Far from home

The Lagos sun had no mercy for the late. It beat down on Mazi Okonkwo Street like a landlord collecting rent — hot, insistent, and completely without sympathy. Ada Obi stood at the gate of her father's compound in Surulere, one hand gripping a single travel bag, the other pressed flat against the rusted iron door she had not touched in seven years. She was twenty-eight years old and she had come home. Not by choice. Never by choice. The flight from London had landed at Murtala Muhammed International Airport at five in the morning, and she had spent three hours sitting in the arrivals hall watching the ceiling fans struggle with the heat, waiting for the courage to take an okada to a house she no longer called hers. When the yellow taxi finally deposited her on Mazi Okonkwo Street, the driver had looked at her through the rearview mirror and said, "Welcome back, sister. Nigeria never change." He was wrong. Everything had changed. The compound looked smaller than she remembered. The mango tree her father had planted the year she was born had grown so large its roots had cracked the concrete path. The bougainvillea her mother used to tend every Sunday morning had spread wild and unpruned across the face of the main building. The gate itself — the same gate — was now covered in rust where it had once been painted green. Ada pushed it open. The sound it made — that long, metallic groan — was the same sound it had always made. Some things, she supposed, did not change at all. Inside the compound, an old woman was sweeping the yard. She stopped when she heard the gate. She squinted at Ada from across the compound for a long moment, and then her hand went to her mouth. "Adaeze." "Good morning, Mama Ngozi." The woman set down her broom and came forward, studying Ada the way one studies a painting you half-remember from childhood. "Chai," she said softly. "You have come back." "I have come back," Ada agreed. "Your father —" "I know," Ada said. "That is why I am here." The old woman said nothing more. She picked up her broom and stepped aside, and Ada walked past her toward the front door of the main house. The curtain in the window nearest the door shifted slightly — someone watching — and then was still again. Ada breathed in. She smelled egusi soup and kerosene and the particular dry heat of a Lagos morning. She smelled her childhood. She knocked. * * * Her father did not come to the door. Her brother did. Emeka was thirty-four now, broad-shouldered and serious in a way she did not remember him being when she left. His hairline had receded slightly. He wore a white singlet and a pair of faded tracksuit bottoms and he looked at her the way you look at someone you have been expecting and dreading in equal measure. "Sister Ada," he said. "Emeka." They stood there for a moment, the gap between them far wider than the doorway. "You should have told us you were coming today," he said finally. "If I told you, you would have found a reason to stop me." He looked away. She had not been wrong, and they both knew it. "Come in," he said. "He is in his room." She followed him through the sitting room. The television was on — NTA morning news, the anchor reading something about the election with the particular solemn energy Nigerian journalists reserved for bad news. The furniture was the same. Same green sofas with the arm covers her mother had sewn. Same glass cabinet with the ceramic figurines no one was allowed to touch. Same calendar on the wall, though a different year. She stopped in front of the calendar. It was still open to December — not this December, not any recent December. She reached up and turned the pages forward with one finger. Emeka watched her from the hallway. "He doesn't let anyone touch it," he said. "He will have to get used to change," Ada said, and turned toward the bedroom. Her father, Chief Bartholomew Obi, was sitting up in bed when she entered. He was thinner than she remembered — the illness had taken something from him that his pride had not yet recovered — but his eyes were the same. Sharp. Dark. Carrying all the weather of his seventy-one years. They looked at each other. "Adaeze," he said. His voice was quieter than she remembered. "Papa." "You came." "You called." He had not, of course, called. He had sent Emeka to call her, which was different, which was exactly the kind of thing Chief Bartholomew Obi did — act through others when pride would not allow him to act himself. But she said nothing more. She crossed the room and sat down in the chair beside his bed, and she looked at the man who had not spoken to her in seven years. "You look like your mother," he said at last. "So everyone tells me." "It is not a complaint." Outside the window, a motorcycle honked. A child shouted something in Yoruba. A radio somewhere played an old Oliver De Coque song. Lagos breathed and pushed and surged, as it always had, as it always would, indifferent to whatever small human dramas unfolded inside the houses along its streets. Ada folded her hands in her lap. "Tell me what the doctors said, Papa." He told her. It was as bad as Emeka's message had suggested. She sat very still while he spoke and did not let her face do anything it should not do. She had learned, in seven years abroad, how to hold herself together. How to be composed. It was the one useful thing that leaving home had taught her. When he finished, she said: "Then I will stay until you are well." "And if I do not get well?" "Then I will stay longer." Chief Bartholomew Obi looked at his daughter for a long time. Then something in his face did something she had not seen it do since she was very small — since the day her mother died and the whole street came to mourn and her father stood in the middle of the compound receiving condolences with absolute stillness until she found him, later, behind the mango tree alone. He looked, for just a moment, like he might cry. "You are stubborn," he said. "Like your mother." "I know," Ada said. "It was always a compliment from you.