She received the call from Obi, while she was on the Tube, and she had to hold on to a pole to stay upright. At Tottenham she allowed her body to be buoyed up, carried along by the wave of bodies gunning for the exit. The wave moved up the escalator towards the opening, then outside. Deposited like driftwood on the curb, Sisi squinted up at the early morning sun, while the snake of bodies bifurcated around her. It was an uncharacteristically warm spring day.
“Excuse you,” someone said as she jostled Sisi out of the way. It was a heavy-set woman with a scarf tied around her thick blonde hair. She glared at Sisi over her shoulder, but the look didn’t hit its mark; Sisi’s downcast eyes and her uncertain stance suggested a person who was beyond any sort of micro-aggression.
Somehow her feet moved and her head turned one way then the other as she crossed the street. Though if a car careened towards her at that moment, would she have the wherewithal to step aside? At the Health Service office where she worked as an accountant, the heating was as usual set to full, the room stifling, the windows sealed shut “for safety”. The yellow lights bore down on everyone ensconced in their cubicles, the tapping of keyboards and chatter an ever-present soundtrack. Sisi dragged herself to her cubicle, not responding to the people who swiveled their chairs to throw greetings at her. She didn’t see their smiles crumple into unuttered questions. In her cube, gravity sucked her down onto the chair. She didn’t bother to take off her sweater or shrug the pack off her back. The mobile phone which had been clutched in one hand since the call was now lying in her lap.
“Sisi, are you alright?” Benji asked.
“Sisi!”
Her father was dead, and here was Benji, wearing his favorite gold and purple Southpark tie, like nothing had happened. And the world continued to turn. She wondered how many first-born daughters like her were right this minute greeting a world in which their fathers were now dead.
“Sisi, talk to me, girl. What’s going on with you?”
Benji’s walnut brown head reflected the light from the bulb overhead.
“My dad…”
“Is he alright?”
Tears occluded her vision. It hurt to have such big tears hanging onto her eyelids, so she blinked and, freed, they rolled down her cheeks. She ignored the look of alarm contorting Benji’s face because she understood it. She wasn’t usually the one who cried. She was the one who laughed and playfully poked you in the ribs when your own eyes filled with salt water. She was the one who engulfed you in the kind of hug you never wanted to end.
“A rake-thin five-footer like you giving the best bear hugs? Who’d have thought,” he liked to joke.
She was also the one who cursed out the people who deserved to be cursed out. A powder keg, she knew that’s how Benji saw his work wife, as he liked to call her. Of the four years they’d known each other, the only time he’d seen her like this was when that bitch of her mother came to town.
She shook her head. “Heart attack. He’s dead.”
“Oh love…” Benji laid his hands gently on her shoulders. Usually when he did this, he’d slide in for a hug, squeeze her gently, saying “bony like a bonga fish,” another of his pet names for her. But this time he just held her shoulders and breathed in unison with her.
Sisi stared at the phone on her lap. What was it Obi had said? He’d been with someone else when it happened?
“By the time they’d managed to get him to a hospital, it was too late.”
Benji’s grasp on her shoulders tightened. He pulled her up and tried his best to give those hugs that she gave. She leaned on him limply, her hands at her sides, her head resting on his shoulder, her eyes on the yellow squares of the carpet.
She disentangled herself from him and wiped her cheeks.
“I have to go home.”
“Of course.”
“Will you tell Mallory for me?” She was already walking out. “I can’t…”
Benji watched her leave. The others in their cubicles did the same, then fixed him in place with questioning looks.
Two days later, after a day and a half of traveling from Heathrow to Murtala Muhammed, then chartering a car from the Lagos airport, Sisi stood in the hospital morgue, cradling the mobile to her right ear. On the other end of the line was Teju, sobbing the way Sisi had on the long flight and in crowded airports. Though now her cheeks were dry and her eyes still bloodshot. This call was costing her a fortune, but she didn’t care. Add it to the other bills that were languishing on the coffee table in her Streatham flat. The electric bill that no doubt had sky-rocketed since the rates had been bumped up. Her telephone bill… Oh god the telephone bill, she thought. She’d forgotten to pay it before she left town, though “left” is an untruth. Dashed. Scampered. Hurtled. Raced. These verbs were more apt, and now, this being the third and final notice, her phone would be cut off. Unless of course her poor excuse for a husband actually got off his drunk ass and paid the bill. But he had no money, so she’d have to figure out a way to get the cash to him from her account. One drawback from taking his name off her account last year.
