The Call at Four
by Damilola Onwah
It is the last day of my weeklong trip to Nigeria, and despite the dull ache that has troubled my abdomen for days, I choose to trek the four streets over to the mall near my hotel in Lekki Phase 1. I want chin chin, coconut candy, and kilishi; snacks I hope the TSA agents in Seattle will let through without stopping me to ask, What is that, ma’am? Did you declare it, ma’am? and other stress-inducing questions that precede marking my precious cargo for disposal.
Lagos on a March afternoon is too hot for gallivanting, even in the lightest of clothing, so the inner thighs and chest and armpits of my multicolor Dye Lab set are soaked through by the time I am done and making my way down the corridor of the shopping complex.
It is why I notice the young man. His getup is impractical in the heat: a dark green leather jacket over baggy, combat-style jeans. As he comes closer, face shining with sweat, a chuckle brews in my chest. I cut my smile short because he is headed straight for me with a scowl.
“My boss will call you on this line,” he says, leaning in. “By four on the dot.” He thrusts a phone into my hand.
The weather is too hot for silly TikTok pranks and the young man’s breath smells like he hasn’t brushed his tongue in days, but I instinctively tighten my grip on the phone. Pranks and odor notwithstanding, I don’t want a stranger’s phone to slip from my hands to the terrazzo floor.
He tilts closer. “Madam,” he says.
“Yes? Do I know you?” I glance around, half-expecting someone to pop out from behind a pillar, point a camera at me.
“Make sure you pick the call at 4 pm. Unless you don’t want to see your daughter again.” His neck veins bulge. “Shey you understand?”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, sliding the shopping bags up my arm to make room for the newly acquired phone and its bearer’s puzzling message. When I look up again, he is already walking away, rays of light catching and illuminating alternating spots on his leather jacket. “Ah! You! Wait, come and take your phone!” But he may as well be deaf, the way he scurries down the staircase like a spider, and soon disappears around a corner.
Clutching my bags and his phone, I hurry after the stranger. Outside, I scan the car park. He’s gone.
When the young man stopped me, I had been going over the rest of my pre-travel to-do list: call Chinyeaka to meet for a late lunch, arrange aṣọ ẹbí drop-off to the tailor, head back to the hotel, finish packing, call it a night. Stand frazzled under the sun with half a dozen shopping bags in hand, and sweat dripping into the soft band of my favorite wire-free bra? Not on the list.
I should have told him immediately, emphatically—You have the wrong person, I don’t even live in this town. I should have tried harder not to let him get away with this dump and dash. Buzzing with regret, I march over to a Honda CR-V close by and toss the shopping bags— filled with dozens of the snacks I was craving, plus clothes and accessories from some contemporary local designers—against its windshield. When a man in a white kaftan heads toward me with a furrow in his brow, I grab the bags—he must own the car—offer an apologetic smile and head for an eatery by the mall’s entrance.
Living outside Nigeria for so long has made me awkward, stiff, ill-prepared for strange turns of events. I wish I hadn’t let Sodiq off early today—my father’s jovial and street-smart driver would have guided me through this without breaking a sweat. The eatery’s AC is blasting. I grab an empty seat and eye the rows of snacks in glass cases across the room.
At 4 pm sharp, about twenty minutes after Mr. Leather Jacket handed me the phone, it buzzes. 08061255524. I want to leave it on the table and get on with my day, ignore the call in the same way I have ignored my cramps all week. But in spite of myself, I thumb the screen, slide the green button to Accept.
“Madam,” a voice says, deeper than the young man’s from earlier. “Who—who is this?” My bright tone surprises me. It does not match how I feel.
“I see you received our package and our message.”
I clear my throat, pull the phone even closer to my ear. “What message?”
“Madam, let me not waste time. We have Amanda here with us.”
“Amanda? Who is that?”
“Ten million naira! Pay it, or your daughter doesn’t come home.”
“What is going on?”
“Mommy!” A girl screams in the background. “Help me!”
I lower my elbow onto the table for support, end the call, and let the phone fall onto my lap. There’s no Amanda in my life. No daughter or son to call me Mommy.
