“Why are you here? You’re supposed to be—”
My father interrupts this. “Do you want the bed or not?”
Both of them stare at me expectantly. I want to press the issue, but I also really, really need the bed. I nod and the salesman hesitates like he doesn’t want to give the discount if it’s for me, then walks away to ring it up. My mother is digging through her purse and I know it’s not to pay because she never does when my dad is around. But maybe she’s different now. Then she sighs and says, “Ike, darling, have you seen my sunglasses?”
—
The photo my mother has stepped out of was taken in 1982. She is wearing a green ankara-print caftan belted at the waist and it billows becomingly. There is a red patina on the photo that has developed over time. As she stands in the kitchen now, humming as she checks the cupboards, I see that the red tint is on her, starker against the white of the cabinets than at the store. The edges of her face are soft, as though she’s kept the slight blur of the photo as well. Slung over her shoulder is the tan raffia purse. All that’s missing are her red sunglasses. In the picture, they are tucked into the V at her neck, awaiting the Enugu sun. My father putters around her, and he is grayer, paunchier, slower than the last time I saw them together, but they move the same way, a tender, familiar dance. Every time I take a breath to say something, my father glances at me and his delight shuts me up. When they bend their heads together and begin to whisper, I slip away from the counter and into my father’s room. I have to find the photo.
It’s missing from the dressing table that, even after all this time, still holds my mother’s jewelry and perfumes, glittering bottles that range from Avon to Armani. The jewelry is just as varied, but most of it is costume, loud, baubly pieces crusted with bling. My mother wore no jewelry in the photo, not even a ring, as she and my father weren’t wed at the time but brave young lovers with, as my mother used to say, nothing to prove. There are other pictures of her on the dressing table. One when she was a child, stiff between her parents, long dead. Pictures of her at my high school graduation, on my dad’s fiftieth birthday, and my favorite, the one where she’s fluffing my baby sister’s frilly white pantaloons and my dad snaps just when Udoma kisses the top of Mom’s head. Udoma. I hear the front door open and she calls out in that Lucy-I’m-home way of hers and I rush to warn her before it’s too late.
When Udoma walks in, she pauses for a stunned moment and my father holds his arms out like ta-da! and she does what I should have done when I first saw my mother: she runs to her and holds her so tight about the waist it’s a wonder Mom can breathe, her sobs shaking them both.
—
There’s no way I’m going back to my apartment. I call in to work and leave a message punctuated by unconvincing coughs. It’s my thirteenth strike, but I don’t care. Udoma is practically in Mom’s lap, telling her every stupid thing she’s ever wanted to tell her and then some. Like my dad, she has simply accepted my mother’s presence like it’s nothing. I sit off to the side while the three of them are pressed close. Udoma stops and stares at Mom’s face and I wait for her to say something about it, but she just moves to the floor and snuggles her head into Mom’s stomach. She was ten when our mother died and just off the plane from Lagos for summer vacation. She’s filling Mom in on that trip and then on every trip after that, eight years of miles. My dad occasionally interrupts to update my mother on who is where now, and it is the first time he acknowledges that she’s been gone.
“And what about you, Uche, what have you been doing?”
They wait to see if I’ll play along.
“I’ve been getting over you. You know, because you’re dead.”
My mother puts her hand to her chest, where the sunglasses should be, like I’ve just cursed, and my father shakes his head.
As the silence grows, I leave.
—
I was a child prone to hysterics. Every cut was a deep wound that would surely keloid and scar me for life, every playground slight an unforgivable infraction that merited a meltdown. I also took to stealing, a habit that saw me disinvited from many of my schoolmates’ homes, so that I spent most of my free time playing in the salon/furniture shop my mother ran. I often wonder if I turned out the way I did from all those hours of inhaling turpentine and hair spray. When things were slow, my mother and her assistant, Obiageli, would curl my hair into elaborate dos. There exists a picture of me grinning as though showing off all my teeth would save the world, hair curled and fanned around my head like gele. Obiageli had persuaded my mother to powder my face, aided by my accompanying tantrum that’d worn down her reluctance. I resemble a Texas debutant turned trophy wife flanked by my exhausted-looking mother, because above all else, I was exhausting. My father was posted in Algiers by the oil company he worked for, and many times, until Udoma, it was just my mother and me. My childhood hysterics eventually congealed into an off-putting self-centeredness that was the topic of my mother’s and my last conversation, eight years ago.
After my mother died, I spent a few months in a place where they spooned food and medication into me. My father and I have never spoken of the state he found me in, Alabama, to which I had run away, home to The Ex I’d promised never to see again. Nor have we spoken of the state he found me in, catatonic after a handful of pills, curled in a moon of vomit. But when I came to, I was in a hospital and he was there and I just knew things had to get better. I was twenty-two.
It had taken me a year and a half to get my shit together and then five years to complete a master’s in technical communications that should have taken two. I’d lived at home until a year ago. But after years of feeling like an exposed nerve, I’d finally myelinated. I still had trouble holding a job and worked the parts table at a pipe supply a few days a week. Sometimes even those few days would be too much and I’d disappear. But those absences became less frequent as things got better and I began to be a person again. And now she just shows up, la-dee-dah ho-hum, like it’s not a big fucking deal.
—
I resume my search for the photograph. I avoid my old room, still the cyclone of a mess I left it in. If it’s in there, it will never be found. I head to Udoma’s instead, where it’s neat as a catalog. I start with the closest chest of drawers, as uncluttered as the room, every sock and panty folded into a tidy square. It’s easy to see that the picture isn’t here. I reach my hand into the drawer and scatter her things anyway. I’m moving on to the next drawer when Udoma sighs in the doorway. I ignore her and continue digging. I can feel it coming upon me, the unfurling of myself until all that will remain is a raw center. I have to find the picture. I have to.
Udoma stills me with a hand on my shoulder. She hugs me from behind and I am once again taken by her intuition. It was like that growing up, too, starting after we moved to Houston when she was only five and I was seventeen. She’s always been able to sense my mood, what it needs, and contort herself to fit that need. Now she whispers: “Why can’t you let me have this? Please let me have this.”
But I can’t.
“She’s supposed to be dead.”
Udoma flinches at the word.
“Don’t you have questions?”