by John Ayang
Missouri City, Texas
November 22, 2012
THANKSGIVING AT Barbara Sanders’s house was sweeter than those of previous years. It was really a Thanksgiving for Barbara, in every sense of the word, because it had a personal context other than just recalling the first Thanksgiving that was celebrated one year after the arrival of the Mayflower on the shores of the New World. Barbara Sanders was celebrating her engagement to Dr. Josef Horacek, and Crystal was celebrating her newfound family in both parents, and she would forever wonder what a lucky year it had been for her. Her first visit to her dad in Norfolk, Virginia was quite dramatic, but it fulfilled her dream beyond her wildest expectations. She had feared that Dr. Horacek would deny paternity and not want to be involved in either her life or her mother’s. It turned out that just the opposite was the case. He had tried to prevail on them to stay for a few more days before returning to Texas, but Barbara had to return to work. Before they left to go back, a trade-off deal was struck. They would return to spend the last week of the long summer vacation with him again in Norfolk. That was a fair deal, as Barbara could use her paid time off. Then, Dr. Horacek would spend the Christmas holidays with them in Texas, during which he intended to visit and reconnect with his old friend and medical school colleague, Dr. Edidiong Barnaby Eshiet, so they could catch up on the latest scientific development in the OB/GYN world.
Their one-week summer visit was still too short for Crystal, but it was a very sweet one. She not only had the opportunity to bond with her dad, but she also got to know a few of her dad’s connections, chief among whom were the President and the Registrar of the University of Virginia, Norfolk, who had been invited to the dinner that her dad held in her honor—to introduce her, his daughter, to the Norfolk medical science community. She knew her dad was paving a pathway for her to get direct admission into the university come autumn 2013, when she would finish her final year at Christo Rey High School. Crystal couldn’t be more pleased with herself. Over and above all these, it was her parents’ eventual engagement after nearly twenty-five years of knowing each other that crowned the year for Crystal.
You could say she saw it coming. Shortly after they came back from the first visit, her mother had hit the gym, and it took Crystal almost a week to realize what was happening. She also noticed that her mother invested a lot more money in assorted cosmetic and beauty products and, although she knew why, she couldn’t resist teasing her.
“Mom, you are behaving strangely these days,” Crystal had said on one occasion when her mom had returned from her usual work-out routine. “Are you alright?”
“What do you mean, Crysie?” Barbara had asked.
“You’re wearing out the floors of the county gym, and getting a little too hard on those facial creams and skin toners!” Crystal had responded, then added, “If I catch you with some hunk, I’m gonna tell Dad on you.”
“Such disrespect!” Barbara had retorted, petulantly, and stalked away into the bathroom for a shower. Crystal had smiled furtively, knowing her mother wasn’t really mad at her for the remark. And she was right. As she turned on the shower and got under it, Barbara also permitted herself a coy little smile because, for one, her daughter’s teasing meant that the results of her efforts were showing. She knew Crystal wasn’t really thinking she was doing all she did because there was a man she wanted to ‘catch’. But she also knew that Crystal was wrong if she thought she did all that to impress Dr. Horacek on their next visit. She did it for him, quite alright, but not to ‘catch’ him, rather to seduce and reject him to punish him by way of revenge. For the one week they would be together, she planned to tease him incessantly and drive him nuts with her feminine wiles, to make him see what he had been missing and regret the many years he had punitively ignored her. Later on, Barbara would wonder what mischievous imp had put that idea into her head because it didn’t work.
It was on the fourth day of their visit and they had just driven two hours back from the Science Museum of Virginia on West Broad Street, Richmond. Barbara was about to go inside the house when Dr. Horacek insisted there was something he needed to show her in the examination room to seek her opinion. Grudgingly, she followed him into the clinic, which was strangely silent. Barbara noticed that a thick curtain divider stretched from one wall to the opposite wall at the east end of the large rectangular exam room, and she was about to inquire whether the staff had a day off when Dr. Horacek spoke and distracted her attention.
