THE STAR CALLED PRIYE

My second mother wore a wide black, hat that exposed only her chin, but since I was right beside her, I clearly saw the contortion on her face, an ugly expression like the combination of a gleeful smile and a hateful sneer. Her black gown billowed in the wind, softly at first, then harshly, as the sky darkened and hesitant raindrops plummeted down as if the clouds themselves were grieving with us.

The priest’s solemn voice monotonously articulated the last farewell for Priye. Her embalmed body lay in the brown casket seven feet in front of us, quiet for the first time in seven months. Her picture was hugged to my chest, where her face blossomed with a pleasant smile that would forever haunt my dreams. The green, chiffon dress she wore in the picture was resting at the back of my wardrobe. I would wait for six months before wearing it along with all her clothes and jewelry that had become mine, even though it had only been seventy-two hours since she died.

Priye was my elder sister by three years. She was frail, sickly and short. But she was more intelligent than me, and she had a beautiful voice that mesmerized everyone in our school. Last year, her performance of Whitney Houston’s “I will Always Love You” was so breathtaking that our principal’s mottled face cracked a smile for the first time that term and he approached her in his black, pinstriped tuxedo to shake her hand. “That was marvellous. It reminded me of my late wife. She loved that song in our twenties,” he had croaked, looking wistful.

Priye had beamed with an ethereal radiance, looking more like an angel than a human being. If not for the leukaemia that ravaged her body…“Oh God, her mother died barely five years ago. Why?” my grandmother wailed in her wheelchair, her saggy cheeks throbbing with every sound she retched. “Why did she die so young?”

I looked at her, at the wispy patches of white hair on her head, and her wrinkled face. In eighty years. Priye could have resembled her. She would have enjoyed her old age, tending to her hibiscuses alongside a host of stubborn grandchildren. I pictured it for a moment, and gulped back a sob.

“Why?” Grandma cried again. She turned to look at me. “Priye, is this a dream? Wake me up!” She gestured at the coffin. “Wake Ifunnaya up, please!”

My second mother hushed her. “Priye is dead, Mama. The person you are talking to is Ifunnaya. The priest is still speaking.”

Did she ever wonder why Grandma kept making that mistake? Maybe not. Grandma’s eyesight was very poor anyway. Most times, she couldn’t see people until they were stooping very close to her nose. But I knew, and the truth was stuck in my throat like a goitre, something I couldn’t swallow, yet couldn’t spit out. Because my mother killed her before her time, I thought, answering grandma’s question silently, hugging Priye’s frame tighter. My mother was a more insidious disease than Leukaemia.

On those dreadful nights, three months ago, when Priye howled in her bed, my mother sang in her room, eulogizing God for bringing misfortune to all her enemies. She rocked expensive aso-oke to galas and to the birthdays of her clients while I held Priye’s hand and assured her, she was not alone.

In those moments, it hurt so much to remember that two years ago, she had been well enough to attend school, chirping tirelessly about everything like the Maths teacher’s knack for singing Fuji in class, her dreams about sailing the Atlantic in her own yacht and her subtle affection for a tall, nerdy boy in her class whose glasses were three times the size of his eyes and who always came first in Mathematics, even though my mother never gave her food for days. It was later that I knew that she poached food from her friends during lunch break, and she did it so prudently that they never suspected that she was being maltreated.

I remembered waking up late in the night, disentangling my second mother’s limbs from around me, and tiptoeing outside. I would go to the backyard with a nylon of biscuits for Priye. She always kept her window open so that I could throw the biscuits in. The window was two stories high so I was often successful two times out of thirty.

Many nights, I was totally unsuccessful, the biscuits thumping against the sliding glass or the wall. Most of the biscuits that made it in had been smashed into crumbs that Priye had to pour into her mouth.

That was when I noticed her fascination with stars. Those nights I woke up after midnight and raced to the backyard, I found her stargazing, with her window open, the chestnut curtain bunched behind her, her white nightgown draped over her skinny frame, looking as bright and quiet like the celestial bodies she stared at.

The only time I ever saw her differently was one night, months afterward, when my mother said she would not waste another dime of her late husband’s money on her disease and Priye latched onto her like a monkey and bit her neck. But after that, she apologized. Though, that night, she looked into my eyes with the intensity of a camera taking a picture. Her diary entry for that night read this: I think we human beings are more like stars than we think. We shine brighter when we start to fade.

It was as if she knew that she would die, so from that day onward, she said her goodbyes quietly. She confessed her love to the boy who told her sorry, he was in love with Zendaya, and she ran home without taking the bus, crying and laughing at the same time. She told me she was crying because he was so stupid, and laughing because she finally mustered up the courage to ask him out. All I did was stare at her, dumb, because I had no idea what it meant to have a crush on someone.

After she calmed down a little, she asked me to draw her, so I took my drawing book and drew her at her window, staring at the sunset. I should have painted the sky black to show it was night but I wanted the memory to be warm, not bleak, besides her skin tone was the colour of a brown sunset and I wanted that effect to show when I painted the drawing.

That night, she sat by the window in her satin nightgown with a crime novel in her lap, staring at the man selling suya on the busy street behind our house and the people walking, and she suddenly asked me a question.“Did you know that stars shine the brightest when they want to fade?” her laptop was playing a YouTube video of how a star becomes a supernova. 

She didn’t seem to expect my answer. She probably knew I didn’t know what she was talking about back then. Now that I remembered it, I could assume that she thought of herself as a supernova.“Ify, will you remember me after I’m gone?”

I just stood there in her room, petrified. I was bigger, healthier and more loved than her, but in that moment, I wanted to become her. I wanted to be the strong one, even if it meant our second mother would hate me.

“I wish my mother didn’t die,” she sighed, and looked at me with a sad smile. There were no tears in her eyes, only the shimmering darkness of her irises that portrayed her beautiful soul.

Believe me, I wanted desperately to, but I couldn’t tell her that her mother didn’t die five days after her car accident, mine did. And the woman who called me her child now was actually her own mother. This was the last thing my late mother told me. It was the secret only I knew.

I couldn’t remember my real mother’s face clearly anymore, but I remembered her dimples and dreads. She might have looked like Asa. She was our first mother and she loved Priye and me the same way. All I did was cuddle closer to Priye that night. I noted how she smelled like a flower garden. It was the soap that a chubby, jovial boy in her class gave her. She told me how expensive the soap was.

While I listened, I wondered why she didn’t realize that this other boy had a crush on her. We talked for hours uninterrupted because my second mother had travelled to Abuja and left us in a neighbour’s care. We pretended we were sleeping so he let us be. That night was the Champions league final so we weren’t his main priority. We heard him screaming and cursing from his room as his club conceded four goals during the match. We couldn’t help laughing at his plight.

Priye and I talked about many things until she began drifting off to sleep. I was often amazed at how quickly she slept. In a few seconds she was breathing softly, relaxed, her hand which moments ago had clutched mine now limp.

“This woman is your mother, you know?” I whispered so quietly that Priye might not have heard me. It was the best I could do.

And for a brief moment, I was sure she did not hear me.

“I know,” she said faintly. “You are Priye and I am Ifunnaya.”