Chapter summary
Eni visits her ailing mother, hides a secret, and quietly counts down two remaining nights.
12.30pm, Sunday 13 February 2022, Akoka, Lagos
The old house had grown smaller every year, the way houses do when you have left them.
It stood at the end of a quiet street three minutes from the back gate of the university, a plain two-storey building painted cream a long time ago and sulking now under a layer of grey. A mango tree leaned over the wall. The gate had a hinge that complained at every opening. Eni had once timed it, at nine years old, with a stopwatch from a school kit: four seconds of squeal, a pause, then one dull clang.
She parked under the mango tree and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
“You coming?” Dami asked from the passenger seat.
“Give me a second.”
Dami looked at her sideways, but she did not ask. She had learned that too.
“Eni! Dami! Una don come o!” Mama Rotimi from next door was already at the fence, a wrapper tied under her arms and a plastic bowl of peeled yam on her hip. She had lived there for thirty-five years and had never once been out of earshot of anything. “Your mama dey ask since morning. She say make I tell am if I see una. I say, Mama, na Sunday, dem
go come.”
“Thank you, Mama Rotimi,” Eni said.
“E don tey wey you come o.” The old woman’s eyes narrowed, kind and shrewd. “You thin small. You dey chop?”
“I’m eating.”
“Hmm,” said Mama Rotimi, which in her language was a whole paragraph.
The sisters walked up the path. At the front door they stopped, and Eni lifted her hand, and so did Dami, and together they knocked three times on the wood.
They looked at each other and laughed, a little too hard.
Inside, the house smelled of Dettol, Vicks, old cloth and the burnt-sugar sweetness of something that had once been plantain. Every object was where it had always been. The glass cabinet. The framed certificates. The brown sofa with its crocheted headrests. Time went around this room as water goes around a stone.
Mama sat by the window in her wheelchair, with a rug across her knees and her small hands folded on top of it. She had been in the chair since the fall in October. Eni still could not look at it directly. It sat in her mother’s life like a stranger who had come for one night and stayed. The hands were what undid her. They were cracked and brown at the knuckles, the hands of
thirty years of nights: bedpans, drips, dressings, the long hours between midnight and five when a ward belongs to the very sick and the very tired. Every line on her face was a shift that nobody had thanked her for.
“Mama.”
Her mother turned her head slowly. For a second there was only politeness in her eyes. Then recognition came up through it like a coin through water.
“Eniola. My own.”
Eni knelt and put her face in the rug and said nothing for a while.
“And this is Damilola,” said Mama, reaching out. “My small one. You are late. Your father has not come in yet. Is he still at the hospital?”
The silence was a short one.
“He’s on his way, Mama,” Eni said, without lifting her head. “He said we should start without him.”
“Good. That man will work himself into the ground.”
Dami stood by the cabinet. Her jaw was working, and Eni, seeing it, felt the old familiar tide of love and fury rise in her chest. It was the same tide every time. Nothing had ever come of it except the next Sunday.
2.10pm
“I’ll get her a blanket,” Eni said. “The thin one. From upstairs.”
She went up. The stairs complained under her feet in the same places. At the top, instead of turning toward her parents’ old bedroom, she turned the other way, toward the little box room at the end of the corridor.
She stood at the door.
She knocked three times.
Then she went in and closed it behind her.
In the kitchen below, Dami was peeling an orange for their mother, one long ribbon, which was a game they had played as girls. Above her head, through the ceiling, she heard the soft, dry sound of something being torn. Once. Slowly. Like a page.
She looked up. The sound did not come again.
A minute later Eni was on the stairs with a folded blanket in her arms and a handbag that looked a little more full than it had before.
3.30pm
They washed the dishes together. It was something they had done every Sunday for years, side by side at the narrow sink, one washing, one drying, with the window open on the mango tree and the sound of a radio somewhere playing old highlife.
“Do you still have The Ferryman’s Ledger?” Eni asked. Dami laughed. “What?”
“The paperback. The one with the ferry on the cover.”
“It’s in the box room with all the others. Mama never threw anything away.” Dami dried a plate and put it on the rack. “Why?”
“I wanted to remember how it ended.”
“Eni. We read it forty times. The clerk disappears into the fog, and everybody cries.”
“I think there’s a last chapter I never read properly,” Eni said.
Dami looked at her. There was an unlovely crease between her brows.
“I have a Chapter Eight for you,” she said. “You didn’t answer my message.”
“Tell me next Sunday.”
“You said that last week.”
“I know.” Eni’s hands were in the water, motionless. She was looking at the mango tree. “Dami. If I ever do something you don’t understand…”
“You always do something I don’t understand. You are a doctor’s daughter who became a pharmacist, and who counts her coffee spoons.”
“Be serious.”
“I am being serious.”
Eni smiled, a half smile, the right side of her mouth lifting. “Just remember,” she said. “Whatever anyone says about me, whatever you hear. I always knocked first.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It’s a joke.”
It was not a joke. They both knew it. But it was Sunday, and the radio was playing, and the water was warm, and a mango had fallen into the yard with a sound like a soft drum.
Dami let it go.
5.40pm
They left as the light was turning orange.
Mama Rotimi waved from the fence. Their mother, wheeled to the door by the housegirl, lifted one hand.
Eni crouched and held her.
She held her for a long time. Longer than a hug should last. Her mother’s shoulders were small and bony in her hands, like the shoulders of a bird. She smelled of Vicks and old cloth and, faintly, of the soap she had used for forty years.
“You hug like someone going on a journey,” Mama said, into her neck.
“Maybe I am.”
“Ah,” said Mama, and patted her back, twice, absently. “Come back soon. Bring your father.” In the car, Dami talked about Hakeem and his new excuses. Eni let her talk. She watched the old house in the rear-view mirror
until the street turned and the mango tree sank below the rooftops. She did not cry. She counted the minutes of her sister’s voice as if they were something she could keep.
Two more nights, she thought.
She counted those too.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 13 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
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