CHAPTER TWENTY
It was as if everything was happening through a fog, or a timeless dream in which he was never going to awaken from. He felt completely weighted down, as if he had no control over his body, and his senses were reeling. His nostrils caught the smell of disinfectant, and there were voices speaking in his ears, like mosquitoes buzzing around a potential meal for the night. Everything seemed to be surreal, and he was aware of sleep and half-lucid moments of consciousness; and then the sharp prick of pain in his veins.
He was in a chasm between dream and reality, and then he finally opened his eyes. The first facts that’s registered in his mind was the fact that the light was too bright, and they hurt his eyes, and that he didn’t like the smell of sterility and cleanliness that suffused his nostrils.
Where was he? Ah, yes, the smell made it out to be a hospital room, and there was this annoying whiteness to everything that surely hurt his eyes. He tried to move his head, and he found that it was almost impossible for him to do so because something restrained his neck. But what had happened?
Out of the periphery of his vision he saw Adamma seated on a chair beside him, her face buried in the pages of Street Style, which had her photo on the cover. She looked stunning, without any artificial enhancements, dressed in a slim-fitting black gown that accentuated her lush feminine allure and brought out the lightness of her skin. She wore no jewels, and her hair had been brushed into her face so that she had to flip the thing away from her face as she gobbled up the fashion in the pages of her magazine.
As he looked at her, he felt a rush of tenderness at her, more than he’d ever felt for another human being. That she was here for him at this time was a blessing to him; he realized that now. She was too beautiful, too perfect for a jerk like him to have her. She was a goddess; the woman who had affected him more than any other person had ever done to him; she was his wedded whore, the mother of his children, and she was the love of his life. Yes, there was no other way to sum it up.
‘Adamma,’ he croaked.
She looked up, and the strands of hair fell into her face; she flipped them away in annoyance. ‘You’re awake,’ she said, her voice cool as she took in his body which was swaddled like an Egyptian mummy. ‘What made you do what you’d done? That was very stupid, you know.’
‘I had to see you and talk to you.’
‘Oh, really? And you also had to get your death-wish by having your ass smashed to pieces when you came running towards me like a lunatic. Why were you in such a rush, by the way?’
‘I love you,’ Obinna blurted out. ‘That was what I wanted to tell you. I had to stop you from leaving because I had the feeling that you were running away from me for the last time and I’d never see you again if I’d let you go. I’d felt great panic that you were leaving, and there was the divorce papers you’d forced me to sign for you. You’d boxed me in, and I realized at that time that I was losing the only thing that mattered to me more than anything in the world. I had to start losing you in order to realize that you meant a lot to me.’ He relaxed back into the bed, thoroughly exhausted from that little speech.
Adamma put her magazine aside, lifted the glass of water beside her and lifted the glass to his lips. After he’d taken a little sip of the cool liquid, he gently pushed her hand away. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.
Adamma smiled. ‘Oh, you now know how to be polite. God; you were really a big pig. You really were a bastard, do you know that? You thought I was some bitch you picked up off the streets and so you could treat me like trash. And now, you tell me you love me. Why are you telling me this now?’
‘I was losing you.’
‘You never lost me in the first instance,’ Adamma countered. Her eyes were as expressionless as a mask, and as hard. ‘I was always there to be swept off my feet by you, but you had to treat me like some kind of filthy bitch. It’s just like being Madonna or Cher; the point is that no matter what happened with them, they were always there; always. It was always about the power play for you, but you forgot that you had no power. I had all the power; I had it in my palms, and there was and there is no other woman in the world who can balance you out the way I do. I was made to whip you into shape, and there was no other way, no other alternatives.’
Then she seemed to remember something and stopped, her eyes widening at him. ‘What do you mean when you say you were losing me?’
‘Helen called me and was crying to me about the fact that you’d intended to steal them away from this country so that they’d never see me again. And then she told me that you loved me.’
