CHAPTER 23
As Alero got out of her vehicle, she was knocked back against it by flying human bodies and excitable shrieks and chatter.
“Ally! You look...”
“I missed you!”
“My sis! My sis!”
Alero could feel the grin tearing at her face.
“Na wa o!” she chided laughingly. “Una for gree me enter house nah!”
The triplets laughed and let up on her allowing her find her way slowly into the house.
She looked over each of them as they crowded her barely letting her put one foot in front of the other. She slumped down on the nearest sofa, tired of trying to bear their combined weight and the weight of her bags.
“So how was school this term?” she asked and got an excited babble of response. She shook her head fondly as she chided.
“If you’d all take it one at a time, I’d be able to hear what you all are saying.”
Temi nudged Gbemi who in turn nudge their brother Toju. After looking themselves in the eyes for a split second, they all turned to Alero with wide, radiant smiles.
“We missed you Sister Ally.” Toju spoke for his sisters too.
Alero felt tears come into her eyes. She could not have loved them more in that moment if she tried. Her younger siblings had come after an excruciating twelve year wait by her parents. Her mother especially rarely spoke of that trying period in her life but though Alero had been really young, she had been old enough to empathize if not totally understand the pain and hurt that her mother had been through.
She was a female child and when her mother had not conceived for years after her birth, there had been pressure from her paternal relatives for her dad to remarry and bear more children. It had been a period of embarrassing fights, sometimes in public between her parents and sundry relatives.
And then in the midst of all that struggle and drama, just when hope was fading and nerves had been frayed to breaking point, her mother had conceived again.
Alero remembered with teary eyes the joy that had engulfed them all when her parents had discovered that they were having twins and the ecstasy when twins had turned out to be triplets at birth.
Her mum used to say that ‘God did my detractors ‘shut up!’ with these ones!’
Alero completely understood that sentiment.
“I missed you all too!” Alero said laughingly. “Hope you all managed to return with at least one travelling box each this time!” She jokingly referred to their penchant for having misplaced ‘all their worldly goods’ each term when they returned from boarding school.
“Ah ah! Ally! We are seniors now o! We came back with almost everything.” Temi responded with her shy smile while Gbemi nodded in agreement.
“Allow your sister get into her room you these people!” her mother scolded as she came into the living room making shooing hand motions at the triplets. They obligingly got to their feet and began make their way to other rooms.
“Ally, I want to ask you something later.” Gbemi said as she bounced off towards the kitchen.
“Yes. Later.” Temi agreed with her sister. Toju shook his head as he headed out the door, mumbling something about ‘tetefo sisters’.
“Good evening Mummy.” Alero greeted her mother while trying to hold in her mirth.
“My dear!” was her mother’s response. “Meanwhile, I too want to talk to you. But first go and change out of these clothes.” Her mother wrinkled her nose as she looked over Alero’s outfit.
“Alright Mum. What is it though?” she asked even though she suspected what this was about.
“I know you are not obtuse. Let’s talk later.” her mum responded sarcastically as she marched back towards the kitchen calling out for her two younger daughters.
Emily felt a flutter of nerves assail her as the car turned into the gates. She remembered that first evening when she turned her car through these same gates. She could never have imagined, that night, that there would be a day like this. She was going to ‘meet the parents’. A part of her, the part she loved to call her more sensible part scolded at her other part, the more frivolous part that it was just dinner but no amount of scolding had been able to tamp down her excitement. It seemed to all her parts that tonight, her relationship with Kenneth would turn a new corner.
“You’re very quiet. Nervous?” Kenneth’s voice seemed to boom at her.
Emily shivered at his question as she turned to look at him.
“Trying not to be.” She sighed in admission.
Kenneth nodded his head and asked. “Is it working yet?” There was a smile in his voice that barely showed on his lips.
“No!” Emily dropped her face into her hands and would have rubbed it if she had not remembered her full make-up at the last minute.
“Hey!” Kenneth tried to pry her hands from her face with one hand. “Come on! My dad is certainly not an ogre. I promise you that.” He said half jokingly as he tried to humour her out of her nervousness.
Emily pulled her hands from her face and tried to take a deep, calming breath. That too did not work. She looked over at Kenneth questioningly as she noticed that he came to a stop just shy of driving into the garage. He put the car on ‘Park’ but left the engine idling.
He turned more fully to her and studied her for a long moment. “You are nervous.” He pronounced with a look of mild surprise and consternation on his face.
Emily felt the tears sting her eyes unbidden and her breaths turned shallow with the release of the pent up panic in her system.
“I’ve never done well with the family!” The words burst out from her.
Kenneth raised his eyebrow in exaggerated surprise and questioningly. He put his hand on her back and rubbed it in circular motions until her breathing regularized.
“When you say never…you are talking of the Adenirans aren’t you?”
Emily nodded. “I don’t seem to…I felt they never quite liked me…like I didn’t quite…meet requirements or something.” She let out a loud, tired exhale and turned and looked to Kenneth whose gaze was locked on her.
“One day,” he said reflectively, “We’ll have to talk about the whole Adeniran debacle, but not now. Right now, we probably have a mildly anxious parent trying to peep through some curtain somewhere to spy on us and see why it’s taking us so long to come in.” he deadpanned. Emily, who had gotten used to his style of humour, giggled at the joke at his father’s expense. She could not imagine Kenneth’s dad, from all that she had gleaned from Kenneth about him, being anything but slightly too dignified to stoop to spying on them. He’d more likely storm out of the door and berate them for keeping an old man waiting.
