When she saw him, the memories came before the questions. Among the first was the sex. The rapid spasms, the sparking of nerves that had never been this titillated before then, all caused by one pound of flesh. His pound of flesh.
Then the midnight talks, the wide stretch of land he called a farm and she called a forest, crowded with tall trees. She had loved the way the branches reached in every direction, each one lined like the regression and correlation graphs she had drawn as a statistics student, before fashion took her. Some nights they lit a bonfire for two and drank coconut water, staring at each other. There were other nights too. On those nights anger took him, and his baritone, the voice she had once thought romantic, shook the house. The banged doors shook it again. He wasn’t the talkative type, but his anger made up for it.
The memories always cut back to the sex. To their first time. To the one before their second child. To the one that gave them their third, and the family planning. To the way he knew her, beyond any boy she had dated in secondary school. He knew her. They had touched every part of each other. His body was hers. Wasn’t that what they had agreed?
But now, as she looked at him, he wasn’t in a body. He seemed to be floating. And she stood on the ground, still not understanding.
She had found him in a club, or so she first thought, because somewhere far off there was music. Whatever this place was, it was huge. She couldn’t calculate its breadth.
“Temilade!” she screamed. She couldn’t hear herself, but she knew what she was saying. “Why are you floating? And what are you doing… here?” She looked around, but couldn’t register much, or anything at all.
He could hear her. She could tell, because he smiled at her.
“You sure know how to make an entrance.”
“If I didn’t, how would you have met me?”
He smiled, in the proud way he knew how to when he was around her.
“Come down nau!” she said, as though it was the obvious thing to do.
“All right, Madam. I’ll come down.” He had always called her Madam when she gave orders, and he said it the way other men said darling. It was not the baritone that had once shaken the house. It was low and unhurried, as though nothing was left in him to be angry about.
Only then did she really look at him. She had always known he was a fine man. She had married him partly for it. But he had never been this fine. The hospital had gone out of his face. The grey had gone from his temples, and yet he did not look young; he looked finished, the way a garment looks when the last thread is cut. His skin was the same deep brown, but lit from somewhere underneath. His shoulders had squared. His jaw, which had softened in the last years, was a clean line again. If she had passed him on the street as a stranger, she would not have waited at any ATM for him to come babbling. She would have walked up to him herself.
And the gown. It was not a jalabiya, nor an agbada, nor any gown she knew. It was white, but not one white. It held the ivory of new cotton at the collar and cooled to the white of a shell at the hem. There was no fastening anywhere. The neckline sat on his collarbones as though it had been cut on his body, and the cloth fell from his shoulders in long, unbroken lines that moved half a second after he did, like water catching up. Along every edge ran an embroidery so fine she had to squint: gold thread in a pattern that looked like vines until it moved, and then looked like writing. The whole thing seemed to have a life of its own. When he came down and stood on the ground like her, then ran toward her, it rolled back its own sleeves.
Something lurched from the pit of her belly to her throat as she ran into his arms. He held her tightly. Very tightly. A tear fell. The last time she had held anyone this tightly, it was her brother, the night before he stopped coming home.
“Don’t cry. Don’t cry,” he said, patting her back. Once, his hands would have moved from her shoulders to her waist, and more often than not to her backside. This time, his hands left her body at the shoulders. She reached for his waist, the way she always had. He caught her hand, gently, and held it between them.
She had his sleeve between her fingers before she could stop herself, turning the hem over, hunting for the seam.
“All this,” he said, “and the first thing you check is my stitching.”
“There’s no seam, Temi!”
“Hello to you too.”
“Who made this? Don’t lie to me. Somebody made this.”
He was laughing, loud. She could hear its reverberation inside her body.
“You’ll find out.” He took his sleeve back, gently. “See. Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, teasing.
She, beneath his chin, looked up at his eyes. He held her gaze. She was surprised. “You win.” She gave up. “You never used to win when you were not looking this good.”
“One of the perks of beauty,” he said. She smiled. That private smile she enjoyed when he made his self-confident remarks.
“What do you think?” His hand traced the sky, and her eyes followed his fingertips to the aurora. Pink, blue and purple. The colours poured down the sky like water and never landed. “It is…” He trailed off.
