Foreign Soil, Fierce Soul

Chapter 4 – Maya’s POV

Let’s bring it back to reality for a moment. Right, oh, there I'm in Nigeria, sitting with a distant cousin of mine who has only lately seen the light.

I know what you’re thinking. How does someone who grew up in a middle-class house in Oklahoma end up in a dingy room in Lagos with a member of the family I've met two times? Trust me, I've wondered the same thing one thousand times. Still, if I‘m going to tell you the story, I need to go back. Because the connection between those two axes, the before and the after, is. shrouded and dismal, all connected with one person, Anita.

But, indeed, before that, I want to tell you how I got myself in this mess.

Two years after my father married Anita, it went from bad to worse!

And I really mean bad, in an insolvable way to describe unless you have endured it firsthand. It wasn’t blaring. It wasn’t trim. It was a kind of bad that subtly takes hold over the times, so subtly you don’t notice it’s there until one day, when you get up and look around, you find yourself in a house that doesn’t feel like your house anymore. With a father who doesn’t look at you the same. With a woman who’s smiling at you as though she has already won.

You might think I’m overreacting, but this is the reality (this time, I was slightly overreacting, sensitive, but well, the situation was rather dramatic).

Morning, noon, and night, Anita is eager to taste this new eatery.” “Anita thinks that we need a new wallpaper for the Chesterfield.” “Maya, I gathered you were having a bit of a rough time lately. Is everything OK?” Now that was the worst. Turning on that concerned voice of his, as if he did not understand for one moment how I might be feeling, as if Anita’s version of me, the difficult teenager who refused to get over the past, was only in his mind.

And if that was not enough, it actually looked like she was really starting to enjoy herself, like that was the sole reason she came to the house. Speaking of reasons, it seems Anita came just to steal my father from me.

I didn’t have evidence yet. Not solid evidence. But I knew. The way you just do, when you can feel yourself being watched, although you can’t see the watcher. The way you just can tell when a smile isn’t real. Anita wasn’t just living in our house. She was invading. Reclaiming. And I was the last scrap of the original narrative that had yet to be struck from the record.

One of the nights, I was walking past the kitchen to get a glass of water I could hear muffled whispers from inside the kitchen. I looked in, and Anita was talking to someone on the phone. Her voice was soft, hushed, a voice used when we don‘t want to be eavesdropped on.

Anita: “I said I would have him again in the end. He was happier with me. Emily stole him from me, and I can have him now that she’s no more.”

I felt like ice-cold water had been poured on me. Emily. My mom, being raised by Anita, with so much anger that it made me shiver, and “stole him”? What on earth was that all about?

Unknown caller: “What if you get caught, however? His daughter is actually clever and will be able to tell when something fishy is going on.”

Anita: “Oh, I’ll take care of that. Besides, she’s another story for another time.”

“Another story for another day.” It was a warning in the air; I didn’t fully understand, but I knew it meant a lot.

While I stood there and listened to what she was talking about, I was just wondering why she called me a “story for another time.” How does she know about me? What did Mom know? Could it be that she and Mom had been keeping a secret, and it was just unraveling?

One story I couldn’t ask Mom to tell. Like the whole thing was supposed to go that way. Like it was planned out for us, colluded, predetermined, with chapters. Like it had been written for us before, I knew Anita’s name. And if Mom had known her, truly known her, not as some passerby of a person, but as someone she had history with? also what had she kept from me? What was buried in the past that needs to be looked into?

While I was standing there wondering what the discussion was about, Anita, still at the doorway, was standing there laughing at me as though she wanted me to hear the discussion after all.

I didn’t see her move. One second, she was at the kitchen counter, talking to some guy on the phone; the next, she was standing right there in front of me. Leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed, and her head tilted like I was the most ridiculous thing she saw all week.

“Looks like you’ve been eavesdropping, haven’t? Hope that Great Big Mouth of ears enjoyed what it heard, honey?” She said with a smile that oozed mockery.

I turned away from her and went to my bedroom, where I remained worried over what she had said. I knew telling my dad about Anita’s plan would do no good now, so I let it go.

I closed the door behind me and sat down on the corner of my bed, my hands shivering, my heart pounding. I couldn’t tell Dad. I had formerly tried. Slight talks, innocent signals, simple remarks about Anita’s oddness that I knew Dad would make light of.

“You‘re twisting it in your head, Maya. She’s doing her style, so leave her alone.” Not this time. To unveil the truth of who Anita was, I would present evidence so significant that Dad couldn’t deny it.

I began to watch. I wrote down what I saw, the dates, the times, the exchanges we eavesdropped on, and I paid attention. I watched when Anita left the house, who she spoke with, and how she conducted herself when she was around me.

I was ghostlike in my own house, creeping around, observing in silence, gathering bits and pieces to a puzzle I could not really grasp but was eager to solve.

A year went by. Anita became pregnant. During dinner one evening, a very happy announcement was made. Dad was over the moon. He hugged Anita and kissed the top of her head with the top of his lungs and discussed cribs and baby names, and the fact that this was "a new chapter for our family. And, Anita. Anita sat there, shining like a star, one hand resting on her still flat belly, looking at me, over the dinner table, with the grin that said: “I beat you.”

And she may just have. Because the baby changed everything. Baby was forever. Baby was proof that this new life dad had built with Anita wasn't just some phase he'd jump out of once the pain subsided. Baby was also proof that I was no longer just fighting for a stepparent. I was fighting a family. One I wasn't a part of anymore.

And if I thought Anita would settle once she had everything she wanted, I was mistaken. If anything, the pregnancy emboldened her. For the first time, she became even more cunning and aggressive. She began plotting strategies on how to throw me out of her house, but nothing seemed to work.

It was gradual. The subtle suggestions she gave me over the breakfast table. George, do you think Maya would be better at boarding school? Somewhere, she can learn to be independent? When those tactics failed, she resorted to the sneakier forms of manipulation. Yanking my phone chargers, losing my homework, food disappearing, and the keys to the car, I had barely gotten the chance to use them. Anita would always check in sometime later, with a look of concern, asking if I was "forgetting anything." In the meantime, she would leave a trail of tidiness in my room and bring up to dad, ad lib, that I had been "slacking off," or "getting pretty lazy." When she blatantly lied to his face, telling him I was sneaking out at night, I watched her grin with a patience no doubt designed to enrage me, as he sat me down for a lecture I didn't deserve.

Yet despite all that she did, not one of her plans worked. And I knew why.

To be honest, I am glad my dad still has feelings for me. I don't think he wants to offend my mom (may she rest in peace).

My father would never cast me out. Never completely. Not in a way that would make him seem the type of man who gave up his own daughter for his wife. Perhaps it was guilt. Perhaps it was love. Or perhaps it was only that lingering thought of Emily sitting on his shoulder, recording everything, like a conscience he couldn't shake, reminding him I was the only thing he had left of her. Whatever it was, there was a limit Anita couldn't pass. A boundary even she couldn't sway him past. And she knew it. I could see in the way her jaw stiffened when Dad defended me.

The way her grin sank, just for a fraction of a second, when he told her gently, always gently, that "Maya's going through a lot" or "she needs some time."

But Anita was nothing if not patient. And if she couldn't get rid of me the easy way, so to speak, then she'd find some other way. I just didn't know the other way yet.

Until it was far, far too late.