a white coat, a clipboard, a face with no smile in it. We were on our feet before he could speak.

“Please, Doctor. Tell us something. Anything.” Isaac’s voice shook.

The doctor looked at the papers in his hand for a long moment. Then he sighed, and the sound was heavy enough to sit on both of us at once.

“Mr. and Mrs. Isaac, I am going to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty. We have run every test available to us. We scanned her brain. We checked her blood, her heart, her lungs, her kidneys. Everything comes back normal. Medically, your daughter is a perfectly healthy child.”

“Then why won’t she wake up?” My voice came out as a scream I did not recognize.

“That is the part I cannot explain.” He looked genuinely lost, which frightened me more than anything had all day. He glanced down the corridor, lowered his voice. “Listen to me. There is a man at the edge of town. He is not a doctor, and I should not be telling you this. But people go to him when hospitals run out of answers. I have a daughter of my own, so you understand how much it costs me to say this — if I were you, I would go and see him. Today. Before it is too late.”

I could not run fast enough. Isaac and I tore out of the hospital, through the car park, into the car, and I drove the way you drive when your only child’s life is being measured in minutes. The road out of town turned to red dirt. The shops thinned until there were no shops at all. The houses shrank into mud and old wood, and chickens scattered across our path as we passed.

I had been to this part of town once before, as a little girl, when my grandmother was still alive. The memories surfaced in fragments — a well with a wooden cover, an old woman grinding peppers in a courtyard, drums rising from a compound where someone was celebrating. The road had been better then. The world had been softer then. Now every bump in the red dirt felt like a judgement, and every compound we passed seemed to be watching us through its fences.

Isaac drove in silence, both hands tight on the wheel. Twice he opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. We had said everything there was to say to each other; the only thing left was to find a stranger and beg him for a miracle we did not deserve.

The car rolled to a stop at the end of a narrow footpath. We got out, and the heat of the afternoon hit us like a wall.

The old man’s house was a small building with a thatched roof and doors worn smooth by a thousand hands. Inside, the air was cool and smelled of herbs and smoke and something ancient. He sat on a mat on the floor — an old man with hair like white cotton and eyes that had seen so many secrets they no longer blinked at mine.

He looked at us, and I had the strangest feeling that he had been expecting us for weeks.

“Welcome,” he said, and his voice was like dry leaves moving in the wind. “You are here because of a child who sleeps.”

I fell to my knees so fast my bones cracked on the hard floor. “Baba, please. Our daughter went to sleep last night and she will not wake. The doctors say there is nothing wrong with her, and we are going mad with fear. Please, I am begging you — tell us what to do. Save my child.”

He closed his eyes. The silence stretched long enough that I started to tremble. And then he opened them, and they were on me like a finger pointing.

“Go and find the two girls you sent away from your gate.”

The words hit me like a slap. “Baba — the — the street girls?”