One thing Kenneth’s comment had done though was turn off the tension that had been ebbing, but only very slowly, from her body as he had tried to humour her out of her nervousness. She realized for the first time since he dropped the dinner bombshell on her that she was not going to be the only nervous person at the table. She supposed that to some extent, they were, all three of them, a bit nervous about this dinner. She drew a bracing breath and tapped Kenneth’s hand a bit impatiently.
“Come on. Let’s not give him a dislike of me before he’s had an opportunity to meet me.” She scolded mildly.
A wide smile lit on Kenneth’s lips and he nodded and re-engaged the gears, sliding the car smoothly into its parking space and pressing the button that automatically locked the garage doors.
There was a pervasive sense of desperation in the air. Every movement, every breath taken, every glance was furtive.
The group of people huddled together in the room. All the curtains were pulled close and the door was locked. Every sign of movement outside the house caused varying degrees of nervous reactions in the room’s occupants.
They were trying to take turns bathing and carrying out various household chores as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. Everyone’s nerves were already shot to pieces and the last thing they needed was to draw undue attention from the authorities
by any sort of outburst.
A little girl whimpered as quietly as she could while her mother tried to shush her as quietly as she could. Another woman lay beside her sleeping daughter, a little one of perhaps three years or so. She stared at her features with anguish drawn vividly on her face.
It had happened, the Rapture. Oh, she had known it would happen. They had all known it but why had they imagined there was yet time to…repent.
She was torn between shame and panic in extremes. She wondered who else had not made it. She mourned the missed opportunity and the certain knowledge that this could only end in one of two ways, her physical death or her spiritual death. She worried for her precious daughter. She was so young and wondered why she did not make it. She was ridden with guilt that she might have been responsible for this baby not making it. Tears stung her eyes and she wiped at it in surprise. She would have imagined that she was all cried out of tears but no, there apparently was still some more.
Suddenly, the door burst open from outside and a storm of soldiers and vigilante rushed into the room. The room which had been so somnolent a few moments before erupted with panicked noise and activity. There were screams, shouts and wails. There were flurries of frenzied movements as occupants of the room tried to escape but were apprehended and dragged to the centre of the room with brutal and often unnecessary force.
The woman kissed her baby daughter’s forehead as she silently said her goodbyes to her, her heart breaking all over again for her. ‘Father please save her! I did this to myself but what has she ever done God?! Have this one mercy God! Let her die peacefully Lord! Don’t let them have her! Please Jesus!’
There was a shout as one of the rounded up occupants of the room made a dash for the front door. He did not get very far. The burst of machine guns echoed in the room for a few seconds and when the yelling and wailing quieted down, the man, he had been one of their pastors, lay dead in a pool of his own blood. But it was not just his body laying there dead, the woman held her little girl in her arms, rocking her gently and humming a lullaby tearfully as the lifeblood bled out of her child. The little girl did not get the chance to wake from her sleep before her breath stilled in death.
The charges against them were called out. The woman looked around the faces in the room as she listened to the charges. They had been accused of ‘hoarding’, she was not even sure what that meant, and helping treasonable offenders. It was a joke but it was too incredible to laugh at. They had committed ‘treasonable offences’? These people were some of the least treasonable people she had known all her life.
It was in the haziness of a daze that they were all loaded up in vans and transported away to destinations unknown.
She was led into a hall and as she watched, a woman stood before a man seated on a chair that had been so extravagantly built that it looked like a throne.
The accused was pleading her cause and as the woman got closer, she heard what was being said.
“I have denied him! I am no longer one of them!” the woman pleaded piteously.
“What of your daughter? You had her with you before. What has happened to her? What did you do with her?” A man who stood beside the one seated on the throne seat asked in mocking accents.
The woman was silent for a long moment and then she began to plead again. “But I have taken up your ways! I am no longer…”
“Kill her.” Came the quiet instructions from the man seated on the throne-like seat. It was so quietly said that at first, the impact of his terse command did not make sense but oh when it did! A surge of horror such as she had never known went through her being as the man beside the seat called out.
“Heart and then vertical.”
The staccato of machine guns rang out with a short bark. The accused lurched as the bullets hit her, her face a tangle of disbelief, worry and terror. Then she began to sink to the ground as if in slow motion, the man beside the throne like seat mockingly moving his hands jerkily like he was a puppeteer as she slumped to the ground in silent agony. There was another sharp report of the dreaded guns, a bit longer this time.
When the woman, who had jerked her eyes shut at the burst of shooting, opened them, she saw that the accused had curled into a fetal position and that her back, along the length of her spine, was punctuated with bullet holes where the bullets had met their mark. She was dead. The woman felt her head swoon with the horror of her day. ‘Thank you Jesus for sparing my daughter. Please pity me and show me mercy’.
Alero jerked awake. It had been a dream! She began to sigh in relief but hiccupped into tears. It had seemed so real.
‘Oh God! Show mercy to me!’ Her heart echoed the cry of the woman.
She looked toward her window and saw through the slit in the curtain that it was bright outside. That meant she had overslept but she could not seem to work up the energy to get up from her bed. She contemplated calling in sick but felt her very soul shudder its rejection of the idea.
It had been a wake-up call. That dream! She needed an overhaul of her priorities.
‘Oh Lord, Mercy I pray You!’
Her mind was still clinging to the terror of her dream.