The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 34

  Something happened and Dad slipped, stumbled. His left hand dropped from Mom’s shoulder and clutched at the hem of her blouse. Then he cried out “Jesus!” and gave voice to despair. His body was bent ninety degrees, like a cheerleader forming an “R.” Obiora and I grasped him from behind, didn’t let him fall, didn’t let him fail. Mom repositioned. She guided his arm back to her shoulder and he was standing again, or as close to standing as he had ever been, as close as we were capable. Two more steps. First Mom, then the left leg, then the right. Once more and we were at the top of the stairs. Now we needed the chair. “Are you holding him?” I asked Mom, searching for her brown eyes. “I’m holding him,” she said. And I let go and ran to grab it, pushed hard and made it skid toward them with its missing battery and one stuck wheel. Mom and Obiora lowered him into the seat gently, folding his right arm into his lap and lifting his right foot onto the footrest. We mopped the sweat from our brows with the backs of our hands and breathed. Finally—after fifteen hours, and 7,000 miles, and four hotels, and six steps—we had arrived.

  III.

  There’s a taxonomy of looks we get when we’re out in public with Dad. As a venue for genuine human feeling, I’ve found the face of the rubbernecker to be raw and dependable. The sudden and transitory nature of their encounter with us prohibits polite composure, the curtains drawn at an uncharitable hour. We’ll get common pity in a crowded restaurant, or morbid curiosity while browsing a department store. Among close friends, extended family, or the rare empathic stranger, you might catch a glimpse of genuine sorrow, a slight quivering of the lip. Most of these looks I ignore, unfazed. The voyeur feels at a great remove from me, as if we are on opposite sides of some unbridgeable chasm. The only look that ever really penetrates, can make me hot with contempt, is relief. The look that says, with a whiff of revulsion, “Thank God it’s not me.”

  I recognized that look on the plane to Addis Ababa as I worked with the airline staff to roll Dad down a cramped aisle. I saw the averted eyes, the pursed lips, the chins tucked into necks. I felt the spike in my blood pressure long after I had settled in my seat. In those moments, I could take no solace from any sense of self-righteousness or moral superiority—I was sure I had been guilty of similar looks in the years before the stroke. But I was soothed by something that felt more useful and harder to earn, an awesome awareness that began to bloom in 2010.

  I could see clearly that the comfort in “Thank God it’s not me” was a delicate self-deception. A lie that warms and embraces us like swaddling clothes. A mirage in the desert. I knew that just as God had not spared us, He would spare no one in the end. That infirmity and death await each of us and each of the ones we love. That everything can change in an instant. I knew this and was soothed because of the blind justice of the cosmos—the timeless balm of all grieving people. And I felt neither shame nor self-pity, but a powerful kind of peace. At least, at last, I was living in the truth of life, in all its frailty and impermanence—the truth of weak blood vessels and bad livers and mortality itself. The lie had been vanquished and I was free.

  In the morning, Adaeze and I ordered room service, something we had never done before in Nigeria. I asked for an omelet with a side of sausage, but when it came, something about the sausage looked a little off.

  “Is that . . . a hot dog?” Adaeze asked, clamping one between her thumb and index finger.

  “No way,” I said. “It’s a sausage . . . Right?” Adaeze took a tentative bite and chewed.

  “Definitely a hot dog.”

  Our cousin Nwachukwu picked us up in his black Nissan Pathfinder to take us to the house. He’s barrel-chested, bald, and boisterous with a high-impact voice and mischievous laugh. “Ochinawata!” he blared, greeting Dad by his ceremonial name. He reached for his right hand before clumsily accepting his left. Loosely translated, the name means “Man Who Was Crowned Chief at a Young Age.”

  After our Waterloo on the stairs the previous day, Dad agreed to let Nwachukwu carry him to the car, piggyback style, which went totally fine. Mom, Adaeze, and I squeezed into the back.