Sisi let out a sigh. She was allowing the mundanities of life to take her mind elsewhere, far away from this irregularity right in front of her. Here was Abel’s body, lying on a stainless steel tray that was shoved into a refrigerated compartment when nobody needed to look at him to confirm it was, indeed, him. The din of the Hospital was blocked out by the heavy door. In here alone, she could look at him without interruption, without holding back the avalanche. He looked so bloated that she hardly recognized this man whom she had known all forty years of her life.
“Where are you now?” Teju asked, his voice thickened and muffled by sobs.
Sisi sighed again. “In the morgue, my dear.”
“Oh…” and Teju’s crying resumed.
“He doesn’t even look like himself,” she whispered into the phone. “He’s gray and his body has swollen to twice its size.” Nausea trickled from her mouth down to her stomach and she almost vomited. She hurried out of the frigid room, banging the door closed behind her, and plunged herself into the nearest toilet. She leaned against the cold tiled wall, her eyes closed and breath rapid. She longed for her bed, for the giant square windows that looked out on her backyard. She craved the sight of the curving street on which she lived, lined on both sides with cars parked nose to bumper, and houses of myriad colors, from blue to orange to mauve, shoulder to shoulder. She missed her neighbors, the Adebayos, who lived one floor up from her, and who were no doubt watching Okra her terrier right now because Paul was probably at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, unable to fulfill his duties as dog caretaker. The sight of Paul in a drunken stupor was not a pretty one, yet she hungered for his presence, his too-blunt jokes, anything really but this hospital that reeked of sickness and dead dads shoved into cold compartments.
Mukaila, Moshood, Jumoke, Bayo, Bukky, and many others were crammed in the hallway outside.
“Oga done pafuka,” Sisi could hear someone in the hallway say into a phone. “Oga. You know who he is now. De one wey dey work for refinery. That one.”
“They say nah heart attack.”
“You hear wetin happen?”
“Na another woman he dey with when it ‘appen.”
“No be im wife.”
“All that house he dey own sef…”
“You no say ‘im wife Obi go keep everyting.”
“All de land, all of ‘am she go keep.”
“Nah ‘im eldest pick’in in there?”
“De one who marry oyinbo.”
“Were ‘im oder pickin’?”
“Poor man sha.”
“Only one pick’in come bury am.”
Sisi emerged from the bathroom. On one end of a hallway that was entirely white – white walls, white floors, white ceiling, white light – sat Obi, her late father’s second wife, inert, a cold expression on her face. Sisi loathed her even more than usual. She thought about Teju in Brooklyn, unable to leave the country, and yet even if he could, what would he be doing here where it was clear people didn’t want him? Sisi could imagine Obi and the scene she’d cause if Teju were to walk into this hospital now. And what about Dad’s brothers and cousins who now crowded the waiting room? Would they even recognize Teju? And what would Teju answer to the question, who are you? Does he describe himself as his father’s son? Questions Sisi was relieved she didn’t have to handle on top of everything else.
The weeks prior to Abel’s death, Sisi’s nagging had reached fever pitch. Yes, Teju had crossed the line in pushing him away the way he had, but could you really blame him?
“Dad you are too stuck in the old ways,” she’d said to him over the phone. But that wasn’t even true because the old ways she knew, people didn’t give a damn about stuff like being gay.
“The transgender stuff seems newer but not really either,” she’d continued. “Before the British brought all this Christian stuff, there were always men who were feminine and masculine women. I mean, what’s the big deal?”
“You should be happy with what God gave you,” he said. “It’s a crime against nature. Whoever heard of such a thing as a sex change?”
“I never understood your narrow view on the subject, Dad. Didn’t you get your PhD in the UK in the 60s? In the midst of the hippies and all the going on about revolution and freedom?”
“Ah, Sisi, this is different” he’d sighed. And she could see him shaking his head vigorously on the other side of the phone.
Eventually it seemed her nagging was beginning to pay off. A mere week ago he’d said yes to beginning the long road towards acceptance. He was not one to reject his own child; he loved his family too much for that. And then the heart attack hit. There was so much she still wanted to say. These last few years they’d all been so focused on Teju. On her dad’s part, it had been angst over how to rid Teju of this “sickness”. On her part, it’d been trying to keep the family together, or at least what was left of it. In all that time she barely talked about her own agony and how ashamed she felt whenever other Naija women she came in contact with looked to her sides and behind her asking, “Where your pickin?”
