Can you pray into your own ear?
After she named us in that second birth, we felt even closer to the Ada. This is not normal for beings like us; our brothersisters tend to have little or no affiliation to the bodies they pass through. The Ada should have been nothing more than a pawn, a construct of bone and blood and muscle, a weapon against her mother. But we had a loyalty to her, our little container. If we had been asked to take a piece of chalk and draw where she stops and where we start, it would have been hard. We did not know then how much of a betrayal this was to our brothersisters.
Our third birth happened in Virginia, after the Ada had moved to America. There was a song that followed us there, into the mountains, into the next split. It started in Sweden, and then it was flattened into a CD and bought in Germany, packed into the cool of a suitcase and carried into the humidity of Nigeria. Lisa unpacked it there and slid it into a CD player in her house in Aba, next door to her father’s hospital where Añuli had been operated on. Lisa and the Ada listened to the song over and over again. The singer was a girl called Emilia and her voice went through the air of Lisa’s room like a wing. When the Ada moved, she brought the song in a suitcase and she played it out loud in Virginia.
In another world, our third birth would have happened in Louisiana, among those swampy spirits, in the mouth of an alligator. There was a school there that gave the Ada a full scholarship, but Saachi diverted us from that path, swerving to avoid a cemetery, and she sent the Ada to Virginia instead. It was a smaller school, it would be quieter, and she thought the girl would be safer there. When she was making these choices, Saachi had tried to sit down with Saul in their dining room, under the painting of a grief-eyed christ, to plan the future of their children, which programs they would go to, which countries they would be lost to. But Saul had turned his back a long time ago—we could have told Saachi that.
“Why are you not interested in making college plans for them?” Saachi asked, hurt and frustration seeping out of the cracks in her voice. She wanted to include Saul; she was tired, ripped from her family, and she wanted him to care, to help. But Saul was an unforgiving man.
“What for?” he said. “I don’t have the money.” It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn’t even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.
Saachi had been in Saudi for seven years by then—seven years of leaving her children, seven years alone. In all that time, Saul had never called her. Saachi would watch as the other women she worked with picked up their phones and broke into smiles at their husbands’ voices, then she would leave quietly and cry to herself in her bedroom, before picking up the phone to call back home because she had not forgotten her children were still there, sacrificed and sad. She made their university plans alone, moving Chima to Malaysia to stay with her family there, then returning two years later to collect the Ada. They traveled to America together, stopping over in Addis Ababa. The Ada was excited because she knew Saachi always flew through Ethiopia—it was part of the human mother’s other life, where she ate grapes reclining on embroidered cushions, acid-washed denim hidden under her abaya by yards of black cloth. When Saachi and the Ada flew through Addis, however, they spent only a few hours in the airport and it meant nothing, it felt like nothing. We were not surprised—many things are like this.
The Ada went to Virginia, to the slopes of grass and the marrow-red buildings of the school, heavy doors and creaking heaters throughout. It was winter when we arrived with Saachi and our body. There is a photograph of them, of Saachi and the Ada standing on a gentle incline with a church settled behind them and the ground suffocated in snow. Saachi’s arms are lost in a black leather jacket and an oatmeal turtleneck wraps her neck like a large fist. Her hand is resting on the Ada’s shoulder and they are both tightening their eyes against the sun. The Ada’s legs stretch out from underneath an oversized fleece, dull mint green slinking over her wrists, and her hair is sticking out in tufts from under her woolen hat.
She is only sixteen, and the way she smiles, you can’t tell we’re in her, that we’re puzzled by the snow and the cold and the damp roaring ocean between us and the red mud we came from, the drifts of white sand, that one palm tree that feels generations old, the one that wavers on the side of the road when you drive down from Ubakala Junction, before you pass all the seven villages, like sliding down the gullet of our mother, past the screaming gates of her teeth. It’s not the first time we’ve been away, but it’s the first time we don’t know when we’re coming back. We had no idea then that the song had followed us.
