Running Away Solves Everything

Tomilola

2018, a good time to be alive. One clause I could not candidly declare, as I was salsa dancing to kirikiri, the maximum jail.

Alarmingly, hands alerting me to stop and help, instead of slowing me down, is what gets me away from this scene quicker. Too many things were going on in my head, so I didn’t make out that irony as speedily as I should have.

“Hello?” It’s the boy who I met at the church that Sunday.

Sounding so distressed from afar, I had to closely hear what he wanted to say, but when I walk up to him, and see that wrecked car, it’s not his distressed voice that coaxes me to jump into that car and drive, it’s the two breathless children in the back of the car and their bleeding momma. He didn’t have to tell me why he stopped me or even try to explain what happened. I knew what to do.

We’re at an American wedding. What’s mine is yours. Americans divorce!. This is what booms off the radio and I angrily turn it off. It was most certainly because those weren’t what I wanted to hear right then, and that tune… I didn’t just need any depression in my life.

Ekene located the nearest hospital on Google Maps and that’s where we were now. I hadn’t seen this family ever before, but I could feel something inauspicious.

“Thanks so much. God brought you.” He was so grateful we got there in time, and showered me with so much exaltations I knew I didn’t deserve. For crying out loud, I killed someone and he didn’t know that.

“You’re the hero here. Let’s pray they are okay.” I’m just wondering what I’d do with that voice recording, when I remember something equally important What was he doing in that hotel?  But I don’t ask that. “Do you know them?”

He answers quickly, but sadly. “Yeah. She’s my mum’s friend and the boy goes to the same school as my brother.”

“Then call your mum.” It’s eleven o'clock, but I don’t take my words back. “She should know they are here.” But he was reluctant. Maybe because his mum didn’t know he was there. He ran out of his house?

I didn’t know what to say when he told me his mum didn’t know he was at a hotel. I literally was just thinking about that. “She thinks I’m at a sleepover with my cousin. That dumped me after he and the people I called my friends made me enter trouble.” If he was betrayed, he didn’t sound it at all. I was sensing more fear in his speech, than anger.

“You will make better friends when you are older,” I assure him, then when I see a nurse coming towards us, I tap him before I scram. “Always do the right thing.” And by the right thing, I was referring to him calling his mum.

I was also going to do the right thing. Play the recording to Kamsi first thing tomorrow morning. I had totally forgotten all about Nneka, but when I regard the misfired gun and Nathan's still physical frame, I’m summoned back to Ocean View. It’s an unalloyed reality that the one thing you don’t want is the one thing you get.