Fiction | Short Story

Rain

What did it take to divert poisonous attention? Beauty. Sinful amounts of it.

Wura Blackson was determined to rest in peace.

To make sure of this, she was going to die alone. She wasn’t going to go the traditional way: surrounded on her deathbed by family members who would hold her hand, smile weakly into her face and pray for her, singing worship songs as her body crossed over. Wura was not that kind of believer. As clearly as some people remembered the day they gave their lives to Christ, she remembered the day she took hers back: a dull Sunday evening over a plate of pounded yam and efo riro when she realized she no longer wanted to cover her food with the blood of Jesus. She had spent all her life praying that prayer and she decided quite suddenly that Jesus had already lost enough blood and she didn’t need to be part of the millions of people summoning more.

With just as much clarity, Wura decided, two years after that day, on her new faith.

When Wura believed in heaven and hell, Wura (of course) wanted heaven with all the cells in her body. She wanted to be right so badly, to be ushered into the afterlife by a warm, holy light and be told well done. But now? She couldn’t imagine an eternity—no matter its promises of golden streets and many mansions—that didn’t feel like punishment. She was done with gold and singing and architecture. She’d done a lot of living and was grateful for it, sure, but what she wanted at the end of it was for the room she died in to be still enough for her to hear her own body go quiet, to hear her heart stagger towards its final punctuation. For her death to feel correct, she knew she had to be the one who thought that final thought: it is done—as she slid past the slippery threshold into nirvana, into nothingness. After that thought came, what she wanted was silence. No wailing, no mourning, no dramatic grieving, no swollen sighs. A quiet movement away.

Wura knew how she would like to die way before the cancer, way before Rain. From as early as age eight, Wura knew in her body that she wouldn’t rest in peace unless she died well. As an adult, that warning had only grown louder. Still, because she was Nigerian and part of a large, sprawling family tree, the possibility of family overriding her wishes—forcing her body into a shiny casket and then into the ground instead of honoring the cremation she wanted—grew up with her omnipresently; because what do large families love more than opportunities to perform the grief they’ve been storing? It’s a comfort for people, sometimes, depending on who has gone—the world turning towards them with tenderness, faces softening, offering condolences. Wura had relatives who lived their whole lives for the relief of that moment—just them, finally, in the eyeline of compassion. So she decided not to tell her family about her cancer. It was a way to hold control.

Wura didn’t get there alone. It was Rain who confronted her once, in a concerned voice, “You’ve lived your entire life for people. All these years and you’ve convinced yourself that you want what they want you to want, but do you?”

“What do you mean?” Wura had asked her.

“You hate events, but you go to them. You hate geles, but you still wear them to parties. You didn’t want children and yet, you summoned me. If you’d found someone to marry, I don’t doubt that you’d have gotten married too, even though you hate weddings, even though you don’t even want to be somebody’s. Where does it end?”

“This is Nigeria,” Wura said weakly. “You won’t understand how it is. Wise as you are, you’re still a child. You literally came out of nowhere. I live here.”

“And so? It’s Nigeria, but this is also your life. What do you want?”

So, Wura thought hard about it. Alive, she didn’t want anything more than she wanted her work. It was her safety, her sanity, the place where she went to become her real self. But Rain was asking about an ultimate want. The answer couldn’t be work. Wura searched herself for a way to explain what she’d always known. What would that be called in summary? How to break it down to a child? “Peace,” she told Rain, finally. “Some silence. Something for myself after giving to everyone else. Freedom from you know . . . all this, at the end.”

*

Throughout the country, Wura’s name was sacred amongst upper-class women who, despite (and because of) the terrible secrets in their lives, needed to look arresting at parties. Wura started her brand on this realization: Gossipers were easily distracted. If you arrived confidently, looking like you had no skeleton, people would forget the scandal until they got home and had the breathing space to think. It was a tried and tested theory. Wura knew this from her own life. She’d started out by making dresses for herself and her best friends, after all—all of them from families whose names grew loud in the spotlight, whose fathers were corrupt leaders who’d robbed the country insane. The dresses she made were a healing, in that they were tailored for specific problems. The sharper the pain, the more dramatic the fabric; the deeper the cuts, the louder the sleeves; the weightier the story, the more precise the tail. It wasn’t long before people started to ask where they got their clothes from. “I make them,” she’d tell curious women in the thumping heart of an owambe, bodies flowing past. And they’d gasp and beg her to take their measurements right there and then. “Call me,” she started to say, then. “Here’s my card.” And two turned to ten to hundreds.