“You’re going to find it strange because it’s not the way you saw it last. I modified it,” he said, grabbing her arm and gently propelling her toward the exam bed. “Here. Sit down, pull off your shoes, and slowly lie down.”
“Wait,” Barbara said, a bit unsure what Dr. Horacek was up to. “Isn’t this the same bed…?”
“Yes, it is,” Dr. Horacek replied. “My mistake. I’m sorry. I modified the wall structure, not the furniture. I should’ve said that. It’s the same bed you laid on when I did the gametes transfer.” Noticing the frown of confusion on Barbara’s face, he added, “Don’t be afraid. I just want you to perform a simple experiment and then tell me about your feeling. Close your eyes and lie down. Imagine you are back twenty years ago, and I am performing the transfer procedure on you, but with your eyes closed.”
Part of Barbara wanted to protest the little charade as childish and ridiculous, and another part convinced her to be adventurous and follow his instructions to see what he was up to. She hesitantly lay down and closed her eyes.
“Relax, breathe deeply, count up to ten, then open your eyes and sit up,” Dr. Horacek directed, sounding serious.
“What?” Barbara asked with eyes still closed. “Are you into magic now? I thought scientists didn’t believe in magic?”
“Barbs, please, quit talking and keep counting,” Dr. Horacek pleaded. He counted ten in his mind and then said, “Sit up and open your eyes.”
Barbara slowly sat up and opened her eyes. Dr. Horacek was in a genuflecting posture like a pious pilgrim in front of the statue of a saint famous for granting instant favors. In his left hand, he held out a small black jewelry box with a sparkling diamond ring ensconced in a velvet bed of opal blue. Then he asked, “Barbara Maria Sanders, will you marry me?”
Barbara looked at the sparkling diamond ring in the box, looked at Dr. Horacek’s face, looked again at the ring, and then slowly and silently held out her left hand. Dr. Horacek took the gesture as a ‘yes’ and quickly slipped the ring on Barbara’s finger. She looked again at the ring and blurted out, almost breathless, “Yes…” Then aloud, “Yes, I will marry you.” Then she slapped him—hard—across the face.
“Ouch! That hurt!” Dr. Horacek yelled in pain. But before he could protest further, she grabbed him and kissed him hard and long on the lips, so hard that he feared he might not come away from the amorous act with his lips intact. As if on cue, the curtain on the east end of the room rolled open and a crowd of three male medical assistants, five nurses, and two receptionists erupted into a loud, merry applause which had been delayed a bit because of the unexpected slap. Barbara was startled and embarrassingly surprised. She now understood the unusual silence when she first walked into the clinic. It was all planned. She felt simultaneously stupid and overjoyed, and started giggling like a silly, gawky teenager. Crystal appeared from nowhere and started singing Isaiah:
I have loved you, with an everlasting love. I have loved you, and you are mine.
After the singing, the crowd erupted into one more applause as Dr. Horacek gathered Barbara in his arms and kissed her back. Tears flowed freely. Nurse Jackson, a.k.a. JJ, wept with abandon, and joyfully refused to be consoled. She had been privy to the unrequited love that her friend nursed for their boss over the years, and couldn’t believe that Barbara Sanders could finally be engaged to the love of her life, and with a grown child who was their biological daughter. By now it was no longer grapevine gossip, but an open story that Cry
stal was Dr. Horacek’s biological daughter. Since it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and everybody was too excited to behave themselves, Dr. Horacek closed the clinic for the rest of the day and herded everybody into his house behind the clinic for an engagement party. Later that night, after their first-ever love making, which, years later, they jokingly called ‘catch-up/ make-up sex’, Dr. Horacek wondered aloud, “Barbs, what was that for?”
“What was ‘what’ for?” Barbara asked in return.
“That slap across my face.” he replied. “Did you know that hurt?”
“Thank God it did,” she replied. “That was just a small price to pay for still being one lucky SOB.”
“Will I be paying for it forever?”
“No, silly,” she replied, sweetly. “That was your last installment.” She kissed him and rolled onto her side of the bed and went to sleep, wondering if Crystal would tease her the next day for not waiting to sleep with her fiancé.
