Three Years After My Husband Vanished, I Discovered Him Inside My Neighbor’s Home

Chapter 2

The new family moved in next door on a Thursday in April, three years and four months after Obinna disappeared.

I noticed them the way you noticed new neighbors — peripherally, with the mild interest of someone whose attention is mostly occupied elsewhere. A moving van. Men carrying furniture in the afternoon heat. A woman directing them with the authority of someone who knew exactly where she wanted everything and was not inclined to repeat herself. Two children, a boy and a girl, who ran in small excited circles around the adults’ legs.

The man.

I noticed the man the way I noticed most things those days — quickly, automatically, filing the observation for later use. He was tall. He wore a hat and sunglasses despite the shade. He moved boxes with the efficiency of someone accustomed to physical work and the caution of someone who had learned not to be easily recognized, though I did not identify that quality until later, when I understood what I was looking at.

I brought them fried plantain and a dish of stew the following evening, because that was what one did in our neighborhood when new people arrived, and because Chioma had pointed out to me that we hadn’t yet welcomed the new family and she was right and the observation embarrassed me into action.

The woman opened the door. She was elegant, composed, with the kind of face that revealed nothing it didn’t intend to reveal. She thanked me for the food with the specific warmth of a person performing warmth, and I noticed it and stored it and thought: this is a private woman, which is her right, and said something pleasant and returned to my own house.

I did not see the man clearly that day.

The next time I saw him was the following week, on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the backyard, hanging the children’s clothes on the line, the wet fabric heavy in my hands, Chioma’s school blouses and Taiwo’s trousers and Clara’s dresses in the small bright pattern she had chosen herself. The kind of task that occupies the hands while the mind goes somewhere else, and my mind that afternoon was on the school fees and whether the fabric shop owner would finally pay and a vague persistent headache that had been sitting behind my left eye for three days.