Adanna’s Secret
a novel by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe
EXCERPT
“NNE, MOTHER, are you back?”
“I am at the airport,” Adanna replied.
“Thank God,” now she could hear the anxiety in her sister’s voice.
“Is there a problem? How is Daddy? Is he all right?”
“That is why I am calling.”
“Why you are calling? What happened?”
“Daddy is missing.” Amarachi said.
“What do you mean, ‘Daddy is missing’?”
“I took him to Camp last night,” Adanna heard some sniffing. Was Amarachi crying?
“You took him where?” She felt her voice rise, and looked around to see if she had drawn attention.
“I took him to Camp, the last Friday of the month. It was a special service. I went to the altar for prayers. I wanted to go with him so that Papa GO could lay hands on him but he would not get up to go with me. When I came back, he was not there. We have been looking for him since then.” The tears came out fully now.
Adanna’s heart hammered crazily in her chest. This was what she had felt on the plane, this was it.
“I have been trying to reach you but your phone was not going through.”
“How could this happen? How could you let this happen?” She shouted at her sister. By now Amarachi was wailing into the phone.
The airport was noisy with the crush of people coming in, but her voice still carried. It made people stop and look at the chic, smallish dark woman, clad in stylish jeans and trainers, who looked too put together to be shouting as she was.
She felt herself go woozy, and she struggled to keep hold of herself. How could Amarachi take Daddy to camp? She had heard of those camps, filled with thousands of people. God, please don’t let this happen, she prayed, an overwhelming sense of desperation sweeping over her.
She tapped her feet, impatient as they waited for the conveyor belt to bring out their bags. It was sluggish and noisy in its turns, as if it was saying, “Look at me. Am I not carrying the weight of the world on me, look at me – carrying the shopping and gifts of Nigerians in black, blue, and sealed bag and suitcases.” People grabbed at theirs as she fought to keep from being jostled out of a prime spot.
Despite her being planted right in front of the conveyor belt, her bags were some of the last to come out, probably because she was the first person to check in, she would later tell IK. She could feel herself trembling all over, fuming and sweating as she waited for them, wanting to be outside already, to be at Amarachi’s house, to go into Lagos and find Daddy.
Think solution, she thought as she dialed her friend Ikechukwu, known to his friends as IK, solution, solution.
His voice was sluggish, and she realized her phone call must have woken him up. But she plunged in without apologies.
“Daddy is missing.” They all called him Daddy.
And, saying it out loud, it struck her in her chest. A heavy thud, like the strike of Daddy’s hammer from his well-equipped tool box on a nail in her mother’s poultry house, or to solder in a bolt falling off the door in the house in Enugu, saying while doing so, ‘there is no need to call a carpenter for work that any man can do.’ Or, more frightening, she thought now, like the thud of red sand that landed remorseless on her mother’s coffin.
Daddy, Professor Josiah Ifemelunma Iloabachie, eminent lawyer, holder of important national positions, widower, father of four, grandfather of four, late seventies, newly diagnosed with dementia, the specific type of which was not fully determined, was missing. In Lagos, a small, vibrant, throbbing city, on whose brown soil twenty million people fought for space and air.