The Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi Page 0,17

help but look at her, like she’s determined to crack her face in half. We fit easily in the frame, all of us together.

After I started attending university in Nsukka, my trips back to my home in Owerri grew less frequent. I didn’t go to Ngwa either. A full year passed, maybe two, before I saw Vivek or his parents again. I wrote them letters, even called a few times after they installed a landline in their house, but I missed Vivek’s graduation, his eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays, and it was only later I found out that he never went to America. No one told me why. According to my mother, he enrolled at Nnamdi Azikiwe instead. One term later, De Chika pulled him out—and still no one would tell me what was going on.

“Since when did you start caring about your cousin?” my father said when I asked. I flinched at the censure in his voice. He’d never commented on our rift, but clearly he’d noticed, and it sounded like he blamed me. I wanted to argue, but my father walked away without waiting for my answer, leaving me ashamed in his wake.

“Don’t worry yourself,” my mother said. “Focus on your books. The boy will be fine. His parents are just spoiling him.”

“But what’s happening?” I asked. “Why did they remove him from uni?”

She hesitated, then flapped her hand in a vague gesture. “He’s not well, but don’t worry. God will take care of it.”

By then, my father had reduced his hours at work so he could spend more time at my grandmother’s house in the village. “I’m getting old,” he said, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did. The house had been renovated into a duplex and he’d put in a phone line. My mother and I joined him some weekends, like small holidays away from Owerri. The village was expansive—a world of land and farms and nature, not like the towns or cities, where everything was cramped and loud. We were finding escapes everywhere.

One evening at the village house, I picked up the phone in the upstairs parlor and heard De Chika speaking to my mother. I should have hung up, but instead I lowered myself to the floor next to the sofa, pressing my back against the leather and covering the mouthpiece with my hand so they wouldn’t hear me breathing.

“You know Osita came down with us,” my mother was saying. “Maybe it’s a good time to bring Vivek around. You remember how close they were as boys.”

“Mary, I don’t know. I don’t know what is happening to my son.” De Chika sounded worried. “Do you know he stopped cutting his hair? If you see him now, just looking like a madman . . .”

“We will pray for him,” my mother countered. “The forces of darkness will not triumph! No, he is not lost. He cannot be lost.” I could already feel her beginning to whip herself up into a holy frenzy.

“I’m not worried about his soul, Mary,” De Chika snapped. “I’m worried about his mind. Kavita has stopped sleeping. She keeps checking his bed, but the boy doesn’t even sleep there anymore. He wanders around the house. He goes and lies down on the veranda with the dogs. Sometimes he climbs the tree in the backyard and just stays there.”

“Ah-ahn!” My mother was surprised enough to pause the spiritual momentum she’d been gathering. “Have you asked him what exactly he thinks he’s doing? You can’t just leave university to come and behave like this.”

“He said he can’t sleep. That the dogs don’t disturb him and he can feel breeze better from the tree, some rubbish like that. When we asked him to start making sense, that’s when he stopped talking. Mary, I don’t want the neighbors to see him like this.”

“Ei-yah! Poor Kavita. So it’s the three of you that are coming, abi?”

“Yes oh. I can’t leave either of them alone, and she won’t leave him alone. You know she slapped him the other day?”

“Ehn, she told me. She said she was feeling guilty. I told her a boy who does not respect his mother enough to behave like a normal human being in her house should be prepared to accept some discipline. Didn’t you people beat him as a child?”

“That was different. He was small, he was obedient. Kavita didn’t tell you she was afraid?”

My mother perked up. “Afraid? Did he raise his hand to her?”

I flinched. She was wondering if he