“It is.” She had agreed before she could argue, and she always argued first. It was as if her mouth had grown a mind of its own and both minds were struck by the same beauty. “Where is this place?”
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, would I be asking you, Temilade? Don’t start.”
“Ah. Right.” He scratched his jaw. “You’re not dead.”
“What?”
“I said you’re not dead.”
“Obviously I’m not. Do I look dead to you? Come, what’s wrong with you gan?”
He studied her the way he used to study her new collections, head to one side, taking his time. “You look like a woman who has been sleeping in a hospital chair.”
“Six weeks. Because somebody would not take his medicine.” But he had not been conscious for weeks. How could he have taken it?
He looked at her as if she were hiding a secret. His head tilted. His lids lifted. His eyes narrowed in realization. For the first time, he seemed afraid. But she would not call it fear. It wasn’t the hysteria of their wedding night, when he paced the room in his suit and shoes and she had been the one who undressed him. It wasn’t the panic of the day her water broke in his office and darkened the red rug, and he thought it was blood. His hysteria was what had made her like him in the first place. He had met her at an ATM, babbling and rambling as his boyish eyes darted around her face. She had giggled and known she would give him her number.
This was different. He wasn’t rambling. His mouth had simply stopped. Every time she expected words, his eyes darted away. He was tapping his foot, and only then did she look down. The ground was clear, as clear as the quartz pendant he had bought her for their twenty-eighth anniversary. There was no shadow at his feet. There was none at hers. She looked up for the sun and could not find where the light was coming from.
“Temi. What is this place? You haven’t told me yet.”
“You really don’t know.”
“You go talk abi you no go talk.” Her pidgin sounded ajebutter-y, like one of those rich kids who had learned it on purpose, to prove they could be street-smart.
He took a breath, the same breath he used to take before telling her he had bought another plot of land. “Tara. You’re out of your body.”
“I’m what?”
It was as though his words switched on every one of her senses. The music she had half heard came clearer. It was a sweet sound, very far away, like singing heard across a wide river. It rose, and went quiet, and rose again. It was not performing for anyone. It was just there.
Now she could see the crowd teeming ahead and the people walking past them. She tried to count them the way she would count any sample, and the number kept slipping away from her. On her left were trees bearing the same fruit in different colours. Beside them stood a creature she was sure she had never seen in her life. She could find no eyes on it, and yet she knew it was looking at her, the way you know someone in a crowd has said your name. The air smelled of rain on hot ground, and of something she could not name, and it made her homesick, for a place she had never been.
“What is this place?” Her voice held horror and excitement at once.
Temilade beamed. “I know, right? Wait until you taste the fruit.”
She looked around. Some people floated. Some stood grounded like them. Some simply appeared. And they were beautiful, all of them. Not beautiful the way the models she hired were beautiful, lit and powdered and tired underneath. Beautiful the way a morning is. A man walked past with a face so kind she wanted to curtsy. A girl who could not have been more than twenty laughed at something, and Tara felt the laugh in her own chest.
And the clothes. Her fashion label, Enikoe, was already exporting to Canada, and she was a nightly face on the fashion talk shows, yet she could not stop staring. A tall woman passed in a wrapper and blouse that could have been aso-oke, except that the weave changed as she walked, indigo stripes at one step and gold at the next, as if the cloth were remembering different colours. A man wore an agbada whose sleeves were so wide and so light they lifted behind him like wings, and the embroidery on its chest was not stitched on but grown into the cloth, the way veins grow in a leaf. Two girls walked arm in arm in pleated silk, hundreds of knife pleats so sharp and even that Tara’s eyes ached, and as they moved the pleats opened to show a second colour inside, coral within cream. An older woman wore a gele tied higher and more intricately than anything Tara had seen at the grandest Lagos wedding, folded into fans and petals, and it did not look heavy. It looked as though it was holding her up.
She looked for a seam on any of them and could not find one. Her eyes, she noticed, were sharper here than they had been in years.
Then the hair. A lady ran past with cornrows that curved around her head like the rings of a tree, a bead at every end, and the beads chimed softly in time with the far-off music. A young man wore his locks long and loose, each one wrapped at intervals in thin gold wire that caught the light that had no source.