Wura’s work stood out because her creativity was bottomless. She was the only designer in Lagos they knew who didn’t take repeat orders, who never made one outfit twice. She left her job and opened a large store on Admiralty Road as a way to leap into the dream, yes, but only because she could. Her old job was with the family business—what were they going to do? Cane her? Women swarmed into the store, showing Wura photos of her own designs in City People and Ovation, saying just like this. Men with hefty names came, too, for Valentine’s Day presents, Mother’s Day presents, I’m Sorry I Cheated Again presents—but her answer for all of them was the same: I don’t repeat my designs.

When Wura hit a block and had nothing in her she could pull for original material, she closed her store for however long she needed to and disconnected the phone. In her twenty-year career, she’d done this only twice: the year she almost ran mad and the year Rain appeared. Both times, she returned to the store foaming at the door with bodies. When wearing a Wura Blackson piece, women found themselves feeling taller, bigger, unquestionable. The actor Ifechi Adams said in an interview that wearing Wura Blackson was the closest she’d ever felt to being god. Wura knew the city like the palm of her hand—beyond its skin and blaring heart rate. She knew what Lagos demanded and what it took to appease it. What did it take to divert poisonous attention? Beauty. Sinful amounts of it. Silk pouring from women’s elbows, jewelry resting on their clavicles, hips like small hills, expensive scents, air kiss one, air kiss two—meticulous masks.

Wura took only two hundred clients a year. Each client was assigned an hour where they could tell Wura anything they wanted to, and Wura would respond not with advice or apology, but with a sketch. A 70th birthday? Alright, wear this, she’d say, putting HB pencil to A4 paper. Your sugar daddy’s funeral? Oh, then this. Your husband’s nth mistress will be there? Definitely this. And it wasn’t very often that a woman in distress would argue with her sketch, because Wura was attentive, and thus, rarely wrong.

The women who came to her knew that Wura had grief of her own, too, but they never dared confront her about it. Once, a woman tried it. “Was your father the Chief Blackson?” she asked. By the Chief Blackson, she meant the one whose assassination the government ordered. His car had been shot three times a year prior to his death, and he’d lost all function in one arm as a result. But that wasn’t enough, so they sent a letter bomb just to finish off the job. His wife ran away before all this, to Godknowswhere. When it happened, Wura knew why. She found out about her father’s other life the year she turned ten—planting boys in the streets to kidnap white expatriates, demanding hefty ransoms in pounds and euros only—but try as she did, she couldn’t hate him. By the time they traced it all to him, he’d looted enough to sustain two generations and stowed it all away in a Swiss Bank. It was his way of saying: My daughter, I have taken care of you.

Chief Blackson was a notoriously busy mogul, but still he made time. And her parents together? Whew, a fortress. A powerhouse. The year her father was first detained, a riot broke out; area boys demanding his immediate release. Her parents were thieves in the truest sense, yes, but which billionaire was not? At least they did something for the people; they had veins in the streets—they could feel every need. Chief always told Wura, “It’s only someone you feel you need that you have to listen to as they insult you. When you need nobody, you can show everybody the door, even the Commander-in-Chief of your entire country. And how do you need nobody? Through money, which is freedom.” It wasn’t the kind of thing one should tell a child, but Wura’s parents knew that their time alive was limited. They had to give what wisdom they could, and quick. They’d always known.

So Wura simply shook her head and told the nosy woman, “No, that is another Blackson.” When the woman was done talking about her issues, Wura said she had no dress for her, which was worse than seizing her jaw in an uppercut. The woman pleaded. She asked to be permitted to look around, but Wura insisted that the dresses were all taken, that it was crunch season and she wasn’t the only one with a problem. Wura had the power to have the woman taken out by security when she began being dramatic, but it was punishment enough for her to watch her melt into hysterics instead, her knees submitting to the ground. Wura stood tall over her, feeling unsorry.

“I’ll soon leave,” the woman said, desperation peaking in her voice, when she realized Wura’s mind was unchangeable. “But please, let me just gather myself. My driver is outside.”

