She never shouted. She never chased me. She only looked at me with a patience more frightening than rage.
Sometimes she spoke.
āYou have my breath.ā
Or: āYou are still using it.ā
I became skilled at living as though nothing was there. That skill followed me into adulthood, into work, into the careful distance I kept between myself and other people. It is hard to belong fully to the living when somebody dead has been watching your chest rise and fall for years.
And every late August, before dawn, before the nearest church started testing its speakers, my mother would step into the yard with a small glass of schnapps and pour a little into the earth.
I used to think it was some family custom she had never bothered to explain.
Now I know it was apology.
When she fell ill, it was 37 that took her in.
Hospitals in Accra are never only hospitals. They are also queues. Brown envelopes tucked under armpits. Relatives sleeping on cloth under benches. Women selling waakye, tea bread, boiled eggs and sachet water outside the gate. Men asking strangers where to find the lab, the scan room, the blood bank. Somebody always hunting a nurse. Somebody always hunting money. Thirty-Seven was all of that, with bats.
The first evening she was admitted, she looked out through the louvre windows and said, āSame place.ā
I nearly laughed. The beds had wheels now. The paint was different. The nursesā station had been moved. Years had passed. But when five oāclock came and the bats started gathering, when their dry leather quarrelling filled the trees outside, I believed her.
By the third day, she was weaker. By the fifth, her voice had become thin and expensive.
On the sixth evening, just before the bats rose, she said, āThe girl has been standing there all week.ā
My throat closed.
āWhat girl?ā
She turned her head slightly and looked at me with old irritation, the kind mothers reserve for children pretending to be stupid.
āDonāt do that. Yellow dress. She stands at the foot of the bed. Sometimes by the drip stand. Sometimes by the window when you go to buy water.ā
I did not answer.
Outside, a trotro mate shouted, āCircle! Circle!ā from the roadside, and another voice answered from farther off. A patient two beds down began coughing. Somewhere in the corridor a nurse called, āSister, Sister.ā The whole ordinary noise of the hospital carried on while the room grew smaller around my motherās words.
āThere was light-off that night,ā she said.
I sat very still.
āThe generator delayed. Casualty was full. Maternity was full. Everybody was running up and down. One oxygen cylinder only. One small mask.ā She swallowed. āYou came out blue. That other baby girl came out crying strong. Strong-strong.ā
The bats rustled harder in the trees.
āThey said wait,ā my mother whispered. āThey said everybody should wait. But I did not wait.ā
She stopped, and for a moment I thought she had finished. Then she looked past me, toward the foot of the bed.
āI held the mask to you,ā she said. āThe other mother was begging. I can still hear her voice. But I held it to you. I chose you.ā
There are some sentences that do not enter the body through the ear.
They enter through the bones.
I sat there with the hospital smell around meāspirit, medicine, sweat, old sheetsāand understood my whole life differently in a single moment. All the years I had thought something in me was wrong, or open, or cursed. All the years I had believed the dead came because they liked me or hated me or mistook me for one of their own. The truth was smaller and more terrible.
Another child had been left without what I was given.
My mother began to cry, not loudly, not like at a funeral, just the quiet leaking cry of a sick person in a ward full of strangers.
āEvery year I poured schnapps,ā she said. āI thought if I apologized, she would leave you. She did not. She came to me too. Not at first. Later. When I got older. When I began to know what I had done.ā
I wanted to tell her any mother would have done the same.
