Ebe onye dara, ka chi ya kwatụrụ ya.
As far as I’m concerned, I have been loyal, both to Ada and the brothersisters. When Ada tried to look for help, I did many things to stop it because she was mine, but believe me, I never wanted her to feel alone. After she tried to kill me and failed, Ada gave up. I didn’t enjoy winning that fight. There’s no delight in watching her crumble—that’s only fun when it happens to other people. Saint Vincent and I tried to make a home for Ada in her mind, and that meant something, at least to me. You don’t know what it’s like to share a life and a body, to watch the days and months and years drag by, the people who came in and revolved out, to watch Ada try and get away from us, to see her fail, to see the way she came to love us better, eventually.
I even finally allowed Ada to see her therapists, since she was being so stubborn about it. I remember one session with a middle-aged woman who had gray streaks in her hair. Ada was sitting there, rubbing the back of her left hand with her right one, tracing the tendon that led to her middle finger, running her fingertips lightly over it until she felt it roll under and across. This was something she did often, just to remind herself that she had a physical body. She was also talking to herself in her head, and I could hear the forced calm that she was injecting into her voice.
“It’s okay, baby, you’re fine. It’s only an hour, then we can go. We’re fine, baby, it’s okay.”
The woman with the streaked hair was talking, but Ada had stopped listening. I looked around the office, wondering how many times we’d been here. I didn’t always follow what Ada had been up to, so things easily slipped by me when I wasn’t paying attention.
“Do you have any questions?” the woman asked. “Comments? Concerns?”
“None,” said Ada.
The therapist made a note, her pen scratching quietly. “How do you feel about your future?” she asked.
Without thinking, Ada let the truth slip out. “Indifferent.”
The therapist’s face sharpened. “Could you elaborate on that a bit more? When you think about the future, exactly what emotions come up for you?”
The therapist continued pushing, and as she spoke, Ada kept blanking out midway through the woman’s sentences, then returning. The therapist asked the same things over and over, rephrasing them as if Ada wouldn’t notice. But it didn’t matter how many ways she twisted the questions, Ada had no answers.
“What about Asụghara?” the woman asked, and suddenly I was paying all the attention I had in the world.
“How the fuck does she know my name?” I hissed at Ada, but she ignored me.
“Are there any more of them?” continued the therapist, and I watched Ada with my breath held. I could tell that she didn’t want to lie. She’d already lied once, when the woman asked what the suicide plan was, which even Ada knew was a truly stupid question. Why would anyone give away a suicide plan—so it could be stopped? What nonsense.
But I could see that Ada was actually considering telling this woman, this complete fucking stranger, about Saint Vincent. I reached out across all the marble and pushed a thousand spikes into it. The pain would reach Ada, whether she tried to ignoreme or not.
“We don’t talk about Vincent,” I reminded her. “Better keep your fucking mouth shut.”
“I’m not comfortable discussing that,” Ada answered obediently, and the therapist let it go.
For the rest of the session, Ada drew imaginary lines on her temple, pressing her index finger into the skin, the pressure holding her together. She traced her eyebrows and tried to find words to tell the therapist about the things I had done to her mind. But I choked up the words and made them rot in her throat—there would be no screaming for help.
When Ada finally left the office, I waited until her feet hit the stone steps outside before I started shouting.
“What the fuck did you think you were doing in there?”
“Calm down,” Ada said. “We’re fine. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay! Why did you have to go and talk to that woman?”
“I was having trouble focusing at school, Asụghara, don’t you remember? I just wanted to get it checked out.”
“But that’s not what she was talking about in there. She knew my name! What have you been telling her?”
“Nothing! Nothing much. She asked a few questions.”
I shook my head. The damage was already done; all I could do was manage it from here. “Well, you don’t need to go back,” I told Ada.
She frowned. “The therapist said that sometimes it’s going to feel like I don’t need the help. She said I should ignore that feeling.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Don’t be silly, you can’t ignore me. I said you’re not going back. Okay?”
“Look, I don’t like it either, Asụghara, but I think it’s a good idea to get some help.”
“It’s like you’re not hearing me, Ada. I don’t want you to see her again.”
Ada set her jaw, getting ready to answer back, but I’d had enough of arguing with flesh. I collected power in my hand and ran it across the marble, sending a deep streak of pain through her skull. Ada gasped and clutched her head, but I didn’t stop. I sank my fists into the marble and split her head open with a crashing migraine, and it worked. She never went back to that therapist again.
*
That was how I kept us all safe, from doctors and diagnoses and the medications they surely would’ve shoved into Ada if they ever saw exactly what her mind looked like. I needed her to rely on only me, so I could take her home and we could be with our brothersisters again and it would be as if none of this had ever happened. The way up is the way down.