For the remaining three days, the newly constituted Horacek family spent a lot of time excitedly planning their next time together, which was going to be at Christmas of 2012, in Missouri City, Texas. Everyone walked on air until it was time to say their goodbyes. Tears again flowed freely and when Barbara and her daughter finally boarded their plane back to Texas, it was with the consolation that their Christmas holidays together would be even sweeter.
So, it was that, instead of teasing and punishing Dr. Horacek, Barbara got wooed, won, and engaged. She would wonder why a woman’s heart always betrayed her and made her fall for the man who rejected her, in the first place, and later went back to reclaim her. ‘Must be the reason why the ancients referred to women as the “weaker sex,”’ she thought. ‘Or, maybe it is naturally designed just that way by providence, so Hollywood can make movies with the ending: “And they lived happily ever after’.”
When school resumed in the fall of 2012, Crystal Sanders had told her friends about her newfound identity. She wasted no time after coming back from her summer bonding with her dad, in having all her official documents redone to bear her new name. She, in fact, dropped Sanders as her surname and adopted Horacek, a decision which pleased her dad so much that he promised her a big Christmas gift which he didn’t reveal. Crystal was agog with expectant excitement at the prospect of the ‘big gift’. Although she would have given anything to know what it was that her father was planning to give her, she decided to wallow in the suspense and did not even dare to guess so as not to take the fun out of it. Altogether, it would have been a perfect beginning to the school year, except for one thing, which, though they saw it coming, no one actually thought about how they would handle it: Kelechi Okubueze Jr. had graduated in May of that year, and as he had planned, travelled to Nigeria to embark on a search for his biological dad. He knew it wasn’t going to be a long, drawn-out adventure, having been armed by his mother with all the information he needed. For one, that meant that Edo-Mma would feel the absence of her boyfriend, and Crystal thought she and Josh would not know how to sympathize with her or whether to sympathize at all. Second, it meant that Crystal would have nobody to help her in her quest to track down her brother, the first child whom Barbara Sanders bore for a couple by surrogacy.
As far as computer wizardry was concerned, Kelechi was their eye and champion. He had revealed to them that he got all his training from belonging to a group of freelance prodigies who called themselves the “Geek Squad’. He had warned Josh and Crystal, even Edo-Mma, to keep their mouths shut about his hacking activities because, apart from being illegal, it was against the Geek Squad code of behavior, as they strictly discouraged members from using their skill in that direction. The big disappointment was that although Kelechi had said he would be back from Nigeria by the end of the summer, it turned out that nobody was sure if he would ever come back to the States. Crystal Horacek did not know whether to worry about her friend, Edo-Mma’s loneliness, or her stalled project. There, again, fate seemed to deal her a lucky card. The solution to the situation came from Edo-Mma herself.
So, it was, that on a certain day, sitting on the wooden bench of the school football pit and munching on their usual break-time snacks of peanut chocolate bars and chips, wondering what their final year at Christo Rey was going to look like and bemoaning the situation of things, an idea suddenly occurred to Edo-Mma.
“Wait a minute, Crysie,” Edo-Mma said. “Why can’t we ask your dad to do the tracking himself?”
“Well, Edo, I don’t know,” Crystal replied, with measured skepticism. “He might start giving me his usual lectures on the ethics of confidentiality.”
“Crysie, you’ve got to ask him,” Edo-Mma persuaded. “After all, it’s not like there‘s a whole lot of secrecy about it now.”
“Yeah, Crysie,” Josh interjected. “If he told your mama he was the father of the first child, as well as you, there isn’t no more confidentiality there, man. Just ask him. The worst he can say would be ‘No’.”
“My dad can possibly help, too,” Edo-Mma pressed on, beginning to get excited. “They worked together and, good thing, your dad is coming to Houston in December.”
“Well, I’ll try,” Crystal finally gave in. “I’ll mention it when I call him tonight. Or, should I wait till he comes?”