“No pickin,” she’d gotten used to answering now.
Just giving simple two-word answers like that brought the conversation to a halt. It prevented the words of pity from escaping their lips. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him that she and Paul were trying artificial insemination. She hadn’t had a chance to lament to him about the IVF procedures, and how they had had to go outside the NHS to pay a doctor so he would start working with them right away. Otherwise, they’d be on a waiting list that was several years long.
Dr. Iweala came in. A tall man the color of burnt pear, his scrubs were dingy and stained, and his face betrayed fatigue. His eyes danced behind round frames as he cast a forlorn look in Sisi’s direction. He wanted to know what arrangements they had made to take care of Abel’s body.
Just then Obi started wailing as if she had suddenly come to, and the sound carried from her end of the hallway to where Sisi stood. A feeling of longing flooded Sisi and she rushed back into the morgue, retracted Abel’s tray from its cold cave, and once again looked upon his body. She bent over, planting a soft kiss on his cheek, right on top of the parallel tribal marks. From somewhere understanding came; a new meaning dawned to her. Still bent over him, her mouth just inches from his ear, she decided to give her dad one last gift: peace.
“I’ll tell Teju you love him. I’ll make sure he knows.”
Sisi slowly stood back up. She wiped the wetness from her cheeks. Then she grabbed her dad’s cold stiff hand and squeezed.
*****
Mr. Osundare shuffled the papers on his wide mahogany desk. A short, medium built man, his white button up was already drenched with sweat. His wood-paneled office was equipped with a loudly-humming AC that, for all its bluster, barely cooled the place: the three floor-to-ceiling windows let in too much sunlight to allow for a proper cooling. Through the windows Sisi could see that the expressway ten floors below was clogged with traffic. Quintessential Lagos. Obi had brought her two brothers to serve as bodyguards – both clad in military gear, with guns strapped to their waists, standing behind their seated sister and doing their best to appear as intimidating as possible.
It was working.
“Ehm.” Mr. Osundare looked from Sisi to Obi and her brothers slash bodyguards.
“Ehm,” the lawyer began again. He looked apologetically at Sisi. “I’m sorry, but your father’s will is incomplete. It doesn’t clearly state who should be administrator of his estate.”
“Ehe! This means that by default it is his wife, abi?” Obi declared. Her brothers moved a bit closer to her, glaring at the lawyer who did his best to avoid eye contact.
“See… the will isn’t even complete. And…” His voice shook even more. “And I can attest to the fact that he was in the process of updating it, but…” He trailed off and opened both his palms.
“So, what are you saying?” Sisi sat up now.
“Ehm… I’m saying that this Will does not entirely say who gets what.”
“What does it say then?” Sisi asked, while Obi gave a small, tight smile.
“It leaves small sums of money to his children and his wife,” – at this the lawyer looked and nodded at Obi – “but it doesn’t say what should happen to his houses and land.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“It means that by default his wife decides!” Obi interjected, then looked up at her brothers, who nodded vehemently.
“Ehm…”
“Wetin be dis ehm ehm business sef?” one of the brothers barked at the lawyer, who shook more violently than ever.
Sisi looked at the one who spoke. “Will you bloody back off so we can have a civil conversation about this? And why the bloody hell are you bringing your armed bodyguards to the reading of the damn will? What the hell is wrong with you?” She directed the last set of questions at Obi.
Obi turned slowly to look at Sisi. She regarded her briefly before letting out a long, dramatic chuckle. “Remember your father isn’t here to protect you anymore.”
“Remember that steady stream of his money you used to rely on has been cut off,” Sisi replied.
“She is his wife! So she gets to say what happens to his things and who gets what!” the same brother persisted, spittle bunching and drying in the corners of his mouth.
“Did you not hear what the lawyer said, you idiot?”
“Nah who she dey cuss?” He looked at Obi, his right hand twitching. Obi quickly put her hand on his belly to restrain it.
“Osundare, no waste our time. Wetin de law say? Abi na me supposed to be administrator? Make you talk quick and settle this once and for all. We have funeral arrangements to make.”
