‘Why?’ he asked me when I finally found the voice to say no, his eyes the image of a lost puppy.
I thought of what to say and settled on the truth, with the dawning realisation that I would never find better. I could tell by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners and clouded over that he could never understand. He was kindness and beauty, a chance at newness and I’d turned him down.
After I ended things with Rodney, my mother called. I was lying in the dark even though it was day outside, the heavy blackout curtains doing their work.
‘Nwakaego, come and spend Christmas with me and Akin in America,’ my mother said. I’d spent every Christmas in London the same way: watching Home Alone in bed with microwaved food, wondering if anyone would notice if I died alone in my apartment.
‘I’m fine here,’ I said.
‘You’re not fine, I’m your mother and I know you’re not fine,’ she said. ‘Will you wait until I die to finally come and visit me here?’
‘Don’t talk like that!’
She laughed. ‘Talk like what? Do you think I’ll live forever?’
I typed up a leave request that night. Akin insisted on paying for my flights and my mother begged me to let him.
‘He wants to feel like a father figure to you, he sees you and your sisters as his children.’
Boston airport brought Lagos to mind – bustling crowds, constant motion, restless anticipation, everyone on a journey somewhere.
Akin stood at the arrivals terminal with a sign that read my name like there was a chance I would walk by him.
‘Nwakaego!’ he called, waving his card high and I rushed into an embrace that filled me with a warm sensation of safety.
‘Your mother is in the car,’ he said to me, taking my lone box. ‘Is that all?’ he asked, looking behind me like he expected a trolley filled with baggage to appear.
‘I have a backpack too,’ I said with a laugh, pointing at the bag at my back.
My mother was pacing anxiously by the side of a silver Ford Edge in the parking lot when we arrived.
‘She’s here!’ Akin announced when we were close enough. My mother did the running this time, pulling me into her arms and squeezing me so tight that my stepfather was forced to say, endearingly, ‘Smallie, she’s coming home with us.’
‘I used to think London was cold,’ I said as we drove down the snow-covered roads and high-rise buildings to Cambridge, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ playing on the car’s stereo, ‘but Massachusetts is COLD. I can feel the chill in my bones.’
‘At least you came here from London,’ my mother quipped. ‘Imagine how I felt arriving from hot hot Lagos. I thought I was going to die.’
Akin laughed. ‘You should have seen her that first winter, always shivering. Our heating bill was through the roof.’
‘Ahn-ahn, it wasn’t that bad.’ My mother slapped a palm blithely on his shoulder, and he shot her a look of such ardent devotion that I turned away, feeling like an intruder.
He’d been her first true love before she’d even known it, the one who’d endured through the years despite distance and marriage to my father and even though she never said it, I knew she wished she’d married him instead.
America was shimmering in colour: sparkling Christmas lights in the likeness of reindeers and sleighs, giant decorated trees covered in glowing orbs.
‘You people really take Christmas seriously here o,’ I commented as we passed a deer-drawn sleigh composed entirely of lights.
‘But you people decorate London for Christmas too – I’ve seen the pictures,’ my mother said.
‘Not like this o,’ I said. Or maybe I didn’t go out enough during Christmas to remember.
‘Christmas is a big tradition here, bigger than Thanksgiving I think,’ my mother admitted. ‘Even those that don’t believe do something. And they’ve managed to export the obsession to the rest of the world.’
‘The entire thing is capitalist anyways,’ Akin said glibly. ‘A way to get the masses to open their purses.’
‘Oh God, you’re about to go into lecturer mode again,’ my mother groaned.
‘America is very capitalist,’ I said.
‘Don’t encourage him!’
‘But it’s true,’ Akin said with a cheeky grin. ‘How else would what is meant to be a Christian celebration of the birth of a Hebrew messiah turn into all sorts of merchandise shilling. Corporates are pulling in millions of dollars annually from this.’
‘England is capitalist too,’ my mother said somewhat defensively, and I wondered when America had begun to mean so much to her. Did she wave flags on their Independence Day too? ‘Most western countries are.’
‘Well at least we have the NHS,’ I teased. ‘We’re not telling our people to die if they cannot afford healthcare.’
We did not speak of Nigeria or the state of its healthcare system.
Akin laughed. ‘She has a point.’
‘I thought you said it wasn’t your country,’ my mother grumbled.
Their home was how ours might have been in the absence of my father’s ever-present iron fist. There was no garish furniture, no gaudy chandeliers dripping from the ceilings; it was a home that embraced instead of intimidated.
‘Please treat this as your home,’ Akin said to me after he’d lifted my box up the stairs; my mother was downstairs in the kitchen, anxiously banging pots and pans together.
The sincerity of his words was evident, but left unsaid was his true desire – to take the place of my father. I questioned how much he wanted to wipe my mother’s memories of her years with my father.
