14
LIKE ELECTRICITY
Sunny unlocked the gate and gently pushed it open. She glanced up at the shining midday sun. She’d been gone for nearly twenty-four hours, and everything was wet from what had probably been a rain- or thunderstorm. She stepped over a puddle, noting all the leaves scattered around the driveway. “Must have been windy, too,” she muttered. It was Sunday, so everyone was not only up, they were home. Both her parents’ cars were in the driveway, and her brother Ugonna’s motorbike was there, too. She turned her phone back on as she walked to the house. She’d had it off since last night when she’d checked it. No new messages. Had they called, though? Her phone wouldn’t tell her that unless they’d left a message.
“I am weary of all this sneaking around,” she heard Anyanwu say.
Something about Anyanwu’s tone really rubbed Sunny the wrong way. “Well, I’m sorry that I’m a teenage free agent,” she said aloud.
Anyanwu said nothing to this and walked to the back of the house and paused, looking at the dead and dried-up, but currently dripping palm tree. “We are more,” Anyanwu said, also aloud.
Sunny sighed and nodded. “I know.” There were days where Sunny wondered if she and Anyanwu had been some sort of mistake. A wrong pairing. Anyanwu was epic; she’d done amazing things over millennia, traveled far, experienced much. How was she supposed to be the spirit face of a free agent like Sunny? And now that they were doubled and Anyanwu was even freer to just be, the bond seemed even more fraught. But she loved Anyanwu; Anyanwu was her.
She felt Anyanwu move within her in a way that Sunny understood was a hug. Sunny smiled. Despite being epic and knowing it, Anyanwu loved her, too. Sunny opened her backpack, dug a hole in the soft, muddy dirt, and dropped the chittim in the hole. Then she pushed the dirt back over it and stuck a stick in it to mark her spot. “Okay, that’s done. Now the hard part,” she muttered. She was glad when Anyanwu made no remark. She used the faucet at the back of the house to wash her dirty hands, put on her backpack, and went to the front of the house.
Her legs felt like jelly as she stepped up to the door, clutching the strap of her backpack. She opened the door with her key. As she pushed the door open, she was pulled forward by the strength of the door opening farther. There stood her father. He wore his Sunday clothes, a blue caftan and blue pants.
Sunny looked up at him, her heart fluttering. “I . . . Dad, I’m sorry, I can explain. Well, no, I can’t . . . but I—”
The slap was electric. She felt the inside of her cheek catch on her closing teeth as her head whipped to the right. Behind her eyes, she saw a great burst of sunshine yellow, and then it retreated and disappeared like a flame descending into a deep pool of water. Sunny stumbled back, holding her burning cheek. Tears of shock and pain stung her eyes as her mouth filled with blood. She stared at her father. He still had his hand up. His eyes glistened, but his lips were pressed together so tightly that no words escaped them.
“Dad!” Sunny said, shakily. She sobbed, glaring at him.
From right behind her, she heard Anyanwu, angry, outraged. What she spoke was firm and simple: “No.” Then Sunny felt her go. Then she, too, turned and ran from her parents’ home. As she ran across the driveway, she stamped down hard in the puddle, splashing water on her sandals and jeans. Her father did not call her back.
Sunny ran and ran. When she finally slowed to a walk, she was shuddering so hard that she had to stop. Two cars and a truck passed close to her as she stood on the side of the road, but she didn’t even care. She put her hands to her knees, head to her chest. She felt she would fall. Anyanwu had fled. To where, Sunny didn’t know. She wiped her face with her shirt and straightened up. A man standing at a bus stop was looking at her.
“God will carry you,” he said kindly.
She smiled at him, nodded, and walked on. She walked all the way to Chichi’s hut. She found Chichi outside, leaning against the hut and smoking a Banga herbal cigarette. The right side of her face was still swollen from the beating she took at the hands of her cousins in the Nimm Village.
“Sunny,” she said, blowing out smoke and smiling. Then the smile dropped from her face and she rushed over. “Oh, what happened now?”
“My father.”
Chichi took Sunny’s hand and pulled her inside. “Sit,” Chichi said.
Sunny stiffly sat on the large, soft, leather-bound book she usually sat on. It was bigger than she was and too heavy to move around, which was why it was always in the same spot. Chichi’s mother was in the corner, sitting on a stool, reading a large dusty red book. She looked up as Sunny walked in.
“Good afternoon, Mama Nimm,” Sunny said.
Chichi knelt beside Sunny, looking into her face. “Your eye,” she said.
“What?” Sunny asked. “Yeah, my dad slapped me.”
“Hard enough to burst a blood vessel in your eye. Be right back,” she said, rushing off. Sunny brought out her phone and used the camera to look at herself. She gasped. There was a circular splotch in the left side of her eye. She blinked a few times. It didn’t go away.
“Subconjunctival hemorrhage,” Chichi’s mother said. “I had those dotting both of my eyes once. Not from eye trauma, but from giving birth to Chichi. The one you have is small-small. Give it a week or two.” She closed her book, put it down, and came over to Sunny. She sat on a stack of books across from her. “Are you all right?”