“I’m s-sorry, Mrs. Omotosho,” the lawyer said, nervously glancing at the guns worn by her brothers. “Dat no be de law.” He pushed himself back from the desk, as if he was about to take a defensive position.
“So wetin we do now?”
“Well, we can negotiate this or…”
“Or?” Sisi asked impatiently.
“Or una go take dis one to court.”
“Goddamit.” Sisi exclaimed.
Obi got up and was immediately flanked by her brothers. “Nobody is going to court over something that can be easily resolved.” She cast a smoldering look at Sisi before turning to walk out of the office. One of her brothers held the door open for her, while the other turned back to glower at Sisi and the lawyer.
“This is not going to be easy,” Osundare said to Sisi after they left. He was calmer now they were alone and the threat of being shot was no longer present. “That woman and her family are connected to some brutal people. She won’t let any of Doctor Omotosho’s things go to you and your sister without a fight.”
Sisi didn’t say that actually she no longer had a sister, but a brother instead.
“You have a long fight ahead of you. My advice is that you take the money he’s left for you and your sister, and leave all the other property wahala for Obi to settle. It will take her years to get the courts to agree to give them to her. First of all, the default administrator is typically the eldest son and since you don’t have a brother, well…”
Sisi looked at him. At first, she smiled at the thought that surfaced, thinking it ridiculous but the thought persisted.
“I do have a brother,” she said. “A younger brother. He’s in the States.”
“You do? I didn’t know that.”
“Well,” Sisi took a deep breath before continuing, “he wasn’t always my brother.”
Osundare cocked his head.
“He’s transgender, my brother,” Sisi blurted. This was the first time she had revealed this to someone outside the family. She wondered who Obi had told, if she’d revealed this to her brothers slash bodyguards.
“Trans—”
“—gender.”
“I see.” The lawyer was silent for what felt like an extremely long time. The sun disappeared behind a few steel gray clouds. In Osundare’s office, the AC hum seemed louder than ever.
“I see,” he repeated, placing both palms on the desk as if he was about to push himself up, but he remained seated. “So what are you proposing?”
“What do you think I’m proposing?”
“I think I know and e no go work.”
“Why not?”
“Wetin you mean why not? You no say nah Nigeria be dis.”
“He’s a man and he has paperwork that attests to that.”
“Im Nigerian passport say he be man?”
Sisi sighed and shook her head. No, his Nigerian passport didn’t have the ‘M’ as a gender signifier, but his asylum documents did. She had finally managed to puncture the thick layer of depression Teju had enfolded himself in after he came out to their dad. She’d talked him into applying for asylum and going for his green card. And just when that went through, when it became evident that he could finally leave the country after years of being stuck in America, Abel died. And now, because he hadn’t prepared an adequate will, they were in danger of losing everything to this woman who had only been in their father’s life a few years, whose temper most likely contributed to his stress and the ensuing heart attack.
Sisi placed her index fingers on both temples and massaged. She felt the anger coil and uncoil in her stomach. It was a sexist and archaic law that maintained that the eldest son inherits everything in the absence of a will, but she wasn’t going to stand by and let her brother be denied his right. Especially if fighting for his right included fighting for what was rightfully hers too. She got up and grabbed her purse.
“I will be in touch,” she said before leaving his office.
Behind her Osundare let out a sigh of relief.
****
“I’m regretting everything,” Teju moaned on the other end of the phone. “I told him ‘you’re dead to me…’”
Sisi didn’t have to see to know he was gazing down at himself with contempt.
“I wish I could take it all back. I just wish…” he trailed off again, as the sobs took over his voice.
“I know, lil bro, I know” was all Sisi could think to say. But the truth of the matter was she didn’t know.
“I just wish I could be there with you but none of those people want me around.”
Sisi could hear the despair in his voice. Anger roiled in her belly.
“Who cares if they want you around or not, Teju? This is our birthright!” She whispered hotly into the cell phone.
She had sequestered herself in the bathroom next to Abel’s study. In the living room, Abel, now in an elegant ivory coffin with gold trim, was surrounded by mourners. Outside this Ibadan house, hundreds of additional mourners sat in metal chairs under white tents. In the kitchen, women from his village were cooking, churning out amala and ewedu, iyan and egusi, jollof and fried chicken. The air was pregnant with the scent of rain mingled with the aroma of frying pepper and onions. On any other day, this would make Sisi’s mouth water with anticipation of a feast, but today it churned her stomach and gave her a headache.
