(If you have not read part 1 of this story, click here )
https://sifaremmy.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/scraps-of-grace-1/
My mind thinks harm, rape, and death from the reflection in her face. She then crosses over me, and I think had she not held me so tightly, I would have surely lost balance. I hug her to my chest, then lead her to weep and sit her at the table, where she does not speak but keeps her head buried in her hands so as to prevent me from seeing the violent spasm shaking her. Still making glances at her, I see her revealing a vulnerability that I cannot put my finger on—one I do not know what to do with. It is a kind of helplessness that causes worry to rise in me. It makes me shudder. However, watching her, I can tell she is preoccupied by one of those griefs that you put off because you do not want to confront it just yet, but only for it to recur sharper than its previous attack.
Nevertheless, for a moment, she manages to put her unknown paroxysm at bay and raises her face, only for it to fall forward again as of its own weight into her palm. But she is not defeated just yet; this time she raises her head with firmness. She clears her throat once, then twice, then three times. She is about to say something but apparently cannot frame the words because of the movement caused by the quivering of her lips, and even so, the words to be said want out but are supposedly held in prudence, through a desire for total discretion, and in the event they are uttered out loud, the probability of expelling them would prove difficult, if not futile. They would be made certain that the more she tells them, the more validity she’ll be giving them, a risk she may not want to take. But this unknown thing is painted on her face. It worries and troubles her; she cannot contain it any more. And as it is, she is forced to create a space to at least allow someone, a person, to make light of these fears that continue to ceaselessly paralyse her.
So be it, with her as a specimen and my present object of study, I get to have a suspicion that she may as well be experiencing a stalemate in making the decision to let me know of her woes or not. Perhaps I like to think she is bumming on the fence, trying to make a pick between choices whose repercussions happen to lie within the spectrum of both bad extremes. And lo! If only she’d never told me, if only she’d kept me in the dark, then truthfully, I would not become partisan to something so foul and disagreeable. I tell it now, but this was later, as I was again relieved in the comfort of my lounge.
Nonetheless, a long minute passes, and the exhaustion of tears has quieted her. The sob in her throat drys, and she looks at me. Perhaps she is upset by the equipoise of my insensitive nature, but I alone know the seizure of sorrow that churns my insides, and as I desired to express it outwardly, to ask questions, to give her comfort through a second hug, to hush her to calmness, something in me upheaves, rebels and inverts itself; something in me cowardly refuses the engagement.
Five years have passed, and I have come to feel acutely the contrast between her life and mine. Five years have passed, and we have grown to have less and less to do with each other. In those five years, I respected her inability to speak, understanding that this was what she needed and supporting her with my silence. And as it is, I cannot bring myself to make a gesture of contact when she groped my way just now. These five years were such a long time, and now her presence before my sight is saying it: that she never stopped loving me, even after abandoning me, and suddenly, from her voice, which has lost all strength and is somehow altered so that it becomes strange-sounding and raw, she utters a few words of sympathy:
“I have never yet been so profoundly unhappy as of late. I have not written to you, but the reason does not lie in my slothiness but rather in my depressed condition of the mind that was brought about by some ill-fated circumstance, and when my world crumbled down, I scarcely knew to what side I would turn, but with you, I have reminded myself of how kind and cordial you always were with me.”
Then she hands me a sticky note whose contents are vague. Printed in is an address to an unknown location, and as I look at her, with her face still expressing misery, she says I will know what to do. Neither of us speaks, and why should we? The need was for action, not questions. Three hours off the road to Kitengela, my car veers off and halts next to the said premises. I can see a whole multitude of people in front of the premises. I quickly make my way through the crowd. The scene shows the body of a man being wheeled into the ambulance. Until then, I do not know what Shish expected me to do. So, going back, I find her sitting in my lounge. I am forced to explain my findings to her. I tell her it may be a case of suicide. However, one thing that caught my eye and was quite interesting about the dead man was that he had his hat covering his face—a gesture so kind that even in death, he was still mindful of others, sparing his spectators from a moment of sheer fright—but he still made a gore sight, lying there dead.
“It’s Jake, my husband; I killed him.”