It was later, years later, when everything had changed, or before or right around, that the Ada lay in a narrow dorm bed in Hodges Hall next to a boy from Denmark and they both looked up at the ceiling. It was springtime and the room was quiet as the boy sang Emilia’s song into the silence, the first two lines of the chorus. I’m a big big girl in a big big world. The Ada didn’t pause, not a beat, and she sang the next two lines softly. It’s not a big big thing if you leeeaave me. The boy sat up on his elbow, pleasantly surprised that she knew the song, asking her how, when, where. The Ada smiled at his delight and told him about Lisa’s house and the pop CD from Germany, and yes, now we recall, this was before it all went rotten. It was only later, much later, that we discovered the staggering breadth of things this boy would do to the Ada.
*
The first few weeks of America were cold and the snow fell thickly, like it was being shoveled out of the sky. It was the Ada’s first winter and she made a snow angel because that’s what she’d waited for, to lie with her arms flung and her legs wide, to flap and fly until sainthood spread beneath her. Saachi stayed for two weeks before she flew to see Chima, before returning to Saudi, again with a stopover in Addis, leaving the Ada more alone than she had ever been.
We felt just like she did, the most alone we could remember, torn from the place of our first and second births: taken on a plane across an ocean, given no return date. Let us tell you, our mother’s children began to cherish another great anger against us then. This was a side effect of being in a body, the fact that the humans had a human life. It was inevitable that the Ada would go to university, that her life would continue moving in a way that had nothing to do with us. She was majoring in biology; she wanted to be a veterinarian because she loved animals. We did not care. We were hungry inside her, raging against this useless mortality, as if we could rage right back to the world we came from. We raged at the displacement of a new country.
After all, were we not ọgbanje? It was an insult to be subject to the decisions made around what was just a vessel. To be carried away like cargo, to be deposited in the land of the corrupters, inside this child simmering with emotions, searching for us because she was uprooted and alone, and we, always we, having to fix it, well, you miss your father—why we don’t know, the man was just a man, and you miss the amen and that yellow girl you used to run around with, and you have work to do, work to do, and no time to shatter any further, and you hide in a lecture hall and cry and cry as if you have something to cry about? Very well, we will do you this one thing, because it was always you and us together, and you named us the shadow that eats things and the smoke that hides the mother color from our teeth, and you have granted us dominion over this marble room that you call your mind, so here is the place where you miss that man and the girls and the road you used to run down, it is soft and fleshy, a bulb of feeling, and here we are like a useful edge and here is the cut, here is the fall, here is the empty that follows it all.
Here is the empty that follows it all.
*
After that, it was simple; the Ada stopped missing Saul and the amen and Lisa. We were still angry; gods are not appeased that easily, so we bubbled violently through her arms. She threw lamps and cafeteria cups across the small room she shared with a white girl on the honors floor, shattered glass following her like a lost dog. She met the American girls who had come from Miami and Atlanta and Chicago, Black girls with slick, straight hair. They fluttered at the state of hers, which was a confused mix of textures and lengths, thick and awkward. When the Ada was a child, it had been a beast leaping from her scalp and gnawing at her small shoulders. Saachi bought relaxers to subdue it, to stop it from rising into the sky; not to make it straight but to calm it down so at least a comb could be teased through. It was washed every Sunday in its full greatness, combed through every morning before school, tugged into two plaits while the Ada ate Nasco cornflakes and winced.
Saachi was in Saudi the day that they cut it, but she spoke of that day as if she was there, telling everyone how the Ada cried. In the months before leaving for America, the Ada had let her hair grow back out, braided it into synthetic twists for her secondary school graduation, then taken those out before flying to Virginia. The American girls sat her down firmly in front of a television and relaxed her hair, blow-drying and flat-ironing it until it was decided and bone-straight. The girl holding the flatiron sang along to the advertisements on TV and the Ada laughed, looking up at her sideways.
“How do you know all the songs?” she asked.