It’s not easy to persuade a human to end their life—they’re very attached to it, even when it makes them miserable, and Ada was no different. But it’s not the decision to cross back that’s difficult; it’s the crossing itself. I had high hopes, sha, since Ada was in a lot of pain. It was always easier to push my agenda when she was hurting, and to be fair, she was always hurting, but this one was different. This one was about Ewan.
Ada and Ewan had been on and off since her graduation, instant messaging and e-mailing each other, then finally meeting up on the coast of Texas, where he pressed her against a yellow soft-top Jeep and told her that he’d fallen in love with her from the moment he saw her, all the way back in that blue room. It was as if he’d forgotten that he left her in Virginia, back when he’d told her that it was his girlfriend who made him happy. Now he was full of fresh confessions.
“You’re the woman I’ve dreamed about all my life, but I’ve got nothing to offer you,” he said. He was drunk. “You deserve so much more than I can give. You make me feel like I can do anything I dream of.”
The wind whipped dust around them. The town they were in was close to the southern border.
“I can’t imagine my life if you’re not in it.”
Inside the marble, Ada turned and whispered to me. “He thinks I’m too good to be true,” she said.
“You are,” I answered sourly. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of loving Ewan again. She could do it alone if she wanted. Me, I’d been on Skype with one of Ewan’s friends just a few weeks before, watching the boy strip off his clothes, his eyes a narrow and hungry blue. We were in New Jersey because Ada was visiting some Christian friends of hers, sitting in the same room as these good girls while the boy stroked his erection in the Skype window. I kept the laptop screen angled away from them and I thought it was fucking hilarious—they would’ve lost their minds if they knew what I was looking at. Like most people, they kept thinking that Ada was still just Ada. I kept my headphones in as he shuddered and moaned, spilling semen over his tight stomach.
He and Ewan played tennis together in Texas, so I knew it could only go so far, but still, it was fun to play. I sent the boy pictures of Ada, her skin bared and brown.
“I haven’t been working out as much as I used to,” I added.
“You have the smoothest body I’ve ever seen,” he said, and that was when I knew I could have him. It wasn’t a surprise—it never is.
He was the one who picked Ada up from the airport in Texas and took her to Ewan. He even went out drinking with them that night and never mentioned to Ewan any of the obscene things he’d said and done over the flattened glass of a computer screen, all for me. I liked that boy. He was a bad person—he was almost as interesting as Soren. I would’ve liked to fuck him, but Ada had chosen Ewan and it was impossible to get away.
She was naïve, sha. She actually thought things would change after Ewan told her he loved her, but of course, they didn’t. He still had his girlfriend and he acted as if his confession by the yellow Jeep never happened. I can say a lot about Ada, but even she has limits, so she ended things with him and Ewan didn’t fight it. It was their second breakup if you count the one in Virginia, and honestly, I wouldn’t have allowed all this nonsense back and forth if it had been anyone else. But it was Ewan, and so the wheel kept turning. This time there were no e-mails, there was no contact, and Ada found herself enveloped by her first real heartbreak. I tried to help, to distract her with new lovers, but she was inconsolable. The girl couldn’t even listen to most of her music because he’d given it to her and all the songs reminded her of lying in bed with him when it was winter outside. It was pathetic. I had loved him too, in my way, but after he left, I knew it had been a mistake. Ewan was just a man, after all, just flesh—selfish and typical flesh upon that. Besides, he’d mostly been spending time with me, not her, and I didn’t expect anyone to be able to see their filthy wants reflected in my eyes and still stay.
In the middle of Ada’s pain, I kept looking for a window I could use to take her home. She didn’t have the strength to fight me, and my plan could’ve worked then, except that one day, Ada got a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize. When she picked up, Ewan’s voice poured into her ear.
“My girlfriend and I broke up,” he told her. “It had nothing to do with you. But you told me not to come back unless I was single and ready to fight for you, and I am.”
I had no chance against that kind of declaration, and when I saw the amount of joy having Ewan back brought to Ada, I didn’t even want to try. I’m cruel, yes, but I’m not that cruel. She was happy and he was different. I could tell because I didn’t like this version of him. Back in Virginia, Ada never even had his phone number, but this time, Ewan was calling her every night. He couldn’t sleep without hearing her voice, he told his mother about her, and when Ada was struggling with her classes, he stayed on the phone with her and told her how much he believed in her.
“He’s rebounding,” I told her. “Just wait.”
“I know,” Ada said, but she was in love with him. All I could do was watch.
Ewan told her about the holidays before he and the girlfriend split, when he would go back to Ireland and show all his friends Ada’s pictures on Facebook. “I told them if I wasn’t with my ex, I would marry this girl in a heartbeat.”