  My father is from a village called Umuatugbuoma, about a thirty-minute drive outside of central Enugu, or twenty minutes when Nwachukwu is driving. We zipped through the city like a rabbit through a briar. I noticed there were traffic signs on the roads—another change from the previous times we had visited—some of which were commonly observed (stop lights) and others of which were apparently decorative (stop signs). The roads themselves were touch and go, with no marked lanes and the occasional trenchlike pothole that would send us swerving. In Nigeria, driving is like double Dutch: half-steppers are best left to the sidelines.

  The city was a riot of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, provincialism fading feverishly into modernity. Our route took us by men in tattered T-shirts herding white oxen down a main thoroughfare, and by giant LED billboards advertising Glo Mobile wireless service. We passed decrepit, windowless buildings with tin roofs and doors dangling from the hinges; and gorgeous, gated compounds with villa-style mansions and new Mercedes parked out front.

  The houses have always been exceptional. Those who can afford to build homes do so with gusto. Hulking cement domiciles with separate servant quarters and elaborate landscaping are common, as are barbed security walls and live-in gatemen. The house is the essential luxury, less a building than a vessel for perpetuating foundational values in Igbo honor culture: family, resilience, work ethic, and hospitality.

  I don’t remember exactly when Dad initiated construction on our own house in the village. No one in my family does. I know that I learned of it at some point between 2001, when I returned from teenage repatriation, and 2006, when Mom and Adaeze surveyed the site after groundbreaking. What I remember most of all is Dad’s unsinkable pride in the very notion of the place. I remember the satisfaction in his voice as he gave us progress reports in family meetings where Adaeze, Chidi, and I flopped listlessly into couch grooves. I remember the palpable urgency of his regular international conference calls in the family room (the last landline standing), one of vanishingly few activities he managed to continue after the stroke. I remember the framed Sims -like computer rendering of the house—resplendent with a little black car in the driveway—that still sits on his bedroom dresser.

  In actuality, Dad’s plan to build the thing proved only barely tenable. He had little choice but to personally oversee construction by phone from Houston, having forsaken the help of expensive professional contractors on the ground. Given that most of the project was conducted before the recent surge of camera phones and broadband Internet access in Nigeria, this meant that messages to and from the site—care of a cousin or family friend or whomever Dad could cajole into playing envoy—arrived effectively as hearsay. Accounting and supply chain management were constant headaches. Project managers were hired with enthusiasm and fired with bitterness. But I think the greatest challenge of building the house, what ultimately allowed it to spiral—like a bad episode of Fixer Upper—from dream home to albatross, wasn’t the fault of technology but of physics.

  Aside from the trip he and I took in 2009, when he could swing it and get time off work, Dad was rarely physically present at construction. He wasn’t able to look the project managers and masons and carpenters in the eye and make them understand the greater meaning of their labor that could only ever be lost in translation by phone or third party. He couldn’t make them see the house as it was in his mind when he lay still in bed at night and the dream was real. And they never did. It never mattered to anyone like it mattered to him.

  We exited the highway and pulled into Umuatugbuoma. The main artery that leads to our village, formerly a red dirt road, had been paved with craggy asphalt. It carved through thick, waist-high brush and scattered patches of yam and cassava plants, with throngs of towering palm trees just beyond. Nwachukwu honked with glee at a group of schoolboys playing football in a clearing, their bodies elastic and glistening in fierce sunlight.

  Ou
r house is at the top of a hill surrounded on three sides by undeveloped grassland. Even behind four cement walls that form a perimeter, you see it long before you reach it—the intricate tan shingles of the cascading, cross-hipped roof; the two sets of brilliant white rectangular columns that face south and west. The scale of the place is genuinely stunning. It seemed large enough to contain our Houston house on the cul-de-sac two times over.

  As we got closer, the extent of the work yet to be done became clear. The security walls were unpainted and unfinished, with ragged edges and exposed bricks that had gone dingy and gray. The entrance gate was at the lowest point of a sharp incline, and the terrain beneath it was so jagged that the Pathfinder’s undercarriage took a loud beating on the way in—much to Nwachukwu’s displeasure. The land leading up to the house was a sweeping scar of red gravel pocked with weeds.

