by Jennifer Juo
But Ayo said nothing. It was then that Sylvia noticed the child’s eyes were still cerebral looking, death-like, open but fixed, not registering anything around her.
Gradually, Sylvia nursed Grace back to health. In a few days, she was eating. In a week, she was talking again. Finally, Grace was released from the clinic. The day Grace left the clinic Sylvia stood with Ayo at the front doors. She watched as an aunt carried Grace on her back. She saw her little face disappear around the corner. She had grown attached to the small, frail girl that had vanquished death.
“She’s doing so well,” Sylvia said proudly.
“But she will never walk again,” Ayo said. “Despite holding on to life, like thousands of other children in Africa, she will suffer lasting neurological damage from the malaria.”
Sylvia saw the despair return to Ayo’s eyes. She thought about what this might mean for her own family. In the best case scenario, if they remained unscathed, she feared Lila and Winston might hold onto life like Grace, even as they suffered lasting damage from the spirits’ and the spell’s incursions on their physical and mental health. And what about her own mental health? All of this was taking a toll on Sylvia. She had told no one, not even Ayo, about her recent nightmares—horrible, frightening hallucinations. They were all about Lila. Her daughter was five years old. She still had two more years to go, and presumably her connection with the spirits would be severed. And Winston? Sylvia didn’t know about him. He continued to return to Simeon’s village despite the curse. Every time he drove off in his jeep, she wondered if it was the last time she would see him.
PART TWO
1980-1983
SYLVIA
Chapter 19
Two years later
1980
When Lila turned seven, the snake spirits came for her again. It was the local Mama wata spirit, the beautiful water goddess, sometimes a mermaid or a serpent. Mama wata brought her victims to the bottom of lakes and fed them black mud, worms, and raw fish. Divers claimed they heard voices and saw light coming from the deep under the water. They also said it was warmer down at the bottom of lakes. They believed that there were underwater mermaid spirit villages.
Along with some other children, Lila wandered down to the lake and the dam on the compound. Some older boys dared Lila and a few other girls to climb down into the empty dam. As Lila climbed down the ladder, she saw dragonflies and pretty butterflies, and they made her forget the danger. But when Thomas and the other children saw the snake, Lila began scrambling back up. It was a long way out of the dam, and Lila’s hands, sweaty from fear, slipped on the metal rungs, and she fell.
A security guard on his moped drove by, and the children shouted for his help. He climbed down and carried Lila out of the dam.
He brought Lila and Thomas on his moped back to their house.
“My arm hurts, Mama,” Lila cried.
Sylvia was beside herself. Had the snake bitten Lila again? She called Winston at his office and then immediately took the children to the small compound clinic. Sylvia knew she had grown lax about placing offerings at Lila’s bush-soul shrine. Nothing had happened for a while, and she had grown complacent. How could she be so careless?
The elderly English doctor examined Lila for signs of a snake bite. Lila lay on the table, crying in pain.
“Looks like she’s just broken her arm,” the doctor said.
Sylvia was relieved to hear these words. Most mothers would have panicked, but she was relieved. She hoped Lila was growing out of her connection to the spirit world since she had just turned seven years old. According to Patience, this was the age most children shed their ties to the spirits.
Winston came into the room at the clinic. Thomas ran up to him.
“You alright?” Winston knelt down to examine his son.
“I’m okay, Baba,” Thomas said. “But Lila’s hurt.”
Lila was lying on the examination table.
“She’s broken her arm,” Sylvia said.
Winston barely looked at Sylvia. They had reached a stalemate in their relationship. They had both given up trying and kept their distance. It wasn’t hard to do since he was rarely at home. Two years had gone by since the juju doctor’s threat, and Winston was still alive, living proof, he said, it was all nonsense. But she knew things happened to him out in the jungle, things he did not tell her.
Winston went to Lila, but he didn’t offer her any words of sympathy.
“You’re the oldest, Lila. I expect you to be responsible for you and your brother,” he scolded. “You shouldn’t have gone down into that dam. It’s dangerous. You understand?”
