We Are Able

Episode 58

A day to the day my aunty would be arriving, something quite
amazing happened. My guardian entered the house and told
me I had some visitors.
“Who?” I asked eagerly.
“Come and see her,” she said and pulled me up, smiling. When
I got to the door, it was an incredible sight staring at my face—
Mrs. Oyindamola and her husband. My right hand slid over my
face three times, but the guests remained there. I knew it was
for real.

I surged forward and gave her a very tight hug. She almost got
knocked down by me. Mrs Omotayo understood the whole
emotion—I had told her earlier about my class-teacher who
was one of the first persons that made me know that I am able.
She meant the whole world to me.

Mrs. Oyindamola scrubbed my hair and then did sign language
over my head. I turned my face up and caught the last word
‘mother’. I knew she was asking for my mother. I burst into
tears.

Mrs. Oyindamola stepped back a bit and asked for her again. I
shook and wept. She was scared, perhaps taking my tears to
mean that she was dead.

“She is—” I paused and wept on. The woman swallowed her
spittle and asked me critically, “What’s wrong with her?”

“It’s a long story,” I said at last. Indeed it was; trying to tell her
my life story from the day my mother and I returned from
Abuja would be quite a long story to tell.
Mrs Omotayo invited her in. She got in with her husband and I
followed them. When I told her the whole story, she shook as
if she was going to faint.

“Jesus!” she screamed with her mouth and signed it
synchronously.

Mrs. Oyindamola soon got over the shock and got ready at
once to get into action. She said she remembered the address
of the court location very well—Agidingbi, Ikeja.

When she beamed at her watch, she b@nged hard at her knee.
It was already late. The court would have closed for the day.

Mrs Oyindamola and her husband were to lodge in a hotel
initially, but the woman begged her husband to stay in the
house with us while her husband left to the hotel.

“Why did you come all the way from London?” I asked her,
because it was such a surprise to me seeing her in Nigeria
where they hadn’t built a house, having sold the one they had
earlier.

“I could not sleep at night because I was just thinking about
you and your mother. My mind kept thumping hard to see
you. I could not rest, such that my husband began to get
scared.”
“Since when have you been having such disturbance?” I asked
her, just to confirm something.
“Over a month ago now,” she said. “I sent a letter to you to ask
for your well-being and also included my home address in the
letter so that you could reply my letter and tell me how you
were faring. Didn’t you get the letter?”
“We didn’t get any letter?” I told her. “It was only Aunty
Rachael’s own we got.”
“Rose, I’m happy that I could set my eyes on you again,” she
said happily as she began to yawn. She was very tired.

I looked at her as she la!d her back on the bed in the visitor’s
room. I smiled as I remembered Moses’ statement that day
—‘God’s way is not our own way and his thought is not our
own thought. He knows the thought that he thinks towards us
—the thought of peace and not of evil to give us our expected
end’. My expectation was to get a way of getting to the court of
law through which we could locate the prison, but now more
than my expectation is here. I estimated the time she said she
began to have that feeling of coming to see me in Nigeria and
found out that it was around the time I prayed to God to show
me the address of the court of law through a vision. My prayer
is definitely answered in another dimension, I thought.

In the morning the next day, Mrs Oyindamola went to her
husband after calling her with a device which I later knew to be
cellular—it was strange to me, since I hadn’t seen it before—a
wireless telephone. The ones I had seen were landlines and not
mobile one, though I hadn’t used any and I would never use
any, since my ears wouldn’t pick a sound from the earpiece
and my mouth wouldn’t be able to voice out words into it.

Mrs Oyin returned to our house and then we began to get
ready to visit the court. Just then, Rachael my aunty came to
the house with her husband. I hardly recognized her.