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She nodded her head and chewed her bottom lip. “Almost twenty years ago. He is Ellie now. But he will always be my little boy.”
Wait.He backtracked. Must have misunderstood. So they weren’t dead after all. “Ellie?”
“Yes, he’s, ah, I don’t know what they say these days … just like you.”
She rose from the armchair and brought over two photographs. The first was framed by black cardboard: Ellie stood in academic dress, holding a makeshift scroll for their graduation snapshot. Their dark skin without a blemish, teeth bright and straight, and their full Afro springing from their head in a luxurious halo. The shirt, buttoned up to the neck, was tucked into high-waisted trousers.
Emmanuel Awolowo Flanders, Keble College
In the second, Ellie stood beneath the Radcliffe Camera, black gown caught in the wind, but they were missing the square hat. They leaned against the spindles of the black fence, looking straight into the lens. A bicycle was chained up beside them.
“That’s my Emmanuel—he was so full of life.”
It would’ve been the later noughties, an unbridled time after the hardship of Thatcherite Britain, a nation that had lived through an epidemic and had also lost a princess. What was it like to be Black, femme, and male presenting back then, or even now? All these things at once. Trans, but without today’s discourse. Now a tick box in the equal opportunities form, a 0.01 percent increment in the still low Oxbridge proportions, Ellie’s minority presence at the university would have been questioned by their peers. White authors were read, white teachers would teach, and exams would be taken on white sheets of paper. But Ellie was an anomaly, wasn’t meant to exist in that space. Had anything changed, really?
Mrs. Flanders clutched at her bosom, and he focused on the thinness of her fingers, the sagging skin, and the threads of vein that wriggled as she caressed the necklace around her neck like hands playing a chord on a harp. “He gave this to me before he left.”
“Where did they go after university?”
“America.”
America.The word was a ghost in his ears.
“And they never came back?”
“Never came back,” she repeated. “I don’t know if he’s still there. It’s all my fault. I didn’t understand it. I said, Emmanuel, you are being ridiculous. Why are you doing these things to me? Whenever I found him wearing my shoes, or with my gel on his head. He used to say to me, ‘Ma, I’m just like you. I am a woman.’ And I would say, ‘No, no, you are not, Emmanuel. You are not a woman, you are a man.’ And Emmanuel, he said he will live how he chooses to live. And one day he was gone, never came back. But it was different back then. I didn’t understand, and now I have lost my son.”
He wanted to console Mrs. Flanders, grieving as she was for her child, and yet she still referred to Ellie in a manner that didn’t see them at all. Who they really were. He thought about explaining it to her.
“Mrs. Flanders …”
“Please, call me Ndidi. That is my name.”
“Okay, Ndidi,” he said, though it didn’t feel right in his mouth. Nor did it feel right to explain to her the correct usage of her child’s pronouns, especially because he wasn’t certain what pronouns Ellie used. Instead, he took it upon himself to respect Ellie’s wishes in the hope she’d catch on. “Have you tried reaching out to them? To Ellie, I mean? I’m sure they will forgive you, will want to hear from you.”
“I have tried. But I don’t know where El lives.”
“Have you tried looking on the internet?”
“Yes, yes, but it is no use.”
He didn’t push it further, conscious of potentially winding down the wrong path. He sipped his cup of tea as she continued to speak of all the things Ellie used to do, all the while hanging onto the necklace. How familiar were those fingers with the shape and curve of its intricate design? He imagined her once youthful hands, caressing it, pulling at it, and then sagging, aging in five fluid seconds as she suffered through life without her child. He thought suddenly of Ada—of the necklace that her fingers mindlessly held through the day, as Mrs. Flanders here latched forher child—and then the locket he kept hidden at the bottom of his drawer. Ada was pining for details of her mother, yearned for something she didn’t have and sought comfort in the solace of an accessory, one that rooted her to a family.
And then there it was, that nervous feeling, one of both fear and excitement. He couldn’t explain it, the sudden shift in his thinking, but this is what he knew: there was a little girl searching for answers, a family that hid secrets from her as well as from him, and a locket without its owner; a son who’d erupted into inexplicable anger at the mention of some photographs and what was to be seen there, and who was seen just before the fire broke out, holding onto the photo album that hosted these same images; and finally, a man who surely had a part to play in all this, who’d claimed not to be in attendance at the Edwardses’ Halloween party, only to have been seen by a girl in a sailor’s costume.
Bron had an inkling that the locket held the key to the Edwardses’ family secret, and in the safety of another house, outside the bounds of Greenwood, he thought a particular thought: that there was something about these events that didn’t add up (or perhaps added up all too well).
And what if maybe, just maybe, the fire hadn’t been an accident at all?
When he returned to the house, he’d planned to head straight to his bedroom and inspect the locket again, but he’d barely made it through the door before Ada pulled at his arm and slammed the door shut behind him.
“Don’t keep any doors open.” She was shifting from foot to foot, peering around the foyer and looking up at the ceiling as though a ghost were creeping along and haunting the place. She was gripping onto a fishnet.
“Ada, what’s going on?”
“It’s Birdie—she’s gone,”
“What do you mean she’s gone?”
