Chapter Four

Emelda paced around the room, concerned, but didn’t know what to say or do. She tried to sit but couldn’t, her heart was heavy with pains and it all seemed she was crying more than the bereaved. 

“She stabbed me…my sister had the guts to do it. Oh. How foolish I was. I was blind; I didn’t see it coming,” Maria said, sitting on her couch while Emelda walked around her room pensively, speechless. 

“We must save your husband first, Maria,” Emelda found words finally. “This is not the right time to whine or overthink” 

“Who will I run to if anything happens to him, God forbid,” she sobbed. If Emelda had noticed her eyes, she would say they had stooped. 

“My family. Would I run to them?” 

“Nothing will happen to your husband, Maria,” Emelda patted her on the shoulders. “Doctors said he would be fine. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Do you trust doctors? Some of them are merchants of hope”

“Please don’t say that. Besides, Gee Hospital is known for its proficiency in...”

“That doesn’t mean they never failed”

“Maria, talk like someone that has hope” Emelda scrunched her face. “But how sure are you? Are you sure your sister did that to him?”

“She was the one. I left both at home before I left for work in the morning. My husband doesn’t work on Saturdays. When I came back, my sister had travelled and my husband was lying unconsciously on this couch; I went to examine the food she served him.”

“Holy Moses” Emelda felt a crack in her bones. Unbelievable. “But don’t you think something prompted this act?” “Have you been observing her? Was she showing interest in your husband?” 

“They had dated passively before I married him”

“What? How do you mean?” Emelda said, her face wreathed in shock. 

The day’s sunlight spilled into the room through the window and Emelda could see the brightness of the day, too striking for late afternoon. She had left her wristwatch but guessed immediately that it was already 4:P.m and she needed to leave for a sudden programme her boss had called her to.

She was getting used to her boss; she had come to imbibe his values and learned how to deliver an extempore speech. It had not been easy for her but she had to cope while she looked elsewhere, where she would be paid more handsomely and would even be appreciated.  

Not in a hurry, though, it was going to be by 6:P.m, the programme, so she still had some time to be with her, sympathize with her, and do all that she could, given that she had come to her too when she was in distress. 

The issue was unfurling and she could see it from many angles. She didn’t like judging very quickly and so while Maria spilled venom on her sister for poisoning her husband’s food, she was hushed, trying as much as possible to remain dispassionate.

Instead of pacing around the room, frenzied, she had sat down with her now, badgering her with questions to understand fully well why her sister had committed such a heinous crime. 

From what she had learned—with the strangeness of feeling, of course—the sister to Maria, her elder sister, Juliet, had dated her husband during their university days. But it was passive dating, as Maria put it—no sex, romance, or intense emotional attachment whatsoever.

But Maria had put it in a way that would absolve her husband from any blame and justify his choice of marrying her. She had been very cagey with information that would nail her. But she, Emelda, had discovered to her dismay that Maria’s husband had promised to marry her elder sister in those days, sticking to her morals of no sex before marriage but later failed to deliver as he promised.

To make the matter worse, he had come to marry her younger sister, Maria, after she travelled, knowing fully well both of them came from the same family. The man couldn’t have chosen someone else after he visited Juliet some years past and picked interest in her sister because she looked finer and calmer, free from those moralities that bedeviled Juliet.  

“Maria -” she said and stopped because there was more to say but little time to say them. Besides, she seemed too carried away with a spate of emotions that speaking out was hard labour “You didn’t know he had dated your elder sister before you accepted to marry him?” 

“I did know. But she was undisturbed throughout the whole drama” she said drama in the way that Emelda looked at her with suspicion. Had she accepted the marriage to hurt her elder sister? 

“There is no art that can see the mind’s construction in the face” Emelda stared in bewilderment.

“I am her sister for crying out loud, Eme. She should have told me she wasn’t happy with the marriage. She should have told me everything. Everything. That he even promised to marry her in the past” 

“Did she need to tell you? Sometimes you need to raise your antennae to observe unexpressed thoughts. I am sorry, I shouldn’t be siding with her, but I want you to understand she might have concealed her fumes for some reason. Yes. For some reason beyond your wildest imagination”

Maria stood up with difficulty. She was broken. And Emelda could tell she was broken more in the mind than she had appeared. She didn’t feel Maria was wrong to have accepted the marriage because he chose her and she couldn’t have stopped him, neither did her parents, even though they tried. 

