‘She doesn’t want to keep the baby?’
‘No.’
Olanna knew why. ‘She wanted a boy.’
‘Yes.’ Odenigbo removed a hand from the steering wheel to roll his window farther down. She found a guilty pleasure in the humility he had cloaked himself in since Amala gave birth. ‘We’ve agreed that the baby will stay with Amala’s people. I’ll go to Abba next week to see them and discuss – ’
‘We’ll keep her,’ Olanna said. She startled herself by how clearly she had articulated the desire to keep the baby and how right it felt. It was as if it was what she had always wanted to do.
Odenigbo turned to her with eyes widened behind his glasses. He was driving so slowly over a speed bump that she feared the car would stall. ‘Our relationship is the most important thing to me, nkem,’ he said quietly. ‘We have to make the right decision for us.’
‘You were not thinking about us when you got her pregnant,’ Olanna said, before she could help herself; she hated the malice in her tone, the renewed resentment she felt.
Odenigbo parked the car in the garage. He looked tired. ‘Let’s think about this.’
‘We’ll keep her,’ Olanna said firmly.
She could raise a child, his child. She would buy books about motherhood and find a wet nurse and decorate the bedroom. She shifted this way and that in bed that night. She had not felt sorry for the child. Instead, holding that tiny, warm body, she had felt a conscious serendipity, a sense that this may not have been planned but had become, the minute it happened, what was meant to be. Her mother did not think so; her mother’s voice over the phone line the next day was grave, the solemn tone that would be used to talk about somebody who had died.
‘Nne, you will have your own child soon. It is not right for you to raise the child he had with a village girl he impregnated as soon as you travelled. Raising a child is a very serious thing to undertake, my daughter, but in this case it is not the right thing.’
Olanna held the phone and stared at the flowers on the centre table. One of them had fallen off; it was surprising that Ugwu had forgotten to remove it. There was truth in her mother’s words, she knew, and yet she knew, also, that the baby had looked like she had always imagined her and Odenigbo’s child would, with the lush hair and widely spaced eyes and pink gums.
‘Her people will give you trouble,’ her mother said. ‘The woman herself will give you trouble.’
‘She doesn’t want the child.’
‘Then leave it with her people. Send them what is needed but leave the child there.’
Olanna sighed. ‘Anugo m, I’ll give this more thought.’
She put the phone down and picked it up again and gave the operator Kainene’s number in Port Harcourt. The woman sounded lazy, made her repeat the number a few times and giggled before connecting her.
‘How noble of you,’ Kainene said when Olanna told her.
‘I’m not being noble.’
‘Will you adopt her formally?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘What will you tell her?’
‘What will I tell her?’
‘Yes, when she’s older.’
‘The truth: that Amala is her mother. And I’ll have her call me Mummy Olanna or something, so that if Amala ever comes back, she can be Mummy.’
‘You’re doing this to please your revolutionary lover.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re always pleasing other people.’
‘I’m not doing this for him. This is not his idea.’
‘Why are you doing it then?’
‘She was so helpless. I felt as if I knew her.’
Kainene said nothing for a while. Olanna pulled at the phone wire.
‘I think this is a very brave decision,’ Kainene said finally.
Although Olanna heard her clearly, she asked, ‘What did you say?’
‘It’s very brave of you to do this.’
Olanna leaned back on the seat. Kainene’s approval, something she had never felt before, was like a sweetness on her tongue, a surge of ability, a good omen. Suddenly her decision became final; she would bring the baby home.
‘Will you come for her baptism?’ Olanna asked.
‘I still haven’t visited that dusty hell, so yes, maybe I will.’
Olanna hung up, smiling.
Mama brought the baby, wrapped in a brown shawl that had the unpleasant smell of ogiri. She sat in the living room and cooed to the baby until Olanna came out. Mama got up and handed the baby over.
‘Ngwanu. I will visit again soon,’ she said. She seemed in an uncomfortable hurry, as if the whole business was one that she was quick to finish.
After she left, Ugwu examined the baby, his expression slightly worried. ‘Mama said the baby looks like her mother. It is her mother come back.’
‘People just look alike, Ugwu, it doesn’t mean they reincarnate.’
‘But they do, mah. All of us, we will come back again.’
Olanna waved him away. ‘Go and throw this shawl into the dustbin. It smells terrible.’
The baby was crying. Olanna hushed her and bathed her in a small basin and glanced at the clock and worried that the wet nurse, a large woman that Ugwu’s aunty had found, would be late. Later, after the nurse arrived and the baby fed at her breast and fell asleep, Olanna and Odenigbo looked down at her, lying face up in the cot near their bed. Her skin was a radiant brown.
‘She has so much hair, like you,’ Olanna said.
‘You’ll look at her sometimes and hate me.’
Olanna shrugged. She did not want him to think she was doing this for him, as a favour to him, because it was more about herself than it was about him.
‘Ugwu said your mother went to a dibia,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Ugwu thinks all this happened because your mother went to a dibia and his medicine charmed you into sleeping with Amala.’
Odenigbo was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s the only way he can make sense of it.’
‘The medicine should have produced the desired boy, shouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘It is all so irrational.’
‘No more irrational than belief in a Christian God you cannot see.’
She was used to his gentle jibes about her social-service faith and she would have responded to say that she was not even sure she believed in a Christian God that could not be seen. But now, with a helpless human being lying in the cot, one so dependent on others that her very existence had to be proof of a higher goodness, things had changed.
‘I do believe,’ she said. ‘I believe in a good God.’
‘I don’t believe in any gods at all.’
‘I know. You don’t believe in anything.’
‘Love,’ he said, looking at her. ‘I believe in love.’
She did not mean to laugh, but the laughter came out anyway. She wanted to say that love, too, was irrational. ‘We have to think of a name,’ she said.
‘Mama