Adamma lifted one perfectly arched brow. ‘Helen told you that? Well, that girl is really a character. Well, she’d lied to you: I only intended to take them with me to Canada for a month and she had to call you and twist the story around. The little girl seems to be getting better at doing this conspiracy crap than I am. We were not going anywhere, and yet you tell me now that what she’d told you had made you to come rushing after me. How apropos.’
‘But I really do love you. I know I was a bitch to you, but I want to make amends. Please.’ He reached out to her, but she seemed so far away from him, seated with regal comfort on that uncomfortable hospital chair.
She shifted the chair closer, and he held her hand and looked up into her eyes. God, he could drown in those eyes and die without really knowing what had killed him. How could he have been so blind? She had been there all along, and all he’d wanted was to dominate her; that had been his stupidest mistake.
‘I love you,’ he confessed again through parched throat, and the words felt right with each moment he said it to her. ‘We could start all over again now that I’ve come to my senses. Please, dear.’ He rubbed her knuckles as she stared off into space.
She continued staring at a spot beyond the bed, her eyes almost hooded, her face a mask of serenity. She was lost in thought, and then she finally looked at him and the smile on her face was one of pure enjoyment. ‘When that car hit you and you fell to the ground, I thought to myself that the stupid man had acted really crazy again,’ she said in a low voice, as if she was talking to someone who was close to her ear. ‘I hurried over to you, and I had to lift you and carry you over to my car as the woman who’d knocked you down was still in a state of shock. The woman rode with you in the back of the car, but I had to refuse her offer to help me carry you up here. The hospital staff was shocked to see you slung over my shoulder like some Gucci carry-on. It was hilarious.’
She broke off her narrative and looked at him, and this time, there was a touch of sadness in the eyes that were looking into his. She then burst out laughing. ‘It was a shock for the doctor on duty to see me drop you down on the floor and calmly call for help to them that you had to have the needed attention from them or you’ll die. You broke two ribs, dislocated your right shoulder, and there was a concussion. So in effect you’ve been on and off consciousness for the past three days; that means that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re delusional.’
Obinna held her hand and squeezed, though he felt a little too weak for the pressure needed to hold he. ‘No; I can’t be delusional. I know what I’m saying to you. I love you, and I can still say it again if you still want me to.’
Adamma snorted. ‘And when did you discover that you did love me?’
‘Deep in my mind I’d always known, but there was something that kept me from really acknowledging it. I knew that you were the woman for me, but the thing there was that we had always been at each other’s necks, and the fire was there to burn to burn us and scorch us. Though, we had our moments, of course.’
They laughed together as the memories flooded in, and then they became serious once again. ‘We definitely had our moments, and as I stood there staring at you, with the rain beating down at you, I knew that there was no way in the world in which I could ever let you go. We have a lot going on, and there was no way in the world that the bloody divorce papers which we’d signed was going to take that away from us.’
Adamma was nodding slowly, but her eyes remained fixed on the spot beyond the bed where she was looking at. When she spoke her voice remained low, serene. ‘Those papers we’d signed were rubbish; I never intended to do anything with them. I just had to get you to sign them so that you could feel the nail coming down on you. Then the sex was just a ploy to see if you really could just let me go like that, and if you could just sleep with me, and look me in the eye, and not come after me to tell me not to go, then it meant that our life together was over. But even if it was over, no other woman in the world would have been good for you. None other than me would have been the perfect match for you. I know you more than any other person does in this world; we round each other out. You would have been miserable with another woman. That much is obvious to me. When you’d fucked that Della woman, did you really enjoy her? Did she satisfy you?’
Obinna laughed mirthlessly. ‘What is this? Twenty questions?’
Adamma glared at him, and her eyes were icy cold. ‘Just answer the bloody question.’
