The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [75]
The neighbors came over when they heard her. It was the woman from the house across the road—the one whose dog rummaged in Grandmama’s dustbin in the mornings—who coaxed the American phone number from your numb lips and called your mother. It was also that neighbor who unclasped your and Dozie’s hands, made you sit down, and gave you some water. The neighbor tried, too, to hold you close so you would not hear Grandmama as she talked to your mother on the phone, but you slid away from the woman, closer to the phone. Grandmama and your mother were focused on Nonso’s body, rather than his death. Your mother was insisting that Nonso’s body be flown back to America right away and Grandmama was repeating your mother’s words and shaking her head. Madness lurked in her eyes.
You knew Grandmama had never liked your mother. (You had heard Grandmama say this some summers before to her friend—That black American woman has tied up my son and put him in her pocket.) But watching Grandmama on the phone, you understood that she and your mother were united. You were sure your mother had the same red madness in her eyes.
When you talked to your mother, her voice echoed over the line in a way it had never done all the years before when you and Nonso spent summers with Grandmama. Are you all right? she kept asking you. Are you all right? She sounded fearful, as though she suspected that you were all right, despite Nonso’s death. You played with the phone wire and said little. She said she would send word to your father, although he was somewhere in the woods attending a Black Arts festival where there were no phones or radios. Finally she sobbed a harsh sob, a sob like the bark of a dog, before she told you everything would be fine and she was going to arrange for Nonso’s body to be flown back. It made you think of her laugh, a ho-ho-ho laugh that started deep inside her belly and did not soften as it came up and did not suit her willowy body at all. When she went into Nonso’s room to say good night, she always came out laughing that laugh. Most times, you pressed your palms to your ears to keep the sound out, and kept your palms pressed to your ears even when she came into your room to say Good night, darling, sleep well. She never left your room with that laugh.
After the phone call, Grandmama lay stretched out with her back on the floor, eyes unblinking, rolling from side to side, as though she were playing some sort of silly game. She said it was wrong to fly Nonso’s body back to America, that his spirit would always hover here. He belonged to this hard earth that had failed to absorb the shock of his fall. He belonged to the trees here, one of which had let go of him. You sat and watched her and at first you wished she would get up and take you in her arms, then you wished she wouldn’t.
It has been eighteen years and the trees in Grandmama’s yard look unchanged; they still reach out and hug one another, still cast shadows over the yard. But everything else seems smaller: the house, the garden at the back, the water tank copper-colored from rust. Even Grandmama’s grave in the backyard looks tiny, and you imagine her body being crumpled to fit a small coffin. The grave is covered with a thin coat of cement; the soil around it is freshly dug and you stand next to it and picture it in ten years’ time, untended, tangled weeds covering the cement, choking the grave.
Dozie is watching you. At the airport, he had hugged you cautiously, said welcome and what a surprise that you came back, and you stared at his face for a long time in the busy, shuffling lounge until he looked away, his eyes brown and sad like those of your friend’s poodle. You didn’t need that look, though,