“Oh my God, that braid.” She caught his arm. “Temi, who is her hairdresser? I need that woman in Ijebu-Ode by Monday!” The woman’s braids zigzagged from her hairline, crossing and recrossing in a lattice so exact it looked woven on a loom. At the crown they gathered into one thick plait that ran down her back to her waist, with threads of something like pearl worked into it, so that it shimmered whenever she moved her head. She turned to Tara with a gentle, amused face.
“She heard me?”
“Yes. Here, everybody is a bit like Superman.” He leaned closer. “So no more gossip. Your voice notes would not survive this place.”
“My voice notes were informative.”
“Fifteen minutes on the Doha trip, Tara.”
“The Doha trip was a disaster. Somebody had to document it.”
He laughed, and then the laugh went quiet in his face. “Tara, I wish I could take you around. Keep you longer. But you have to start going.”
“Why are you chasing me away?” She narrowed her eyes toward the braided woman. “Is it her?”
“I’m not chasing you, Tara. You’re not dead yet.”
“Are you dead?” she blurted.
“I’m alive, as you can see. Even more alive than you.”
“Am I dead?”
“No. You’re only less alive.”
She made the face from the memes he used to send in reply to her fifteen-minute voice notes. In them she complained about interviewers who made her promote her collection on the spot, and about her staff, the fake fabrics and the poor quality of everything these days. The memes showed a confused man with equations floating in front of his face. He laughed now the way he had laughed then.
“Twenty-eight years of marriage,” she said, “and you finally win an argument by dying first.”
“No, no, no,” he said between laughs, and touched her hand. A shared memory flashed through them both.
It was their wedding night. He was pacing in his suit and shoes, and she caught his hand as he passed. “Temilade, sit down. Imagine it like us dancing.”
He let out a nervous laugh. “I don’t even know how to dance.”
“Some songs can make you a dancer,” she said.
“It was beautiful,” he said now. “Life is beautiful. Love is beautiful.”
“Since when do you make speeches?”
“Since here.” He shrugged. “They give you time to think.”
She was quiet. She didn’t know what he meant by that, and whatever it meant she knew she wouldn’t like it. So, he was still annoying here, too. She stared at his gentle face, and his mouth with which he had professed the sweetest and the harshest things, and sometimes nothing at all. And then she was back at their first date, days after the babbling at the bank. He had bought her a Sprite at Mr Biggs and nothing for himself.
“You won’t drink?” she’d asked.
“Oh, sorry. I’ll drink. I was watching you drink. Not in a strange way. In a normal way. I’ll drink.” He ordered. He drank. He choked. The next moment his head was in her lap and attendants were crowding around, one holding a cup of water, one holding a phone. They spent the rest of that evening in his family’s clinic, and there she had told him, “I love you.” He had smiled, shy. He hadn’t said it back.
“I love you,” she said now. He smiled, shy? She wasn’t sure. He didn’t say it back.
“You still won’t say it.”
“You know me.”
“Come with me. Let us go back. Let’s leave this hospital and go home.” The words came out of her the way they had come out every night for weeks beside his bed. “Just take the medicine, Temi. Take it so you’ll be well. Take it so we can go home, take it and let us go home! I cooked the moi-moi.”
“Tara.”
“Don’t Tara me.”
He smiled sadly and looked around.
And she was a girl again, begging her brother to come home. Mummy had been clutching her gold chain, shouting his name in the compound. Daddy was calling the driver and the police. The smoke swirled into her nose, and the smell of weed clung to her clothes long after. Her brother did not come home.
But this was not her brother’s boyfriend’s room, and this was not smoke. She looked where he was looking. The aurora. The music, rising again from far away. The trees with their many-coloured fruit. The braided woman, still smiling at her from across the clear ground. And something in her stopped pulling at him.
“Stay,” she heard herself say.
He turned to her. “Madam?”
“Stay. Don’t come back.” She meant it, and she had not known she could.
It frightened her how easily it came. For weeks she had pulled him toward her, toward the chair, the medicine, the house. Now she looked at his face, the way it had settled here, finished, and she found that what she wanted was whatever made it look like that. His joy had become hers. She had not stopped wanting him. She had only begun to want for him.
