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 6

At Maria’s house, morning came in like a blessing. The twins woke in the soft yellow light of a beautiful bedroom, clean and fed and — for the first time in years — not afraid. Faith and Hope sat up in their new bed, looking at each other, and both of them were crying without knowing exactly why.

Maria walked in carrying two new school bags and two folded blue-and-white uniforms. Her face was bright.

“I have spoken to a friend of mine who owns a school,” she said, laying the bags on the bed. “Tomorrow, I am taking both of you there. You are going to start school again. You are going to learn, and read, and become whoever you want to become.”

The twins slid off the bed and knelt on the floor, tears of joy running down their clean, smooth cheeks.

“Oh, Mummy Maria!” Faith cried, gripping the woman’s wrapper. “We thought our life was finished on the street. We never knew anybody could love us like this after our real mother threw us away.”

“Thank you, Mummy!” Hope sobbed. “We will read our books very well. We will not disappoint you.”

Maria bent and lifted them both, touching their heads. “Stand up, my beautiful daughters. You are no longer street children. You are my children now. And I will never let anyone make you feel small again.”

At that moment, Maria’s husband walked in wearing his native attire, and the twins looked at him with wide eyes. He was a big man, a chief, used to being obeyed — but when he looked at the two small girls kneeling on his bedroom floor, his face softened into something gentle.

“Listen to me, Faith and Hope,” he said, placing his hands on their shoulders. “I am your father now, and I want the best for you. You must forget the past. You must focus on the future. Go to school. Behave well. Study hard. Make us proud.”

“Yes, Daddy,” the twins said together.

“Good,” he said. “No more running to people’s houses. No more shouting in the street. From now on, you are our daughters, and you will live like daughters. Do you understand?”

“We understand, Daddy. We will be very good girls.”

—

While the twins were kneeling before their new parents in a mansion at the edge of town, I was kneeling before a hospital bed in a room that smelled of antiseptic, watching my only daughter not breathe enough.

Three days passed. The doctors called us in again, and their faces were even grayer than before.

“Mr. and Mrs. Isaac, I am going to be straight with you. Her body is not failing. Her heart is strong. But a child cannot stay like this indefinitely. If she does not wake soon — ” The doctor could not finish the sentence. He did not have to.

Isaac gripped the edge of the desk until his knuckles went white. “How long, Doctor? Give us something. A number.”

The doctor shook his head slowly. “There is no number, Mr. Isaac. The machines can keep her body alive. They cannot keep her spirit here. Every day she sleeps, the chance that she comes back — ” He stopped, and I watched the words die on his lips.

That was when I stopped hearing him. I turned and walked out of his office, past the nurses, past the waiting families, out into the corridor where the fluorescent lights hummed, and I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold floor with my head in my hands. Somewhere, far away, a baby was crying. Somewhere, people were getting good news and bad news and every kind of news in between. And my daughter was sleeping in a room that smelled of bleach, and the only person who could wake her was a girl with a scar on her arm who I had thrown my money at.

That afternoon, I made a decision. I was going to the old man again. I was going to beg him again, and this time I was going to make him understand that I had looked for the girls, that I had driven every road in the city, that I had called their names into crowds of strangers who looked at me like I was the one who was mad.

“I don’t know where they are, Baba!” I cried, falling to my knees on his mat. “We searched everywhere. The market, the motor park, under the bridges, in the gutters. They have vanished like smoke. Please, Baba, isn’t there another way?”

“No,” the old man said, and his voice was final. “There is no other way. You threw them into the world, and the world swallowed them. Now you must find them again, because only their forgiveness can open your daughter’s eyes. Go. And do not come back to me until you have knelt at their feet.”

We searched for three more days and three nights. Isaac drove; I sat beside him with my eyes on every doorway, every shadow. We stopped strangers and described two small girls with a scar on one arm. We handed out folded naira notes to street children, asking if they had seen the twins. We passed the same roads until the roads blurred into one long road.

Once, in a motor park choked with buses and shouting men, I saw a flash of two small figures huddled behind a kiosk and I screamed and tore across the tarmac, my voice cracking — “Faith! Hope!” — and the two children turned, and they were not my twins at all, just two frightened little boys who ran from me like I was a demon. I stood in the middle of that noisy park, weeping, while strangers stared.

Another time, Isaac grabbed a young woman selling plantains by the roadside, demanding to know if she had seen two girls with matching faces. She pulled her arm away and shouted at him. He stood there with his hands hanging at his sides, and I saw the proud, furious man who had threatened children at our gate reduced to a tired stranger in a dusty car.

“We’re losing our minds,” I said that night, back at the hospital, with Rachael’s hand in mine. “We are losing our minds and our daughter is slipping away.”

But even as I said it, something in me refused to stop. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the money falling, saw the foot stepping on it, saw Hope’s face crumpling. And I understood, with a sickness in my stomach, that I would never rest again until I had knelt before them.

“Rebecca, think!” Isaac shouted at one point, banging the steering wheel. “Did they say anything else? Anything that could tell us where they would go?”

“They said they looked for me for five years,” I whispered. “Five years, Isaac. And I threw money at them and told them to go away. I told them I had never seen them.”

Isaac was quiet for a long, terrible time. When he spoke, his voice was small — the voice of a man who had done something he could not take back.

“Then we have to find them,” he said. “Whatever it costs. We have to.”

But the city had swallowed them whole.