Hospital Patterns

Home on Braddock Avenue.

Notion of Family. Gelatin silver print, mounted on archival museum cardboard, wooden frame. © 2007 LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels.

Your mother broke her hip. Nothing serious.

A tight, sexless voice over the phone.

Later, the details as related by Dee Kobimdi: She had attended a Nigerian get together there in Baltimore, and though she’d drunk a little she hadn’t been drunk. She’d come home past 2:00 am. At the door to his apartment, she’d realized that the keys were locked up in her car and had gone down to get them because she hadn’t wanted to wake him up. Missed the second-or-third-to-last step on her way back down. Intertrochanteric fracture, though nothing looked threatening. No need to come.

But I did come, it did not occur to me not to come; so used to our hospital patterns carried over from Nigeria was I. Without thinking about it, I’d scribbled Mercy Medical, 301 St. Paul St. on a sticky note pad beside the phone, underneath a reminder to call Fatima Hair Thursday.

I could almost hear Dee Kobim’s shrug over the phone.

Then: “She may not want, you know, stress. Ka o gbake.” A warning. When we were younger he’d say, if I talked back at her, Don’t be like that, Kamsiyochukwu. Don’t try to hurt her.

In the evening I called my husband, Okechukwu, at work, told him I would be driving over to Baltimore on Sunday morning because Mother was in the hospital. His reply surprised me.

“Baltimore from Annapolis: Thirty-two minutes, 30.62 miles. Come back early.”

Now I stared at her in the white room.

Her wig was too small. It looked like a dead, gray rat, clinging tightly to a space in the middle of her skull. I wondered why she had to have it gray when it was immediately obvious to anyone with eyes that it was not her hair.

She stared at the wall on top of my head. A silence.

Momme Portrait Series (Floral Comforter).

Notion of Family. Gelatin silver print, mounted on archival museum cardboard, wooden frame. © 2008 LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels.

When the thoughts were tired of living in my mother’s head, they moved out, disintegrating into four words which I would remember because they seemed to explode upon contact with the air.

My mother’s first words that Sunday morning shocked me only because they were true.

I had known about the thing with Mother since I was five (though only vaguely then. I was thirteen before I knew ‘the thing’ was clinical depression), since that day relatives converged in our house, whispering like a swarm of agbishi in warm rain water. I recognized Dee Mai, her older brother, Daa Jo, and Ugo Nwanna’s father who I knew because I had liked Ugo Nwanna.

There were a lot of other people whose faces I had never seen and haven’t seen since. They stood around my mother in an informal circle.

“They want to take her away,” whispered Dee Kobimdi, my older brother and the more attached to her.

I remember I felt a short rush of joy, a sharp salty relief which quickly soured to guilt. Only bad girls hated their mothers.

One woman whom I had seen often at church had encircled my mother in a hug and was crying, bawling, and whispering a string of meaningless words, or maybe I just didn’t know their meaning then. I watched a ball of snot wobble at the edge of her nose and jump right into her open mouth, a detail I would relate over and over to Dee Kobimdi (“Nyamma!” he’d reply, his eyes swelling with laughter). I walked around them, trying to get a glimpse of my mother.

Her head was bent, and she was motionless. I made my way to the...