And she loved him. She knew it the way she had known it at Mr Biggs, with his head in her lap, except it was larger now, and quieter, and it needed nothing back. She remembered his hands leaving her body at the shoulders, and she understood that nothing had been taken from her. Almost thirty years of learning each other had been small. Not less. Small, the way a door is small beside the house it opens into. What waited for them would not be his hand on the small of her back, or anywhere lower. It would be something she had no word for yet, and every part of her that had ever trembled for him trembled now, toward it.
If her body had not been waiting for her in that chair, she would have stayed, for him, for this, for everything.
Together is not forever. The wedding souvenirs had lied. Tara woke up.
The machine was beeping. Her head had fallen onto his arm as she slept in the chair beside his hospital bed. She did not scream Doctor! Doctor! Doctor! the way she would have, the way she had thought she would. The doctors came and swarmed him. She stepped back into a blurred cocoon of silence, wide-eyed, as though she had never slept.
She watched the doctors leave. She signed documents. She watched his body zipped into a bag. Months later, at his burial, she threw sand three times and said amens beyond counting.
Some nights she was sure of it. If she had begged harder, if she had held the medicine to his lips one more time, he would have followed her home. Then she would remember the aurora, the music that came and went, the braid, and the clear ground under her feet, and she would know she had not wanted him to.
She cried one night, staring blankly at the television, when Christiane Amanpour signed off from London the way she always did, the way he had always said goodnight back to the screen. She wept until her chest ached, the way only the living can.
The next morning she went down to the workshop before her staff arrived. She had not cut fabric with her own hands in years. She kept that for the pieces that mattered most: a first lady’s gown, a wedding she had been paid too much to refuse. Her staff found her there at eight, and at eight the next day, and the day after.
She was not copying. She could not have copied it if she tried. There was nothing to copy from, only the memory of a gown that rolled back its own sleeves, a braid that ran into another braid, and colours that fell and never landed. She draped silk and tore it off. She pleated chiffon until her fingertips were raw. She drew curves the way she had once drawn regression lines, searching for the one line that would pass through every point. Every morning, the line missed. For weeks, the bin filled.
Then one evening she held up a gown and could not find the seam. She knew where it was. She had sewn it herself. But she looked for it the way she had looked for his shadow on the clear ground, and it was not there.
She sat down on the workshop floor and laughed.
The collection showed in Lagos in March, and then in Toronto in May. The fashion pages said Enikoe had never done anything like it, that no one had. On the nightly shows they asked her where it came from. She smiled and said it came from grief, which was true, and let them think she meant only him.
It was him. It was the place. It was everything there. She sewed toward it the way you lean toward music you can barely hear. She seemed to dance a little awkwardly but oddly satisfied in this new life, the way they had danced on that cold hotel bed. And she found, to her surprise, that the longing did not make her ungrateful for here. It made her more grateful. She thought of the green signboards on the Lagos–Ibadan expressway, faded and leaning, that she had passed a thousand times without a glance. If one of them had ever led her somewhere like that place, she would have gone back to wash it. She would have painted it fresh and made it bigger.
That was what their love had been, and she meant to make the sign bigger. So she opened the land he called a farm. She cleared paths between the tall trees and built cabins under the branches, and couples came from Lagos and Ibadan and Abuja to walk where he had walked with her. On Friday nights there were bonfires, and she stood by the fire cracking coconuts open for strangers, and watched husbands and wives stare at each other’s eyes across the flames. The Sprite at Mr Biggs she kept. Even when Mr Biggs closed down. Some things were only theirs.
And some things she remembered only when she was alone. His hand on the small of her back in crowds. The first night, and every night after, his body and hers learning each other for almost thirty years. She had thought it was the destination. It had been the sign. It had been a foretaste, handed to two people who did not know what they were tasting. It had pointed past itself, the way his fingers had pointed at the sky.
So she loved him more now, not less. She wore the perfume he liked on evenings when no one would smell it. She slept on his side of the bed. Some nights, after the guests had gone to their cabins, she lit a small fire of her own, poured two glasses of coconut water, and drank hers slowly, saying his name to the trees the way she used to say it into his neck. It was not madness, and it was not mourning. It was washing the signboard.
The souvenirs had lied. The love had not. They could not have together forever. But they could share forever, and that was enough.
✦ ✦ ✦