was, when he wanted to be someone else and he died being that person, Chika. We failed, don’t you see? We didn’t see him and we failed.”
Chika’s face blanched as soon as she mentioned the affair. His first instinct was to deny it, but there was no redirecting her away from the truth. He could only watch as she got to her feet, rage darkening her face, and stormed to the back door. There was a garden hoe lying there, and in a flash she grabbed it and marched back to the headstone.
“What are you doing?” he said, trying to step in front of her. But Kavita drove right past him, and then she was raising the hoe, slamming it into the headstone, the flat metal sparking against the stone.
“Kavita, stop it!”
She swung again and again, ignoring him, and Chika just stared, too shocked to try and restrain her. Kavita was grunting and crying—more in anger than grief, it felt like—and the gravestone chipped under her onslaught. She was aiming at the inscription now, and he cringed as he realized it.
“We—can—at—least—get—one—thing—correct!” she snarled between swings. Tiny cracks blossomed across the surface of the gravestone; chips littered the grass. Chika took a step back to avoid one flying into in his eye. He folded his arms and decided to let her get it out of her system. She swung until her arms were tired, then stopped, panting; the long handle of the hoe hung from her hands, banging gently against her knees. Her face was covered in sweat and her hair stuck wetly to her cheek.
“Are you finished?” he said. There was a small wound in the gravestone now, open and fragmented around the edges. Kavita whispered something and Chika took a step closer. “What is it?” She looked up at him and he wrapped his arms around her, the pain in her eyes wild and pounding. He was surprised when she didn’t pull away.
“You have to fix it,” she whispered, her voice thick and clotted. “You have to fix it.”
Chika held her tightly. “Of course,” he said, though he was confused by what exactly she meant. “I’ll fix it. Of course I’ll fix it.”
It was only when they got home, and he made her some tea and sat with her on the veranda listening to the birds from the plumeria tree, that she finally explained what she wanted: their last gesture for their dead child, their belated apology. “He might still be alive,” Kavita said, “if he’d felt safe enough to be himself in our house, instead of walking around like that. How could we protect him if we didn’t know? And he told them not to tell us because he couldn’t trust us, and he was right not to. Can you imagine what we would have done?”
Chika’s jaw clenched, but he knew she was right. If Vivek had been alive, he would never have conceded her point, but when you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.
“Besides,” Kavita added, too calmly, “you owe me.”
Eloise hung between them and Chika bowed his head, knowing he had lost. Kavita had stated her price, and his choice was clear: pay it or lose her.
He called the contractor and ordered a replacement headstone with a new inscription. He didn’t tell anyone in the family about it, but he knew they visited the grave, so when Ekene called him and said, “Better late than never,” Chika accepted it. He said nothing more to Kavita about his shame, or the new headstone, or the photographs. Kavita said nothing to him when she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.
Twenty-three
Osita
I went to Vivek’s grave on his birthday, very early in the morning.
I knew Uncle Chika and Aunty Kavita were going to arrive later that day and spend the night, so I came the day before and slept in my grandmother’s room. When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open, I went out into the compound and stood in front of his grave, with the new marker Aunty Kavita had forced Uncle Chika to put in. He hadn’t