As Josh and Edo-Mma unanimously disagreed and urged her not to wait till December, Edo-Mma’s phone gave a text message signal. It was Kelechi. Edo-Mma swiped her finger across the LED screen of her phone to reveal a picture of Kelechi swathed in local Nigerian attire, sitting among other young men of his age, similarly dressed, and holding up what seemed like animal horns. Edo-Mma knew it was the horn used for drinking the local palm wine. They sat around a table with plates and bowls which seemed to have food remains in them. Underneath the picture was the short inscription: Yam Festival. Kelechi seemed to be laughing hard and having a good time, like one who’d had too much food and wine.
“Oh, my God!” Edo-Mma exclaimed, exasperated. “This boy is no longer coming back to the States!”
Josh and Crystal rushed and huddled over Edo-Mma’s shoulder to look at Kelechi’s picture.
“Boy!” Josh exclaimed. “The guy’s having a good time. Look at him laughing with his mouth wide like a yawning crock.”
“Yeah, looks like they’ve had plenty to eat and drink,” Crystal remarked, woefully. More worried now about her friend, she added, “He’ll come back. He can’t just up and quit like that.”
“He graduated,” Edo-Mma said, a shade too loud.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean coming back to Christo Rey,” Crystal said, conscious that her first statement of assurance fell flat and, instead of consoling, irritated her friend. “You could go to Nigeria to visit him. Couldn’t you?”
“That can only happen after I graduate, and only if I still have feelings for him then,” Edo-Mma said resolutely. Then added, “And I probably will still love him if he keeps in touch the way he does now. He calls every other day and sends an occasional text as he just did.”
“See, the guy’s big-time interested in you,” Josh said with an air of final proof.
“He’ll come back,” Crystal repeated.
“He had better,” Edo-Mma replied, menacingly, as the bell shrilled, signaling the end of break. “If I have to go to him, I will whip him, pinch him by the ear, and drag him back here.”
Crystal and Josh cracked up at the thought of Kelechi, almost a giant, being flogged, pinched on the ear, and dragged back to the States by a girl half his size. They put their trash into the dumpster and trooped back to class, still laughing. Edo-Mma knew why they were laughing. She tried gallantly to stifle her own laughter and only ended up pouting and looking amused at the same time.
PART III
Then Nathan said to David: “Thou art the man.”
2 Samuel 12:7
Houston, Texas
December 10, 2012
“ALL RISE! First circ
uit court in session. Honorable Justice Anieno Montgomery presiding.” The bailiff, a tall and sturdily built gentleman, in a well-pressed khaki uniform spoke in a booming, but flat, baritone voice laced with a hint of boredom, indicative of an ad nauseam repetition of the same speech over the years. All in court stood to attention as Judge Montgomery, an equally tall and stately middle-aged woman in black gown, stepped up to the bench amidst the fading din that pervaded the court prior to her arrival. She sat down, raised her face, and swept the court sternly through her thick glasses, almost the size of aviation goggles, as judges do when about to start the business of the day. She had an almost square face with strong cheek bones. Her glasses rested on the ridge of a broad nose indicative of her African heritage. Her hair was combed Afro-style, too. She looked every inch a no-nonsense, learned, dispenser of justice. She oozed power, or at least tried to look it since, in spite of her veneer of sternness, there was something innately compassionate about her bearing. Having determined that the level of comportment in court was satisfactory, she nodded to the bailiff, who said curtly, “All sit.”
No small shuffling followed the order as the court audience and jury took their seats, as though it were a long-yearned-for reprieve from holding their breath while they stood. The seating arrangement was adversarial, as was customary, with a central isle running from the front of the bench to the back of the court, effectively separating Fr. McCarthy and Stacy Donovan, his attorney, sitting by the desk on one side, from Edidiong and Ima Eshiet sitting behind another desk with Patrick Turner, their attorney. The jury of nine—four men and two women, all white, and one man and two women, all black—sat on pews on the left side of the judge’s bench, all with businesslike demeanors. The rest of the audience consisted of family members and friends sitting behind their respective litigants. A handful of reporters, pressmen and women, with cameras swarmed the back of the court, ready to report on the proceedings of what, from all indications, was a high-profile case of discrimination in the Catholic Church.