Her parents were thieves in the truest sense, yes, but which billionaire was not?

“Take her to the crying room,” Wura said to her assistant, disinterested. The crying room was a well-ventilated thickly dark room with rows of lounge chairs flown in from Italy. Sometimes, women spent an entire work day in there. To enter, Wura gave them noise-cancelling headphones, so that they wouldn’t have to hear other women wailing. Each chair was sectioned away by a room divider. When women left the room, they often asked, “How do you keep the room so dark? It’s almost like it breathes black smoke.” She’d laugh, pat them on the back, and see them off.

Inside, the woman didn’t cry. She sighed a hundred times as tears rolled down, until she was ready.

Outside the door and behind her back, Wura looked at the assistant and said, “If you like yourself, don’t ever let me see her here again.”

“Yes ma,” the assistant said, meaning it with all the bones she had.

*

Success was a drug on its own, but Wura still had outside voices in her head, so she sat still with a question a friend asked aloud one day: What’s life without love? She took stock and realized that yes, she had the longest waiting list of VVIP clients in the country, but well, that was it. And she was okay with that, until she wasn’t. She thought to herself: I need a person of my own. I need someone who comes from my body, who is a citizen of me, who I can teach about life. I need a child.

And then she got pregnant. And then she decided that she was going to name her daughter Esther. She also decided that her daughter was going to be one of the most beautiful children in Lagos, that she was going to give birth to one no person with a heart could ignore. She could already see into the future: clients pouring into the store and ooh’ing and aah’ing, saying what a wonderful mother you are, she looks just like you. Her whole life, she’d lived on the rim of normalcy; maybe a child would be the cure, maybe this decision would finally shift her in. Wura was strong, yes, and she had unconventional beliefs, also yes, but she was still in a bleedable body. She was still a human being—which meant that as much as she hated to admit it, she was still malleable; she still said yes to many things she wanted to say no to.

People’s weddings and funerals, for instance. Rain was right. Wura hated both for their excesses, and each time she showed up to one, she swore to herself that it would be the last time. I’m never doing this again, she used to think, as the bride walked down the aisle or the choir croaked their hymns or as professional mourners burst into the tears they’d been hired to cry. Never. And still, whenever she entered her house and Sanusi, her gateman, handed her yet another invitation from a loyal client, she did the same thing every time—she took off her shoes at the door, put down her bag, sighed, and then began sketching a dress. When done, she’d get on the phone to her tailors. “Afternoon. Yes. Another black boubou. You know the style. You have my measurements. Yes, cut it. I’ll be there to do the finishing myself.” She couldn’t get herself to stop. She was Wura Blackson, after all, a household name that was spoken often and said exactly like that each time: Always complete. Never Wura, never Ms. Blackson. Always Wura Blackson.

She knew exactly why these women depended on her in that way, why she was a relevant witness in the first place. They’d all told her too much about their lives. She listened. And in turn, they came back again and again and again. Even in the deepest recession, when other brands experienced a nosedive in demand, Wura’s grew skyscrapingly high. Who else could Lagosians point to that had grown bigger every single year for decades since she started out? No one. At least not in fashion, with its volatile affections. The others who’d lasted had made it because they shifted with the times, but time bent to meet Wura where she’d always been standing. She didn’t make anything to trend; she threaded each outfit out of individual pain, out of growling grief, which was an omnipresent resource for those who knew how to tap it correctly. Still, she knew they would talk if clients who’d spent millions of naira on her clothes invited her to come to a husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/child’s wedding or funeral and she said no. All that calcified malice would be all over the papers. She needed them just as much as they needed her: She made her best work under their influence; their secrets were endless fodder, and Wura enjoyed peeling their layers open. Besides, she was worried. Wouldn’t a no multiply her clients’ grief? Wouldn’t it be cruel?

“No,” her daughter had said to her for what felt like the millionth time, her voice impatient. “Being obsessed with what people think will kill you one day. You need to be careful. You can say no. You have cancer, for God’s sake! And even if you didn’t have cancer, so what? Are they going to beat you? They talk about everyone. Everyone talks about people, including you—and you don’t see those people you judge dropping dead.”

