Americanah

CHAPTER 43

For the first few days, Ifemelu slept on the floor in Dike’s room. It did not happen. It did not happen. She told herself this often, and yet endless, elliptical thoughts of what could have happened churned in her head. His bed, this room, would have been empty forever. Somewhere inside her, a gash would have ruptured that would never seal itself back. She imagined him taking the pills. Tylenol, mere Tylenol; he had read on the Internet that an overdose could kill you. What was he thinking? Did he think of her? After he came home from the hospital, his stomach pumped, his liver monitored, she searched his face, his gestures, his words, for a sign, for proof that it had really almost happened. He looked no different from before; there were no shadows under his eyes, no funereal air about him. She made him the kind of jollof rice he liked, flecked with bits of red and green peppers, and as he ate, fork moving from the plate to his mouth, saying, “This is pretty good,” as he always had in the past, she felt her tears and her questions gathering. Why? Why had he done it? What was on his mind? She did not ask him because the therapist had said that it was best not to ask him anything yet. The days passed. She clung to him, wary of letting go and wary, also, of suffocating him. She was sleepless at first, refusing the small blue pill Aunty Uju offered her, and she would lie awake at night, thinking and turning, her mind held hostage by thoughts of what could have been, until she fell, finally, into a drained sleep. On some days, she woke up scarred with blame for Aunty Uju.

“Do you remember when Dike was telling you something and he said ‘we black folk’ and you told him ‘you are not black’?” she asked Aunty Uju, her voice low because Dike was still asleep upstairs. They were in the kitchen of the condo, in the soft flare of morning light, and Aunty Uju, dressed for work, was standing by the sink and eating yogurt, scooping from a plastic cup.

“Yes, I remember.”

“You should not have done that.”

“You know what I meant. I didn’t want him to start behaving like these people and thinking that everything that happens to him is because he’s black.”

“You told him what he wasn’t but you didn’t tell him what he was.”

“What are you saying?” Aunty Uju pressed the lever with her foot, the trash can slid out, and she threw in the empty yogurt cup. She had switched to part-time work so that she could spend some time with Dike, and drive him to his therapist appointments herself.

“You never reassured him.”

“Ifemelu, his suicide attempt was from depression,” Aunty Uju said gently, quietly. “It is a clinical disease. Many teenagers suffer from it.”

“Do people just wake up and become depressed?”

“Yes, they do.”

“Not in Dike’s case.”

“Three of my patients have attempted suicide, all of them white teenagers. One succeeded,” Aunty Uju said, her tone pacifying and sad, as it had been since Dike came home from the hospital.

“His depression is because of his experience, Aunty!” Ifemelu said, her voice rising, and then she was sobbing, apologizing to Aunty Uju, her own guilt spreading and sullying her. Dike would not have swallowed those pills if she had been more diligent, more awake. She had crouched too easily behind laughter, she had failed to till the emotional soil of Dike’s jokes. It was true that he laughed, and that his laughter convinced with its sound and its light, but it might have been a shield, and underneath, there might have been a growing pea plant of trauma.

Now, in the shrill, silent aftermath of his suicide attempt, she wondered how much they had masked with all that laughter. She should have worried more. She watched him carefully. She guarded him. She did not want his friends to visit, although the therapist said it was fine if he wanted them to. Even Page, who had burst out crying a few days ago when she was alone with Ifemelu, saying, “I just can’t believe he didn’t reach out to me.” She was a child, well-meaning and simple, and yet Ifemelu felt a wave of resentment towards her, for thinking that Dike should have reached out to her. Kweku came back from his medical mission in Nigeria, and he spent time with Dike, watching television with him, bringing calm and normalcy back.

The weeks passed. Ifemelu stopped panicking when Dike stayed a little too long in the bathroom. His birthday was days away and she asked what he would like, her tears again gathering, because she imagined his birthday passing not as the day he turned seventeen but as the day he would have turned seventeen.

“How about we go to Miami?” he said, half joking, but she took him to Miami and they spent two days in a hotel, ordering burgers at the thatch-covered bar by the pool, talking about everything but the suicide attempt.

“This is the life,” he said, lying with his face to the sun. “That blog of yours was a great thing, had you swimming in the dough and all. Now you’ve closed it, we won’t be able to do more of this stuff!”

“I wasn’t swimming, kind of just splattering,” she said, looking at him, her handsome cousin, and the curl of wet hair on his chest made her sad, because it implied his new, tender adulthood, and she wished he would remain a child; if he remained a child then he would not have taken pills and lain on the basement couch with the certainty that he would never wake up again.

“I love you, Dike. We love you, you know that?”

“I know,” he said. “Coz, you should go.”

“Go where?”

“Back to Nigeria, like you were planning to. I’m going to be okay, I promise.”

“Maybe you could come and visit me,” she said.

After a pause, he said, “Yeah.”