The girl laughed back at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “By the time you’re here for a while, you’ll be singing all the commercials too.” She ran a wide-tooth comb through the Ada’s hair, admiring how all the curls had gone. The other girls came to check it out, to give their approval, and then they took her around to meet the other Black kids on campus, because the Ada was now one of them, welcome to America. We watched, fascinated. Humans are so ritualistic. When they met her, the Black boys sidled up, grinning. Most of them were track runners, tight and almost feline in how they moved.
“Hey girl,” they drawled. “Where you from?”
It wasn’t a question we were used to, not yet. “Nigeria,” the Ada replied, smiling politely, wondering if it sounded strange. We never had to say that when we lived there.
“Oh, word? That’s cool.”
The girls who were showing her around leaned against the walls and flipped their silked-up hair. “Watch out now,” they said, smirking. “She’s only sixteen.”
The Ada watched as the boys visibly recoiled.
“Oh, hell no!” they said, drawing out the hell. “We gon’ have to wait till you eighteen, shit.”
Everyone laughed and the Ada smiled vaguely, but she didn’t get the joke, not then. After a few weeks with that crew, it became clear that the Ada didn’t quite fit. They disliked the white equestrians who lived on the honors floor with her, and the Ada didn’t know why, not yet. America would teach her that later. When the Black kids found out that she listened to Linkin Park, they looked at her like she was a stranger thing than they’d bargained for. The Ada drifted away from them and found the other international students instead: the long jumper from Jamaica, the soccer players from Saint Lucia and Uganda and Kenya, the Dominican cigar-smoking girl, all the others who didn’t quite fit either. They became her circle for the rest of her stay in the mountains.
Then it was two years later and she was eighteen and her hair was long and decided and bone-straight, falling past her shoulders in heavy dark brown. We were still inside her, but she was much the same as she’d been when Saachi brought her there and handed her over to the kindly white faculty, except she now knew what everyone meant by the jokes about her age, she knew what they were waiting for. The Ada still wore a gold crucifix around her neck, a gift from Saachi’s mother, a reminder that she had kept her childhood crush on the christ. She never questioned his decision not to hold her; instead she constantly asked him for forgiveness as she tried to be worthy of his love. There had been the Panamanian boy when she was sixteen (sixteen and a half, she’d corrected, and he looked at her like she was a child), the dark muscled boy from Canarsie who ate no meat and taught her how to twist his dreadlocks and braid them, the assistant track coach from Colombia, the embarrassing crushes (the man from admissions, the skinny Trini boy who ran like wind on the pitch)—all just kisses, no one had touched her lower than the indent of her navel.
We kept her neutral. It was strange; it had been strange even when we were home (back across the ocean, where we belonged). There was one day when Lisa had come out from her boyfriend’s room and told the Ada about the splash of white that colored his trousers from the inside, and our body just arranged her face the way it was supposed to look, as if she understood the secrets of hot teenage fumblings or the appeal of shiny condoms. She knew, logically, but we kept her neutral. It was not meant for her, the heat rising, the tricks of the body, the compulsions of flesh. She turned eighteen and nothing happened. We kept her. They watched her move in her innocence, a golden chained thing, dancing on dim dance floors and bright stages, winding circles with her waist as if she’d done so on a body before. She tried to hide it, flirting and kissing as if she had fire inside rather than us. All those boys, all that empty following it all. We kept her, we held her, she was ours.
There was a Serbian boy with clear brown eyes who was different, who mattered to the Ada very much. His name was Luka and he was on the tennis team. He lived in the house down the hill and had dark hair, even on the gap of his chest that showed through his shirts and on his forearms and calves. Luka knew the Ada enough to see when the blood rose to a blush through her brown skin and he had been a safe place, a port, a boy who called the Ada magic and wanted more than the friendship she offered. He stopped when she chose someone else, later, afterward, when she had no safe places outside her anymore.
The Ada used to go to Luka’s house down the hill, where their friends drank to prepare for the night out, rolling joints and snorting quick lines of coke. The house was full of volleyball players, tall Europeans who were sweet, affectionate, open.
