Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re always pleasing other people.’

‘I’m not doing this for him. This is not his idea.’

‘Why are you doing it then?’

‘She was so helpless. I felt as if I knew her.’

Kainene said nothing for a while. Olanna pulled at the phone wire.

‘I think this is a very brave decision,’ Kainene said finally.

Although Olanna heard her clearly, she asked, ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s very brave of you to do this.’

Olanna leaned back on the seat. Kainene’s approval, something she had never felt before, was like a sweetness on her tongue, a surge of ability, a good omen. Suddenly her decision became final; she would bring the baby home.

‘Will you come for her baptism?’ Olanna asked.

‘I still haven’t visited that dusty hell, so yes, maybe I will.’

Olanna hung up, smiling.

Mama brought the baby, wrapped in a brown shawl that had the unpleasant smell of ogiri. She sat in the living room and cooed to the baby until Olanna came out. Mama got up and handed the baby over.

‘Ngwanu. I will visit again soon,’ she said. She seemed in an uncomfortable hurry, as if the whole business was one that she was quick to finish.

After she left, Ugwu examined the baby, his expression slightly worried. ‘Mama said the baby looks like her mother. It is her mother come back.’

‘People just look alike, Ugwu, it doesn’t mean they reincarnate.’

‘But they do, mah. All of us, we will come back again.’

Olanna waved him away. ‘Go and throw this shawl into the dustbin. It smells terrible.’

The baby was crying. Olanna hushed her and bathed her in a small basin and glanced at the clock and worried that the wet nurse, a large woman that Ugwu’s aunty had found, would be late. Later, after the nurse arrived and the baby fed at her breast and fell asleep, Olanna and Odenigbo looked down at her, lying face up in the cot near their bed. Her skin was a radiant brown.

‘She has so much hair, like you,’ Olanna said.

‘You’ll look at her sometimes and hate me.’

Olanna shrugged. She did not want him to think she was doing this for him, as a favour to him, because it was more about herself than it was about him.

‘Ugwu said your mother went to a dibia,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Ugwu thinks all this happened because your mother went to a dibia and his medicine charmed you into sleeping with Amala.’

Odenigbo was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s the only way he can make sense of it.’

‘The medicine should have produced the desired boy, shouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘It is all so irrational.’

‘No more irrational than belief in a Christian God you cannot see.’

She was used to his gentle jibes about her social-service faith and she would have responded to say that she was not even sure she believed in a Christian God that could not be seen. But now, with a helpless human being lying in the cot, one so dependent on others that her very existence had to be proof of a higher goodness, things had changed.

‘I do believe,’ she said. ‘I believe in a good God.’

‘I don’t believe in any gods at all.’

‘I know. You don’t believe in anything.’

‘Love,’ he said, looking at her. ‘I believe in love.’

She did not mean to laugh, but the laughter came out anyway. She wanted to say that love, too, was irrational. ‘We have to think of a name,’ she said.

‘Mama named her Obiageli.’

‘We can’t call her that.’ His mother had no right to name a child she had rejected. ‘We’ll call her Baby for now until we find the perfect name. Kainene suggested Chiamaka. I’ve always loved that name: God is beautiful. Kainene will be her godmother. I have to go and see Father Damian about her baptism.’ She would go shopping at Kingsway. She would order a new wig from London. She felt giddy.

Baby stirred and a new wave of fear enveloped Olanna. She looked at the hair shining with Pears oil and wondered if she could really do it, if she could raise a child. She knew it was normal, the way the baby was breathing too fast, as if panting in her sleep, and yet even that worried her.

The first few times she called Kainene that evening, there was no answer. Perhaps Kainene was in Lagos. She called again at night and when Kainene said, ‘Hello,’ she sounded hoarse.

‘Ejima m,’ Olanna said. ‘Do you have a cold?’

‘You fucked Richard.’

Olanna stood up.

‘You’re the good one.’ Kainene’s voice was controlled. ‘The good one shouldn’t fuck her sister’s lover.’

Olanna sank back down on the puff and realized that what she felt was relief. Kainene knew. She would no longer have to worry about Kainene’s finding out. She was free to feel real remorse.

‘I should have told you, Kainene,’ she said. ‘It meant nothing.’

‘Of course it meant nothing. It was just fucking my lover, after all.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Olanna felt the tears in her eyes. ‘Kainene, I’m so sorry.’

‘Why did you do it?’ Kainene sounded frighteningly calm. ‘You’re the good one and the favourite and the beauty and the Africanist revolutionary who doesn’t like white men, and you simply did not need to fuck him. So why did you?’

Olanna was breathing slowly. ‘I don’t know, Kainene, it wasn’t something I planned. I am so sorry. It was unforgivable.’

‘It was unforgivable,’ Kainene said and hung up.