If there was anything Grace’s life had taught her, it was that love wasn’t a given. It could be taken away. Once she was no longer the person they thought they knew, their feelings too would change. It had happened before, in her previous life. She took another forkful of cake. Her cheeks bulged like a squirrel’s. The food burned her throat but Grace would not give up.
Every year, she did this; she ate a cake on Baby’s birthday. At the beginning, it had been those horrible triangular-shaped travesties made with palm oil rather than butter that she had bought with money pilfered from her father’s shirt pocket or her mother’s purse. She would tear open the plastic wrapping of the cake even before leaving the store and would always eat all of it before going home. Later, when she could, she began buying better cakes, cakes with icing that melted in her mouth, but burned all the way to her stomach, settled like mixed cement. Grace was not superstitious, but she believed in things. Like this ritual for one. Wherever Baby was, it connected Grace to her. If she gave it up, if she missed one year, then Baby would become a ghost.
Nobody else knew of Baby. Not her husband, not her children, not her best friend, Ifeatu, who imagined that she knew everything there was to know about Grace. If her secret made it out, made it to BellaNaija or Linda Ikeji or one of the other gossip blogs, she’d lose everything. She was a deacon in the church, a well-respected business owner, a decorated midwife. OFR. Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. And one day, she hoped to run for political office. She would start with a senate seat, cut her teeth there. With the right support, she could pull it off. She already knew what her campaign slogan would be: For One and All. She would have photos of herself surrounded by babies, two of whom would be in her arms. To have a successful shot, she needed to not just have money, she also had to be perfect. The world did not forgive women it found wanting. She could not afford a scandal. Everything she’d worked for would crumble if her secret came out, and she could not – would not – have that. She poured out a cup of coffee. Black. No sugar. The way she had learned to drink it when she began to shed other parts of her old self to replace them with a new persona so that she could live. She grazed her fork against the piece of cake on her plate. A more attentive husband might have noticed after fifteen years of being with her that her mood swings and the cake eating always happened on the same date each year. The fourth of June. But not Okika. Grace was not complaining. A more attentive husband would have made her life more difficult with all his questions and she might not have been able to keep her secret this long. There were times she thought that that was why she had married Okika. He was a good husband, a good man, but even good men had their limits. She raised a hand, heavy with melancholy, and took another bite of the cake.
During the compulsory marriage counselling class they had taken before their wedding, Grace and Okika had been cautioned to be truthful about everything. Lay your secrets bare to each other, the priest said. The sort of thing a person who had never been in a relationship would say, Grace thought. Everybody else knew that the key to a happy relationship, especially marriage, lay in holding your secrets within your fist and making sure you didn’t loosen your grasp. She didn’t want to know everything about Okika. She knew enough and that would do. At the beginning of their relationship, Okika had told her he had a child with an ex-girlfriend in the US. He didn’t want her finding out from anybody else. ‘I’m not really in his life but I just thought, you know, that you should know.’ She said Okay, thanks for telling me, like it was nothing, but she had spent days marvelling at how easy it had been for him to say it. He had offered the information with no trepidation, no sense that it had the potential to torpedo his life, just said it with the same casualness with which he had told her of the car he had before they met, slipping it in between ordering lunch at Madam Volvo’s and switching off his phone, which had begun to vibrate. The ex was American. Sophia. They had met at the University of Georgia. She had fallen pregnant, decided to keep the baby. She didn’t ask him what he wanted, didn’t ask him to marry her like a Nigerian would have, he said. ‘Besides, I was young, was in no state to marry anyone or raise a kid, so that was good.’ He graduated when the baby was just under a year old and returned to Nigeria. ‘She didn’t do long distance, moving to Nigeria wasn’t an option for her and the breakup was amicable.’ Did he miss his child? Grace asked. Okika paused, mid chew, tapped his spoon against the plate in front of him and said, ‘No. I mean, I don’t really know him. Sophia used to send me pictures until he started elementary school. Maybe she got tired of sending them. But everyone in my life knows of him, just in case he comes back one day when he’s old enough, looking for me.’ ‘Would you want him to?’ Grace had asked. ‘I guess. I mean, he’s mine. It’d be nice if he did, but it’s got to be his choice.’ That boy would be twenty-eight now, two years older than Baby.