Lila said nothing. She looked like she was about to cry. His words hurt more than the broken arm. Sylvia stood closer to her daughter, stroking her hair.
Winston returned to his office while Sylvia waited for Lila’s cast to set. Afterward, Sylvia took the children to the clubhouse and bought them ice cream, served in soft swirls on a cone from a machine. They sat down at a table on the clubhouse patio. She watched as Lila ate.
“Feel better now?” Sylvia leaned over and touched her daughter’s face.
Lila looked up at her and smiled. That beautiful smile, thought Sylvia, what she would do for that smile from her little girl.
***
Later that night, Lila had a nightmare. She had these dreams often, and Patience said it was a sign of her travelling to the spirit world at night. This time, Lila was sleepwalking, and Sylvia coaxed her back into bed. Lila’s eyes were open, but she was not awake.
“I went to visit the mermaid in the lake,” Lila said as if in a trance.
Sylvia tried to shake Lila out of this dream by waking her up, but Lila started screaming and flailing her body around. Sylvia worried her daughter would hurt her arm in the cast. It took all her strength to lay her child back down in bed. She held her down, stroking her face. Finally, Lila drifted into sleep. Sylvia went back to bed exhausted. But she couldn’t fall back to sleep herself. She was filled with dread.
According to Patience, a child grows out of the spirit world once she can separate the dream world from the real world. If her dreams still merged with reality, the connection to the spirit world remained. Clearly, Lila was still making her nightly sojourns to the spirit world, continuing her double life. She was holding onto her lifeline to spirit world, and unlike normal children at this age, she would not let go.
***
Sylvia tried to escape it all—the spirits, the curse, her failed marriage. For over two years now, since that New Year’s Eve in 1978, she had been leading a double life of her own. She met Ayo at his father’s house in town at the end of her shift and during Ayo’s afternoon break, the two of them leaving the clinic in separate cars at staggered times. Ayo gave Sylvia’s driver, Ige, a small “dash” or tip to ask no questions. Sylvia knew Ige had just had triplet boys, and he could use the extra income from Ayo’s weekly tips. Ige didn’t seem to care either. He mostly parked his car in the shade outside Ayo’s house and leaned the driver’s seat way back for an afternoon nap. It was easy money.
Ayo and Sylvia lay in bed, hiding behind the white mosquito net in that hazy, make-believe world of theirs.
“Spend the night with me this weekend,” Ayo said.
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Isn’t Winston away for several weeks?”
“His schedule is random. He could just turn up.”
Ayo was silent as if he resented being constrained by the existence of her husband.
“I can’t leave the children anyway. I’m worried about Lila,” she continued.
“Patience can handle that.”
“I know she can…but if I weren’t there…if something happened.”
“You can’t let the spirits dominate your life. You have to take care of yourself too. You need a break. You’re a ball of nerves. Stay the weekend, and I’ll take you somewhere special, a place I used to love as a boy.”
“I want to but…” He put his fin
gers on her lips.
“Right, it’s final then. Doctor’s orders,” he said.
***
Sylvia left Ayo’s house in town feeling apprehensive. She twisted her hair nervously in the car. They had made a plan to meet on Friday after their shifts at the clinic. Although she had agreed in theory, she wasn’t entirely sure she would actually go. She worried about what she would say to Patience. Would Patience approve? Would she be willing to keep her secret?
When she walked into her house, the kitchen smelled like fried plantain. Now that she volunteered at the clinic several times a week, her steward Energy had started cooking more. She had taught him how to cook all the basic Chinese dishes, but tonight he was cooking a local dish—pounded yam, fish stew, and fried plantain—which the kids loved. Patience had already set the dining table and was bringing the hot dishes to the table where the children waited obediently. Sylvia realized her house and her family functioned like clockwork without her.
“Madam, you’re here just in time,” Patience said, smiling.
Sylvia went and hugged her children. After a hard day’s work at the clinic, she felt grateful for her own healthy children.
“Mama, we caught a frog today,” Thomas said. He was five years old now and full of mischief.
