A boy returns home to meet the sad reality of his father’s death. But his return will also uncover more heartbreaking revelations about his father’s death. ‘Duel’ touches on the themes of family, grief, and healing.

I pause outside the front door of our house for a long time, my eyes boring into its wooden panel as if my fixed gaze at it would make it suddenly become transparent and enable me see the interior of the house from where I am standing. The door seems to sense my hesitancy in coming in as it slides backward in an opening motion. But I find Mother standing in the doorway, and this makes me feel somewhat disappointed. I had been hoping the door had opened itself in an attempt to cajole me into the house. Such anomaly, such upheaval of the foundation of the world, is what I need to distract me from the awful reality plaguing my existence at the moment.

But to find Mother in the doorway, her face lighting up with a smile at the sight of me, is proof that the universe is still holding on to its normalcy and sanctity. It is so unfair, so partial of God that while my world reels from the impact of the turmoil that had struck it, the rest of the universe still gets to retain its order.

Mother rushes towards me and soon I’m enveloped in her warm embrace. I feel how gaunt she has become, and I suddenly realize how much I miss her as I smell the unique fragrance of her perfume, a delicious blend of orange and mint flavors.

“Welcome son,” she says, pulling from the embrace but holding me from herself as if to size me up. I am thrilled by the sound of her voice, not so much for the weight of emotion it carries as the refreshing effect of having to hear it after so long.

I try to say something but my throat is desert-parched. I will the words to come out, even if only in response to Mother’s greeting but my tongue rebels against the effort. We enter into the house, Mother insisting to help me out with my backpack, but I decline with a vigorous shake of my head, so vigorous that I fear my head would fall off my neck if I didn’t stop immediately.

I look around the living room, a scrutinizing expression in my eyes. Everything is just as I remember it– the familiar smell of air freshener in the air, the spick-and-span condition of the place, all thanks to Mother who is a stickler for tidiness– still there’s something strange and different about the house today. I had sensed it even while I was standing outside, watching the door. I move around the room, my senses sharp and alert like an animal in the midst of hungry predators, trying to decipher what the oddity is.

“Emeka, are you not going to sit down?” Mother throws the question at me, her eyebrows raised. She must be wondering why, all of a sudden, I’m acting like a stranger in our own house. It’s true that I’ve been away for five months, but that doesn’t excuse my odd behavior of being unrelaxed in the home where I was born and brought up.

I oblige her by sitting on the sofa next to her, after taking off my huge backpack and placing it on the cold tile floor. I turn to face her, and as I look into her eyes for the first time– I’ve been avoiding this since I met her at the door– I find the answer I was looking for, the oddity that has been nagging my mind, right there on her face: this is just a house and no longer a home. It is the same house, the same physical space with all its furniture and decorations, but the warmth and aura that make it a safe haven are long gone, leaving behind no trace as a testament that they had been there earlier. It’s been four months, but Mother’s face still bears the sorrow, the full weight of it. The light, that peculiar twinkle that gave her face a certain exalted glow, is gone from her eyes. Everything about her now, from her haggard frame to her beaten-up visage, betrays the truth that she’s chewing on the bread of widowhood.

The picture frames on the wall are all in tact; she didn’t take down any of them. In some of them, he’s alone but in most of them, they’re together, a beautiful couple trying to outshine the sun with the radiance of their smiles. It’s his presence that is missing from the house; his absence is what makes the house seem totally different. It’s his absence, too, which has snuffed the light out of her eyes, pulled down the stars from the sky of her face.

She sees me staring at the pictures for too long, and she breaks down, overwhelmed, clearly unable to keep up her act. I inch closer to her, and this time I do the snuggling.

“It’s alright, mum,” I coo, pleased to finally put my voice to use. “It’s alright.”

She releases herself, gives herself completely to the comforting warmth of my words like a patient submitting to a therapist’s hypnosis, ease herself onto the sturdy support of my arms, and this magnifies her vulnerability, makes her the child and me the mother, cradling and rocking her in the crook of my arm. I wonder how she managed to go through this all by herself for four full months. I did everything within my power to come back on hearing the news, but this is how soon my line of work could allow me.

“I’m here now, mum. We’re going to go through this together, I promise.”

“You know, it would have been much more better if it’s just the grief I have to deal with,” she says, drying her eyes with the inner side of her blouse. “But there’s the guilt, too.”