He looked her squarely in the eyes without blinking. ‘No, I did not enjoy the bitch because I never fucked her. From the moment I married you I steered clear of them because no other woman could compare to you. You were great in bed_ still the best lay I ever had. So why should I bother to go to that hare-brained fool when you were there all along. All I did with the moron was to flirt just to make you jealous the way you made me jealous with all those bloody fools who were all hanging all over you like a bad smell. That was the only way I knew to make you jealous the way you always made me whenever you smiled at some idiot I knew I was better than in every way.’
‘Those fools were the ones that helped to push my career forward for me and there was no way in which I could just isolate them or stopped being nice to them simply because of the fact that I was your wife,’ she explained gently. ‘They could help to help make me or to destroy me. So there, you have your answer.’
They looked at each other, and there was an evaluative moment as they weighed what the other had said. Then Obinna cleared his throat, though it came out more as a rasp than what he’d intended originally to do.
‘So we’re clear on that now, aren’t we?’ he asked her, but she wasn’t even bothered to give him a look in reply. He remembered something she’d said and frowned. ‘What do you mean by that you weren’t intending to do anything with the documents we’d signed?’
‘Just what I said,’ she replied simply, and her eyes bored into him. ‘I never intended to divorce you; I just had to make you see that you were stupid to let me go. If you’d wanted our marriage to end then you’d have to file the papers yourself. I just wanted to take them and chuck the bloody things in one of the safes in my house. That would have been the end of it for me.’
‘And why’s that?’
Adamma threw her hands up in annoyance, and her eyes were blazing with a cold fury that seemed to burn from her very sockets as she fixed her husband with a basilisk glare that would have wilted the roses in the morning. ‘Because I love you, you fucking idiot! I love you more than I love any other thing in this bloody world!’
Obinna was dumbfounded. ‘And yet you were ready to end our marriage? What, are you some kind of masochist?’
‘Whatever!’ she snapped. ‘When your bloody mother threw me out of the house, I knew that I loved you very much, but what could I do about it? Absolutely nothing! I had to leave, and I had to keep my mouth shut or else you’d twist my heart out with your stupid arrogance. And what could I have done? I was your bloody whore!’ and this time the word whore erupted from her mouth in a furious hiss of fury. ‘You treated me like some bloody whore! And what was I to you more than that? Nothing! So now, tell me why I shouldn’t end the bloody marriage? Tell me!’
‘I am sorry.’
Adamma laughed, but the bitterness in her voice was so evident that Obinna almost shrank back into the bed. He had never seen his wife this mad since the time he’d known her.
‘You are sorry? You . . . are . . . sorry? Is that all you have to think of the ways in which you’d treated me when we were together?’ She was livid. ‘You are a fool, and I can never fathom why I fell in love with you. But there it is: I love you, and if that is what you want to hear, then you’ve heard it. But know it that you will never treat me like a piece of trash again in your whole life; I won’t let you. And do you know why? The divorce; we will file those damn papers and put an end to our sham of a marriage. Is that clear?’
Obinna looked at her calmly with the same serenity she’d exuded to put him at a discomfiture. ‘It’s not clear, and the reason is because we love each other, and since we love each other, then we simply just can’t start putting our marriage to an end when what we have to be doing is to go about finding a way in which to rebuild the foundations of our marriage_’
‘Which was never really there in the first place,’ Adamma finished for him.
She thought for a moment, and then the tears appeared in her eyes, misting her vision so that she was seeing Obinna and his white hospital wrappings through a mist. There was a feeling of great pain in her chest, and the feeling was exacerbated by the fact that what she’d always wanted for her life had been granted to her and there was no way in the world for her to know that he was saying the truth about his feelings for her except for her to take his words for it the way he’d said it to her. But somehow, in the deep recesses of her heart, she knew. He was saying the truth just the way it came to him at that moment that they were talking about their life.
‘I remember my parents vividly, just as if the last time I’d seen them was yesterday,’ she continued, and the calm had returned to her voice. ‘They had been so much in love with each other, and their love had been so transparent it was obvious to all who knew them that the way they felt about each other had been real. I had wanted to be like them, and in the old days I used to read all those small fairy tales and say to myself that my husband would treat me the way my dad treated my mother. But that was before life happened.’ She smiled.
