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Three: Necklace

Three

Nightmares...

Loopholes...

Midnight Screams...

Infant Shrills...

Silent whispers...

Deafening echoes...

Broken laughter...

Bleeding souls...

We'd just newly moved to the States when we all began to have these frequent and terrible nightmares with no one to run to but ourselves.

They became so incredibly frequent that we would begin to keep up with them like they were some sick form of TV Show on HULU or Netflix.

"Did you see the little—"

"Oh my God! Yes, the little girl!" Titilayo would cut me off and rather than being pissed, I'd be scared as hell.

"I think we need to tell mummy and daddy about this." Tiwatope would suggest but I'd be the one to steer her mind off the notion.

"We'll only end up making mummy scared and we all know Dad would wave it off as stupid bants."

"But it's not stupid bants!." Tiwatope would stump her foot angrily—then she'd hear the echo of the noise that came from her own shoe via the wooden floor and finally jump to where I stood, shivering like hell.

Dad left us with a strict Ethiopian governess, but she never failed to remind us about how precious her sleep time was and how rude it was to scare old women like herself awake because of "plain old nightmares."

We'd usually end up joining our tiny hands in prayers until one of us got sleepy and finally infected the others; this worked up until the day I was brushing my teeth and—(mind you, up until this day, no one still believes me, but I saw my toilet seat shoot open and it wasn't automatic—and just when I was done screaming my heart out and tried walking over to it, the water faucet made a creaking noise and I watched water gush angrily out of it; and maybe I wouldn't have fainted if the door didn't shut by itself, but it did and I woke up at the Royal Adelaide Hospital with a blurry vision of my father by my side.

"They've told me everything, Tolani...Don't you worry, daddy will take care of everything...just sleep." He assured me and I'd never been so glad to set my eyes on someone in my entire life.

Dad called us into his room a week later. It was one of the strangest nights of my life.

He wore a white long hooded gown dress which look more like a witch ensemble than pajamas and I noticed how different he looked. Was he wearing mascara? I thought to myself.

"The three of you, on your knees now!" He'd never spoken to us in the kind of way and manner in which he spoke to us that night, ever, and I remember thinking he was almost scarier than the nightmares that plagued our sleep. There was something strange about the way he hummed as he circled himself around us, this couldn't be prayer, or had Daddy joined the Celestial Church of Christ? because the last I checked, we were Redeemers—he even made it mandatory that the governess took us to the nearest Redeem Christian Church in the State every Sunday morning.

I remember stealing looks at my sisters who had both beaten me to my theft as we all began to communicate with our eyes.

"CLOSE YOUR EYES!" Daddy commanded and that was when we knew something was wrong—not with Daddy per se, but with the whole situation because the energy in the room began to feel different and I began to wonder if this was how those ladies who claimed to catch the Holy Spirit at church felt judging by the way I was beginning to feel the ground shake furiously from beneath our knees— and how did daddy know we had our eyes open with that hooded fabric almost concealing his neck? I thought to myself— of course with my eyes closed and just like magic, everything went dark and the only evidence of life was the distant voice of my father screaming a certain word in a strange language, and I'd stayed long enough in front of Africa Magic Yoruba to know that nothing that came out of his lips that night was of our dialect.

By the time I came back to normalcy, Daddy was back to rocking his custom Tom Ford eyewear and Gucci shirt and jeans.

"What happened?" Tiwatope beat me to it.

"The Holy Spirit came down and saved you from your nightmares."

The words 'Holy Spirit' sounded foreign from his lips and even our American Eskimo: Darrel barked at his lie.

Whatever energy descended on us was far from the Holy Spirit and we were too weak and tired to think too much of it, we just wanted to know that we weren't going to be having scary nightmares any longer, and frankly speaking, the little drama we'd just witnessed kind of gave us some weird form of assurance.

It wasn't until when we escorted Daddy to the airport days after and he was about to step into the private jet did he bring out the necklaces from his Gucci wallet.

"Have you guys noticed that the nightmares have stopped?" He squatted right in our midst as he usually did when we were little and broke at Iyanapaja and mum would report something terrible we'd broken—but Dad was always too nice to spank us, he'd just squat in our midst and make us promise never to let it repeat itself and somehow, that worked more efficiently than Mummy's constant nags.

No one said a word in response, we just nodded our heads in unison.

"Good," he sighed and pushed his palm open in front of us, and gestured with his eyes for us to pick at random. "It'll be better not to put this necklace on at all than to ever take it off—I repeat, it is better not to put this necklace on at all than to take it off." And that was all he knew we needed to hear.

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