Burning

Adanna knows her mother’s faces. There is a face for the days when she wakes up with a light in her eyes and they stay home eating too-sweet balls of puff-puff, batches and batches pouring out of her mother’s pan and forming small steaming hills on every surface in the kitchen. On days like this, they rewatch her mother’s collection of Nollywood films, in which good and evil are separate like oil and water, and justice comes swift from heaven in the form of lightning. On other happy days, they visit Teluosho Market and make their way through a maze of clothes shops, male traders whistling at their backsides and grabbing at their hands, and Adanna’s mother throwing smiles at them over her shoulder while Adanna tries to shrink herself to nothing. When they return home with piles of clothes, Adanna’s mother says with a conspiratorial wink, “Good thing it’s your grandfather’s money paying for all this.”

There come the days when her mother is unable to drag herself out of bed. On these days, her mother’s face is pale with fear, her eyes darting at the slightest sound. Adanna’s mother buries this face in a pillow and refuses to get up, and Adanna makes her own breakfast, a cup of Milo and two slices of bread, and eats it standing in the quiet kitchenette. Then, in the bedroom-slash-living room she and her mother share, she puts on her blue shirt and pink pinafore and heads for the front door, hoping to hear her mother’s voice call out at the last moment with an offering, to walk with her maybe, or a promise to be there when the bell rings at the end of the school day. One time, her mother did call out to her from under the bedding, told Adanna to hold on as she put on a T-shirt and tied a wrapper around her waist. She took Adanna’s hand along with a deep breath, and they walked out the door together. The pressure of her mother’s hand, the quiet slapping of her slippers against her feet made up for those mornings Adanna had walked alone. With her mother holding her hand, Adanna would not have to tug at strangers’ sleeves at the busy junction and ask for help to cross the road. But barely halfway to school, her mother’s hand went limp and let go of Adanna’s. Her mother sank, squatting in the street and burying her face in her hands. Adanna stood stunned, feeling naked as strangers’ eyes stared at them. She wanted to keep walking and ignore the anchor pulling her down, pretend that the moaning ball of flesh had no connection to her. She resisted the urge to scream at her mother, at the sky, at all the people watching them but moving on, minding their business. Instead, she knelt on the warm asphalt and rubbed her mother’s back in circles, around and around. The noise of traffic and hawkers and conversation faded until all she could hear was her mother’s muffled sobbing. When Adanna’s mother stood again, it was Adanna’s hand holding hers, guiding her back home.

There are days when her mother wears her heavy face, the skin around her mouth pulled down by the weight of things Adanna cannot know. On these days, her mother sits in their shared bed and cries endless streams of tears, pushing aside Adanna’s attempts at comfort — an embrace, a glass of water, a wad of tissues — until Adanna learns to keep her distance. She sequesters herself in a corner of the room and imagines the tears as a flood that rises and rises until their bodies, hers and her mother’s, become two islands separated by infinite seas. Sometimes the tears are accompanied by mournful Igbo songs that sound at once ominous and beautiful.

Some days, her mother wakes with a face as hard as stone. On a day like this, nearly a year ago, Adanna and her mother ended up at the top...