Will disappears into the kitchen and reappears moments later with two glasses of water clutched in his hands. Even now, the life I know swirling down a drain I can’t plug, I’m circumspect enough to eye the glasses with caution.
He sighs. “They’re clean.”
“Thank you.” And I mean it, too, a steady gratitude creeping over my body as I accept one. This may not have been the outcome I wanted or was expecting, but I’m glad that Will has been honest with me.
A beat.
“So on Christmas Eve, James confessed to you that he killed his ex-girlfriend. And you want to come clean to the police, but he doesn’t.”
“That’s right. I mean, I feel horrible about it. Her parents were trying to get the case reopened for years. Kept shelling out money they don’t have on private investigators, the lot. And Chioma was always so nice to me, I—”
“Chioma?”
He pauses, puzzled. “Yeah.”
At once, I can feel my head getting hot and my blood running cold. “But that’s a Nigerian name.”
Will only looks more confused. “Yeah. She was.”
So I am not the first Black girl my husband has dated, despite everything he’s said. “Will, I’m going to need to know exactly what happened with Chioma, and why James refuses to talk about her.”
41
Then
James
Some people have hazy memories of their childhood, brains wiping away and fogging up the past until it remains only a vague impression, brief flashes of clarity. It’s not like that for me, my early years as sharp and clear in my mind as my adult life. In some ways, those early memories are clearer, purer.
It’s because of this that I can’t forget how potent my parents’ indifference toward me has always been. Sure, I was the younger son, and stories of spoiled younger children would constantly be spilling out of people’s mouths: friends, family, teachers. But it just wasn’t my reality. I actually used to embarrass myself arguing about it in school.
Well, Mommy wanted one child and to be named partner at her firm, but instead she has two children and nothing interesting to say at dinner parties. We all do things we don’t want to sometimes, darling. Eat your greens.
I was four when she said this to me. Shockingly, that knowledge of being unwanted has stuck.
Boys are cruel at the best of times, and the boys at my boarding school might have been even worse, so when I accidentally called one of our teachers—the hottest one—“Mom” in the lunch hall when I wastwelve, the already existing mommy issues I’d put on display made my life a living nightmare. One of the older boys overheard and nicknamed me Little Edie after Oedipus. Few of the boys my age knew the full origin story, but everyone knew that it meant I was a “mommy-fucker,” as it was so eloquently put.
It fucks up a boy’s brain having the concept of fucking his mother become a constant throughout his day, Little Edie picking up steam as a name. And if that didn’t suck enough, I’d then return home over the holidays paralyzed by the need to spend time with my mother and the opposing need to not seem like a needy, mother-loving freak. To prove them all wrong. Because I wasn’t Little Edie. Just James.
Whatever I wanted or was trying to do was irrelevant in the long run. My mother’s indifference toward me was so violent that the more I pulled away, the more content with me she seemed.
It’s with all this in mind that when I met Chioma in the leisure center in the next town over, I was immediately drawn in. It was the summer I was fifteen. I’d been with Will at the time, his friends larking about doing laps while Chioma and her friends were practicing handstands in the shallows. I was in the middle of a race, eyes blind to the gleaming legs stuck into the air with pointed feet.
The collision was slow but embarrassing all the same. I was ready for the angry words and mean looks. I’m someone who was always in the way, it seemed, and here I was in the way again. But as I gabbled out an apology, she gave me a smile with kind eyes.
“It’s okay,” she said.
We got chatting. She laughed at jokes I didn’t know I was making. Laughed at my “posh voice” but seemed to like it. When I told her things, she didn’t immediately try to argue with me. Prove me wrong. It was easy as we bobbed around in the water. And although I noticed Will’s friends elbowing one another and pointing our way, thecreeping rash of embarrassment that started to rise over me was eventually transformed into something else.
“He’s not bothering you, is he?” one of them said, splashing over.
“No.” Her voice was bright, beautiful.
“Because I can always get him to fall in line, you know,” he continued.
I then noticed how he was puffing his chest up. How he wanted to look important in front of her. And I looked at her again and took in how pretty she was. Fine braids, bright eyes, white smile. The boys didn’t put up posters of girls who looked like her in the dorm rooms, but I could tell that they thought she was desirable.
“I can do a wicked handstand, you know,” he went on.
