Far from home

Chapter three

She found the letters on the third day.

They were in a wooden box under her father's bed — the kind of box that has no lock

because its contents are protected by something stronger than a lock. She found it when she was

cleaning his room, and she would have left it alone except that it fell from under the bed when

she moved a stool, and the lid came open, and she saw her own handwriting.

She sat down on the floor.

There were eleven letters. She had written them over the first two years she was in London

— before the silence between her and her father had calcified into something that could no

longer be called estrangement and could only be called grief. She had written them and sent

them and received no reply, and eventually she had stopped writing.

She had assumed he had thrown them away. That was, after all, the kind of man Chief

Bartholomew Obi was — a man who threw things away when they became inconvenient.

He had kept them.

He had kept all of them.

She did not read them. She put them back in the box and put the box back under the bed

and sat there on the floor of her father's room for a long time while the ceiling fan turned slowly

overhead and the sounds of Lagos filled the silence through the window.

When he woke from his afternoon rest and found her there, he said nothing at first. He

looked at the box. He looked at her. Then he looked at the ceiling.

"Your mother used to keep all her letters," he said. "Every letter anyone ever sent her. She

said: words written down are words that last."

"I didn't know you kept them," Ada said.

"There are many things you don't know about me," he said. "And many things I don't

know about you. That is what seven years does."

"Papa —"

"I was wrong," he said.

The words fell into the room like stones into water. Ada looked at her father. Chief

Bartholomew Obi, who had not apologized to another human being in her living memory, was

looking at the ceiling and his jaw was set in the way it set when he was pushing through pain.

"I was wrong to say what I said when you left. I was wrong to let my pride sit in the place

of my love for you." He paused. "I have been wrong for seven years, and I am too old now to

keep being wrong."

Ada pressed her hands together in her lap. Her throat had done something she did not want

it to do.

"You were also wrong," he said. "You should not have gone the way you went. Without

looking back."

"I know."

"But you were twenty-one. Twenty-one-year-olds do not know how to look back. They are

not built for it."

"I know that too."

He finally looked at her. "You look like her," he said. "Every day. More and more."

"I know, Papa."

"It is the best thing about you," he said. "Do not ever let anyone take it from you."

He closed his eyes then, tired by the effort of the conversation, tired in the way the sick are

tired — not just in body but in the accumulated weight of everything they have held for too

long. Ada stayed seated on the floor until his breathing slowed and deepened into sleep.

Then she allowed herself to cry.

Quietly, the way she had learned to do things in London — contained, private, efficient.

She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and cried for seven years of silence and all the

letters that had been kept and all the words that had not been said, and when she was done she

wiped her face and stood up and went to make him the bitter leaf soup the doctor had said he

should not have but which he had been asking for since she arrived.

She made it the way her mother had taught her. The way you make things when love is the ingredient that cannot be measure