“Y . . .” Sunny sighed. She shook her head. “No.”
“Family will not always understand,” she said. “Especially the families of free agents.”
“I think it goes further back than that,” Chichi said, returning with a cup of tea. She handed it to Sunny. Sunny took it and sipped. Sweet and strong, no cream. She took another sip. “Sunny’s dad is a traditional Igbo man and she was born a girl—”
“An ‘ugly’ one,” Sunny added, side-eyeing.
“Oh, don’t say that,” Chichi’s mother said.
“I’m only repeating what I once heard my dad tell his best friend when I was little, when I used to sneak and listen.” Tears filled her eyes as she felt her father’s slap again. “ ‘I have two sons, so a daughter’s okay . . . but couldn’t she not look like a forest spirit?’ Then laughter and more Guinness beer. That was a long time ago. What will he say now that I’m tall and lean like a guy?”
“You don’t look like a guy,” Chichi laughed. “You look like a runway model who decided to go for runs instead of starve herself.”
“And you are beautiful,” her mother said. “Anyanwu, sun goddess. You have albinism, yes, embrace it, see it. And stop sulking.” She cocked her head to the side. “You think you were the first one to be thrown out of her home because of a misunderstanding?”
Sunny was so shocked by her words that she just stared at Chichi’s mother, her mouth hanging open.
Chichi’s mother grinned. “Ah, now you forget sadness. I did it. Yay!” She got up. “Drink your tea. Stay here tonight. Use your, ah, phone to tell them you are here.” She took her book and went out the back of the hut. “And take some time and figure out the Nsibidi on that piece of wood.”
Sunny sipped her tea as she brought the wood out from her bra. She put it back in. Not yet. When Chichi lay on the floor beside her, Sunny asked, “How are you doing?”
“Sore,” she said, rubbing her side.
She lowered her voice. “You tell your mom everything?”
Chichi nodded.
“And? What did she say??”
“She said, ‘What did you expect?’ ”
“She wasn’t mad?”
“Oh, she was mad as hell,” Chichi said.
“At least she didn’t slap you.”
Chichi shrugged. “There are many ways to slap someone . . . but yeah, she didn’t slap me. But she was super angry. Sunny, that really was a suicide mission. She said they’d have happily killed me . . . and you. If Queen Abeng didn’t think that returning that ghazal was so important, she’d have had both of our heads.” She paused. “And they like taking people’s heads there, my mom said . . . if you’re the enemy. They totally annihilated the Egbo Clan.”
“Using juju from the ghazal?”
“Udide is the finest juju maker in the universe. Her juju is relentless, thorough, and merciless.”
While Chichi’s mother prepared dinner, Chichi and Sunny went out in front to enjoy the cool night air. For once, Chichi wasn’t annoyed when Sunny brought out her mobile phone because Sunny played all sorts of Afrobeat tracks. Together they danced and danced themselves sweaty, and the joy of motion and music brought them up from the darkness that neither of the girls realized they had descended into.
Then Chichi showed Sunny the makeshift shower in the back of the hut, a mud cove with a hose run through a hole at the top of the wall. The water was cold, but in the warmth of the night it felt great. And as she stood in the narrow stream of water, Sunny felt another layer of darkness slough off. Wearing one of Chichi’s cheap yellow wrappers and an old T-shirt with someone named Joan Jett on the front, she sat beside Chichi as her mother served them huge bowls of hearty edikaikong soup with pieces of roasted goat meat, dried fish, and plump shrimp, and soft, smooth balls of fufu on the side. Sunny’s favorite!
“Oh man,” Sunny said, barely able to contain her delight.
“I love you, Mama,” Chichi sang, resting a head lovingly against her mother’s arm.
Her mother laughed, pouring them both glasses of weak palm wine. “I know.”
An hour later, Sunny fought to keep her eyes open as she cleaned her teeth with the chewing stick Chichi gave her. She quickly sent a text to her mother to let her know where she was and then turned off her phone. By the time she’d chosen a spot on the floor to unroll her mat and place her pillow at its head, she was groggy with fatigue. Chichi had set up her space a few feet away. Sunny suspected Chichi’s mother was either in the front or back of the hut smoking, because she could smell the cigarettes. She detested smoking, but tonight she found it comforting.
“Your mom, does she miss home?” Sunny asked, closing her eyes.
“Yeah. It’s weird. I wouldn’t miss that place. She says the Obi Library is her home now, but home will always be home, I guess.”
“Yeah . . .” She was drifting off. “Chichi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Everything your mom went through back then, everything you went through today; it’s not fair.”
“The world isn’t fair . . . but thanks, Sunny.”
She heard it land right between her and Chichi and she smiled, turning over onto her side. The ghost hopper’s sweet melancholy singing lulled her into the warmth of yet another unusually pleasant night’s sleep.