The device sitting on my lap is an iPhone covered in a light pink, hard-shell case, smooth and warm to the touch. The image sketched on the rear is that of a chocolate-skinned young woman sitting with her back turned, head slightly cocked to the left. A large Ankara head- scarf drapes her head, down to her dark teal swimsuit. The phone case looks like something from the crop of young, enterprising Black artists who sell merchandise and art prints to customers who can’t afford their paintings. I’ve written product descriptions for thousands of e-commerce gizmos in my job as a freelance copywriter, and now, crav-ing the familiar, I can’t help but do the same. Art lovers, this unique case will add artsy appeal to your most prized possession. I finger a lone, coarse hair on my jawline, mentally replacing unique with colorful. The phone case is likely mass-produced, and if one can’t be perfectly honest when writing marketing copy, one should at least avoid telling outright lies.
I do not have a daughter, never even wanted children, a preference I mostly kept to myself because no one expressed that kind of thing in the circles I grew up in. As early as primary school, when my friends talked about how many children they wanted and what gender, I squirmed, bit my tongue. How were they so sure they wanted to be mothers someday? We were all babies ourselves.
My aunt, Big Mommy, was worse—always hugging me too tight and praying too loud that I’d bear my own children and live to raise them. Unlike your mother, who did not, poor thing, was her prayer’s silent coda.
In JSS3, I told Chinyeaka that I didn’t want children and her eyes widened. She warned: “You better don’t go around saying that, you crazy girl!”
What was the big deal about motherhood? I took Chinyeaka’s advice, though, and never mentioned it again, not even to Folabi when we were dating. I held my tongue and floated along with his vision of a girl and two boys and a house with a pool and a garden and a driveway and vintage cars. Folabi was the only son of his parents, how dare I voice a desire to discontinue their lineage?
If one couldn’t be perfectly honest, one held their tongue.
I turn the stranger’s phone in one hand—What am I in the middle of?—reach into my purse, pull out my phone, open WhatsApp, call Folabi.
“Baby, something weird just happened,” I say, trying to calm my voice, lower my register. After seven years of marriage, I know not to overly dramatize my stories so Folabi won’t dismiss me as emotional. Through our relationship, his response to any hint of distress has been to tell me to just stop worrying, just stop being anxious, just stop crying, as though his words are a magic eraser that can wipe my troubled feelings away. Unlike him, I am unable to carry on as if my world isn’t crumbling when it is. When his employers announced an upcoming reduction in force last year, he’d slept like a baby, snoring—I’m too valuable to be fired unceremoniously, he’d said—while for weeks, my eyes snapped open from 2 am until dawn, heart brimming with anxiety.
It is early morning in Seattle and Folabi clears his throat several times as I run through the story. “Toke, this sounds like a scam,” he says. “Can you just leave the phone on the side of the road? Or with a security guard at the entrance? Go back to the hotel and rest. You’re not in the condition to be running up and down carrying people’s matter on your head.”
My husband’s concern for my condition fills me with guilt because he doesn’t know the half of it. Every day of this trip, I’ve fought the urge to tell him what has happened to our baby. It’s easier to leave the words unsaid. It’s why I avoided Big Mommy when I went to Ilorin to visit my father. I knew she’d take one look at me and know that some-thing was very wrong, so I stayed home for days and asked Daddy not to tell anyone I was around.
I say goodbye to Folabi and take a few deep breaths that do nothing to calm the churning in my chest. I could take my husband’s advice: discard the phone, go back to my hotel room, fly out to Seattle tomorrow, slip back into my life like nothing happened. But the young man in the leather jacket thinks I am the mother of his victim. What would Amanda’s mother do?
If I simply move on, the thought of what could have been—and that girl’s scream—will live with me forever.
If I start shouting for help right here in the mall, I could end up doing more harm.
If I go to the police—and I have no idea where the closest station is—they’ll probably try to extort me.
Maybe the act of carrying a baby to term, of birthing and nurturing it, creates unique neural pathways, instincts I can’t access. I place a warm hand against my abdomen, feel it expand ever so slightly with another deep inhale.
Truly, I never wanted children, but for the past seven years, I’ve tried for one like my life depended on it. Last Christmas, I found out I was pregnant. Then, a little over a week ago, I discovered I was losing the baby. To avoid giving Folabi the news, I fled to Nigeria the moment the miscarriage tissue was removed, before he returned from his trip to
Hyderabad.
