Purple Hibiscus Read Free Page A

did not have dinner with the family. I developed a cough, and my cheeks burned the back of my hand. Inside my head, thousands of monsters played a painful game of catch, but instead of a ball, it was a brown leather-bound missal that they threw to each other. Papa came into my room; my mattress sank in when he sat and smoothed my cheeks and asked if I wanted anythingelse. Mama was already making me ofe nsala. I said no, and we sat silently, our hands clasped for a long time. Papa’s breathing was always noisy, but now he panted as if he were out of breath, and I wondered what he was thinking, if perhaps he was running in his mind, running away from something. I did not look at his face because I did not want to see the rashes that spread across every inch of it, so many, so evenly spread that they made his skin look bloated.
    Mama brought some ofe nsala up for me a little later, but the aromatic soup only made me nauseated. After I vomited in the bathroom, I asked Mama where Jaja was. He had not come in to see me since after lunch.
    â€œIn his room. He did not come down for dinner.” She was caressing my cornrows; she liked to do that, to trace the way strands of hair from different parts of my scalp meshed and held together. She would keep off plaiting it until next week. My hair was too thick; it always tightened back into a dense bunch right after she ran a comb through it. Trying to comb it now would enrage the monsters already in my head.
    â€œWill you replace the figurines?” I asked. I could smell the chalky deodorant under her arms. Her brown face, flawless but for the recent jagged scar on her forehead, was expressionless.
    â€œ
Kpa
,” she said. “I will not replace them.”
    Maybe Mama had realized that she would not need the figurines anymore; that when Papa threw the missal at Jaja, it was not just the figurines that came tumbling down, it was everything. I was only now realizing it, only just letting myself think it.
    I lay in bed after Mama left and let my mind rake throughthe past, through the years when Jaja and Mama and I spoke more with our spirits than with our lips. Until Nsukka. Nsukka started it all; Aunty Ifeoma’s little garden next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.
    But my memories did not start at Nsukka. They started before, when all the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red.

SPEAKING WITH OUR SPIRITS

    Before Palm Sunday

    I was at my study desk when Mama came into my room, my school uniforms piled on the crook of her arm. She placed them on my bed. She had brought them in from the lines in the backyard, where I had hung them to dry that morning. Jaja and I washed our school uniforms while Sisi washed the rest of our clothes. We always soaked tiny sections of fabric in the foamy water first to check if the colors would run, although we knew they would not. We wanted to spend every minute of the half hour Papa allocated to uniform washing.
    â€œThank you, Mama, I was about to bring them in,” I said, getting up to fold the clothes. It was not proper to let an older person do your chores, but Mama did not mind; there was so much that she did not mind.
    â€œA drizzle is coming. I did not want them to get wet.” She ran her hand across my uniform, a gray skirt with a darker-tonedwaistband, long enough to show no calf when I wore it. “
Nne
, you’re going to have a brother or a sister.”
    I stared. She was sitting on my bed, knees close together. “You’re going to have a baby?”
    â€œYes.” She smiled, still running her hand over my skirt.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œIn October. I went to Park Lane yesterday to