As morning breaks and the rays of sunshine slip through the beige curtains we found when we moved into this house four years ago, Millie’s body language is too loud to ignore. She is sleeping on the furthest side of the bed, with her back facing me. I should really stop making promises I know I can’t keep. I messed up, Millie rarely asks anything of me and the right thing to do would have been to put my anxiety aside and just watch her favourite show with her, but I just had to make my life harder by dozing off, now she is disappointed, maybe even furious. I stretch my hand towards her; hesitantly and fully aware that my advances will be turned down; they aren’t.
“Are they still threatening you?”
“Babe, I told you not to worry about it”
“Calvin, I have seen how stressed you have been the last few days, we promised not to keep stuff from each other.”
“The church is trying to stop the launch today. They are threatening to burn the offices if we do not stop operations.”
“For believers, they sure have some violent bones in them. What are you going to do now?”
“I won’t back out, everything is set, we launch today! I have been working towards this for years babe.”
“I know, your mother would be proud.”
Millie had always amazed me by how well she knew and understood me. It is like the universe had seen all the brokenness and trauma I carried and decided to use her beauty and grace to fill those spaces. I owed her my sanity, she was there when my world turned upside down.
As she showered, I sat on the toilet and carried out my customary morning business, she started telling me about the riveting plot twists of the show she slept late watching the previous night. There was no malice in her tone but I still felt a little guilty for leaving her in the cold like that. As she was speaking, my mind drifted off to the day we met, so many years ago on one of the most horrific days of my life.
I was 25 years old, fresh out of campus and buzzing to experience life. I lived with my mother in a big apartment building that stood the tallest in the small town that I grew up in. We lived on the fifth floor and had a two-bedroom house. My mum had divorced my dad when I was eight after he eloped with a barmaid and emptied her bank accounts. My father was a restless man who refused to stay in one place for too long. Not even a wife and son could suffice.
My mother was broken after the divorce, she took me, and bags of our belongings and we left her matrimonial home for a simpler and less painful life. I never saw her in the company of another man but I had heard stories that she tried to date again but I guess none of those relationships had amounted to anything.
My mother and I were closer than typical mothers and sons because we had gone through it all together. We were bound by the harsh realities of a jobless single mother attempting to pick up the pieces after her marriage fell apart. Once the dust had settled, we found a house and made it our home. Just the two of us
“Babe, are you even listening?”
“Sorry, for some reason my mind just went back to when we met.”
“Awww, that is sweet babe. I know it was a rough day for you but on the bright side I met a hunk who is now my husband.”
“Was that the day you met Uncle Frank as well?”
“Uhm.. I guess so, was he at the hospital as too?”
“Yes, he was the one who paid Mum’s mortuary fees “
“Oh sorry about that babe,”
“It is all in the past now, today we will be honouring her name.”
I jumped into the shower as soon as Millie was out and showered quickly because I was pressed for time. Luckily, Millie had already picked out an outfit for me. Two hours later, both of us stood together hand in hand as we cut the ribbons to my first clinic. The Florence Chima Clinic is named after my beloved mother.
“Doctor Calvin!”, a deep voice called from behind us. “You are a disgrace and a murderer! You will burn in hell for this!”
I held Millie close to me, keen to have myself between her and the angry mystery man. I was thanking a doctor friend of mine when a plastic doll came flying over my head and landed on Millie’s chest. The doll had been dipped in red ink and there were residues of the ink on the suit she had picked out for me. Her beautiful pink dress was stained and destroyed. There was a look of shock and terror in her eyes. As I walked her inside the clinic surrounded by my friends, the man responsible for the attack cried out, “Why are you doing this!”
—-
My mother bought her red Toyota Starlet when I was in my first year of university. It was her office, her means of livelihood. She was a sales manager for a telecommunications company and she traveled from town to town selling products and doing activations. She worked just as hard as her little starlet. My mother loved that car.