Ada spoke to him every day and it was all fresh and new and pretty. It made her happy. One night, Ewan asked what the worst thing he ever did to her was, and Ada winced at the memory but she told him anyway, about the last time they slept together in Virginia.
“I told you I loved you,” she said. “You told me to shut the fuck up.”
I was surprised to hear her say that—I thought I had been the one who said it, not her. Maybe we were blurring more than I realized.
“It was really shitty,” she was saying. “It made me feel …” She paused. Was there a word to describe that particular humiliation?
On the other end of the phone line, Ewan spoke into the silence. “I made you feel cheap,” he said, and then he started crying. “That was all you ever asked me for—to never lie to you and never make you feel cheap. I’m so sorry, Ada.”
I listened in amazement as he apologized for all the things he’d done to her. Ada listened with me, equally surprised.
“Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to love him again,” I said to her. “That’s if you want.”
Ada tilted her head and listened to him thoughtfully. “Actually,” she said, “I’m not sure.”
She kept considering, weighing this new Ewan, and along the way, he told her that he too had a private relationship with Yshwa. I rolled my eyes at this, but I knew it mattered to Ada, to be with someone who loved Yshwa like she did. That November, Ada flew back to that little Texas border town to spend Thanks-giving with Ewan.
He was claiming that he’d loved her for a long time, but I knew Ewan. He would never have left the security of his old relationship if he hadn’t known Ada’s wild love would catch him. It was fine, it was human. No wahala. Besides, he did love her, perhaps with even more abandon than she loved him because, as he had predicted, she changed his life. There was no need to pretend with her because Ada already knew who he was at his worst, so instead Ewan tried to show her who he could be at his best. I kept waiting for his cruel hands, the version of him that I knew and loved, but all he gave Ada was gentleness.
The first time she climbed into bed with this new Ewan, Ada reached for me as usual, but for the first time since I had thundered through a window to rescue her, I wasn’t there. I didn’t come.
Ewan thrust inside her while Ada held back tears, panic screaming inside her stomach because it wasn’t supposed to be like that, not with him, not with the one she loved who loved her. After he came, Ada started crying.
“What’s wrong?” said Ewan, naked and frantic, holding her as she wept. “What happened?”
“They’re not bad tears,” she said, to calm him. “I’ve never had sex without a mask on before. There’s always this other hard layer on top of the real me.” Ada felt crazy trying to describe me and Ewan just held her tighter.
“You don’t need a mask,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you anymore.”
But she was wrong—they were bad tears, they were a panic attack that threw her back into the marble. Inside her head was the only real safety. Ewan was just a stranger to us. Vincent placed his hand on the center of Ada’s back as the panic took over her chest.
“Breathe,” he said.
I stood by, horrified, watching as she wept. She looked up at me, her eyes reddened.
“Where were you?” she gasped, splintering under Vincent’s hand, pieces of her crawling on the floor. “Why did you leave me? You said you would never leave me! I was alone!”
I continued watching her and all I could think was that I was so afraid, and I had never been afraid before. “I couldn’t find you,” I whispered. “I didn’t know where you were, Ada, I swear. I couldn’t get to you.”
She sobbed against the marble and my heart broke.
“Maybe because it was him?” I was guessing. “Maybe you didn’t even know when you sent me away, but I swear, I didn’t know how to find you.” The guilt was too much. One simple promise—you will never have to feel them move in you. I will be there. I will be the one they push into because they cannot hurt me.
And now Ada had gone and fallen in love with a man who had the power to send me away. He was going to destroy her.
“He can’t make us leave,” said Vincent, because he could see through the back of my open brain. “We’ll always be here with you, Ada. And if we sleep a little more because you have him, maybe that’s a good thing. Even if he leaves, we’ll be here to pick up your pieces. We’ll always be here, yeah? We promise. Right, Asụghara?”
I nodded because my throat was too tight for words. This felt too much like the day I was born, the way she had been entered and hurt.
“You’re safe now,” I managed to say. “We’re never going to leave you.”
I knelt beside her and held her hand tightly in mine.
“Breathe,” said Vincent.
*
It must’ve gotten better. I don’t remember much—I was sleeping more, just like Vincent had predicted. I was giving Ada a life because Ewan made her happy, and honestly, the girl deserved a little happiness. He left Texas and moved outside Boston to be with her. They got their first apartment together there. He proposed in a library in Cambridge and they got engaged and Saachi was furious, but she thawed after she met him and realized that Ada was going to marry him whether Saachi approved or not. So Saachi flew herself and Añuli to Ireland to meet Ewan’s family, who was throwing an engagement party for him and Ada. When they returned to the States, Ewan and Ada quietly got married in Manhattan, at City Hall, and Ewan had tears in his eyes when he said his vows. They moved to Brooklyn, enrolled in graduate school, got a cat and named it The Prophet Jagger.
