was, that he had this inside him and he wanted the opportunity to express it, so that’s all we gave him, that opportunity. I know it’s frightening to see him look so different. I was worried, too, when he told me, when he started dressing this way. But he was so happy, it really made a difference.” She smiled faintly at the memory. “I wish you could’ve seen him. He was happier than he’d ever been since Uncle Chika brought him back. Sometimes he asked us to call him by another name; he said we could refer to him as either she or he, that he was both. I know it sounds—”
“Bas!” Kavita raised her hand for silence. “It’s enough. You people will not sit here and tell me my son wanted you to call him she. It’s . . . it’s unnatural.”
“But it’s true,” said Elizabeth. “That’s just who he was.”
“That is not who my son was!” shouted Kavita, throwing the pictures to the floor. “I don’t know what you people did to him, but that was not my son! That was not my Vivek!”
Osita felt his chest hurt but he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid that any words leaving his mouth would emerge dripping with guilt, and he was filled with nauseous relief that Juju had agreed to take out the photos of him and Vivek. Olunne was staring at Kavita with pity. Her sister, however, was furious.
“He didn’t belong to you,” Somto growled, and they all looked at her, appalled. “You keep talking as if he belonged to you, just because you were his mother, but he didn’t. He didn’t belong to anybody but himself. And the way you’re behaving now—that’s why we couldn’t tell you. That’s why he lived the last months of his life as a secret. That’s why he couldn’t trust you. You think you own him, when you didn’t know anything that was going on in his life.”
She sucked her teeth and Kavita’s tears stopped, mostly out of shock at Somto’s rudeness. Olunne pinched her sister’s arm to make her shut up.
“Is it me you’re talking to?” Kavita said, incredulous.
“We were just trying to protect him,” Elizabeth said. “We didn’t want anything to happen to him. We took care of him.”
Kavita turned to her. “Is that so? Where were you on the day he died, then? Where were all of you? Can someone finally answer me that one?”
A silence followed her words, heavy and thick. Then Juju spoke up reluctantly, her voice low. “He was at my house. He had started going out in dresses and I tried to stop him. I told him it wasn’t safe, but he said he was just going down the road, that it wouldn’t take long. Usually he’d come back quickly, but that day—” Here, Juju’s voice broke. “He didn’t come back at all. And there was the riot at the market—”
“And it burned down,” Kavita completed, her voice flat. The akwete cloth over Vivek’s body had smelled of smoke.
Juju nodded tearfully. “I think he walked too far and someone caught him,” she said.
Kavita’s throat clenched. She imagined the scene: Vivek caught in a mob, someone staring too much before shouting He’s a man, bodies pressing around him, tightening like a noose, hands ripping off his clothes, someone throwing a stone that broke open the back of his head. Her boy crumpling to the ground. A sob tore through her and she folded in half to keep it in.
“Aunty Kavita! Are you all right?” Juju reached out to touch her arm.
Kavita dragged herself together, past the pain, and straightened up. “So you think that’s how he died?” She directed the question to all of them. “He went out like this”—she gestured to the photographs sprawled on the floor—“and the rioters caught him?”
They all nodded. “It’s the most likely scenario,” Olunne said.
“Then how did he get back here?” asked Kavita. “Who brought him back?”
“Maybe it was just a Good Samaritan,” said Juju. “Someone could have recognized him, and if they were too afraid to stop the attack, the least they could do was bring him home.”
Kavita covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to at least hold herself together until the children were gone. “I see,” she managed to say. It wasn’t as if she’d thought his death would have been anything other than violent. There was too much that was suspicious about how she’d found him: the injury, his missing clothes. Yet hearing