Final Chapter

Chapter 16

Tara felt better, but the annoying pain in her foot kept her in bed. She was starting to rouse from sleep when the door into her room opened gently and a woman cradling a small bag in her arm walked in.

The woman was past her prime, but the beauty that held men in awe in her youth still flourished gracefully as she aged.

Her graceful stride as she walked in, her set face as she carried herself and the beautiful black mane that accompanied her left no one in doubt about the attention and authority she commanded. Even when she frowned, it only accentuated the beauty of the curves around her face.

When she approached Tara’s bed, she appeared warm, so much that she wanted to rise into her embrace, yet the creases on her no-nonsense face betrayed the relics of the many battles she had fought and probably won to remain elegant and quintessential.

“How are you today, Tara?”

When she spoke, her tongue glided between her teeth to give her syllables an accent of the purest Northern ancestry.

But age had started to take its slow and debilitating toll on her skin. Despite the smoothness and near evenness, her veins ran a map of green tributaries around the back of her hand in contrast to her fair skin.

There was something about her eyes that drew curiosity. It smiled when she smiled and frowned when her face broke into one. Her smile unveiled the most perfect set of dentitions for her age.

Her father walked in behind her with a look that betrayed no emotion, whilst Ann walked in slowly behind.

Tara braced herself on one elbow to get a good look at the mysterious woman before responding.

“I feel well, thank you. Are you Ann’s mother?” she looked a bit like the woman she saw behind the wheel of the white SUV she had tried to trail the last time.

“My name is Esther Dosumu-Coker, and yes I am her mother.” Her tongue slipped behind her teeth as she spoke.

Tara looked just like a slightly younger version of her mother; Esther had to admit.

The curve of her face and the way her chin accentuated her lips, bore some resemblance with Christiana. She had safe eyes, perhaps that was the best way to say it. Those eyes reminded her of the man that fathered her. The one sore spot in her marriage that haunted her for decades.

As Esther stood a few inches from the bed, with her handbag clutched to her chest, staring intently into Tara’s face with eyes pleading for forgiveness, she felt pity.

She had seen Tara only one other time, when she was a little child, that was many years ago just after Christiana had passed on.

Her father had reached out to Adetokunbo and Esther to inform them of Christiania’s child and of her demise. He did not tell them that he had found her lying still on his bedroom floor with a bottle of poison a few inches away from her open palm. She was dead and that was all they needed to know. And it remained that way.

That was also the first time he met Ann, who was barely eight years old at the time. It was also the first time that Ann met her little stepsister, Tara.

The conversation that evening between the two men was awkward, labored and full of disdain. Adetokunbo was not sober on the day and his aloofness left no room for Esther to grieve.

Now, she was at the wellness center at Ann’s insistence, after she returned from at the close of work with a passport photograph of Christiana, flooding her mind with memories of a past she had tried so much to forget.

“What did you say she is diagnosed with again?” She turned behind her to look at Ann.

“Schizophrenia.” Ann responded almost in a whisper.

She continued after clearing her throat of phlegm “She suffered a relapse after she stopped using her medication. She had difficulties separating her reality from her thoughts. We are managing the condition with some psychotherapy sessions and some more medication. She will be here for a few weeks.

She is getting much better than she was when her father rushed her in here by after he followed her to the house on Lawal Adeleke Street.”

“Her mobile phone number was unavailable all through the night and I was worried for her.” Her father found his voice.

“I am glad you brought her in right on time.” Ann added.

Tara didn’t like that her health was being discussed as though she wasn’t in the room. If not for her bandaged foot, she would have walked out of the room in protest.

“Let them fool themselves. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. They have no idea what you are dealing with. You have been through the most difficult time in your life and you have turned out just fine. There is nothing wrong with you. You are just fine.

You must leave tonight, even if you have to hop on that one good leg. You belong in the real world, not this forsaken wellness home.” Bella’s voice of reason forced its way into her subconscious.

Tara smiled.

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THE END

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Thank you for reading.