“Guilt? What guilt?”

“Before it happened, we were not in good terms. I kept fighting him because, as you were aware, he was cheating on me with other women. It became serious that we just stopped talking altogether. Now, I wish I had been a little more understanding, a little more forgiving. I wish I had overlooked some of the things he did. I wish I can swallow back some of the hurtful things I said to him. Can you believe, Emeka, that till your father died, both of us were snubbing each other?” She starts sobbing all over again.

I remember that before I left the house, the quarrels between my parents was starting to pick up. It started with Mother’s continuous accusations that Father was cheating on her. I didn’t know on what evidence she founded her theory– because she never mentioned it– but she was so convinced of the fact that I didn’t know who to believe between the two of them. Although I tried to maintain a certain level of neutrality, there were times I caught myself drifting towards Mother’s side, avoiding Father, my eyes heavy with rebuke and repulsion, sometimes refusing to speak to him for days. I didn’t know things deteriorated to the level where they gave each other a silent treatment.

“It’s ok, mum. I’m sure dad will understand. You have to forgive yourself. But how did dad even die?”

She sighs deeply before replying. “This is the only thing about his death that I’m quite grateful to God about. My joy is that your father didn’t die after suffering from an illness or as a result of an accident. Your father died peacefully, in his sleep. I think it was his time and God decided to call him home, and it’s a blessing that he went the way he did.”

And that becomes my consolation as I toss restlessly on my bed throughout the night: Father hadn’t died from a violent cause, but peacefully in his sleep.

***

When I step into Father’s room the next morning, I’m surprised to find it in an orderly state. The bed is well laid, the floor swept and mopped, nothing out of place, and I almost expect to see Father coming out of the bathroom, surprised to find me in his room, and with his boyish grin, ask me when I returned.

Mother is really doing a lot, I say to myself, admiring the amount of work that goes into keeping the room tidy every day. How does she even cope doing this? Doesn’t a sense of nostalgia sear through her, stabbing at her heart when she comes here every morning? Doesn’t his ghost taunt her memory of him, render her bitter and berserk and useless in her grief? Maybe it’s the opposite that happens. Maybe she finds something akin to peace in performing the cleaning rituals she has always performed even when he was still alive; maybe it helps her escape reality, maybe it helps her pretend, for some minutes, that she still has her husband with her, that death didn’t win the duel and leave with him.

Without Father’s presence, the room is unusually cold. I sit on Father’s favorite spot on the bed, adjacent to the bedside drawer. The drawer seems locked, as it always was, but I pull at the knob just for verification. Surprisingly, it opens and I peer in. I find another surprise. A diary. Father kept a diary?

This is strange. Firstly, I wouldn’t have put Father as the journaling type. And secondly, Father had had very little education, if any at all. I have never seen Father written anything before. Matter of fact, I don’t know if he can even write.

Curiosity-drunk, I flip open the diary and begin to absorb its content. There’s only one entry in it, a rather long entry, one that seems like a treatise. I smile as I start reading. Father wrote very neatly, his spellings were surprisingly good, but his sentences were…well he wrote them just the way he spoke, whenever he was trying to speak in English instead of our local Igbo dialect. But soon the smile fades out of my face. My brows become knitted, my hands start trembling and tears begin to gather in my eyes as I continue to read.

***

I am carrying death inside me. Death is living inside me, and I am living with death. Doctor say I have cancer. Very bad disease. Doctor say it why I cannot perform all this time. So my wife not understand why I no more touch her. She think it is why I follow other women. But me does not follow other women because I cannot even do.

But I do not tell my wife that I cannot do. How can me, man as I am, open my mouth tell my wife that kind of thing? So I lie. I pretend.

But now we fight everyday. We does not even talk again. My wife is angry with me, sometimes I too angry with her. So I decide say it is better I go before cancer finish me.

***

Peaceful death, Mother had said. But Father had been dying in silence for months, and neither of us had sensed it. In his words, he had been carrying death inside his body. What horror he must have suffered that neither of us had understood, that I took sides with Mother against him. Could that be why he decided to end things himself?

I feel a burning sorrow, more than I’ve experienced since his death even as sobs rack my frame. I wish Father had shared his struggles with us and not with a lifeless diary.

Mother runs into the room. “What’s it?”

I hide the diary. She must never know.