  The house itself, viewed up close, would have been exquisite were it not for a handful of unnerving flaws, like an ill-fated romantic prospect you’d never text while sober. When Dad and I visited in 2009, it was essentially a pile of bricks, with gaping holes where windows would go and no roof. Now it had those things, and many other things that generally make a house look like a house, but nothing was as finished as it should have been. A planned two-tone paint job—white on the second story, apricot on the first—had dried unevenly, and the exterior was covered in gray blemishes where rough spots had been sanded down. Some edges of the building itself were misshapen. Doors fit awkwardly in doorways that either had warped, were poorly constructed, or both. The kitchen was a pile of rubble. Stairs were of inconsistent width and depth. Roof panels sagged. Floor tiles were missing or misplaced. The floor plan itself occasionally tested logic, with superfluous walls creating puzzling alcoves. And that’s to say nothing of plumbing (nonexistent) or electricity (on in some rooms, off in others).

  We had no reason to be surprised at the discord, but I couldn’t imagine what Dad must have been feeling—what it must have been to lose the veil. The house, like everything we love, was a mirror in which he hoped to glimpse a better version of himself. He stared for a long time at the blotched paint. “It’s an eyesore,” he said, wrenching his face.

  With some effort, I pushed Dad up a slick tile ramp that had been set just that day and into the house through a side door. Post-stroke, ramps needed to be installed throughout the house, including, hypothetically, a system long enough and shallow enough to safely reach the master bedroom on the second floor. The war against stairs would start at home. Our cousin-in-law and acting project manager for the past year had been waiting for Dad in a spacious first-floor living room with ornate tile floors and an arched entryway. I left the two of them to their business.

  Mom, Adaeze, and I probed the house in all its fractured beauty, canvassing room by room, trying to imagine the possibilities. For all its imperfections, it was incontestably lavish, and we acknowledged how absurd it was that it belonged to us. Even if all six of my original family members had been able to inhabit the house at once, even if Chiugo had never left and Chidi were alive and healthy, there would have been too many rooms to fill. We picked out guest bedrooms, a game room, an office—each with floor tiles of different styles and colors.

  As we walked up the stairs and down the halls, I felt something—dimmed but discernible—that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid: a particular kind of wonder, the recognition of potential not previously imagined. On the second floor, we rounded a corner into a bright room with a forest-green floor and two windows adjacent to a balcony.

  “This is my room,” I heard myself say.

  I recognized the words from a previous life, when my siblings and I were young pioneers, freshly arrived in some new town where Mom or Dad had found a better job, a better future, and we were good at the beginning of things. By reflex, I had claimed the room as if something urgent were at stake, as if I were calling dibs. No one put up a fight.

  IV.

  The morning of New Year’s Eve, Mom’s younger brother Nnaemeka came to the hotel to give her a ride to the market. He was visiting from Onitsha, where Mom and her siblings grew up, about two hours west of Enugu. The cousin-in-law had been relieved of his duties as project manager, and, in his stead, Mom volunteered to buy building materials, paint, and small furnishings for the house. The goal was to get it as close to finished as we could before flying back to the States on January 9. We had resolved, once more, to be pioneers.

  In Mom’s absence, the responsibility to care for Dad during the trip fell to me. The reason for this was never put into words, as far as I can recall, but it didn’t need to be. We had all made incalculable sacrifices since the stroke: plans changed, dreams deferred. But there could be no comparison between how Dad’s condition altered the course of my life and how it altered my sister’s.

  In the summer of 2010, Adaeze and Chidi were home in Houston. Chidi had just graduated high school, and Adaeze was entering her third year of law at Vanderbilt. She had always been the gifted child, the most likely to succeed. My brother and I were partners in crime since before he could talk, but my friendship with my big sister cooked more slowly, through heated rivalry in adolescence and into a tender allyship in young adulthood. When I was naive and selfish, she was wise and giving—the one phone call I’d make from jail.

