Purple Hibiscus

him look younger, more vulnerable.
    “Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from school. She will be fine,” he said.
    “Yes, Papa.” I looked away from his face, back at my books.
    He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions.
    “Stand up,” he said. I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.
    MAMA CAME HOME the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot 505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she got to it.
    “
Umu m
,” she said, hugging us. “My children.” She wore the same white T-shirt with GOD IS LOVE written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their life fragments inside.
    “There was an accident, the baby is gone,” she said.
    I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure thebaby was gone? I was still staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi’s cheekbones were so high they gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you, laughing at you, and you would never know why. “Good afternoon, Madam,
nno
,” she said. “Will you eat now or after you bathe?” “Eh?” For a moment Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. “Not now, Sisi, not now. Get me water and a towel.”
    Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel. The étagère had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to reach out and straighten her wrapper.
    “
Nne
, this is your study time. Go upstairs,” she said.
    “I want to stay here.”
    She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs raised high in the air, before she spoke. “
Nne
, go.”
    I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes.
    Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For Mama’s forgiveness. And on Sunday, the first Sunday of Trinity, we stayed back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with holy water. Someof the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or me beginning to drift off at the thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama needed to be forgiven for.

    The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read them. Even as my first-term exams approached, even when we started to do class reviews, the words still made no sense.
    A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker, the wife of Papa’s editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that loud before.
    “They have taken him! They have taken him!” she said, between throaty sobs.
    “Yewande, Yewande,” Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.
    “What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my breast! How will I raise them alone?” I could hardlyhear her words; instead, what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then Papa said, “Yewande, don’t talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you. Ade will be fine.”
    I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of