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“God has to take control of Nigeria,” he went on. “They said that a civilian government would be better than the military ones, but look at what Obasanjo is doing. He has seriously destroyed our country.”
She nodded, wondering what would be the most polite way to ask him to leave, and yet reluctant to do so, because his presence gave her hope about Udenna being alive, in a way that she could not explain.
“Have you seen pictures of family members of the victims? One woman tore her clothes off and ran around in her slip. She said her daughter was on that flight, and that her daughter was going to Abuja to buy fabric for her. Chai!” Chinedu let out the long sucking sound that showed sadness. “The only friend I know who might have been on that flight just sent me an e-mail to say he is fine, thank God. None of my family members would have been on it, so at least I don’t have to worry about them. They don’t have ten thousand naira to throw away on a plane ticket!” He laughed, a sudden inappropriate sound. She refreshed an Internet page. Still no news.
“I know somebody who was on the flight,” she said. “Who might have been on the flight.”
“Jehova God!”
“My boyfriend Udenna. My ex-boyfriend, actually. He was doing an MBA at Wharton and went to Nigeria last week for his cousin’s wedding.” It was after she spoke that she realized she had used the past tense.
“You have not heard anything for sure?” Chinedu asked.
“No. He doesn’t have a cell phone in Nigeria and I can’t get through to his sister’s phone. Maybe she was with him. The wedding is supposed to be tomorrow in Abuja.”
They sat in silence; she noticed that Chinedu’s hands had tightened into fists, that he was no longer rocking himself.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” he asked.
“Last week. He called before he left for Nigeria.”
“God is faithful. God is faithful!” Chinedu raised his voice. “God is faithful. Do you hear me?”
A little alarmed, Ukamaka said, “Yes.”
The phone rang. Ukamaka stared at it, the black cordless phone she had placed next to her laptop, afraid to pick it up. Chinedu got up and made to reach for it and she said “No!” and took it and walked to the window. “Hello? Hello?” She wanted whomever it was to tell her right away, not to start with any preambles. It was her mother.
“Nne, Udenna is fine. Chikaodili just called me to say they missed the flight. He is fine. They were supposed to be on that flight but they missed it, thank God.”
Ukamaka put the phone down on the window ledge and began to weep. First, Chinedu gripped her shoulders, then he took her in his arms. She quieted herself long enough to tell him Udenna was fine and then went back into his embrace, surprised by the familiar comfort of it, certain that he instinctively understood her crying from the relief of what had not happened and from the melancholy of what could have happened and from the anger of what remained unresolved since Udenna told her, in an ice-cream shop on Nassau Street, that the relationship was over.
“I knew my God would deliver! I have b
een praying in my heart for God to keep him safe,” Chinedu said, rubbing her back.
Later, after she had asked Chinedu to stay for lunch and as she heated up some stew in the microwave, she asked him, “If you say God is responsible for keeping Udenna safe, then it means God is responsible for the people who died, because God could have kept them safe, too. Does it mean God prefers some people to others?”
“God’s ways are not our ways.” Chinedu took off his sneakers and placed them by the bookshelf.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“God always makes sense but not always a human kind of sense,” Chinedu said, looking at the photos on her bookshelf. It was the kind of question she asked Father Patrick, although Father Patrick would agree that God did not always make sense, with that shrug of his, as he did the first time she met him, on that late summer day Udenna told her it was over. She and Udenna had been inside Thomas Sweet, drinking strawberry and banana smoothies, their Sunday ritual after grocery shopping, and Udenna had slurped his noisily before he told her that their relationship had been over for a long time, that they were together only out of habit, and she looked at him and waited for a laugh, although it was not his style to joke like that. “Staid” was the word he had used. There was nobody else, but the relationship had become staid. Staid, and yet she had been arranging her life around his for three years. Staid, and yet she had begun to bother her uncle, a senator, about finding her a job in Abuja after she graduated because Udenna wanted to move back when he finished graduate school and start building up what he called “political capital” for his run for Anambra State governor. Staid, and yet she cooked her stews with hot peppers now, the way he liked. Staid, and yet they had spoken often about the children they would have, a boy and a girl whose conception she had taken for granted, the girl to be named Ulari and the boy Udoka, all their first names to be U-names. She left Thomas Sweet and began to walk aimlessly all the way up Nassau Street and then back down again until she passed the gray stone church and she wandered in and told the man wearing a white collar and just about to climb into his Subaru that life did not make sense. He told her his name was Father Patrick and that life did not make sense but we all had to have faith nonetheless. Have faith. “Have faith” was like saying be tall and shapely. She wanted to be tall and shapely but of course she was not; she was short and her behind was flat and that stubborn soft bit of her lower belly bulged, even when she wore her Spanx body-shaper, with its tightly restraining fabric. When she said this, Father Patrick laughed.
“‘Have faith’ is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx,” he said. And she had laughed, too, surprised that this plump white man with silver hair knew what Spanx was.
Ukamaka dished out some stew beside the already warmed rice on Chinedu’s plate. “If God prefers some people to others, it doesn’t make sense that it would be Udenna who would be spared. Udenna could not have been the nicest or kindest person who was booked on that flight,” she said.
“You can’t use human reasoning for God.” Chinedu held up the fork she had placed on his plate. “Please give me a spoon.”
She handed him one. Udenna would have been amused by Chinedu, would have said how very bush it was to eat rice with a spoon the way Chinedu did, gripping it with all his fingers—Udenna with his ability to glance at people and know, from their posture and their shoes, what kind of childhood they had had.
“That’s Udenna, right?” Chinedu gestured toward the photo in the wicker frame, Udenna’s arm draped around her shoulders, both their faces open and smiling; it had been taken by a stranger at a restaurant in Philadelphia, a stranger who had said, “You are such a lovely couple, are you married?” and Udenna had replied, “Not yet,” in that flirty crooked-smile way he had with female strangers.
“Yes, that is the great Udenna.” Ukamaka made a face and settled down at the tiny dining table with her plate. “I keep forgetting to remove that picture.” It was a lie. She had glanced at it often in the past month, sometimes reluctantly, always frightened of the finality of taking it down. She sensed that Chinedu knew it was a lie.
“Did you meet in Nigeria?” he asked.
“No, we met at my sister’s graduation party three years ago in New Haven. A friend of hers brought him. He was working on Wall Street and I was already in grad school here but we knew many of the same people from around Philadelphia. He went to UPenn for undergrad and I went to Bryn Mawr. It’s funny that we had so much in common but somehow we had never met until then. Both of us came to the U.S. to go to university at about the same time. It turned out we even took the SATs at the same center in Lagos and on the same day!”