  I had left home the winter before the stroke to try to make it in New York. Making it in my case meant a second postgraduate internship and dates financed with overdraft protection money. It was Adaeze who called and told me, her speech faltering like foal knees, that something had happened. I can still only imagine it. Dad had gone numb the night before, she said. An ambulance was called. The doctors were running tests. By the time she called, they were all at the hospital and I was alone in a windowless room in an apartment I shared with a woman who had four cats.

  At some point Adaeze put Dad on the phone, but he was too emotional to speak. At first I heard nothing, and then an odd sound. I’ll never forget it: a heaving, sorrowful croak. It sounded strangely anachronistic, like the preverbal cry of some marooned hunter-gatherer. I heard Dad start weeping, and I was weeping too. I had never thought much about his diabetes. He had gotten a stent in his heart earlier that year without even telling me. I found out days after the procedure, when he was already home. “It was nothing too serious,” Mom had said, dubiously. “We didn’t want to worry you.”

  They never wanted to worry me. And I never called enough to be worried. That was the way things worked.

  After the call I made myself small on a mattress and box spring. It occurred to me, as tears dampened my dollar-store sheets, what a profound waste I was, unable even to afford the flight to Houston. It would be over a month before I made it home, a month when the reality of who we were and could conceivably be was shifting irrevocably beneath us.

  In the years after, when I had returned to New York, it was Adaeze who propped our family up. Even after she’d started at a law firm and made more than enough to strike out on her own, when it was her turn to be naive and selfish, she did the opposite. Became more generous in spirit. Moved back home and stayed there, helping Dad, yes, but also Mom and Chidi, who needed moral support. And when Chidi got sick for the last time, she was there for both of our parents. Screamed bloody murder by his hospital bed as he was dying. Drove Mom home when it was over and not over at all. No one ever asked her to do these things—she would never make them ask. But she was there when they needed her anyway. She cooked meals, cleaned messes, and DVRed The Good Wife. She put our family before herself. That’s the kind of person she is.

  The kind of person I am is the kind who shows up twice a year and spends most of the time in his room with the door closed. The kind who makes you dredge up Christmas decorations when the pain is still fresh. So though it’s true I did my best to take care of Dad in Nigeria, stood by his side and generally tried to make myself useful, I didn’t do this because I was a good son, or because I was selfless. It was the opposite. I did it because I’m the
selfish one.

  To everyone’s surprise, Obiora, Mom, and Adaeze had returned to the airport the day before New Year’s and recovered the battery to the Pride Mobility chair, which apparently arrived on the flight after ours. Dad was sitting in the newly functional chair when someone from room service knocked at the door. We were in my parents’ room, across the hall from the one I shared with my sister, which had tangerine-colored walls with mundane paintings of flowers on them.

  I opened the door and tipped a young woman in a navy blue vest a few hundred naira, which amounts to a couple of dollars. I was never quite sure if this was a good tip or a bad one. I cleared space on a table beneath a mirror and set a plate of fried plantain with tomato stew. I poured a bottle of water into a glass and plopped a blue-and-white striped bendy straw inside. Dad clicked his chair on (meep murp) and cruised over to the table.

  In accordance with our usual procedure, I tore off a paper towel and tucked it into his shirt collar like a bib. I’ve never tried eating exclusively with my nondominant hand before, but given that I can barely hold chopsticks with my dominant one, I can only think of Edward Scissorhands eating peas.

  I had served Dad food, begrudgingly, countless times before the stroke. When we were kids, it was one of the main ways my parents taught us respect for elders, along with requiring us to greet them before school in the morning and when they came home from work at night. I remember being eleven or twelve and ladling ogbono soup, bubbles bursting on its swampy surface, from massive metal pots on the stove in our open-ended kitchen. When Mom wasn’t looking, Chidi and I would climb onto the bar opposite the stove and do death-defying stunt dives across the living room, crash-landing on a plush gray three-seater. I remember taking Dad’s favorite cup, a giant gray mug with a green handle from Mr. Gatti’s Pizza that was bigger than my head, and filling it with water at the ice dispenser. I’d press the button and wait for an eternity as the water gurgled toward the brim.