I Do Not Come to You by Chance - By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani Page 0,47

‘If you go into the next room, every single thing there is just shoes. And not one pair of them costs anything less than a thousand dollars.’

I kept looking at him.

‘Go on. Go out and look. I know you’re hungry, but after looking, you can come back and finish your rice.’

I put down the tray with my half-eaten meal on it and left. My uncle was right. The entire space was covered from wall to wall with racks. Each rack harboured shoes of a different shade and different make. There were green shoes and yellow shoes, and red shoes and turquoise shoes. Every single member of the class Reptilia must have been represented in that collection. I finished looking and returned to the bedroom.

‘Have you finished looking at my shoes?’

‘Yes, I have.’ Then as an afterthought, ‘Thank you.’

He nodded heartily and began another marathon monologue about his footwear. From there, he extended to the topic of his wristwatches and then to his designer clothing.

When his three bowls had nothing left in them but stubborn bones and fingerprints, my uncle lifted the Just Juice packet and poured the liquid directly into his mouth, pausing from time to time to spread his mouth open and belch out a noise that sounded like a frog in heat. I half-expected him to gobble up the empty packet as well. Instead, he flung it onto the tray. Then he shouted for Protocol Officer, who came and doled out some money retrieved, this time, from inside the wardrobe. I received the naira notes thankfully and left.

The next day, my father was transferred to the Abia State Teaching Hospital, Aba. A week later, he awoke.

Fifteen

To think that one person’s waking up from sleep could cause the sun to rise and the stars to shine in so many hearts. I was especially glad for my mother, whose constant night-and-day vigils had paid off. She had been right there when it happened.

Contrary to what soap operas have taught us to believe, a person who wakes up from a coma is first disoriented and confused. So my mother could not say exactly how long it was that my father’s eyes had been open.

‘It was around 11 a.m. or so that I raised my head from a brief nap and saw him staring at the ceiling,’ she said.

Like people who dream without ever expecting their dreams to come true, at first she had dismissed what she saw as the wishful thinking of a desperate wife who had spent the past many nights sleeping on a raffia mat on the floor of her husband’s hospital room.

‘Next thing, his eyes just turned and started looking at me,’ she continued.

Then he opened his mouth and said something in Igbo.

‘Ha abiala? ’

My mother became worried. The only times she heard her husband speak Igbo were when he was dealing with the villagers. He never spoke it to her, he never spoke it to us, he never spoke it in our house. Even the house helps from the village were banned from speaking vernacular. In due course, though, my mother realised that it did not matter what language he was speaking. The fact was, her man was awake and talking.

‘I started jumping about and screaming for the nurses to come,’ she laughed. ‘Honestly, you should have seen me. You would have thought I’d gone mad.’

But she was afraid to touch him. When the nurses came in to investigate, she hovered around the bed and waited with her hands clasped against her chest. Finally, one of them noticed her reticence and assured her that her touch would not push him back into oblivion. My mother then sat beside him on the bed and stroked his hand until I arrived.

The rest of the day, my father stared as if seeing for the very first time. He stared at the ceiling, at the nurses, at me, and at his wife. Apart from one or two insignificant phrases in Igbo, he did not speak and did not acknowledge anyone when he was spoken to. His breathing was also not much different from when his eyes had been closed. The doctor confirmed that his left side was slightly paralysed and that he might not be able to regain his communication skills for some time. He also explained that it was common for patients just waking from a coma to speak languages that had been relegated to the archives of their minds.

‘The most important thing,’ the doctor said, ‘is that there has