Obinna watched her as the tears flowed from her eyes, and he knew that the topic of her parents was a sore in her heart that had refused to heal in spite of the fact that several years had passed since her parents were killed in the car crash that took their lives.
And he knew that he loved this woman from the very depths of his heart, more than the very air he breathed in. How could he have been so stupid all these years without seeing the very best thing that had happened to him since he was born?
‘I’ll make it up to you in whatever way you want me to,’ he told her. ‘What really matters is that I’ve gotten you back with me and there is nothing else that can happen that will ever change that fact. In my heart there’ll always be a space for you for all my life. Come back to me, and we’ll be the very best friends that you can think of. Just say yes. I never really had anything to do with Della, as I’m sure you’ve had nothing to do with that Dan guy, so we’re even.’
‘We’re not even. Dan was and is and will always be the very best friend I have in my life. I love him the way I love myself, and the reason is because of the fact that he did something for me which no other man in the world did for me. You can’t be jealous of him because there’s nothing going on between us; there never was. You were the only person who had me for as long as we were together, but then you had to spoil everything by being such a bitch.’
They laughed together, and it was the very first genuine laugh they’d shared for a very long time. Adamma still had those tears in her eyes, and it made her look somewhat ethereal; Obinna wanted to kiss those tears off her lids and swear to her that she’d never shed them again for as long as he was there to protect her. But as it was, he was battered, with his body wrapped in bandages so he couldn’t even move a muscle. Still, he raised his hand slowly, aware of the pain that knifed through him, and wiped those tears in her eyes. They felt moist in his fingers, and he brought them to his lips.
‘Now, you mustn’t cry,’ he begged. ‘It’s useless for you to cry. The point is that we’re back together.’
She then broke into real sobs, and there were those giant tears flowing from her eyes and running down her cheeks, and he felt within him that he’d never seen her so soft and so human, or even more beautiful. The tears really softened her, gave her a human, down-to-earth look that transformed her from the unquestionable screen goddess she was to a stunning woman of great beauty, the type the knights of the olden times were always ready to slay dragons for and rescue from all sorts of imaginable dangers even at the expense of their own lives.
She was crying, but she was leaning towards him, and the sweet rosy fragrance of her shampoo wafted into his nostrils as her hair brushed at his nose she laid her head on his chest and he stroked the soft tresses of her natural dark hair. He was happy at the closeness of her body to his, at the fact that she was now with him, that they could not be separated again.
‘Ah, what a lovely picture you both make.’
Adamma drew herself up immediately, her head twisting to see her daughter standing framed in the doorway of the room, a cup of chocolate ice cream in one hand. She was smiling with an angelic radiance. She said: ‘I told my silly brother that you guys were together again and he said I was joking. Now he’s lost the bet, and I’ll eat his share of the daily morning pancakes for a week. I won.’
Adamma laughed at the antics of her incredibly resourceful daughter, knowing that the girl wasn’t bluffing. If she said that she’d eat the morning pancakes all by herself for a week, then she would. ‘Helen, my love, come here.’ She stretched out her hands to the girl.
Helen lifted one brow in perfect imitation of her mother. ‘And risk catching a germ from that bed? No way.’ She shook her head. ‘Dad, I’m comfortable here, so if it’s ok with you, then I’ll just chill out here by the door and eat my food.’
‘That’s junk,’ Adamma pointed out.
The girl shrugged. ‘Whatever. As long as I get to beat Ian at Scrabble and eat my morning vegetables dutifully, then I get to eat my junk at least once in three days. We had a deal.’ She wagged one finger at the bed. ‘And you won’t break it. I love you for saying yes.’
They all burst out laughing though Obinna could only manage a small smile because of the pain in his ribs before Helen walked towards the bed and climbed in beside her father.