Chapter summary
Dami discovers Hakeem drove Eni to Ojota, then leaves him after learning his prolonged betrayal.
10.15am, Saturday 18 March 2023, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos
The insurance renewal was due on Monday, and Hakeem, as usual, could not find the papers.
“Check the car,” he had called from the bathroom, over the sound of the shower. “Glove compartment. Blue folder.”
Dami had gone down to the garage in her slippers with a cup of tea in one hand. It was a bright, windy morning, the kind that made the whole compound smell of wet concrete and frying plantain from the neighbours’ kitchens. She slid into the passenger seat of his dark saloon and opened the glove compartment, and found the blue folder at once, tucked behind a tyre gauge and a roll of mints.
A piece of paper came out with it.
It was folded in four, soft at the creases, like something that had been taken out and put back many times. A parking receipt. The ink had faded to the colour of weak tea, but the print was still clear.
OJOTA MOTOR PARK. ENTRY: 15/02/22. 04:09. AMT: N300.
Dami read it once. She read it again. Then she sat in the car with the blue folder on her knee, and she did what she had done on the night she found the pills in Tunde’s bin, and in a market in Abuja, and on a kerb in the heat. She
waited for the feeling to come, so that she could decide what to do with it.
It did not come as anger. It came as a ringing quiet.
He had been at the depot that morning. He had told her so. He had come in at seven, smelling of cold air, and gone straight to the shower. She had been so frantic, that night, when Tunde called to say Eni had not come home from the pharmacy, that she had never once asked where her own husband had been at four o’clock.
Four-oh-nine.
She folded the receipt along its old creases and put it into the pocket of her dressing gown.
7.40pm
He came home late, with a bag of suya and a bad temper about the traffic.
She had laid the table for two. Rice, stew, a bowl of fried plantain. A candle, which she never used, stood in the centre. Hakeem looked at it for a moment as he took off his jacket, and a wary expression crossed his face.
“Is it a birthday?”
“Sit down.”
He sat. She took the folded paper out of her pocket and placed it on the table between the plates, and smoothed it flat with two fingers.
He did not touch it. He did not need to. She watched his eyes read it, and watched them go dead.
“What time did you leave the house that morning?” she said.
Her voice was perfectly level. It was the voice she used for dangerous prescriptions.
“Dami…”
“What time?”
“Half past three.”
“Where were you going?”
“Ojota.”
“Who was in the car?”
A long, long silence. The candle flame stood up straight and stayed there.
“Eni,” Hakeem said.
The word sat on the table with the rice.
“She asked you.”
“She asked me three days before. She said…” He rubbed his face with both hands. “She said she needed to go somewhere. She said she would be safe. She said I must not tell anybody, not even you. Especially you.”
“Why especially me?” “She said you would follow her.”
Dami closed her eyes for a moment.
“And you said yes.”
“I said yes.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for so long that she thought he might not answer. When he did, his voice was small and bare, the voice of a boy standing in front of a headmaster.
“In twenty nineteen,” he said, “I lost a consignment.”
“I remember.”
“You don’t. Not all of it.” He swallowed. “I had been betting. Football. A small thing, I told myself, a little here and a little there. By the end, I owed some very bad people four million naira. So I took it from the company account. Just to cover it. Just until the weekend.”
She said nothing.
“The audit came on Friday. I was going to prison, Dami. I swear to God. I was going to prison, and you would have been the wife of a thief.” His mouth twisted. “I went to your sister at the pharmacy. I knelt on the floor of the stockroom and told her everything. She did not say one word. She went into her bag, and she wrote me a cheque for four million, two hundred thousand naira, from her savings.” “She never told me.”
“She made me swear. She said, ’It will break her. She is proud of you. Let her stay proud.’” His voice cracked. “She never mentioned it again. Not once. Not at Christmas, not at your birthday, not at any Sunday. She was never even cold to me. She just carried it.”
Dami opened her eyes.
In the candle flame, she saw her husband’s face. A weak, gentle, handsome face that she had once thought was kind. A face that had spent a lifetime leaving the room before the bill arrived.
“So when she asked,” she said slowly, “you owed her.”
“I owed her everything.”
“She asked you for one thing.”
“She asked me for a year.” His eyes were wet. “Give me one year. That was all she said. I kept it, Dami. It has been a year and one month. I kept it a month longer than I promised.”
“A year and one month.”
“Yes.”
“I called her number three hundred and eleven times.”
“I know.”
“I went to Abuja. I sat in a market in forty degrees and I asked a man who mends phones if he had seen my sister. I came home and you said to me, Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.” He flinched.
“You said it like something you had practised.”
“I had.”
“You let me look,” said Dami, softly. “You let me look for thirteen months. You lay next to me at night while I counted her calls, and you said nothing. And in a church, in front of my father’s friends, you made me a promise too.”
He had no answer.
She stood up, surprised at how steady her hands were. She folded her napkin and pushed the candle a quarter of an inch to one side, so that it would not set the tablecloth alight.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No. She said, ’The less you know, the safer you are.’”
“Was she afraid?”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “That was the strangest part. She was calm. She was like somebody on her way to an exam she had prepared for.”
“Did she take anything?”
“A small bag. A backpack.” He hesitated. “And one other. A grey one. A holdall. She would not let me carry it. When she lifted it into the car, I saw her arm shake. It was very heavy.”
“What was in it?”
“I did not ask.”
10.50pm, Akoka
She packed one suitcase.
She did not do it in anger. She did it as she did everything, in order, one thing at a time, rolling each blouse and folding each dress with the care of a woman preparing for a long journey. Hakeem stood in the bedroom door and watched her, and for once in his life, he did not say anything at all.
She took a taxi to Akoka.
The old house was dark except for the lamp in the sitting room. The housegirl, half asleep, let her in. Dami went up the stairs with her suitcase bumping on every step and pushed open the door of her mother’s room.
Mama lay in the big bed with the rug pulled up to her chin, and her small hands folded on top. The light from the corridor fell across her face. She opened her eyes.
“Eniola,” she said. “You have come back.”
Dami stood in the doorway for a long time.
“It’s Dami, Mama.”
“Ah. Damilola.” Her mother’s gaze drifted, soft and puzzled, and came to rest on the suitcase. “You are going on a journey?”
“No, Mama.” She set the case against the wall. “I have come to stay a while.” “Good,” said Mama, closing her eyes. “Shut the door. There is a draught.”
Dami shut it. She stood alone in the corridor with her hand flat against the wood.
Heavy, he had said. I saw her arm shake.
She tried to imagine it. Her careful sister, the woman who counted coffee spoons, standing in the dark at the end of a road with a bag so heavy that a grown man would remember it for a year.
What could Eni possibly have carried that was that heavy?
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 23 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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