“You did?” Sylvia said.
“The frog’s disgusting,” Lila said, rolling the pounded yam into a ball and then dipping it in the flavorful sauce of the fish stew.
“You want to see it? Patience said I could keep him as a pet,” Thomas said.
“Yes, I’d love to. After dinner,” Sylvia said, kissing both children on the cheek.
***
After the children had gone to bed and before she let Patience return to her quarters behind the house, Sylvia broached the subject.
“I’m going on a trip this weekend,” Sylvia said. “I need you to take care of the children.”
“Of course, madam. Dey go be safe wit me, don’t you worry. You go. Relax. Be happy. You go look so sad all de time here,” Patience smiled, encouragingly.
Patience did not ask who she was going with or where she was going, but Sylvia felt it was understood between them. Her secret was safe with Patience. Patience was the mother and friend she had never really had. She could rely on her in a way she had never been able to rely on anyone in her life before, except Ayo. Patience and Ayo, these were her true friends now.
“I will be back by Saturday evening. You can still have Sunday off,” Sylvia added, knowing Sunday was the one day Patience dressed up and went to church in town. Church was a social activity, and Patience usually stayed well into the evening, returning home late at night. She had heard rumors from some of the other house girls that Patience was popular with the older men because she couldn’t get pregnant, making her a low-risk woman to have an affair with. She knew Patience had needs just like everyone else, and Sylvia wanted to be there for her too if she could.
On Saturday morning, Sylvia woke up for the first time in Ayo’s arms listening to the song of the tropical birds at dawn—a chorus of soprano voices and the low, melancholy echo of her favorite bird. As a child, she had awoken to the rude noise of traffic and alley street vendors clattering in between the tall, narrow buildings of Hong Kong. It was calming to hear the sound of birds instead, the music of their mating call. But she still couldn’t forget her fears. What if Winston suddenly returned home? It wasn’t likely, but it could happen. Worse still, what if something happened to Lila? Ayo seemed to sense her anxiety and he pulled her closer to him.
After breakfast, she and Ayo drove several hours north into the dusty savannah. The green jungle gave way to the dull brown landscape of the grassland—dead yellowed grass and dry, withered shrubs. After several hours, they came to a bright turquoise spring, so much color, an indulgence in the surrounding gray-brown landscape.
Ayo stripped off his clothes and jumped naked into the aquamarine spring, and Sylvia followed. The blue-green water was lukewarm, a natural, warm spring bubbling from underground. She floated on her back, watching the monkeys leap from branch to branch above her. The trumpeting of elephants echoed in the distance. The tension in her body eased, and she let herself feel some kind of happiness.
She swam after him to the far end of the spring where there was a rock wall. She noticed he was holding a flashlight in an airtight plastic bag. He took her hand, and they dived underwater and swam underneath the wall. It wasn’t very deep. They surfaced inside a cave and swam to a rock ledge where the water was shallow. He took his flashlight out of the plastic bag. As her eyes adjusted, she saw they were inside a small underground cavern.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Spirits are said to reside here. Good spirits,” he added.
“How did you find this place?” she said.
“As a boy, I would come and swim in this spring with my half-brothers. We could tell the water was coming out from under the rock wall. So one day, we dared each other to explore what was underneath. We wrapped a torch in plastic just like I did today and swam under the rock. We felt a bit like explorers when we discovered this cave.”
“So it became your secret hide-out?”
“Yes, of course. And back then, no girls were allowed.”
“Then later, it probably turned into the place to bring girls.”
“No actually, it didn’t…I haven’t. You’re the first. I’m breaking the rules.” He pulled her closer in the water and kissed her.
In the darkness of the cave, they made love with their bodies half-submerged in the water, the sounds of their lovemaking echoing off the walls of the cave.
“I love you, you know that?” he said, holding her in the warm turquoise water.
“I know,” she whispered. She should have felt happy to be loved by him, this was what she had craved. But she felt a foreboding that their love would soon become a mere memory, a scrapbook of photographs in her head, a lonely woman’s dream. She traced her fingers over the place where he had etched his name on the cave wall as a boy. She wanted to add her name underneath as if engraving it next to his would somehow lend permanence to their love.