“Come to Iceland,” Axel said, his blond hair falling over his beautiful cheekbones, bending down to forgive his height. “Come and see the northern lights, they’re wonderful.”
A year later, he would climb up a fire escape, rumpled and handsome in a linen suit, to kiss her, and she would be sad because he was so carelessly lovely but everything was too late. But then, back then, he was bright and drunk and high, and he and his best friend, the Slovakian, Denis, played Pac-Man with mad concentration. Together with Luka, they were that house that drew everyone in, the center. She liked them, she liked being around them, because when she came over, they already knew she didn’t drink or smoke, and so they played music she liked instead, with horns blasting, and we would dance inside her like those days when we used to dance with Saachi before she birthed our cage. We danced through her body, our body, the one that had been built so carefully for us, now winding through the rooms, her hands swirling in the air, the music repeating as the boys played it for as long as she wanted, the only fix they could offer, the only one she’d take.
We were distinct in her head by then: we had been Smoke and Shadow since the naming, since the second birth, little nagging parts that the Ada tried to ignore, that she sometimes argued with but didn’t tell anyone about. She just went down the hill, danced until her long hair smelled of smoke or until everyone left for Gilligan’s, where she’d been going before she was legal because the club took college IDs as if they were real, as if everyone started college at eighteen. It was at the house down the hill that she met the boy who would sing the Emilia song a few months afterward. His name was Soren. He was one of the volleyball players, Danish according to his passport, Eritrean according to his blood, a skinny boy with pools for eyes and dark spilling smooth on his skin. We noticed him. He noticed the Ada because she didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, only danced, and there was something in her, something he wanted to put his fingers on. He walked beside her as they all left the house in a rowdy crowd.
“Do you smoke?” he asked, to be sure.
She thought he meant cigarettes. So did we. “No,” she answered.
He’d meant weed, but he liked her answer. They danced together in the smoke of Gilligan’s that night, slowly. The club was named after a TV show that she’d never seen, very plastic and Hawaiian, with fake parrots and violently colorful drinks. The first time the Ada went there, she’d stared in shock at the way people ground against each other, ass to crotch, lost in smoke; she’d stared at the dangerous fall of jeans lower than hips, at the bad behavior of it all. They always played “Sandstorm” and, later, at the end of the night, “New York, New York” as a kind of dramatic finale. By her last semester, the Ada would be up on that stage, arms around a line of strange white girls, kicking her legs up to Frank Sinatra’s hymn to Manhattan and dreaming of the day she’d live there.
But that night, beer was slippery under their feet as Soren touched his lips to the angles of her hand and the curve of her neck. He had the fullest eyes she had ever seen, so she let him come back to her dorm room with her. The Ada lived alone then, as a resident assistant, so she could smash mirrors and make carpets of fine glass in peace and quiet. She could feed us with cuts without having to explain or having people think something was wrong with her. That night, she brought him into her room and they kissed and fell asleep. Soren returned every day after that.
He cried a lot, that boy, with those doe-dark eyes of his. The Ada pretended not to hear, but we listened intently as he huddled against the white brick wall and sobbed into the night, dreams driving him away from sleep. In the day, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her for too long. He held her constantly (we liked that). One day, when they were getting breakfast in the cafeteria, the Ada filled her plate with six hard-boiled eggs and brought them to the table.
“Don’t eat that,” Soren said. “It’s too many eggs.”
She stared at him and laughed, then started cracking the eggs against each other, point to point, like gladiators. Whichever broke first got eaten. The winner survived till the next round.
Soren stared at her, his face blank. “I said, you can’t eat that.” He didn’t raise his voice.
The Ada frowned at him and ate her eggs, curious about the harm she could smell in his gentleness, surprised that he thought he could command her. He said nothing more and ate his breakfast, his smooth face moody, his slim shoulders curved over his plate. The next day, he called her his girlfriend.
“Wait, really?” she replied. “I didn’t know that.” Her answer made him angry, which irritated her.
