Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Author:Ayobami Adebayo [Adebayo, Ayobami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

21

Sesan was born on a Wednesday. I was at work when my water broke and it was Iya Bolu who drove me to the hospital. Her husband had just bought a new secondhand car and she had finally inherited his old Mazda and was learning to drive. Her driving experience had been limited to driving from the salon to her house and back, but she refused to put the red “L” sign in front of her number plates or anywhere on the car. I sat in the front seat and tried to give her driving tips in between contractions. I could have taken a taxi, but I let her drive me to the hospital. Perhaps because, on some level, I believed I deserved some punishment for what had happened to my daughter.

There were few people at Sesan’s naming ceremony. It was a small gathering that took place in our sitting room. Guests sat on dining chairs we had borrowed from our neighbours, ate Jollof rice, and went home an hour after the ceremony. Moomi did not even come. Her daughter Arinola, who now lived in Enugu, had also had a baby around that time and Moomi left for Enugu about a week before I gave birth to Sesan. No one travelled down from Lagos or Ife. There was no live band, no tarpaulin tent outside, no microphone, no DJ. There was no dancing.

Sesan’s middle name was Ige because he came feetfirst into this world. Those feet were good feet; there was no doubt in anyone’s mind after a few weeks that my son’s feet were as good as feet could get. Like all people with good feet, his arrival in our family was followed by all sorts of good things happening to us. For instance, Akin bought four plots of land for half the market value because the owner was swarming in debt and had to sell all his assets. That was not such a good thing for the poor man, but as with many things in life, sometimes one person’s good fortune is a direct consequence of another person’s ruin.

I was vigilant with Sesan. Akin thought I was becoming paranoid. He warned me that my son would grow up and never be able to marry because he would be overattached to me. And I wondered how on earth Sesan could be overattached to me when his life depended on him attaching his mouth to my breast. The way I saw it, the danger was in a child being underattached or not attached at all. I was fully prepared to padlock Sesan’s wrist to my apron strings and drag him around for the rest of my life.

Sesan was a peaceful child. He cried only when he needed to eat and even then his cries were punctuated by polite pauses. Sometimes I would check on him in the middle of the night to find him wide awake in his cot, chortling with his hands and legs in the air, enjoying his own company, not demanding attention.

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