WINSTON
Chapter 20
Winston sat with the villagers in the spring of 1980, watching the egungun masked dancer perform in the middle of the village. The ceremony marked the planting of the new crop. Simeon spoke to his ancestors through the egungun, praying for a good harvest and presumably extra protection against the curse.
The egungun dancer wore a heavy helmet mask made of wood with elaborate carvings of a face with exaggerated features and a fish tail. Winston was told the mask, passed from generation to generation, was believed to possess supernatural powers. Special rites had to be performed by the men who wore the masks, and the masks were believed to be dangerous to women. As the egungun danced, strips of leather and cloth on his costume swirled out. The dancer lurched violently and moved toward Winston, putting him on edge. He didn’t like the eerie mask or the dance for that matter. He stood up and walked away from the village festivities toward the fields.
Winston stood alone on the freshly plowed field in the setting sun. He knelt down and took out a plastic vial from his leather satchel, filling it with a handful of the dusty, red earth, transient flyaway dirt. He planned to take the soil back to his laboratory for testing. In the distance, he thought he heard a voice from the thick forest at the edge of Simeon’s fields. He stood up and heard the voice again, it sounded like someone was calling his name. He cautiously walked closer to the edge of the forest.
Winston stood at the edge of the jungle and looked through the dark layers of the canopy and undergrowth—thick, opaque, claustrophobic. He saw nothing and was about to turn around when he heard the voice call his name, loud and clear now.
He hesitantly walked into the forest toward the voice, his heart drumming a fast polyrhythm. The sun was setting, and it would be dark soon. He knew he shouldn’t walk alone in the forest. He turned around, planning
to head back, but suddenly an old man with yellowed eyes stood in front of him. Winston instantly recognized him as the juju doctor.
“I told you, eh? You should not come here. Go take your legs and run. Run before it’s too late,” the old man said to him in a menacing tone.
Winston stood immobile, his heart drumming wildly now.
“Run, I said, eh? You hear? You stupid O’Ebo?” the juju doctor shouted in his face.
Winston began to run out of the forest, but men camouflaged with leaves suddenly appeared out of nowhere and blocked him. He turned instinctively and ran the opposite direction into the forest. The men dressed in leaves chased him deeper and deeper into the forest. Winston dropped his leather satchel with the vial of soil and kept on running.
***
Night descended, and the men in leaves still hounded him. Winston couldn’t see where he stepped, there was no path. He tried to run through the dense undergrowth, but he kept tripping on thick, knotted roots. His arms became entwined in vines, net-like, tentacles reaching out and grabbing him. Then suddenly, something sharp clamped around his leg and pierced his calf. He howled and stumbled onto the ground. The sharp metal teeth tightened around his leg, puncturing his calf and ankle, the pain was excruciating. Winston realized it was a hunter’s trap of some sort, possibly to catch bush meat. The men in leaves seemed to have disappeared just as silently as they had appeared. Or were they watching him from the trees?
He tried to pry the trap open with his hands but without success. His mind rationally ran through all the dangers. It was dark, and he knew he was lost in a forest he didn’t know. He couldn’t walk properly, his leg was killing him, the best he could do was limp toward what he thought was the direction he came from. It was also the sacred part of the forest, which was rumored to be inhabited by all sorts of spirits. On top of that, he knew the trap was probably rusty, and he couldn’t remember if his tetanus shot had been updated. If he was lucky enough to avoid coming upon a poisonous snake in the dark, he figured he was likely to perish either by spirits or the tetanus or worse still, an infection in his leg. He had no idea how long it would take him to get out of the forest or if anyone would ever find him. He grabbed a long stick and used it to limp toward the general direction he came from, dragging the leg with the trap. He started shouting for help and wished he hadn’t dropped his leather satchel. It had a flashlight, which would have helped him avoid the snakes. He felt small, vulnerable, and completely at the mercy of nature, the spirits, and the witch doctor.