“This is ours, Teju. Dad would want us to have it, to fight for it.” Sisi was like a kettle on boil. “I mean you should see the bitch out there with her bodyguards, sorry, brothers, who act like they are going to use their guns on people. At a goddamn funeral! Teju, this is not who dad would want his estate to go to. An estate he worked damn hard to acquire for us. He acquired them for us.”
“If he wanted us to have them, Sisi, he would have made a proper will stating that.”
“He didn’t realize his time was short. Who knows when they are going to die?”
At the mention of the word “die”, Sisi thought about her father’s body, gray, bloated, unrecognizable, squeezed into the gleaming ivory coffin that sat in the middle of the living room.
“Teju, you have to come home and reclaim what is rightfully ours. This is a fight you can’t walk away from. You are not just fighting for properties, lands, and whatnot. You are also fighting for yourself. You are fighting for your place in this family. And I’ll be damned if this bitch is going to erase us,” Sisi said, pushing out the words, wiping tears and catarrh from her face, and stomping her foot on the ceramic tiles.
Outside she heard a commotion.
“Hang on,” she said, turning the cell phone to her chest as she exited the room and went to the living room. There she saw Obi’s brothers, pointing their rifles at a group of men who were preventing them and Obi from getting closer to the coffin.
“You are an abomination! You dare bring these riff-raffs with their guns to my uncle’s funeral!” That was Bayo. Three other men stood beside him, their fists clenched, squaring off against the gun-wielding duo.
“Where were you all these months, Bayo?” Obi barked. “You only came around to ask for money. All of you!” She turned around and pointed at the people standing in the room. “All of you nah money you care about. Get out of my way!”
Sisi turned around and walked back into the study.
“You won’t believe this fucking nightmare.”
“What’s happening?”.
“Don’t worry about it, but just think about what I told you. You have to come back. Come home, Teju. Come take your rightful place in this family. You’re over there cowering because of what these buffoons think. Enough is enough, Teju! Fight for your place. Believe me when I say I have your back. Hell, Mom has more ruffians in her family, more clout in this country than that yeye woman.”
“But Sisi –,”
“Don’t Sisi me. Listen I have to go deal with the bullshit that’s unfolding in the living room right now. I will call you back later. I love you.”
She ended the call and returned to the living room where the commotion had gotten louder. Samuel, one of Obi’s brothers, had Bayo by the neck. Pinned on the floor beside them was Obi struggling to free herself from the clutches of Temitayo, Bayo’s wife. Others in the room begged for the fighting to stop. Sisi punched and kicked Samuel, trying to force him into releasing Bayo. For the first time since his death, she gave in to the avalanche of immense feelings, the despair, the animus. She allowed herself to blame Abel for the war now unfolding in his living room. She was subsumed by an all-encompassing rage.
Then everything went black.
When her mind fog finally cleared, she wasn’t sure how much time had passed but the living room was a wreck. The chairs were upturned, tables flipped, food dripping to the floor, lamps lying in a heap of their now broken parts, and the air still charged. Exhaustion rang through her body, forcing her to moan, melting her into the one upright chair. She shook uncontrollably, a residual effect of the fight. There were scratches on her arms and legs. Her fingers were smeared with dust and sweat. She asked herself what just happened over and over again.
She was oblivious to the people drifting out the front door, dashing through the downpour in the direction of their cars. At that moment, she heard Teju’s voice as if he were beside her: broken, telling her that he understood, that he would come. Sisi pulled out her phone at once, staring at his name. In that moment she realized her fierce love meant protecting him from this world so weaponized against him. She glanced toward the front of the house where Obi’s brothers were stationed on opposite ends of the verandah, oozing menace. Sisi typed one sentence, oscillating between relief and regret, “I was wrong. Please don’t come. I’ll fight for you—right from here. Stay in Brooklyn.”
She watched the message send then tucked the phone back into her pocket. As she stood up, pangs of pain shot up her left leg from an orange shaped bruise just below her knee. She closed her eyes and breathed for a few seconds before gingerly walking to the front window overlooking the verandah, now taken over by a swirling pool of brownish red water. She tore her eyes from the pool and focused on the torrent just beyond it. The rain had blurred everything in sight. It roared with thunderous applause and unleashed bright white streaks of illumination. Sisi wondered what lay on the other side of all this water.
=====
Image: Copilot remixed