not a boy. What if she heard him say that? As if she means nothing, as if she’s nothing?”
Kavita held Maja’s hand tightly. “Have you told her yet?”
“No!” Maja’s voice was spiked and loud. She pulled it back down, shaking her head. “No, I can’t tell her. I have to figure something else out. She can’t know he did this, that he’s like this. It would destroy her, and he’s already caused enough damage. She thinks he’s away on a business trip.”
Kavita wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t approve of secrets, but she also knew it was dangerous to tell another woman how to raise her child. She’d barely survived an argument in her own family when she and Chika decided not to tell Vivek that he was born on the same day that Ahunna died. The convergence had made his birthdays difficult—the way everyone kept trying to smile past the grief clotting inside them. They didn’t want to tell Vivek because they didn’t want him to think it was his fault they were always sad on his birthday, as if his arrival had caused her death. Kavita had thought the pain would fade over the years, but it had multiplied instead, like a load getting heavier and heavier on your head the longer you walked with it.
Finally, when Vivek was seven or eight, Ekene challenged them over it. “He deserves to know,” he insisted. “This is his history, our family history. He needs to know what happened!”
“Is that so?” Kavita had folded her arms and glared at her brother-in-law. “How do you explain something like that to a child?”
Ekene fell silent.
Strangely, it was Mary who did it—Mary, before she became the woman she was now. She’d sat down with Vivek on her lap, his little legs kicking idly through the air, his hair dropping into his eyes. They hadn’t started cutting it short yet, that came with secondary school.
“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman, Vivek,” she told him. The boy didn’t look at her, busying himself with a Hulk Hogan action figure he was turning over in his hands. “On the day you were born, she went up to Heaven and became an angel so she could look down on you and protect you.”
He raised his eyes to her, with those long eyelashes. “She went to Heaven?”
“Yes, nkem. She went to Heaven on your birthday. So sometimes your mummy and daddy feel sad, because they miss her very much. You remember when you came to stay with us in Owerri for the first time and you missed your mummy and daddy and you were crying?” Vivek nodded. “Well, they feel like that sometimes, too. But they are also very happy because they got you, so it’s a happy-sad feeling, you know?”
Bittersweet: that was the word for his birthday, though he was too young to know it then. Sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour and bitter notes scraping through the rest of the mouth.
Kavita and Chika got better at perfecting their smiles until he couldn’t see through them; they pressed down their pain to protect him. What had changed? Nothing, really.
Kavita looked at Maja, who was doing the same thing, after all. Burying her hurt so her daughter wouldn’t see it, trying to keep her safe. They were all trying to keep their children safe. She sat with her until the rest of the Nigerwives arrived, some bringing food because that’s what they did, because it saved Maja the bother of having to cook for her family, or what was left of it. Kavita stood up and let them flock around Maja, hearing the story again, gasping and clucking and raining curses down on Charles, that useless bastard of a man. Kavita said nothing about Vivek and what had happened at the church in Owerri. It wasn’t the time or the place, and besides, there was a tendril of shame unfurling into a leafy plant inside her. She was the one who had allowed Mary to do this to Vivek, when she should’ve known better. All the Nigerwives liked to make fun of what they called the fanatic Christians, always catching the Holy Ghost and convulsing on carpets, but Kavita had pretended they hadn’t infected her family, as if she didn’t know who Mary was. As if Mary was the same girl she’d known all those years ago when Ahunna was alive.
A sob caught in Kavita’s throat. Ahunna would have known what to do about Vivek. She