My instincts—motherly and wifely—are shit at the moment.
The stranger’s phone buzzes, startling me.
“Madam, you cut the call while I was talking. You no dey fear? Your daughter is expiring here and we have not yet done our worst.” He lets out a hideous laugh.
A protective burn rises to the top of my chest as my brain conjures images of these men’s worst. “No, no, no. Wait, first. Please. How much do you say you want?”
“Madam, I already told you. Abi you want to be pricing your daughter like meat ni?”
Mihret Dawit, Togetherness, 2009. Terracotta. Courtesy of the artist.
“I don’t have ten million.” My heart quickens at the lie. Even with crude conversions of naira to dollars, Folabi and I easily hold triple the ransom this man is requesting across multiple high-interest savings accounts.
“Ask your husband, na.”
“My husband?” I say, startled that he has somehow read my mind. “Senator, yes. This is small change compared to all he has looted from this country.”
Senator? So, the phone belongs to a politician’s daughter who has been kidnapped? Shit. I’m in the middle of a Nollywood movie plot. “Um, please, give me some time,” I say.
“Madam, we’ll give you only one hour. Call Senator and tell him to take care of his daughter or else we will take care of her. You get what I mean?” He laughs again. “I will call back with details for the funds drop off.”
I want to vomit and my breasts ache, subtle shades of the symptoms I felt for an entire week before I reluctantly took the pregnancy test, then sobbed, then jumped for joy, then called Folabi to share the good news. After my D&C, the breast pain dulled, then returned, then dulled again, all within days, as my body dazedly oriented to its new reality. My uterus had repelled my baby and, after nearly a decade and tens of thousands of dollars, was back to its steady state: empty.
You can’t put a price on a child. I know this well, because all our money could not get us one of our own. But what if the money can help save someone else’s?
I text Folabi with a summary of the latest call, and a proposal.
His fast response is a splash of cold water. Don’t get more involved & don’t even think about touching our savings. Even if not a scam, it’s not your child, not your business. Drop the phone with security & don’t get worked up, please. Will be in my org’s QBR for next 2 hrs. Call you after.
How easy it is for my husband to dismiss the girl in danger, even if it is out of concern for me. Will he brush me off when he finds out I’ve lost the baby we tried so hard for? What will he say when I tell him that relief washed over me after the suction D&C, that all I felt was freedom from the burden of motherhood? That I’d taken the impromptu trip to Nigeria because it was impossible to break the news without lightness flittering from my every word, without it being clear that this one time, I wouldn’t need his insufferable calming?
On the phone case, the dark-skinned girl’s head is cocked; her lone, visible arm grips the edge of her seat. Perhaps like me, she is hiding for a moment, gathering herself, considering weighty thoughts. When- ever I have a tight deadline at work, I imagine my brain crumpling like paper, then reopening like a flower, smooth, sharp, and rearranged for the task ahead. I hope for the same now.
Which senator is Amanda’s father? I moved to the U.S. nearly two decades ago and am not plugged into Nigerian politics anymore. I could be on that search for hours. Finding his number in Amanda’s phone contacts should be easy, but it requires Face ID or a passcode. On my phone, I google how to unlock an iPhone without a passcode.
As I read through the options, Amanda’s phone vibrates for a third time. Mommy, the caller ID reads. My tongue zigzags against the roof of my mouth, clearing the path for whatever is to come forth.
“Hello,” I say.
“Amanda, didn’t I ask you to call me once you arrived? It’s been three hours.”
“This is not Amanda,” I say, gently tapping my nails against the table. “Why are you with her phone? Abeg, give my daughter the phone, please.”
“I—um—I don’t know where she is. I think she’s been taken by some bad people.” I can’t bring myself to say kidnapped. Somehow it feels too dramatic, even for me.
“What do you mean you don’t know where she is? Stop joking. God will punish you, tell me where my daughter is o.”
“Madam, please remain calm,” I say. I sound just like Folabi, demanding composure in a situation that requires everything but. “I don’t know where Amanda is. I have nothing to do with what has happened to her, but I think the people who took her thought I was you.” I narrate the story.
