BIRD OF PARADISE 2

It was blue murder for the Ofilis at Sue’s departure. After several discussions, although with the help of Phillip, they were able to iron things out, and Sue was half her way to relocating to the US. Mbechi was bereft. The only thing that kept not only her but Emeka solaced was Virginia’s undeniable stance that she had been a bad mother. And even more so, she was ready to pay her pound of flesh a thousand fold to them—she would repatriate their good deeds with a million naira and one of her newly bought properties in Ajah.
Iya Praise heard of the happenings and decided to pay the Ofilis an impromptu visit. The week she darkened their door to proffer her unsolicited advice, Mbechi, home alone, was wary of seeing anybody. So she told her husband to lock the door outside while she made use of the backdoor for her needs.
Dr. Phillip had soon become more receptive, and his generosity towards them knew no slack. He offered Emeka a car, promoted him as his personal assistant, and gave him two American tables Fidelity Bank had given him. Mbechi was not left out; Virginia promised to open a food stall for her in Gbagli on the outskirts of Badagry. She promised to call them as soon as they touched the tarmac, just so they could follow up with the conveyance documentation.
Deep down their heart they felt splattered with preempted guilt that they were bad parents for neglecting Sue like the plague, yet conforming to what they thought was her embarrassing skin features. It had pained them. They knew.
The day Sue travelled to the US, Emeka and Mbechi stood watching her with a kind of nostalgia of something advertently abnegated. She reminisced the day her father was committed to mother earth. The coffin they enclosed him was alike with the slitting door of the American airline. She drank her tears just too much, barricading it with the crown of her fingers. When they ambled back the security, their aura transformed and they were dead sure they had made the biggest mistake in their lives.
That day Emeka did not go to work, everything was hazy with a propending awry countenance nudging him into his darkest cupboards of untold secrets.
“Emmy, I like this design welwel”, Mbechi said poring over a high-resolution image of a new shop near the central Badagry Hercules.
He was in no way going to reply that. He picked up the Guardian Newspaper spluttered on the table, and aligned it in a graceful repose.
“Emeka, I dey talk to you,”
Emeka kept taciturn and flounced outside the house to buy cigarettes.
“Gee, how far naa?’’, Aruwe said to him while he wheezed the first cigarrete.
I hear wetin happen. About dat your yellow pawpaw daughter,”
He had barely finished speaking when Mama Baseje pressed her fat body on him, hugging him so tight like she hearted all his problems, and could only give that knowing semblance.

I had never felt so happy in my life until mother brought me to this heavenly burnished place with paradise furnishings. My first day in the US was dour because mother cried and cried hedging me around my two siblings, Clinton and Marcaine. She called herself a bad mother, and I wonder why she did. I tried to appease her with my smiling eyes, but all she registered was a lofty pity for me; she looked at me with chagrin, and I was sure I was going to squeal because she was going to harm me.
I grinned for the first time when she daubed her tears with the velvety handkerchief she chaffed my hair with when I brushed it over a dusty head-rest on the plane. She dialed my erstwhile surrogate parent’s number; Mbechi picked the phone. I was once more happy to hear her shrill voice boomeranging backwards and forwards as she spoke reading out from a paper boldly typed on it: LEASE OF CONVEYANCING.
I didn’t like the school I was enrolled in because my classmates, to me, were mop-headed, reddish, prickly, and very outspoken. Much as I knew America could give me the best space I needed to contend with my inherent lot, I didn’t want mother to look at me crying in dire pity.
She introduced me to a bald-headed, goateed, robust man as my father. I looked at him in a glimpse, and I regretted that his almond-eyes kissed mine as I tried to back away from his proffered hug.
“Mummy who is this, crap”, my little sister said.
I wasn’t in the least surprised when the words streamed out like a surging tide from her mouth because I was too unsmiling to them; I was yanked away from the world that gave them so much expression to call me crap. I harboured a terrible loathing for her, but I was too temperamental to realize.
I was never gregarious and I will never be. Mother tried all she could to make me street-wise, relax my clenched shell. She gave me drinks I hated like pomegranate, mango-orange juice, milkshake, and apple-cider vinegar which tasted like gall. I broke her figurines the day my surrogate parents called her that they liked the house she gave them in Ikoyi, and Mbechi was ecstatic of her booming canteen. Mother’s accent was a little too fine-tuned for their comprehension, so she spoke Pidgin English to them. I was relaxed even the more.
“Shey you like the house wey them give you?”, mother said.
“Aunty, thank you oo. We dey very happppy!”
“Ok… take care of yourself and be good people”
I heard all her conversations with trepidation that I might one day have to make her proud. After several weeks of my acclimatization, mother drove us out to Miami Beach. I invariably loved outing especially if it was purposed for only sight-seeing. A little bird told me that Mbechi relayed what I did when she was down with an ailment that I scrunched my leg on the gravelly floor, and had flung my leg to her direction because she kept me secluded.
“This girl will go places”, mother told a close friend of hers the day I drew a countryside illustration.
I didn’t say anything but just walked to the bucket of my siblings’ toys and fared it on the floor. My sister was my enemy, her face dredged up Mbechi, her now lack of care for me because of some entitlement. I hated that she was swept up her feet to the highest heavens.
Mother made researches every single day on how to remedy my disposition. She would sit lost, bashing away on her apple laptop. It worried me; it depressed me that I did not take immediate action to flank her that I was fine. I really was, indeed.