Far from home

Chapter 5

Her father improved.

Not all at once — not in the dramatic way of films, where a man decides to live and simply

does. He improved the way real people improve: slowly, with setbacks, with bad days after

good ones, with mornings when he would not eat and evenings when he would ask for things

she had not cooked since she was a child and did not think she still remembered.

She stayed.

She had told her supervisor in London she needed a month. Then she asked for two. Then

she stopped counting.

Her flat in London sent her letters which she read and did not respond to immediately. Her

friends in London sent voice notes full of concern and updates from a life that was continuing

perfectly well without her. She listened to them in the evenings, sitting on the veranda, and felt

the strange double vertigo of belonging to two worlds and being entirely inside neither.

"You could work from here," Emeka said one Sunday, over rice and stew after church. He

said it the way he said everything important — sideways, as if he was talking about something

else.

"My job requires me to be present."

"Plenty of people work remotely now. Even from Nigeria."

"Emeka —"

"I'm not asking you to stay forever. I'm asking you to consider that forever is not the only

option." He looked at his plate. "Papa is better. But he is not young. And I am here alone."

"You have a wife."

"I have a wife, yes. But you know what I mean."

She did know what he meant. She had always known. Emeka had stayed — had stayed

through their father's difficult years and their mother's illness and every hard thing the

compound had seen since she left — and he had never once said: I stayed so you could go. But

she heard it anyway. She had always heard it.

She went to see Chidi's mother that same afternoon.

Mama Abara was eighty-three years old and sharp as a new blade and she received Ada in

her parlour with the kind of ceremonial warmth that made clear she had been waiting a very

long time.

"Sit, sit, sit. Let me look at you. Chai. Beautiful. Beautiful like your mother." She patted

Ada's hands. "You have made us wait, o."

"I am sorry, Ma."

"No need for sorry. You are here now." She leaned forward. "My son."

"Ma —"

"I am eighty-three. I do not have time for subtlety." She fixed Ada with eyes that had seen

everything and forgotten nothing. "My son has not been the same since you left. He has tried.

He has been engaged. He has done what a responsible man does. But something has been

missing. You know what it is."

Ada was quiet.

"I am not asking you to marry him tomorrow. I am just asking you to — open the door.

That is all. Even just a little." She sat back. "The rest will handle itself. It always does, when

people stop being afraid."

On the walk back to the compound, Ada passed the junction where she used to buy suya

on Friday nights. The suya man was different — younger, the old man's son probably — but the

smell was the same. She stopped and bought two sticks without planning to, and stood at the

corner eating them and watching the street do what Lagos streets do: live, loudly, without

waiting for permission.

A okada blared its horn. A woman balanced a basin of tomatoes on her head with the ease

of someone who had never doubted herself. Two children chased each other around a parked

truck. Somewhere, music was playing — Fela, of course, it was always Fela — spilling out of a

window and into the evening air.

Ada stood in the middle of it all and thought: I have been away for seven years and this

street did not miss me and does not need me and will continue to exist perfectly well without

me. And yet it is inside me. It has always been inside me.

She took out her phone. She called her supervisor in London.

"I need to talk to you about a more permanent arrangement," she said.

Her supervisor was quiet for a moment. Then: "I was wondering when you'd ring."

She walked back to the compound. The gate made its sound — that long, familiar groan —

and she went through it and into the yard. Her father was sitting outside in his chair, in the

evening light, watching the mango tree.

He looked up when she came in.

"Adaeze," he said.

"Papa." She sat down beside him in the other chair — the chair that had always been her

mother's chair. "I have been thinking."

"Thinking is good."

"I think I might stay. For a while. Properly."

Her father said nothing for a long moment. Then he reached over, slowly, and placed his

hand over hers. It was large and dry and warm and it was her father's hand and she had missed it

for seven years without allowing herself to know it.

"Your mother," he said, "always said that home is not a place you return to. Home is a

place you choose." He squeezed her hand once, gently. "Choose well."

Above them, through the thick leaves of the mango tree he had planted the year she was

born, the first stars of the Lagos night were beginning to appear. One by one, as they always

did. As they always would.

Ada looked up at them.

She was twenty-eight years old. She had come home. And for the first time since she had left it, home felt like exactly the right word.

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