Page 97 of Cursed Daughters
“Fuck you,” she said.
—
She spent the next few weeks in a semi-coma. She barely came out of her room. She couldn’t gather the energy to move, to bathe, to eat, to think. Sango stayed as sentry; her family came in and out, spoke words she did not hear, brought food she could not eat. Her mother was the most awkward of them all. She could tell each time her mother showed up that she was beginning to lose patience. She would lean against a wall, then pace, then lean, bring out thesnuff box, chew the tobacco, spit out the window, chew some more, mumble something about keeping the mind busy and then leave.
Eventually she said the words.
“You are not the first to lose a child.”
“Okay, Mummy.”
“At least you were not pregnant for long. Your grand-aunty Ronke was six months along when she lost her own baby. You are young, you can quickly get pregnant again.”
Mo turned, so that she was facing the wall. Away from her mother. She did not have the energy to fight her. She could not be bothered to explain. She was certain this would be her one and only pregnancy. It would not happen for her again.
XIII
Ebun’s waist was gone. She had filled out. She was wearing a bubu, so it was somewhat hard to tell, but Mo watched her as she moved about the kitchen. She and Tolu were eating breakfast at the table, but Ebun had declined to join them—she was fasting for Lent. Perhaps the guilt was crippling her; or maybe she was simply looking for a way to shed some pounds. Mo eyed her cousin again. The weight looked as though it was concentrated in the middle of her body.
Two months had gone by since Mo had lost her baby, and she and her cousin had barely spoken. For the first six weeks, Mo isolated herself in her room, unable and unwilling to lift herself out of her pain. The days had run into each other. She lost weight because she couldn’t garner any interest in food. She often forgot to brush her teeth or take a bath. She lost some of her hair.
She could have stayed that way for ever—grown weeds all over her body and rooted into the furniture—but Tolu came into her room and joined Sango on the floor, refusing to leave until she did. He remained there for a day and a half, also not bathing, until Mo became more and more uncomfortable. Between the two of them and the dog, they were beginning to stink up the room.
“Shit. Get out, Tolu,” she finally said.
“No problem. Will you take a bath?”
“Yes. Yes. Please just go before your stench kills me. And take Sango with you.”
For the first week of her liberation, she still barely saw Ebun, whowas always at her new job. They had decorated their Christmas tree together; but then Ebun was sent on a training course, spending more time out of the Falodun home than in it. She was managing to move forward with her life despite the trauma.
But Mo was looking at her cousin properly for the first time in months, and despite said fasting, the baggy clothes could not disguise the weight gain. And then she thought about how much distance had been between them since they acquired the pills. She had put her cousin’s aloofness down to her suffering, Ebun too would have been experiencing the pain of loss. They had both made a difficult choice and they were going through it. Mo had barely had space for anything other than her own pain, so she could not hold it against her cousin. But Ebun’s body was telling a different story.
“Ebun. Are you…are you still pregnant?”
Tolu raised an eyebrow and Ebun looked at her hands. “Was something supposed to happen to her pregnancy before?” he asked.
“Ebun?”
“I couldn’t go through with it.” Her voice was so small, Mo convinced herself she had not heard what she said.
“What?”
“I could not go through with it. I’m sorry.”
And Mo screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed.
XIV
It was late. The okada man seemed perplexed by where she had asked him to drop her.
“It is not safe here at this time of the night o. Where are you going? I will not even charge you for the journey home, let me take you back.”
His kindness almost made her stay on the bike. She could be home in thirty minutes, listening to the comforting sounds of the women of the house bickering, Sango leaning protectively against her legs. Instead, she told him a friend was coming to pick her up in a moment. She gave him more money than the trip required. All the money she had on her. After all, it would all be soaked in a couple of minutes.
“Are you sure, ma?”
“I’m sure.”