One night when I was on holiday I was driving with her in her car; I had requested to go with her to work because sometimes she would let me drive. On this day, we had been out in the field too late and darkness had come upon us. We were 30 minutes from home, going through a deserted road when three men dressed in what seemed to be police clothes, stopped us.
It was unusual for police to be out at that hour but Mum being a rule follower, stopped and parked by the side of the road. Before we could even take a breath, the doors swung open and a heavy blow landed on my jaw. I could’ve sworn that my jaw was broken from the sheer force I was hit with. I was disoriented by what was happening and the cries from my mum quickly brought me back to reality.
“Who are you and what do you want with us?”, she cried. Her voice was different, it was deeper and heavier, and it carried so much emotion. It was fear, confusion and desperation.
One of the men put his palm over my mother’s mouth, muffling her cries but not her pain. She fought with everything she had.
“Stupid woman!” another man shouted. “Stop fighting or I will end you right now!” He added.
There was great commotion in that small car as one of the men had made his way in the back seat and was now pinning me to the seat as the other two wrestled with my hysterical mum. She kept saying that I was just a boy. “Don’t hurt him!” She repeated between her screams and cries.
The men quickly realized that she would not calm down and hit her hard on the head with a metal rod they had. They hit her with so much force that I believed my mother was dead because she instantly passed out. With the three men now in the car, I was slapped three times and asked to part with all the money I had.
My eyes were full of tears and my hands were shaking with fear as I gave them the five hundred shillings my mum had given me earlier that day for helping her out at work. The men must’ve felt disrespected by that because they hit me a few more times while asking me if I wanted to die that day.
“I see you want to be a hero today right? You want to be a clever boy!”
“No please, I don’t have anything. Please let my mother and I go. Take anything you want. Here is my phone, take it…”
The next thing I heard was the revving of the engine as the Starlet drove away. They had left me on the side of the road with a broken rib and a bloody nose. My eyes followed the tail lights for as long as I could. I needed to know where they were going because my mum was still in the car.
I gathered up the strength to stand and walk towards the direction of where they had driven, which was away from the general direction of home. Any movement I made was excruciating. Blood was coming out of my mouth and nose. I was in bad shape, scared and cold as the moon lit my path.
I was helped by a boda boda rider to get to the nearest police station. I was later taken to hospital as the police went out in search of my mother. I insisted on going with them but I was turned down. They said I didn’t have any useful information that warranted me being with them in my condition.
My mother was found the next day, in a ditch thirty kilometres from where we had been carjacked. A sheep herder had found her barely alive, she had received a beating more violent than mine. She was half naked and they had done things to her that no one should do to a fellow person. I looked at her report on the day I went to see her in the hospital. They had raped her the entire night.
Doctors feared that the blow to her head would cause permanent damage and lead to memory loss or worse, disability. Her recovery was a miracle, a one-in-a-million chance. I stayed with her at the hospital as much as they could allow me to stay. I cried every day for my mother as she lay there motionless. The wounds on her body testament to the brutal abuse she had gone through. What about the wounds that I couldn’t see? Would my mother ever be the same again?
—
I couldn’t stand being in the dark. I was terrified of strangers and more so, strangers who came around my mother. I became increasingly scared of everything and anyone that felt strange to me. Uncle Frank, my mother’s brother, took me in and gave us a place to stay when my mother was discharged.
She never said a word about the assault she had experienced. Like me, she became protective and apprehensive of people we didn’t know. She didn’t say it, but I saw guilt in her eyes like she felt somehow responsible for the ordeal we had gone through. I did my best to reassure her that I did not blame her in any way and I just wanted us to move on with our lives.
“Mum, if you could have any car in the world? What would it be?” I asked with ulterior motives.
Without missing a beat, “You know I love small compact cars. I would go for one of those shiny and fast Volkswagens”
“Have you ever thought about following up with the Starlet? I can look into it.”
Mum looked visibly disturbed and uneasy, “There is no use for doing that, I am sure that baby is long gone…”
“Mum…..I Was talking to Uncle Frank about us going for counselling”.