It turns out that Amanda’s mother, Dorothy, owns a store at the same mall. Within minutes, she is in my face at the eatery, panting, tears streaming down her cheeks. We look alike by general description— light-skinned, slim, oval-faced, taller than average—though the lines on Amanda’s mother’s face show she is older, and her close-cropped, bleach blonde hair contrasts my honey-blonde box braids. I conclude that Mr. Leather Jacket is mildly incompetent, and I, mildly unlucky. Sensing the eyes of restaurant staff and other patrons, I guide her out.
“Where have they taken my daughter to, Toke? She is the only child I have in this world. Am I not finished?”
We step into the sun and she presses into my side, causing our fused form to stagger.
“Please calm down, madam,” I say. Coco by Chanel—a scent I know in my sleep because Chinyeaka wore it for three years straight when we were in school—drifts from Dorothy to me, and I stand upright, trying to keep some space between us, to keep her anxiety from seeping in along with her scent.
We walk to her store, a sizeable space on the mall’s first floor that shines with bedazzled lace fabrics of all origins and colors. It looks impeccably kept, though there are no shop attendants in sight. Blue fluorescent lights give the room a cerulean hue, and I imagine customers stepping toward the windows so they might see their chosen fabric’s true colors clearly. Why do these shop owners bother with mood lighting? I guide Amanda’s mother to an empty plastic chair and she spills her life’s story.
In the late 90s, Dorothy married a local government chairman who quickly rose to become one of the nation’s most recognizable senators. She was his first and legal wife, but was treated like the other woman because she had only one child for him, a girl at that. More than half a dozen miscarriages later, his family accused her of being a witch who ate her babies. Amanda was ten-years-old when the senator appeared at home, bearing twin boys and their young mother, and asking Dorothy to move out if she couldn’t live with it.
Just how many women on the journey of childbearing sip of this cup of grief?
My reflection collides with Dorothy’s in a glass display. She looks a lot like me, and she is beautiful. I love seeing myself this way, blurry and side by side with a doppelganger, more than in my own mirror, where my eyes immediately hone in on flaws: face too long, nose too wide, freckles too many.
In another life, she and I might have been mother and daughter, cut from the same cloth. She would teach me about womanhood, guide me on handling in-laws, explain how a miscarriage really feels. I would have called her on the drive to my gynecologist as I bled my only child away, confusion washing over me. She would have found the right words, stopping the bitterness of her own life experiences from seeping through. She might have insisted I tell Folabi, and dropped everything to come see me. I would not have made yet another set of tough decisions by myself, with no mother to call on for a soft landing.
I take our reflections in, aching for what could have been. Then I look away.
Unexplained infertility, the doctors said to Folabi and me in the second year of our marriage, but I quietly blamed myself. My long-seated unsureness toward having children had clearly encoded itself inside me, repelling Folabi’s seed.
I’d needed the ambivalence to survive life without my mother. I paid close attention to how people spoke of my father’s widowhood and my motherlessness, quickly learning that any longing for the woman who died shortly after my birth—whose spitting image I apparently was—left me vulnerable to pity. So, when anyone asked what it was like growing up without a mother, I shrugged and put on a bored face. “I’ve never known anything else, I said. “And my dad is the best. So.”
Dorothy tries to call the senator and his personal aide to no avail. She calls her sister, Benita, wailing so badly that I take over the call and explain as calmly as I can what is going on. Cramps pinch again, as my body expels the last of the pregnancy tissue onto a thin sanitary towel. My skin itches for a hot shower.
Benita is on her way out of town, but she turns around immediately, promising to make some calls. Dorothy confesses that she knows better than to have called the senator. Even if the call got through, he would have barked at her to sort it out herself. She wails and hacks and sniffs, and I grab some facial tissues from a box on the checkout counter.
“Do you have children of your own?” she asks.
I shake my head. My pregnancy did not make it past twelve weeks. “I—,” I begin to say, but Amanda’s phone rings again, saving me.
I put it on speaker.
“Amanda, this is Mommy. Are you there?” Dorothy shouts repeatedly. There is no answer, only muffled grunts until the call cuts off. I had not mentioned hearing Amanda’s screams earlier. I worry that she’s been seriously harmed.
