Zain E. Asher - Where the Children Take Us: How One Family Achieved the Unimaginable

I cant remember most of what happened that Sunday in September.

I couldnt tell you what the Gospel reading was at Mass that morning or whether Aunty Fatou came over to braid my hair in cornrows, or which Culture Club song was playing on the beat-up radio in my bedroom.

None of that really matters anyway. Everything about that Sunday was so routine, so plain, so unremarkable. Until the phone rang.

My mother had been waiting for that sound since morning, never straying too far from the living room just in case she missed it. Everything shed done that dayfrying plantains, leafing through the Argos catalogue, ironing my brothers school shirtswas all a plot to fill time.

She kept telling us to turn down the television so nothing would drown out the sound. She was anxious, fidgety; we all were.

When the phone rang at 6:30 p.m., she finally gave herself permission to exhale.

Arinze?

It was supposed to be my dad. He was supposed to explain why he still wasnt home; to apologize for the eight hours of worry hed put her through.

But the voice on the other end of the line wasnt his.

This voice was nervous; it hesitated and stuttered. It took a deep breath and mumbled two sentences that brought one chapter of our lives to a swift and sudden end and started an entirely new book.

Your husband and your son have been involved in a car crash. One of them is dead and we dont know which one.

Its human nature to fear the worst when we dont hear from a loved one for several hours, but usually, the worst doesnt happen. Usually, everyone ends up all right.

This was not one of those times.

My father and eleven-year-old brother were four thousand miles away on a father-son road trip; long-awaited quality time together after a busy summer. My brother gazing out the car window, wide-eyed and inquisitive. My father pointing and explaining: the sprawling textile markets, the street hawkers selling okpa, the overcrowded yellow buses with conductors riding on the outside. All distant flashes of rich culture, a universe away from the corner shops, brewpubs, and lollipop men that littered our neighborhood in South London.

Somewhere along that six-hour stretch of bumpy highway between my fathers home state of Enugu and the buzzing West African metropolis of Lagos, the man driving my father and brother swerved into the opposite lane to cut traffic. As their car veered around a bend, it was crushed by a speeding tractor trailer. Everyone in the car was killed instantly, apart from one person in the back seat, where my father and brother were sitting.

Our relatives in Nigeria were initially told both of them had died. Then, hours later, that one had survived. Then again, that both were killed. They were still in the middle of arguing, trying to work out the facts, when someone made that dreaded call to my mother.

I was five, my eldest brother was fourteen, and my mother was four months pregnant at the time.

She hung up the phone in stunned silence. Every expression shrouded in disbelief, every movement weighed down by numbness. She prayed thered been a mistake; prayed that perhaps in the whirlwind of sirens and stretchers that names and identities were mixed up; that somehow her husband and son had been spared. She thought maybe if she fell asleep, shed wake up to the sound of my brother playing Au Clair de la Lune on his recorder or my dad tapping his feet to atilogwu music in the living room.

She glanced over at me, her little girl, playing happily with a few figurines on the living room floor. Her son Obinze was watching TV. She closed her eyes.

God, if you grant me just one miracle for the rest of my life, let it please come tonight.

My parents owned a small pharmacy in a residential part of Brixton, South London, opposite a community of housing projects. After Obinze and I were asleep, my mother drove there in the middle of the night, oscillating between bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. She unlocked the rolling metal shutters and raided the shelves, throwing dozens of items into a tote bagbandages, gauze, antiseptics, cold compresses. Her job now was to help whoever had survived.