“I saw your wife on the way here.”
“Oh?”
“She was crying.”
“Oh.”
I wait for him to add something more, but he chooses to pick up the remote control and continue flicking through channels. He does not seem surprised or disturbed by what I’ve told him. Or particularly interested. I may as well have told him that I saw a wall gecko on the way to work.
“Did you ever love her?”
“Once upon a time…”
“Perhaps she still loves you.”
“She does not cry for me,” he says, his voice hardening. “She cries for her lost youth, her missed opportunities and her limited options. She does not cry for me, she cries for herself.”
He settles on a channel—NTA. It’s like watching television from the nineties—the reporter has a green-gray tint and the transmission flickers and jumps. We both stare at the screen, at the danfo buses zooming past and the passersby craning their necks to take a look at what is being filmed. He’s muted the sound, so I have no idea what is happening.
“I heard about what happened to your sister.”
“News travels fast around here.”
“I’m sorry.”
I smile at him. “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”
“She tried to hurt someone again.”
I don’t say anything—but then he didn’t phrase it as a question. On the TV, the woman has now stopped to interview a passerby and his eyes continually flit between her and the camera, as though he is unsure whom he should be making his case to.
“You can do it, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Free yourself. Tell the truth.”
I can feel his gaze on me now. The TV has started to blur. I blink, blink again and swallow. No words come out. The truth. The truth is that my sister was hurt on my watch because of something I said, and I regret it.
He senses my discomfort and changes the subject. “They are discharging me tomorrow.”
I turn to meet his eyes. He wasn’t going to be here forever. He isn’t a chair or a bed or a stethoscope; he is a patient, and patients leave—alive or dead. And yet, I feel something akin to surprise, akin to fear.
“Oh?”
“I do not want to lose touch,” he tells me.
It is funny, the only times I ever touched Muhtar was when he was sleeping or at the gate between life and death, when it was necessary to move his body for him. Now he turns his head back to face the screen on his own.
“Maybe you can give me your number and I can WhatsApp you?”
I cannot think of what to say. Does Muhtar exist outside these walls? Who is he? Besides a man who knows my deepest secrets. And Ayoola’s. He has a strangely European nose, this keeper of confidences. It is sharp and long. I wonder what his own secrets are. But then I do not even know what his hobbies are, what his shackles are, where he rested his head at night before he was carried into the hospital on a stretcher.
“Or I can give you my number and you can call anytime you need to talk.”
I nod. I am not sure he sees the nod. His eyes are still fixed to the screen. I decide to leave. When I get to the door, I turn around. “Perhaps your wife still loves you.”
He sighs. “You cannot take back words, once they’ve been spoken.”
“What words?”
“I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.”
SISTER
Ayoola is lying on her bed, angling her body to show Snapchat her injury. I wait for her to finish, and she eventually pulls her shirt back down over her stitches, puts her phone to one side and grins at me. Even now, she looks blameless. She is wearing cotton shorts and a white camisole and is holding on to one of the plush bears on her bed.
“Will you tell me what happened?”
On the bedside table is an open box of candy, a get-well-soon gift. She plucks out a lollipop, unwraps it and sticks it in her mouth, sucking on it thoughtfully.
“Between Tade and me?”
“Yeah.”
She sucks some more.
“He said you broke my ring. Said you were accusing me of all sorts and that maybe you had something to do with my ex going missing…”
“What…what…did you say?”
“I told him he was crazy. But he said you were really jealous of me and had some kind of…umm…latent anger…that what if”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“what if you had gone back, after we left, you know, to talk to Femi…”
“He thinks I killed Femi?!” I grab Ayoola’s arm, even though she is not to blame this time. How could he think I was capable of that?
“Weird, right? I didn’t even tell him about Femi. Only Gboye. Maybe he saw it on Insta. Anyway, it’s like he wanted to report you or something…So I did what I had to do.” She shrugs. “Or at least I tried.”
She grabs a bear, buries her head in it and is quiet.
“And then?”
“Then when I was on the ground, he was all like, oh my gooooosh, Korede was telling the truth. What did you tell him, Ko-re-de?”
She did this for me and ended up hurt because I betrayed her. I feel dizzy. I don’t want to admit that I chose a man’s welfare over hers. I don’t want to confess to letting him come between us, when she clearly chose me over him. “I…I told him you were dangerous.”
She sighs and asks, “What do you think will happen now?”
“There will be an investigation of sorts.”
“Will they believe his story?
“I don’t know…it’s his word against yours.”
“Against ours, Korede. It’s his word against ours.”
FATHER
Yoruba people have a custom of naming twins Taiwo and Kehinde. Taiwo is the older twin, the one who comes out first. Kehinde, therefore, is the second-born twin. But Kehinde is also the older twin, because he says to Taiwo, “Go out first and test the world for me.”
This is certainly how Father considered his position as the second twin. And Aunty Taiwo agreed—she did everything he told her to and held an unquestioning trust in everything he did. Which is how—doing what she was told, unquestioningly—she found herself in the house with us the Monday before our father died, shouting at me to let go of Ayoola.