Chapter 2: Seven Shells

I did not touch the shells that night. I stood in the doorway staring at them until my legs got tired of holding me up, and then I stepped carefully around them, closed the door, and pushed the small wooden stool from my dressing table against it. It wouldn't have stopped anyone determined to get in. It made me feel better anyway.

In the morning, they were still there. Seven small white shells, arranged in a straight, even line, as if someone had used a ruler. I crouched down and looked at them for a long time before I finally picked one up. It was cool and smooth, worn from age, the kind of shell my grandmother used to keep in a little cloth pouch, though I couldn't remember what she used them for. Divination, maybe. Or blessing. Or warning.

I carried them wrapped in a handkerchief to the kitchen, where my mother was already awake, grinding pepper with the kind of focus that told me she hadn't slept much either.

"Mama, look at this." I set the handkerchief on the table and opened it.

She went still. Not surprised-still. Not confused-still. The kind of still a person goes when they already know exactly what they're looking at and have simply been waiting for the day someone shows it to them.

"Where did you find these?" she asked, and her voice had dropped so low I had to lean in to hear her.

"Outside my door. Someone put them there last night." I watched her face. "Mama, what is this?"

She wrapped the shells back up so fast she nearly dropped one, tucked the handkerchief into her wrapper, and said, "Nothing. Old superstition. Some people in this village still play these games when there's a death in a house." She turned back to her pepper, her shoulders set in a line that told me the conversation was finished whether I agreed or not.

It was not nothing. I had spent my whole life reading my mother's silences, and this one had teeth in it.

I decided, since my mother wouldn't give me anything, I would try the aunties instead. Ijesun women loved to talk, and grief loosened tongues even further, at wakes people said things about the dead and each other that they'd never say on an ordinary day. I found Aunty Folake in the yard, supervising two younger cousins as they folded chairs from the previous day's mourners.

"Aunty, can I ask you something strange?"

She smiled at me, that same too-wide smile from yesterday. "Ask, ask."

"Someone left cowrie shells outside my door last night. Seven of them. Do you know anything about that? Is that a village custom, when someone dies?"

Her hands stopped folding. For just a moment, something moved behind her eyes, quick and afraid, like a bird startled off a branch. "You should ask your mother," she said, and went back to folding, faster now, her fingers fumbling the metal joints.

"I did ask her. She said it was nothing."

"Then it is nothing." Aunty Folake did not look at me again.

I tried two more people that morning. A cousin named Bisi, who laughed nervously and said she'd "heard stories" but wouldn't say which ones. An elderly neighbor, Mama Ronke, who had known my grandmother, who softened when I mentioned the shells and started to say something about "the Adeyemi women" before catching herself the way everyone else had, and changing the subject to how big I'd gotten since I was six years old.

By midafternoon I had a headache and a growing, uncomfortable certainty that everyone in this compound was carrying a piece of a story I didn't have, and that all the pieces fit together into something they were determined I would never see whole.

I found the last aunty, the oldest one, sitting alone under the guava tree at the edge of the compound, shelling groundnuts into a bowl balanced on her knees. Her name was Aunty Comfort, my father's eldest sister, a woman with hands like driftwood and eyes that had gone cloudy at the edges with age. She had always liked me best as a child, sneaking me extra pieces of meat from the pot when my mother wasn't looking.

I sat beside her without asking and took a handful of groundnuts to shell, the way I used to. For a while neither of us spoke. It felt easier that way, and I think she knew it too.

"Aunty," I finally said, keeping my voice soft, "what does it mean, when someone leaves cowrie shells outside a door?"

Her hands slowed on the groundnuts. She didn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit there instead of filling it, the way I'd learned to do in negotiations back at the firm, when the other side was closest to telling you the truth right before they decided not to.

"It's an old warning," she finally said, so quietly I had to lean toward her. "A sign that someone in the house is being watched by something that has watched this family before."

My skin prickled. "Watched how? Watched by what?"

Aunty Comfort's mouth opened, and for one breathless second I thought she was finally going to say the word everyone else had swallowed. Her lips shaped it. I watched them shape it.

"The cur—"

She stopped herself so abruptly it looked like something had reached inside her chest and yanked the word back down her throat. Her hands began to shake around the bowl of groundnuts, and when she looked at me, her cloudy eyes were wet with something that looked less like grief and more like fear.

"Forget I said anything, child," she whispered. "Some words, once you say them out loud in this compound, they don't let you take them back. Ask your mother. Ask her properly. Tell her I said it's time."

She stood, spilling groundnut shells across the dirt, and walked back toward the house without looking at me again.

I sat there under the guava tree with my heart pounding, one single word ringing in my ears louder than anything else anyone had said to me since I stepped off that bus.

Curse.