Wura shrugged. She had no way of knowing that she wouldn’t drop dead. Wasn’t she disintegrating already? Who knew how much life was left in her.

“Try it,” Rain said. “Try to say the word.”

“What word?”

“You know the one I mean.”

“No,” Wura said. The word sounded like a plant withering.

“Good,” Rain said, smiling honestly, “that’s a start. We’ll strengthen it together.”

*

Rain arrived out of nowhere—irritable, fully formed, complete with a voice and full of defiance. Not a baby. Her first words were, “I can’t believe you wanted to name me after your horror film of a mother. I could never have allowed that.”

“My mother was not a horror film,” Wura retorted, still shocked by this barrage of a presence in her room, but too tired to properly process the bizarreness of it. She’d seen enough strange things already. Earlier that week, she’d gone to the doctor to complain about dizzy spells on what would-have-been her child’s due date had it stayed, only to receive news some days later that she was going to die. And then to come back home to meet this? She was exhausted.

“Got it,” Rain said. “If you say so. But good luck convincing me of that. And just so you know: I will never show myself to any of your relatives. If you try to force me, you will never see me again.”

Before Rain, horror was not a word Wura would ever have associated with her mother. “Strict” or “disciplinarian” she used often, but she wasn’t about to start defending herself. She did notice her heart speeding, though.

“Stop looking around like that,” Rain said. “She’s not here. It’s just me.”

Wura took a deep breath, realizing her own fear. “So what do you want to be called?”

“It’s not about what I want to be called. It’s about what my actual name is. It’s Rain.”

“Rain,” Wura repeated after her, and the girl smiled like the world made sense. With her lips pulled back like that, Wura recognized her—she had the same teeth as her, with the half-inch gap in her smile. This was her daughter, and she knew it. It didn’t make sense, but it did.

“What?” Rain asked.

“Of course my daughter would have a sharp mouth,” Wura said, shaking her head. “Clearly the universe believes in opposites.” Rain cackled, which made Wura smile.

Wura had gotten pregnant with the idea that she’d have at least a few years to adjust to this part: when the child could talk and ask questions. She’d thought she’d have time to figure out what to do in case of rudeness or rebellion, since she didn’t plan to hit her child. But now that the daughter was here and rude, all Wura could do was stare at her.

“Just a warning,” Rain said, reading Wura’s face. “I don’t come with a mask. Or a filter. I say what I actually think.”

“Okay,” Wura said again, too full of joy to hear both the words and the warning inside them. She wasn’t alone anymore. She could deal with anything, including this blade of a child.

“Well,” Rain said, swinging her feet from the edge of the bed. “You asked for a daughter. I’m here. I’m excited. Aren’t you?”

*

Rain had no time to waste. For a person who was above and beyond time in itself, there was not much to fear. Whatever society wanted her to be was what she refused to become, and she proved that from the beginning. She had existed before and she would do it again and again, if provoked. Her other mothers had barely survived her, but Wura was strong enough for it. She knew. So Rain started their relationship by refusing to be born. When Wura was six months pregnant with her, sewing a boubou for the First Lady, Rain purged herself out of Wura on the storeroom floor, clot by clot, only to arrive by herself at the nine-month mark—already wise and wordy.

She wasn’t all mean. Or rather, she wasn’t mean at all. She just wasn’t interested in being seen.

“How old are you even?” Wura asked.

“As old as you want me to be.”

So Wura sent Rain to YHS, an expensive secondary school on the more enviable side of the bridge. Every year, she paid her fees and no questions were asked, because it was a school, after all, and what did it matter if she owed nothing. Wura attended all PTA meetings, a quiet presence at the back of the hall. And because she always showed up with her face all dark and sunglassed, no one dared point her out to ask, which one is your child? Questions like that were for smiling women. She could see Rain and Rain could see her clearly, and Wura had learned to make that all that mattered. Cancer could do that. So could this daughter. Besides, who cared which student matched which parent, if not for gist sake?

Rain was nothing like Wura had been as a child, a student. Rain loved school; she loved learning; she loved teaching Wura new things. She talked about how all the girls were just so obsessed with boys and getting their attention when boys were nothing special at all. She didn’t like girls either, really, but if she had to choose who to kiss, she would pick a girl.

