TWO MOTHERS CHAPTER TEN

*Theme songs:

Lewis Capaldi: Someone you loved.

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THE FIRST STORM

Seven years ago

I watched her sleep. I listened to the gentle breathing of her heartbeat, marveling at how she survived every hit that created hideous scars on her body. “He is an animal” she cried when she narrated her occurrences to me. He raped her, made her suffer, took the bright light in her eyes away and replaced it with a bitter energy towards life. She looked at peace now, sleeping gently, her head pressed into my pillow. I loved her like a sister I never had, and I wished for once, she would stay.

“I have become a wanderer in my own father land.” she told me bitterly and it is all his fault. He promised her, and he failed. I thought I was the only one who was naïve, but she was just as green as I was. The man she had eloped with was a beast who wanted the most beautiful girl in the shallows. All he had to do was paint her a very bright picture of her future to steal her breath away; that was all it took. He didn’t deserve a girl like Halimah, just like I knew I didn’t deserve the incidents that followed after.

She stayed for the months that followed. There was no way I would let Halimah go back to that beast of a husband she had. She said they got divorced and there was no place for her to stay so, I took her in. Out of the bond that held us together in the past, I let her stay with me. The child she brought reminded her of the pain she felt in her past. He was the product of many whip lashes, of many forceful sexual pleasures. He stood for everything she stood against. I had seen her scream at her son when he cried, I had seen her refuse to breastfeed him because she wanted to be left alone. For many hours, I’d see her stare into the distance as if she was searching for something lost and when she didn’t find it, she’d go into extra hours of isolation. She barely ate, she barely slept, and she barely spoke about her several journeys that made her different.

One day, she disappeared.

Present day

“A tumor” he said. “The tumor was growing near his lungs, it pressed down on it, making him lose air. He wasn’t able to breathe for a while. He passed out gasping, and while falling, he struck his head against the ceramic potty. We have been able to reduce the swelling in his brain, he had a lot sutures and he lost a lot of blood. He is on strong anesthesia and until we get a clear imaging from the CT, until then would we be able to tell you the level…” every other words floated into the background. It was like water was clogged in my ears. I always said he was frail, I always said he looked underfed, he had unusual behavior patterns kids his age didn’t have, but all I was busy doing was trying to get money to sustain us. I should have been more observant. The tears that laced my eyes had dried but stung all the way to my heart.

            I settled on the waiting bench and heaved a deep sigh that wrenched my heart. He sat beside me as well. “I am going to do everything in my power to make sure he is okay.”

            “Tumor…”

            “His abdominal scans shows it is not malignant. It is removable, and in time, he’d be back on his feet.”

            “He couldn’t breathe…” I looked into the eyes of the doctor that operated on my son. “…you said he couldn’t breathe.” Afresh tears formed in my eyes and my heart pounded with pain like a metal clogged in my chest. I buried my face in my palms and sobbed for a bit. I knew the cause of it, and it broke my heart even more. Everything I tried to run away from was coming back at me with a force so strong that I might give in under the pressure. I was running away from the story that led to me being the mother of a son I never birthed or adopted but it taunted me day and night. I was running away from my past, and it showed up on my doorstep about two years ago. I was running away from the searching eyes of Mohammad, and now, he was sitting here next to me, telling me the fatality of my son’s health. I never knew he worked as a surgeon at this hospital, and now he was in his third year of residency.

            “He’d be fine…”

Seven years ago

“Put him down!” I yelled at Halimah. “You will hurt him like that.”

“Tell him to stop crying!” she screamed back, her neck twitching from side to side. Halimah needed help, she needed to see a psychiatrist because by the minute, she was losing her peace of mind to the demons that haunted her sleep. She was away from the troubles in her life, but it appeared to her when she stared at walls for long hours, when she went to sleep at night, and when her baby cried of hunger. She was holding him up in the air with one foot, threatening to smash him into the cold tiles.

The little child was terrified. He was scared, having no idea whatsoever why he wasn’t in the warmth of his mother’s hands but dangling four ft or more above the ground. “Tell him to keep shut! Tell him to stop!”

            “He is not going to stop if you keep doing that. Give him to me, let me keep him quiet.”

            “I am his mother, he should listen to me when I tell him to keep quiet!”

            “But he was only a few months old, what language did he understand? What does he know about the world except the brutality his mother had shown him? It wasn’t her fault; her heart had been mutilated by the claws of cruelty.

            “Look at me!” I had her attention now. “Look at me Halimah. He is innocent, he has nothing to do with everything that has happened.” I moved closer to where stood and stretched to collect the child from her. She hasn’t even named him yet. “You don’t have to do this… give him to me.”

Her eyes were glassy with tears as she looked ahead, above my shoulders as if she was reliving the moment, every time the beast of her husband plunged into her, hitting her, making her suffer.

She dropped the child to die.

  

Seven years ago

I touched the scar on my upper abdomen. That was the first scar I got for my son; when I wanted to catch him back then, I had dived straight into a glass table.

            I rose my buried face from my palms and looked at Mohammad who had his eyes keen on me, his arm on my shoulder in consolation. “Please do all you can to keep him safe. Please, he is all I have left.”

***

I peeped through the glass walls of the ICU and saw my son attached to all those wires and machines. I breathed steam onto the glass and for the first time in years in my mind, I returned to Kanawar to revisit my past memories. I saw myself, and I saw the bright innocent eyes of Halimah. I knew he looked a lot like her; even detailed to his fingernails. It was then I strengthened my resolve, a promise to my son that I would protect him no matter what, and I will make sure she paid for everything she did to us.

            One day, my son would be the one other sons in the world would look up to. All he had to do was survive this storm first.

What happens next? Find out in the next chapter of Two Mothers by Okunola O. Zain

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