Not knowing what else to say, she stood up and went to adjust her cotton. The sunlight was getting harsher, penetrating her eyes. Immediately she spread the cotton, she came back to settle. And for the first time, Emelda saw the greenery in her eyes; it shone with allure. Who would not love those eyes, Emelda could be thinking.

Those eyes, her husband had seen something beautiful, sublime and she wondered for a moment why a man would choose a wife based on looks and appearances. Those eyes, those beautiful eyes; there must be something beyond her eyes he saw, anyway, Emelda fought her dirty thought, her unruly thought of covetousness. She had caught herself admiring her fellow woman in a way that didn’t go down well with her.  

When Emelda looked again through the window to observe the day, she was awed. Just a few minutes ago, the sky was strikingly clear but all of a sudden cloudy. She had agreed— after getting a call from her boss that the programme would no longer hold—to follow Maria to the hospital to see her husband but what did they see now?

The angry look of the sky would put everything to pause. And even though she would have loved to retire home early today, she would cuddle under the pillow in her friend’s house while the rain falls. 

“It is raining already. Oh,” Emelda stood and went closer to the window overlooking the ground. They were living—Maria and her husband— on the second floor of a three storey-building. What a coincidence, she had had friends that didn’t live in a bungalow.

All of them preferred a storey-building including herself, and she wondered what the craze was all about. Or why, she would say, she had accepted to live a life of unending displeasure, climbing up and down every day to reach her apartment.

And the day she would squeeze her face like a hungry dog, was always when the water tap got spoilt and she would have to climb down to fetch some water. Clambering up the stairs with buckets of water, and groaning like an old woman under the weight of a heavy basket. 

“Get your clothes inside. You spread them on the verandah. I saw them hanging loosely over there…” Emelda pointed.

When Maria returned, she saw her friend lying on the couch. She sat quietly and except for the patter of the rain on the roof, the room gloried in silence. The heavy downpour had ended their conversation. They could hardly hear each other, and one had to project one’s voice to out-loud the p atter of the rain. 

“You need something to warm your body before you doze off,” Maria said. 

“Tea?” Emelda asked. 

“The rain had come with freezing coldness. I am catching a cold. We need some warmth. Don’t you think so?”

“As it pleases you,” Emelda said indifferently and lay his head properly on the sofa. Truly, the rain had come along with some memories and the accompanying cold made it all seem exact—the exact day, so many years ago—she had sheltered in Maria’s abode at Green House, in Nsukka, a stone’s throw from the prestigious University of Nigeria.

She had come to write a screening test after which she couldn’t go home because there was a heavy downpour and she had to stay back; besides, night had approached and there was no way she could have insisted on travelling back to Anambra State.

No way, she had to beg and beg and beg. And it suddenly dawned on her that she didn’t have people, that she didn’t have relatives beyond her father’s corridor. That having people was twice important as having only money. It dawned on her, yes; she would have cried but didn’t. Who would have sympathized with her, anyway? She would do the crying and wipe the tears all by herself and continue to wallow in self-pity till thy kingdom come.

She would have cried, yes, but saved her tears for some other things; she would have wept especially when some of her colleagues were calling their relatives who lived within or on the outskirt of the school. Some were calling their boyfriends who knew people that would accept them. She didn’t know people, she didn’t know anybody, tiredly, groping for a helper.

And Maria appeared like a Godsend. Like an Angel from above – sent to save her from the overwhelming danger of the cold.

 It was this stranger that gave her shelter and she was never as amazed at such a kind gesture. All the memories came crashing on her, vivid, unfolding, and transparent.   

When the rain came to an abrupt end, they hurried up to visit Maria’s husband in the hospital. Emelda imagined what if she hadn’t taken the hot tea, how worse it would have been. Because the cold outside was more freezing than she had thought.