“Your mouth ehn,” Wura teased. “This your mouth will put you into trouble one of these days.”

“With who?” Rain asked back, her neck a curious arc. She waited a few seconds and then said, “let me go and change.” Wura couldn’t think of a smart answer in good time and she agonized over it all night, turning from side to back to belly in bed. What kind of child was this, so unafraid of the world? How could one raise a child that only they could see?

“It’s okay,” Rain said the next morning, her voice gone all toddlered, thinning out on itself. This was one of the endless wonders of her: She could switch between ages, between genders, between temperaments whenever she so pleased. Sometimes she became thunderous for no reason at all, and other times she was gentle as a drizzle. She could be a cruel girl, or the sweetest boy ever; a son it never occurred to Wura to pray for, with a dark storm of hair tumbling down his back. “I’ll let you win next time, okay?”

It was true that when Wura imagined having a child, Rain was the furthest thing from her mind. But now that this was what she got, she didn’t hide Rain either. She told the clients she was close to, like Ms. Kolawole, her longest standing customer, about her daughter. She doted on her.

“When will we finally meet this daughter of yours, ehn, my sister? Na so so hear we dey hear of the girl, when will we see her?”

“When we’re ready,” Wura said, even though she knew Rain would never agree.

The only other person Rain had ever shown herself to was Wura’s heaven—a woman named Adura. After all the old friends had fallen off like dead leaves, after work had swallowed Wura completely, Adura was the only person who had ever heard Wura’s real words out of her real mouth. When Adura met Rain, she didn’t try to tell her to brush her hair or that her skirt was too short. She didn’t think it either, or Rain would’ve been able to tell. She also didn’t think Rain was pretty; she thought she was brilliant and self-assured, which pleased the girl. The three of them lay down on the floor, rolled around in the duvet together until they were perfectly wrapped, like three sausage rolls—and watched a film from there. The only way to explain the way Rain felt around her was using the word glee. Wura liked seeing Rain like that, so she tried to invite Adura over more, but Adura both had a secret wife of her own and a multinational to head. She wanted to stay; she made that clear, but there was only so much time. Real life was still real life, some risks cost too much.

“It’s okay,” Rain told Wura as she cried over the end. “It’s okay if your heart is breaking. Maybe you’ll get over it or maybe you won’t, but you’ll still be you. And you’re a crucial person to be. And you still have your work. Your work makes you so, so bright. Put it all into your work.”

*

Rain sheathed her mouth while Wura worked. She was cotton candy in Wura’s life while Wura stowed herself away and made her final collection called The Hundred, which rearranged every ache in her body by the time she was done. Wura sent messages to her favorite clients and asked them not to spread the word. On the night before launch, she fell asleep in her office overnight to Rain singing to her. By the time she woke up, there was a queue the length of two anacondas outside. Customers fought each other at the door, yelling. There were men, women, children. Wura kept the door locked and refused to serve anyone.

“I’m proud of you,” Rain said, as Wura played Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.”

“For?”

“For not opening the door. Your nos are getting stronger.”

“Yeah,” Wura said. And then after some time, she asked, “What will happen to you when I die?”

Rain didn’t flinch. “I’ll just go back to where I came from.”

“Where did you come from?” Wura couldn’t believe how long it’d taken her to ask this.

Rain laughed a shaky laugh that made her eyes a dark kind of wet. Her voice stiffened. “Where are you going when you die?”

“To nothing. Me, I’m fading to black.”

“Exactly.”

“Fair enough. Are you scared? Of losing me, I mean.” Wura sometimes worried that she wasn’t doing enough, that motherhood was not supposed to be this easy. But Rain appeared without a need to be cared for. Too much softness suffocated her. She reacted violently to being touched out of the blue, to being held.

Rain chortled and shook her head No. Then she asked. “Are you scared of losing yourself?”

Wura thought about it. No one had asked her a question like that before. “Hardly. I just didn’t expect it to come so soon, you know? The pain, the treatments, all that? Those things are exhausting. Sometimes, I feel like I’m vanishing.”

“Blue in Green” entered the room and Wura sat up, playing her fingers in the air. Her song.

“That’s fair,” Rain said, seeing Wura’s attempt at lightening the mood. There wasn’t that much time left for hints, though; she knew. So, “What kind of death do you want? How would you like to go?”