“How can you not know that? What do you think we’ve been doing?” he asked.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re just now telling me?” the Ada replied, but Soren stayed angry.
That was the first thing that made us interested in him—his anger. His rich, thick blood sap anger. His nightmare childhood trauma anger. His I was taken when I was little and the men kept me in a dirty, small room and they never found the other child anger. You could taste the sharp sting of it, the salty frantic colors it had. He was angry that the Ada didn’t know she was his girlfriend; he was angry because she performed indifference, telling him he could end it if he wanted to, he could leave if he wanted to. He was angry when she suggested he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, angry when she tried to walk out of their arguments, angry when she ran and hid in a basement to get away from him.
We were fascinated by the ease with which he slipped into his rages, how much he looked like a little boy when he stormed off down the hallway, his slippers thick and plastic and slapping against the carpeting. None of it really touched us. The Ada was performing other things, acting the role of a normal girl in college, selling kisses in order to be held. She had many conversations with her christ, always one-sided, trying to decipher what he wanted. The abstinence was easy for her; she had always been interested in sex only from odd, indirect angles, reading the Bible for perversions, trying to learn all the words, all the pieces of it that only fit in the mind. Her body, our body, was indifferent. When the other girls talked about their lusts, she listened curiously to these hungers she didn’t have, a need neither she nor we understood. When Soren tried to fuck her, she did not understand. We didn’t understand either. We were only interested in his pain.
He was full of shame and apologies when she said no. The Ada smiled and explained her vow to the christ, explained how important it was to her while fingering the gold crucifix around her neck. Her grandmother on Saachi’s side would have been proud. After that, the Ada watched with a mild interest when Soren slid his penis between her breasts. She found herself still watching as she moved into his dorm room for the May term, still watching when he raged about his father, when he punched the walls till his hands swelled. We watched with her, observing this furious human and his hungers. One evening, Soren stood up from the bed and looked down at our body.
“You need to get birth control pills.” His voice was calm, a pool of quietly congealing blood with a skin forming.
The Ada didn’t understand. She blinked and there was a pause, a teetering moment. She had no idea what he was talking about. Then slowly, information started filtering through, edged with alarm. Plain details at first, like it was afternoon and the trees outside the window were green in the sunlight. Like he was naked but she had no idea what she was wearing. Like his penis was out and it was brown like his eyes. Like how she didn’t remember taking anything off or putting anything on. He pulled on a pair of shorts as she sat in the cheap Wal-Mart sheets, knowledge trickling like warm urine into her head, traveling down to her chilled hands. The words swirled in nausea around her. Birth control pills, because this boy, this boy with the doe eyes and the sad skin, had released clouds into her. But she couldn’t remember any of it and she couldn’t remember saying yes because she couldn’t remember being asked.
She was confused. There had been so many refusals in the weeks before, piled up like small red bricks, the weight of an apartment building that got torn down, things she thought would be heavy enough to hold him away because he knew, he knew, he knew she didn’t want to. She couldn’t remember anything, like was this the first time, was it the fifth, oh god, how long had he been moving unwanted parts of himself in her? The rush of unknowns propelled the Ada out of the bed and she slid her feet into sneakers and laced them up as fast as she could. Her burst of motion alarmed Soren; he hated when she left, so he grabbed her arms, forcing her to stay, shouting words, more words than she could listen to. She moved blindly against him, thinking only of the door, of away. He wanted her to say something, so he kept shouting. The Ada opened her mouth and all that poured out were large shapes of pain that flooded the air as her legs gave out. She crumpled to the floor and he dropped down with her. They sat together in shambled sheets as he shouted blank words at her.
She started to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her vision was numb. There was a window in front of her but it opened into a nothingness like the one yawning from her mouth. Somewhere she could hear a building sound, a wind, huge and wide, rushing out of the void, rushing toward her. The walls, the veils in her head, they tore, they ripped, they collapsed. The wind rushed over his empty voice and the Ada thought with a sudden final clarity—
She has come. She has come for me at last.