I stare at Shish, unable to speak. I become completely disturbed by her display of complete unconcern and insensitivity with which she makes her confession. She could not have done it. She did not do it, but I think I heard her say she did it. A possibility I found unbelievable—I mean, she loved him fiercely. I was a witness to their experience. I was certain I had seen her go in and out of dating with numerous men who were always fleeting, never staying long enough for me to even get their names, but when it came to Jake, she had fallen head over heels in love. How she disappeared, love taking her full, but as I now search her face more clearly, I note that I had never seen her look, as perhaps she never had, being for so long that we had not met in five years( or so it seemed to me and still does: that until then our eyes had never seriously met), she reappeared shrunken and haggard.
There were dark shadows under her eyes. Her face was weary. She looked old with wrinkles that did not take full possession of her so that they merged to become a part of her face—rather, these features were purely circumstantial, the product of a possible grievous event that needed to be unveiled if not conquered. Still directing my eyes on her, I see that she has transformed into a statue staring into space. She does not seem unfazed anymore, and so I begin to think that maybe now the magnitude of the message I had earlier brought her has started to take effect, simmering within her slowly but surely in her own way in order to make her elicit the desired reactions that often arise towards such bad news.
In utter blindness, I continue to stare at her in astonishment. It was as if she were descending, before my very eyes, into the depths of an underworld I had never imagined, like someone fallen in a well, from which the only sounds to be heard were desperate gasps for breath.
“Look, I told you I do not fancy you anymore. You made a fool of me with your beauty. You were glitter on the surface, but underneath you are a plain and charmless woman. Now that your voluptuous curves have deflated, you don’t take care of yourself. I mean, I picked you up from the club, and now I think I should have known better. Your dubious past must have had you abort one, too many children, and right now your womb is flattened out, empty, unable to hold a baby for nine months.”
His tone is harsh, insulting, and bordering on the irascible. The word “killing children” is humiliating, and that too a bad taste. Always, he never misses an opportunity to be offensive.
“We could do a surrogacy; we could still adopt; there are still many ways to be parents,” I say.
“I will not do such a thing. Not even over my dead corpse, because I cannot comprehend why you insist on stripping me of my manhood. I still can sire kids; it’s your fault, and you know that, but you lost again, a third time, Shish. This is the third time I am suffering the consequences of your shady past. A third time of being fatherless”
The verbal clash cascades, and I feel a blow on my face that sends me sprawling in the kitchen sink. The utensils are close by; my hands take hold of the glass vase, and with all my might, I go after him and hit it on his head. He falls down. I stand in horror, then I kneel next to him. I grab his left arm and his waist and pull him towards me, and that side of him rises and turns. I lower him to his back, and his face tilts up. I think I hear his heart, but then I lose it. His pulse cannot be felt. He cannot be sleeping. He is already dead. I clean up the mess, put his body in the car, and drop him off in an unknown location. I do not leave any stone untouched, so nothing leads back to me.
By the time she’s finished breaking from her reverie, she begins to cry as she opens up to a scene that breaks me into a myriad tiny pieces.
Four years into marriage, my husband became convinced that what was lacking in our marriage was a child. So life revolved around numerous check-up visits to the gynaecologist, but no sign of pregnancy was forthcoming, and with time, he started behaving towards me with a complete lack of consideration, with revulsion and scorn. He mistreated, abused, and undermined me, making me feel hopeless about my childlessness. So that every day I anticipated a beating from a catalogue of weapons that were mostly cutlery. Sometimes I like to think the reason my body refused to respond was the idea that I did not want to have a kid with the person who keeps hitting me, and maybe you are wondering why I did not leave after the first blow. It irks me too, but I cannot tell the reason why. It’s as though something held me. Something that had the shape of fear and hope.
It was hope; hope chained me with its seduction that things would change tomorrow and that he would eventually give up violence, then it was fear—the fear he sought to instill in me was never the actual dead itself but the fear the action could lead to death. However, between the two forces, hope triumphed and came to fruition. I became the mother of not one but four children towards the fifth year which unbeknownst to me, was the last year of marriage. Each of the conceptions found me pacified and treated well, and maybe this is the honest reason of why I did not leave him. And as it is, everything was okay, so I thought. He still loved me, so I thought, because not once did Jake begin any kind of divorce proceedings, a cue that he never lost hope in me, and with my first conception, I cracked the code to a happy marriage, so I thought. But fourteen weeks later, on Friday at 4:50 am East African Time, the universe fixed my due date. A date that remains forever imprinted in my mind. The day my thighs slipped out a sleeping child. The child was dead. And as I recall…
To Read Scraps of Grace (3) tap the link below 👇🏿
https://sifaremmy.wordpress.com/2023/12/12/scraps-of-grace-3/
Memoir of Me 
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