The Pardner

It has been a year and five days since Mayowa lost her daughter—lost, because she cannot say the other word: suicide. It goes against everything she ever stood for. Suicide damned you in death. But now she wants to believe that anything can be reconciled with Jesus, on anyone’s behalf. So she aims to be of better service to the Lord than anyone among her congregation. She arrives at the Celestial Church of Christ earlier than most others on Sundays. She turns up midweek to clean, replace the toilet rolls, and index new membership cards. She spends hours after service in loud and feverish prayer with her intercession group, while at the same time she quietly implores the Lord to take mercy on the soul of Abiola. Fourteen. Her youngest child. Her baby. How different would she have been at fifteen now? She would be a shade removed from her idiosyncrasies, more outspoken and demanding. She’d take her upcoming exams for granted, argue for black- or blue-colored lipstick, and flip her lid over the fact that she could only see her friends on weekends. Mayowa pines for the now impossible privilege of fighting these battles, and in the strange, uncomfortable nostalgia of loss she relishes the thought of any act of rebellion; she is warmed by the picture of her daughter, older and autonomous, spirited and full of wondrous malcontent.

There are six instances of suicide in the Bible, seven including Samson. She has, in recent months, pored over them looking for evidence of God’s damnation, and within the ambiguity she feels the Lord’s merciful glow wash over her family. Sundays shake it all out of place—the looks of pity and shame sprinkled among the congregation, the silence of the elder sisters whenever she walks into the anteroom, the slow ease with which the married elder, Brother Stephen, regularly strokes her back. She’d quietly fall apart on any given Sunday, and so it was important for Mayowa to spend the working week putting her faith back together again.

She calls for Jesus this morning. She doesn’t believe she can get out of bed today without the assistance of some kind of divine hand. It’s the grief, it sits beneath her chest and immobilizes her, and only when it lets up is she finally able to stand. It flows downward as though the sorrow is pooling at her feet. Her first steps toward the bedroom door are heavy.

Predawn light seeps through the bedsheets that hang in the window as makeshift curtains. In the lambent blue that washes over the room she looks over the calendar on the back of the bedroom door. An annual gift from the Christ Apostolic Church, and every year is almost always the same thing, an inset photo of the pastor and his bright smile as somewhere in southern Nigeria, thousands gather for an outdoor evangelical revival. She marks Tuesday, July 12 with an eyebrow pencil. There are five X’s now. One for each morning her husband hasn’t come home. A new low, even for him.

________

The bus winds its way north toward the West End, then crosses Waterloo Bridge, where the Thames is like black steel at that hour, shimmering under the illuminated London Eye. By the time Mayowa steps off the bus, the skylight has broken from night into a luminous purple. The early morning air is beginning to warm, the summer staking its claim on the day. She uses the staff entrance to the hotel, a path that takes her along the edges of all the opulence, the white marble flooring, gilded columns, crystal chandeliers, and gold leaf ceilings.

She barely makes it to the stairway. She steadies herself as she heads to the basement. The exposed piping along the walls rattles at her ear. She gasps for breath as she moves between the mounds of food-stained linen by the laundry rooms. She doesn’t have the presence of mind to step over the puddles in the kitchen. The...