The Third Door — Chapter 8: Four Questions

Chapter summary

Dami questions Tunde about Eni’s disappearance and discovers the secret behind nine years without children.

4.10pm, Tuesday 8 March 2022, Ikoyi, Lagos

Dami knocked three times on her brother-in-law’s front door and hated herself a little for doing it.

The gateman had let her in without a word. He had looked at her the way servants look at a family argument: with great courtesy and total attention. “Madam Dami, Oga dey inside,” he said. “No wahala.”

There was a great deal of wahala. She had been carrying it in her chest for three weeks.

Tunde opened the door himself. He wore a grey polo shirt and the expression of a man who had been expecting her, though no one had called ahead. He was freshly shaved, and his eyes were clear. His hands hung at his sides without a tremor, and that, Dami thought, was the first wrong thing. Nobody’s hands are steady when their wife is missing.

“Dami. My sister.” He opened his arms. She did not walk into them. After a moment, he let them drop, smiling, as if that had been the plan.

“Come in. Let me get you something.”

“I’m fine.”

“Water, then.”

“I said I’m fine, Tunde.”

She walked past him into the house.

The sitting room was a show-flat of itself. Cream sofas. A glass table with one expensive book on it, opened to a photograph of a fishing boat. A wall of framed prints. It was a room built to be photographed, not to be sat in, and Eni had always looked a little like a guest in it.

By the door, on a small brass tray where keys usually went, lay a wedding ring.

Dami looked at it for exactly one second and then looked away, the way you look away from the sun.

She sat down on the edge of a sofa. Tunde took the armchair opposite and crossed one leg over the other.

She had prepared for this. She had stood in her bathroom that morning and decided that she would not shout and she would not cry. She would ask questions the way she checked a prescription: one at a time, in order, and without expecting kindness from the answers.

“When did you last see her?”

“Tuesday the fifteenth of February.” He answered at once. “She left for the pharmacy at eight. She kissed me on the cheek.”

“Did she say anything?”

“She said, don’t forget my mother’s call.”

“Did you quarrel?”

“No.”

“Ever?”

“Dami. We’re married. Everybody quarrels.”

“Not that week.”

“Not that week.”

He sipped from a glass of water he had somehow acquired. She watched his Adam’s apple move.

“What did she take with her?”

“Her handbag. Her phone.”

“A suitcase?”

“No.”

“Money?”

The smallest pause. It would have been invisible to anyone who had not spent a lifetime watching her own husband pick his words.

“None that I know of.”

“Her passport?”

“In the drawer.”

“Then she hasn’t left the country.”

“No.”

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time, a thread of something crossed his face. It could have been grief. It could have been calculation. In Tunde, she thought, the two had always worn the same coat.

“Why is her ring in the dish?”

He did not look toward it.

“She takes it off when she goes to the gym.”

“For three weeks?”

“Maybe she forgot.”

“Eni has never forgotten anything in her life.”

He spread his hands: what do you want me to say?

“Have you reported it to the police?”

There it was. She watched the question land in his face like a coin in a well, and she heard the long fall before the sound.

“There is no need.”

“No need?”

“She is a grown woman, Dami. She has gone away to think. She will come back.”

“Your wife has been gone for three weeks and has not called her mother, her sister or her pharmacy. And you have not told the police.”

“I have told people who matter.”

“Who?”

“My mother.”

“And what did your mother say?”

“She said, now you can find a wife who will give you a child.”

The room was very quiet.

“Is there anyone else?” Dami asked.

“What do you mean?”

“A man. A friend. A person she could have gone to.”

“Eni?” He laughed, and it came out wrong, too short and with no air in it. “Dami. You know your sister. She does not have a secret life. She has a ledger.”

“Did you ever hurt her?”

“No.”

He said it quickly. Too quickly, and then, as if he had heard himself, he said it again more slowly.

“No. Never.”

She let the silence sit between them, and she saw, with a small, cold lift of surprise, that she was the one who was calm.

It was only afterwards, in the car, that she would understand what had been missing from the whole conversation. Tunde had answered every question. He had not asked her one. Not Have you heard from her? Do you know where she is? Has she called you?

A man who did not know where his wife was would have asked that first.

4.50pm

“May I use your bathroom?”

“Of course. Upstairs, or there’s the one in the hall.”

She took the guest bathroom in the hall. It was small and spotless, with a shell-shaped soap dish and a neat roll of paper in a wooden holder. She washed her hands for no reason. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw, to her annoyance, that her eyes were wet.

She reached for the paper towel and saw the bin.

It was a little steel pedal bin beside the sink, lined with a white plastic bag. She would never have looked at it, except that something silver glinted near the top.

She lifted the lid.

A blister strip lay on top of a crumpled tissue. Silver foil, a calendar of pale round marks, each one pressed out, all the way down to the last.

Dami knew it at once. She had counted them into brown envelopes for twelve years. A month’s supply of the oral contraceptive pill. Spent. Finished, with the care of a woman who never missed a day.

She stood there with the lid in her hand.

She thought of the mother-in-law. The Sunday lunches. Is there a medicine for what you have? Nine years of Eni at the head of a table, nodding gravely while a family mourned the child she had never had.

Her sister had not been unable.

Her sister had been choosing.

Dami lowered the lid, very gently, until it closed without a sound.

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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.