What kind of child was this, so unafraid of the world?

Wura put her hands down and sighed. “A silent one,” she said, before she could stop herself. And then, “Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t that an odd thing to say to a daughter? That I don’t want anyone there?”

“Not when that daughter is me. I won’t wilt because you chose to die alone, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m me and you’re you. Have a silent death, mummy. You deserve what you want.”

It was this first time Wura had ever heard the M word directed at her from Rain’s mouth with such inescapable gentleness. She choked on a tear. “Are . . . are you sure?” she asked.

Rain moved closer and nudged her. Suddenly, Wura knew what she had to do.

*

Wura needed herself more than she needed any more secrets. So, she shut down the store. Her staff were to deliver the final collection to the hundred clients she’d made them for, with a personalized note each, she decided. All gifts. What did she need more money for?

For Ms. Kolawole, she wrote: I’ve always admired your strength and confidence. I think you’re a woman who will shine in this world if you really allow yourself to. Don’t let them tie you to a tree. This is your final dress from me. Cancer. Find other dresses. Wear them well. The magic is not in the fabric. It is in your body, your bones, your blood. —WB

Also the daughter of a dodgy billionaire whose source of income no one knew, Wura trusted Ms. Kolawole because she knew what questions not to ask and she did not mistake the silent understanding between them for friendship. Ms. Kolawole knew that the world was harsh, and so she clung only to her clothes and her jewelry and her Bible. She too was a woman who often heard the words: “You’re so lucky, I’ll do anything to be you.” She too wished she had the energy to ask “at what cost?” But women like that didn’t need to talk too much, they didn’t need to self identify; their suffering was encrypted in the dark crescents under their eyes. She had seen Wura and Wura had seen her.

Wura’s second favorite client was a man called Mr. Teniola Jones. Wura has sewn over ten fitted evening dresses with tails and veils for him, for his private life. He only wore them at home, with pearls and silk gloves, and he always sent her photographs. For him, she sent a note saying: You give me courage. You are legitimate even when you’re the only one who knows how to translate yourself onto your body. You are not invisible; you are real. And never alone. I feel you even now. Trust yourself. Take care. —WB

He cried hard on the phone to her, asking, “What do I do now? What do I do?”

“You live,” she said. “You live at whatever cost you can bear. That’s all you can do.” When he asked her what she needed, she said space. Mr. Jones respected this.

Ms. Kolawole was harder to convince. She asked to bring Wura food to the hospital. Yam and owo. Her cook made the best kind, she said. “I’ll be quiet if you want me to be. Just to drop the food and go. It’s the least I can do.”

Wura agreed and dropped the phone. The dress that took the longest was for Rain.

*

Ms. Kolawole arrived with the food, but also with a Bible, because if there was anything she knew, it was that Wura Blackson did not deserve to go to hell. After all she’d done on earth, she didn’t want her to be thrown into a lake of fire where she would burn forever, her skin regenerating each time only to slide off the bone again. She felt like she owed it to Wura to tell her about the gospel. So she watched Wura as she ate the yam and then she asked, with steady searching eyes, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

Wura wanted to lie, but she could feel Rain’s voice in her ear telling her to flex the word, flex the word. “No,” Wura said.

“I will make you one promise,” Ms. Kolawole said. “If you just give your life to Christ and pray this scripture I give you—this Psalm 91—every single day, no matter how far gone this cancer is, God will heal you.” She believed herself. There were greater miracles in the Bible. What was a little healing?

Wura considered it. Yes, she had come to terms with dying. And yes, she’d released the suffering around it. Yes. But she was still in a body, and there were times when the thought of dying ate her from the inside. She thought she’d last longer. She’d wanted a different future. She wanted more time with Rain.

But Rain’s voice again. Like showers on zinc. Wura asked, “So if I don’t give my life to Christ, your God can’t heal me?”

Ms. Kolawole tried to figure out what to say next. “He can, but you have to surrender first. You have to let him in for him to be able to work on you. He doesn’t go anywhere uninvited.” Inside her, her heart was somersaulting, but she stood her ground even as the concrete of the hospital floor seemed to be shifting. “Know this God and know peace. Don’t let all this talent you have go to waste.”

