Chapter 3: My Mother's Handwriting

My mother did not come to find me that evening, even though I was fairly sure Aunty Comfort had gone straight to her. Instead, my mother made dinner, sat through it with the rest of the family, laughed at one of my uncle's stories about my father as a young man, and went to bed early, complaining of a headache. She was avoiding me with the skill of someone who had been avoiding this exact conversation for twenty-two years.

Fine. If she wouldn't tell me, I would find out myself.

I waited until the house had gone quiet, until I could hear my mother's soft, even breathing through the wall between our rooms, and then I went looking through what was left of my father's things. Most of his personal belongings had already been distributed among the family, the way it's done here, but his old study at the back of the house hadn't been touched yet. Nobody had the heart, my uncle had said. I understood that better than anyone, but grief wasn't going to stop me from asking questions grief itself had made unavoidable.

The study smelled like him. Dust and old paper and the particular smoke of the cigarettes he'd sworn to my mother he'd quit years before he actually did. I ran my hand along the shelf of law books he'd collected but never quite finished reading, past a photograph of the three of us from before we left, my father's hand resting on my six-year-old shoulder, his smile wide and untroubled.

I found the locked trunk at the back of his closet, half hidden under a folded mat. It wasn't hidden well. If anything, it felt placed there, tucked away but not truly buried, the way you'd put something where a determined person could still find it if they looked hard enough.

The lock was old and simple. I worked a bent hairpin into it the way my roommate back in the city had taught me during a bored weekend, more for fun than necessity, and after a few frustrating minutes it gave with a soft click.

Inside were folded cloths, an old photograph album, a stack of letters tied with faded ribbon, and, at the very bottom, a leather-bound diary with my mother's initials pressed into the cover. N.A. Nkechi Adeyemi.

My hands were shaking a little as I opened it. The first pages were exactly what you'd expect from a young wife's diary. Small joys. Complaints about my father's snoring. A recipe for pepper soup copied out in careful handwriting. Then, further in, entries about being pregnant with me, worried and hopeful in equal measure, the kind of ordinary tenderness that made my throat tighten reading it.

I kept turning pages, and the entries kept moving forward in time, past my birth, past my first steps, and that's when the tone of the diary changed completely.

I am afraid to write this down, but I am more afraid not to. If something happens to me before I can tell her myself, I want there to be proof somewhere that I tried.

Tonight I dreamed of a woman standing at the river in white. I know what that dream means. My mother had the same dream, the year before it happened to her mother. I woke up and could not stop shaking.

My stomach dropped. I flipped forward, faster now, my eyes skimming lines that felt less like memories and more like a map of exactly what had happened to me since I stepped off that bus two days ago.

There will be knocking. Three times, always three, and when she opens the door there will be no one there. I do not know how I know this. I only know that I do.

The shells will come next. Seven of them, laid across her threshold like a sentence being read out loud.

My hands went cold. I read the words again, certain I had misunderstood them somehow. But there was no other way to read it. My mother had written about the woman in white, about the three knocks, about the seven shells, years before any of it happened to me. She had written it like a woman describing a memory, not a fear.

I turned the page, and the next entry made my whole body go still.

She will ask questions. She will not stop asking, because she is my daughter and I raised her to never accept an answer that doesn't satisfy her. I used to think that was a gift I gave her. Now I am afraid it will be the thing that kills her.

I kept reading, faster and faster, chasing something I both needed and dreaded to find, until I reached the final entry in the diary. It was dated the week of my birth. The handwriting here was different, less steady, like it had been written in a hurry, or through tears, or both.

Amara,

If you are reading this, it means I never found the courage to tell you myself, and I am sorry for that more than I can say. I am sorry for every question I dodged and every sentence I let trail off unfinished in front of you. I told myself I was protecting you. I have started to wonder if I was only protecting myself from having to watch your face while I told you the truth.

You are the fifth. I don't know how else to write it plainly enough for you to believe me. There have been four women in this family before you, each the firstborn daughter of her generation, and each one of them died before her twenty-third birthday. I used to pray it was only bad luck, the terrible, unlucky kind that runs in some families like a weak heart or a shared face. I do not believe that anymore, and I am not sure I ever truly did.

I don't know everything. I want you to understand that. I know there is a shape to this, a pattern too exact to be an accident, but I have never been able to see all of it clearly enough to fight it. I have only ever been able to watch it happen and grieve in advance.

I am so sorry, my daughter. I am so sorry that this is the inheritance I am leaving you, on top of everything else.

Be careful who you trust in Ijesun. Be careful who tells you they only want to help.

The diary ended there. I sat on the floor of my father's study with the book open in my lap, my whole body cold despite the warm night air, and read those last four words again.

Be careful who you trust.

Somewhere outside, past the compound wall, a dog began to bark, sharp and sudden, and I realized my hands were shaking too hard to turn another page.