CHAPTER ONE

August’s mother refused to name him before his birth. There remained this gentleness still, to the child growing in her womb. A hushed quality that kept her from pinning her hopes on it. She would not name the baby until it was squirming in her arms. Her daughters did not understand this. Or at least Uzoamaka and Chinyere did not. The youngest, Peculiar, was too young to understand or not understand. She simply walked in her sisters’ footsteps and repeated the questions they asked. It wasn’t something their mother could explain to them. She did not want them to worry. She herself worried sometimes, when her faith faltered. On those occasions, she read herself the letter she’d received from Kaduna, sitting in the darkness of her room. To her right, the curtains were drawn, as though if she let light fall on the brown paper, it would crumble into dust in her shaking hands.

Dearest sister, you will have a son, and it shall not kill you. I dreamt of your blessing. God is always faithful, and His word says, of whose report shall we believe? Have faith.

Her sister’s letter did not make her heart impervious to her doctor’s warning. She still remembered the way he’d pointed at her.

“Mrs. Akasike, I hope you heard me.Don’t try again. Don’t, at all, at all. You willnot survive it. Take care of the ones God has given you.”

But the letter made her feel as though she had God’s very own grace behind her and with that came a sort of courage. A courage that eluded her husband.

“I’m afraid,” he told her once, his head resting on the roundness of her stomach.

They were in the living room. She, lying sideways on the couch so that her protruding belly was resting on the cushion. He, sitting on the floor in nothing but shorts, rubbing her stomach gently. The children had already retired to their rooms and an old episode ofCheckmate was playing on the TV. She loved his belly rubs, and the way his whole face would light up if he felt the baby move.

“It’s just pregnancy,” she said, laughing.

When he kissed her stomach, rubbed his cheek against the warmth of her belly, she said, “God will make a name for himself. I trust in him.”

August grew up thinking his mother brave, though foolish. It was one of those things he never said out loud, a thought he allowed himself only in the privacy of his own mind. He knew how sad it would make his sisters. How they would repeat it to one another, whispering, making sure their whispers were loud enough for him to hear.

“Did you hear what August said? Did you hear?” Their heads would be shaking morosely from side to side.

Sometimes, when August said or did something his sisters thought unacceptable, they told him a story about his mother to make him sufficiently remorseful for what he had done. What she had sacrificed for him to live. August gathered all those stories, nursed them until they were ingrained in him, almost memories of his own. He knew the folds of his mother’s skin, the round immunization scar on her right shoulder, the contours and ridges of the stretch marks that danced outward from her navel in slender lines, even the way her voice broke when she cried. He knew his story, too, every bit of it. Every detail of every event. He could trace the defiance in his mother’s face as she sat in the car almost two months before her due date, trying to breathe deeply and evenly. The more he ruminated on these memories, the more he was enveloped with pangs of incomplete