Wura realized she felt sorry for Ms. Kolawole. There was so much desperation in her face, so much effort. But as irritating as the conversation was, Wura got it. Religion helped people cope with death. In the absence of it, what people had was no explanation for all bodies being lowered into the ground, for all the fell-asleep-and-didn’t-wake-up, all the senseless shootings, all the disappearances, all the bodies being taken by clingy diseases. No explanation for how a body could be full of breath and life one minute, only to become a vacant case of flesh. It’d be the body you knew and loved, the body you held and hugged or fucked or kissed, but it would no longer be the person. Just unclaimed organs inside.

“Wura,” Ms. Kolawole said, her eyes watering. “Please. Just consider it. Just try God and see.”

As much as Ms. Kolawole was sure that this was what she wanted Wura to know, that this was the only way to secure eternal life, she was terrified by how calm Wura seemed to be. How immovable. How already at peace. Most sinners she’d told about Jesus Christ were stubborn and argumentative or rude and dismissive. But Wura was just . . . there.

“What does your God offer you?” Wura asked.

Easy. Ms. Kolawole knew this answer by heart. “An abundant life here on earth. Forgiveness for all sins. Eternal life in a heaven with no pain. Don’t you want no pain?”

Wura shrugged.

“Can I pray with you?”

Wura needed this to be over. She wanted to smile and say, “let me think about it,” then tell the nurses not to let Ms. Kolawole in again. But she was too tired now. She was too close to gone to still be that much of a coward. So, “No,” Wura said. “I’m okay. I’ve heard you, but my answer is still no.”

Ms. Kolawole knew she was overstepping now, but she’d gone too far to stop. She loved Wura, she really did. “What do you believe will happen after you die?”

“Well, I’ll either return or become nothing. I’m hoping to become nothing.”

Wura saw Ms Kolawole’s eyes soften with pity. “Ahhh,” she said, fear-pity swimming through her voice. She was tearing up. “Ah, Wura.”

“You look scared,” Wura said chortling. She sounded like Rain. “Are you afraid of what your God will do to me?”

“Hm. Wura,” Ms Kolawole said, picking up her bag, facing the door, trying to sidestep any possible blasphemy. “Look. It’s okay if you don’t want to listen to me. I will be praying for you. But please, if you change your mind, shey you know you can call me? Or just invite Jesus into your heart and ask him to take over. Wura, God will ask you about this moment. God will ask you.”

“And I will answer,” Wura said. “You’re the one who’s scared, not me.”

“Can I leave this with you?” Ms Kolawole asked, referring to the Bible.

“No,” Wura said. “You need it more than I do.”

*

The next day, Ms. Kolawole went again, her body both full and empty from praying and fasting—and was told that Wura was already dead. Ms. Kolawole bribed the nurse to tell her more. “She didn’t let anybody come inside,” the nurse said. “But she didn’t seem afraid. She asked for water and music. The next time we went to check in on her, she was gone.”

Back at home, Ms. Kolawole’s six sons welcomed her at the door. She was too tired to reply to them. Now more than ever, she wished she’d had the daughter she was trying to get instead of this loud clan of boys who wouldn’t stop bickering about football. She gave birth to six of them, all in an effort to get that one girl she could talk to, show things to, pass down her dresses to. And still.

“Mummy needs to sleep,” she told them and locked her door.

Inside her room, she tried on the final dress again and cried. On her knees, she repeated Mark Ch9v24: “I believe, help my unbelief. Ibelievehelpmyunbelief

Ibelievehelpmyunbeliefhelpmyunbeliefhelpmyunbelief.”

A presence entered the room and stirred the air. Ms. Kolawole was terrified. She wasn’t ready to see God.

“What’s your name?” she asked the figure. “Who are you? Who are you?!”

The presence thickened and Ms. Kolawole started backing away. “I rebuke you!” she said, hand over her eyes. “I plead the blood of Jesus, I plead the blood of Jesus! Jesus!”

“Calm down,” the presence said back, and Ms. Kolawole lowered her hand, watching it solidify into the shape of a girl. The girl was wearing a black dress embroidered with ruby stones at the neck. Her eyes shone, but Ms. Kolawole knew that face. She had dreamt that face for years.

“My name is Rain,” the girl said. “You asked for a daughter. I’m here.”