“I am so tired right now, let’s chat about this at a later time. Okay?”
—
Uncle Frank followed up with the carjacking case but all leads led to a dead end. It was frustrating for the entire family not to have answers. When my mother was asked to describe her attackers, she said nothing. It was like she had locked that part of her memory somewhere far in her mind that she couldn’t revisit.
Three months later we moved back to our house. My mother had undergone major surgery as a result of the abuse so she wasn’t moving around easily. I stayed with her as she recouped. She was weak and mostly spent her days in bed. She took no visitors except close family and a few friends.
Uncle Frank would visit regularly to bring us food and supplies. He was the rock that held us together and took care of us when everything was taken away.
“Calvin, how are you holding up? If you need assistance with your mum, just say so and I will take care of it.”
“No worries Uncle, mum is getting better by the day and soon she will be moving around freely.”
“What about you? How are you?”
“Honestly I am just worried about mum. I fear that her being in this house all alone might not be good for her.”
“I know Calvin, I know. I will talk to her about it.”
Four months after the incident my mother was doing better and was getting ready to go back to work. Uncle Frank would give her his spare car to use for work before she could figure things out.
One day when she was away, I found a pile of papers by her bedside. I didn’t want to snoop but I couldn’t help myself. My mother was journaling about her thoughts and feelings and they were heartbreaking. She wrote about the fact that she couldn’t sleep and stayed up until four in the morning. She wrote…
“I am in pain and I don’t know where my remedy lies. I fear that my son Calvin will be scarred by this incident for the rest of his life and this thought is crushing me every day. I don’t know what to say to him and what not to say. I should probably schedule a meeting with a psychologist. We could both use it because I fear that I am a changed woman. I carry with me a lot of shame and guilt and I cannot speak to anyone about it. To make matters worse, I carry in me a seed from that night that grows in size every day. What am I supposed to do? What will people say?”
I dropped the papers and almost fell to my knees. I felt my legs turn to rubber instantly. My mother was hurting and she was pregnant!
That night I made up my mind to address the elephant in the room once my mother was back. I couldn’t keep quiet about the issue anymore.
I waited all night and fell asleep on the couch. I was woken up by a knock on the door. It was Uncle Frank and he came bearing the worst news. My mother was dead.
We drove in silence to the general hospital where my mother had been admitted. Uncle Frank explained that my mother had seen a dodgy doctor to help her get an abortion. Something had gone terribly wrong and she didn’t wake up after it was over. She had lost too much blood, she died in the emergency room.
We arrived as she was being readied to be taken to the mortuary. I didn’t want to see her but Uncle Frank insisted that I needed to see her one last time. I broke down the minute I saw her lying there lifeless. I felt a knot fill my chest and my throat caved into itself, I couldn’t breathe, it was the worst pain I have ever felt. A student nurse held my shoulder and gave me a bottle of water. Her name was Millie.
She was beautiful, warm and nurturing, she became my rock through the burial of my mother and through the heart-wrenching phase of picking up the pieces. We were friends first and she helped me through the late nights while studying for my medical exams.
—-
I became a trained doctor and specialized in sexual and reproductive health. I worked for small NGOs in refugee camps and it was there that I was exposed to the darkest part of humanity. Women and girls from war-torn areas would come to us in bad shape, and sexually assaulted by their captors. I was responsible for giving them care and treatment.
We carried out safe abortions for those who sought it out but we did it under the wraps. It was legal but morally frowned upon. We felt and believed that we were making a difference because women were dying while trying to carry out abortions at home or from untrained doctors like my mother did.
Once my contract ended I came back home, married Millie and decided to open up a Clinic. On paper, it was a normal clinic but when the doors closed, we worked closely with rescue organizations to help victims of sexual abuse or any other woman who was in sound mind and had made the decision to seek safe abortion.
—-
The angry man at the clinic had asked me why. That was my reason. That no other woman would die like my mother did.
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