“Madam, what do you want to do? Do you have ten million for the ransom?” I ask, practicality and worsening cramps pummeling my will to stay involved. I rummage in my bag for the pack of kilishi I bought earlier. Food might help stave off what’s happening in my body.
“Where would I find ten million as I am like this?” Dorothy says, tears resurfacing.
“Let’s go to the police, then. We have no choice.” I chew on the stringy, peppery meat.
How did I end up here, with a senator’s ex-wife, the day before my flight back to Seattle, the day before I have to sit face-to-face with my husband and my vacant womb again? I could blame it all on a desper- ate, last-minute avoidance, but there is more to it. We are hunting for this woman’s child. Her daughter. Amanda’s cries of “Mommy” earlier, and her mother’s desperate “This is Mommy,” have cut through me, underscoring what I no longer have.
She holds on to my arm as we walk to the car park, and this time, I don’t pull away.
We arrive at the nearest police station and stand before a concrete counter. The words “Information Desk” sit lopsided on a chipped plastic sign hanging from the ceiling. The walls are cream colored, with three horizontal lines running across the middle: royal blue, yellow, and green. Right out of a Nollywood movie.
We are attended to quickly—Amanda’s mother looks middle-aged, and her scent, gold jewelry, and purse signal that she is fairly well-to-do. “Madam, kidnapping on the roads is at an all-time high these days, God have mercy on us,” the officer says, after collecting our statements. “Let us hold the phone for when they call back. We will take it from here.”
I hesitate, then hand Amanda’s phone over, knowing that it now belongs to the police officer.
He grabs it hungrily, slides the case off with some effort and tosses it back to me. “We don’t need that,” he says.
It lands on my chest, and with both palms I stop it from falling to the ground for the second time today.
“Please stay with me until Benita gets here,” Dorothy begs.
It is dusk as we slide into her car, which is parked outside the police station. As I shut the door on my side, my phone rings. I don’t look at it or pick it up. I know it is Folabi, and I have no words to explain how deeply invested I’ve become.
Sitting in the dimly lit car, waiting to hear Amanda’s fate beside her groaning mother, long-blocked emotions unearth—tenderness, hope, the possibility of disappointment.
I could have been a good mother. My baby did not have to die. I could have loved her. I could have loved him.
At 10 pm, hours before the first leg of my flight back to Seattle, Dorothy, Benita, and me, are back in the police building. A corpse has been found in the boot of a car in Epe, and the suspects taken into custody. Benita knows someone who knows someone who knows the DPO, and is able to prevail on the officers to bring the body to the police station for identification before it is taken to the mortuary at the teaching hospital.
“It can’t be her, don’t worry,” I say to mother and aunt, unable to pinpoint the source of my confidence. It feels hollow, yet necessary, like the bravado I once wore as a shield in the absence of my mother. A navy-blue police pickup truck rolls onto the station grounds. Benita runs to it. Once parked, she looks into the back with the help of an officer’s flashlight, clenches her fists and lets out a deep, gurgling cry. Dorothy leaps toward the police car, but I catch her just in time, restrain her. She goes limp as tears blur my vision.
Benita’s sobs echo across the compound.
“This is insane. This can’t be happening,” I say. “Is it for real? Who let this happen?”
“Calm down, madams,” the officer with the flashlight says, eyes darting between Dorothy, Benita, and me.
“See, I spoke to her today,” I say, my voice breaking. “I still heard her talking hours ago. She was very much alive. What happened?”
“Are you the mother? Or is she the mother?” the officer asks, point- ing his flashlight in succession at each of us—Benita, still wailing, Dorothy, mute in my arms, and me, demanding answers. “Which of you is the mother?” he asks again, trying to cut through our sorrowful, maternal chorus.
I am no one’s mother. I am no one’s daughter.
I let out a sharp cry, giving in to the anguish I’ve carried on my own for far too long. Sharing is a relief when you’ve wrestled alone all your life, and I weep with these women for all that is lost: my child, my mother, Amanda, her unborn siblings. I weep with these women for all that remains.
Amanda’s mother jerks suddenly, and I tighten my hold. I will only disentangle if I can climb onto the pickup truck, wrap my arms around her daughter, squeeze the girl back to life, coax her onto her feet, and turn her around to face her mother and her aunt and me. But this is not within my power, so I hold on to the grieving mother, and onto my grief.