I left Ada to her new family. When she came to sit with me in the marble, we talked like old friends, as if we’d never planned to kill each other.
“He wants us to be equal,” she told me.
I crossed my legs and frowned. “Like how?”
Ada blushed. “Like during sex.” I stared and she lifted her shoulders, then dropped them and hugged her knees. “You know, on plain footing. With no one having more power over the other.”
I laughed. “But that’s impossible.”
Ada shrugged again and fiddled with a broken nail. “Who knows,” she said.
“It doesn’t work like that, Ada, not when the clothes come off.”
“You mean, not when you’re there.”
Oh. I hadn’t realized I was still helping her with that, but it made sense. I was automatic at that point, a shell she could drag over her, whether I was asleep or not. “I guess I’m always there when the clothes come off,” I said. “The promise must be holding.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We can’t change that?”
I shook my head and took her palm. “You’re just not capable of it, sorry. Or rather, we’re not capable of it.” Ada watched my nails slide between her fingers as I massaged her hand. All my bones were slightly longer than hers.
I gave her a look. “I’m fine. I come when you need me, like now.”
Ada looked a little ashamed. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around that much.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “As long as you remember that we can’t be separated, Ada. Without us, you’re nothing—you won’t feel anything, you won’t see anything, you won’t write anything. You have to be at peace with us, you hear? We’re you.”
“Yeah, I know I have to remember,” she said. “Otherwise I wake up not knowing who I am.”
“Exactly.” I patted her hand. “We’re the buffer between you and madness, we’re not the madness.”
She nodded. “Where’s Saint Vincent?”
“He’s sleeping. Do you want me to call him?”
“No, let him rest.” She watched as I cracked her knuckles one by one. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said, her voice small.
“Biko, how many times do I have to tell you? We’re not going anywhere.” She made a face and I rolled my eyes. “Ada, stop feeling guilty about being happy with Ewan. We’re fine.”
She blushed and looked down. “He wants me to give myself to him completely.”
I looked at her, confused. “What?”
“Completely. You know. All of me. Like how he’s given himself to me.”
I didn’t like how she said it, with a tinge of hope, so I tried to be gentle. “Me, I don’t think that’s possible, sha.”
“Why not? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re in love?”
I groaned and dropped her hand. “My friend, it has nothing to do with love.”
She frowned. “What is it then?”
I looked at her, and I swear, if I could’ve freed Ada right then and there to love and be happy and normal, I would have. But I didn’t start any of this and I didn’t know how to stop it, only how to finish it.
“What is it?” she demanded.
I took a deep breath and hoped for grace. “Look, you can’t give yourself to him because you’re not yours to give. That’s it. I’m sorry.”
It took a minute for Ada to understand, to realize that she was locked away, that all those parts of her he wanted, the parts she wanted to give, the parts that would complete the love they had—all those parts were gone. Or if they weren’t gone, they’d been put somewhere so far away that not even Ada could touch them, let alone Ewan. I watched her face fall, and when she started crying, I held her and whispered apologies for what felt like forever.
It was only a matter of time after that. Ewan wanted what any man in love would: a wife who could withstand tenderness, who didn’t have the core of her locked away inside a dark ocean. He wanted a soft moon in his hands and he got a scalding sun. Ada didn’t have a choice—she would have given him everything if she could, just to make him happy. He had stopped drinking for her, stopped smoking, stopped the drugs, everything. But I had made her a promise and we were both trapped inside it, doomed to play our roles without release. It broke her heart and I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain, so I took over and I took her away, because their marriage was burning and I was trying to protect her. It took Ada and I years to realize that I fucked it up, that keeping her walled off from Ewan killed any chance they had at making it out together. By the time Ewan was begging her, she was long gone and I refused him. But honestly speaking, even if she and Ewan had fought more, they probably still would’ve lost. The only thing that could’ve saved them was if I had never existed, if Ada was not divided up the way that she was, if she had been able to control me. We can stand here and list impossible things all day long.
By the time Ewan moved out of their apartment, he was drinking again, smoking packs of cigarettes, and snorting coke in small bathrooms in the West Village. He dropped out of school, leaving Saachi with a huge loan she’d cosigned for him, and then he fled the country. That was when I knew I had been right, that he had been weak the whole time, that it was a good thing Ada couldn’t give herself to him, because he would have ruined her; he was nothing more than a fucking useless human.
It was time for me to come back and make it right. I had let Ada have her time in the sun. She had known love, she had tasted happiness, and it had gone bad. That was fine, that was life, abi? No wahala. But I still carried a larger truth, a better truth. It had been good to be flesh. It would be better to go home.