I knew this small road well—there was a side gate from Uncle Chika’s compound that opened up into it. When Vivek and I were still in secondary school, we had broken the rusty padlock and cleared a path so that we could use the gate to sneak out of the compound. I got through the puddle, legs wet to my calves, and I was passing the gate when I looked down at Nnemdi and stopped.
There was something new in her face. It didn’t look like her anymore. Hurrying, I knelt down and laid her on the ground to check her neck for a pulse. There was nothing. I held my hand in front of her nose. Nothing. My sleeve and shirt were soaked in blood. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes blurred and I felt as if I was going to faint. I shook her, called both her names, as if it would do anything. We were under a flame-of-the-forest tree. An orange flower fell down and landed on her chest.
I knelt there, close to the fence, no one else on the road with me. I put my hand on her face and called her names again. It felt as if I was imagining the whole thing.
I was there on the road with my cousin’s body in front of me.
Someone was going to see me.
The thought took precedence and adrenaline shot through me. I can’t tell you why I did what I did next, except that Uncle Chika’s house was right there, and I knew the hospital was now useless, and I didn’t know how I would answer any of their questions if I walked into either place. Vivek had always told me and Juju, “Make sure my parents don’t find out. They already have so much to deal with. Make sure they don’t find out about Nnemdi.”
So I did what he would have wanted me to do.
I untied the bow the dress was fastened with, and I stripped it off her body, crying the whole time, my hands shaking, my head scattered. I took the material I had used to soak up the blood and unfolded it. It was akwete, in a red-and-black pattern. I used it to cover my cousin and I picked her up again, and I walked to the side gate—the lock was never fixed—and pushed it open with my foot. I ran through the backyard, along the side of the house to the veranda, where I laid Nnemdi down by the welcome mat. There was so much blood, all over both of us. I couldn’t stop crying.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.” I stroked some hair off her face and pressed my forehead against hers, my tears falling on her nose and mouth. My uncle’s voice sifted through the window.
“Did you hear that?” he was asking my aunt.
“Someone is at the door?” she replied.
I choked back a sob, sniffed, and held my cousin’s face in my hands, kissing her lips. “I have to go,” I told her. “Please, forgive me. I have to go.”
I reached around her neck and unfastened her silver chain, the Ganesh pendant still warm against my palm. I clenched my fingers into a fist around it.
“I love you,” I said to her silent eyes. Then I got up and ran, bent in half so I couldn’t be seen through the windows. I ran away, through the back, through the side gate, pausing only to close it behind me. I ran down the side road and picked up the dress from the ground, shaking off the orange and yellow petals that had accumulated on it. I ran down to the main road, past the hospital gates, and people stared at me, but the grief on my face must have looked familiar this close to the hospital, as if I had lost somebody there. I asked a woman selling oranges at the side of the road for a polythene bag. She stared at the blood on my clothes in alarm, but she gave me a black-and-yellow bag and handed me a sachet of pure water.
“Clean your face,” she said. “Gịnị mere gị?”
“I was in an accident,” I said, as I rinsed myself, pale red water in my hands.
“Chineke! Are you okay?”
“Yes, Ma. I’m just trying to reach home.”
“There’s plenty blood on your shirt.”
“It’s not my own.”
“It’s not good to be walking around looking like that.” She called out to a woman selling clothes in a kiosk next to her, gaudy bedazzled T-shirts and