Tseju's Bayo

Chapter Seventeen - Loving Can Hurt

Flashback

It was a hell of a day. The call from the hospital to Mrs Jumi Rotimi's Glo number was placed as soon as Tseju passed out in Ada's arms at the threshold of the emergency room. The first two times, the call failed to connect and to Tseju's utter dismay, the nurse was left with no choice but to call her own mother. Tseju was barely awake when they placed the call but she wasn't too pleased about it. God! How she hated that woman. She wanted to have nothing to do with the woman especially not now in the midst of all this. Tseju was sure the woman wouldn't even come or even if she did, she was sure it was going to be another talk down. How she wished aunty Jumi had been her mother instead.

Placing the unconscious girl on the small emergency bed, the nurses in the emergency ward worked quietly, carefully and with a prayer in their hearts. The first task had been to clean and bandage the wrists the girl laying on the bed before them had slit. Just a tiny cut, barely noticeable, but very deadly. Then, for the next one hour, the doctors pumped her system clean of the pills she'd consumed to end her life. Apparently, she'd taken two options, just in case one didn't work, the other would.

They'd tried to revive her, but immediately she got up, the dear girl had started vibrating like she was sitting on a thousand naked wires and Dr Mohammed, the Mobijilade family doctor had to give her a sedative injection to knock her out. The diagnosis could come later. Looking at her disheveled hair and ripped dress and taking the suicide attempt into consideration, he could only hope it wasn't what he feared.

Under the hospital covers and the influence of the heavy sedatives, Tseju slept like a log of wood and so, when Mrs Mobijilade came rushing through the hospital doors, tripping over her wrapper, barely dressed, eyes already swollen from tears of the fear of the worst, she'd not noticed. For the next six hours as she'd slept, she been completely unaware of the woman who watched her chest rise and fall like a hawk, eyes barely blinking. Based on the affirmative directive from Mrs Mobijilade, a gynecologist had been summoned and a test had been carried out on the sleeping girl, confirming Dr Mohammed's fears, and so as she slept, Tseju missed the tears of a woman mourning the painful experience the woman in front of her had just been through, the tears of a mother who blamed her failure to put her pain last and be a good mother to her children, and the tears of a wife who still wondered where she'd gone wrong with the man she'd spent the better part of her life worshipping.

"I can't believe you Wunmi! All these years I warned you!! I warned you, now look where we are! Just look where we are Wunmi!" Mrs Madejumi Rotimi had been replying an email from a foreign investor when Ada's text lit up her screen. She'd been too engrossed in the mail to notice, and so five minutes later, the silver Bluetooth earpiece around her neck lit up. It was Ada calling. She couldn't drive to the airport, she was too shaken, she'd left her car and taken a cab. On the ride to the hospital, every worse scenario which ended up in her burying her favorite niece had crossed her mind over and over again like cars crossed the Lagos-Mainland bridge during rush hour.

"Yes, your husband left you. And so? Neither are you the first nor will you be the last that will happen to!!!! Hold your children! I told you to hold your children! Especially your daughter. Now look at her!! Look at this!! Lo... look..."She couldn't complete the statement, the part of her brain that allowed her to produce coherent sentences had been shushed by the part that made humans cry when life threw hard frozen lemons at them. She couldn't imagine what had happened, whenever it happened. She just wanted her niece up and out of there.

"You better hope nothing happens to my niece! If anything happens to her, I swear to God! I will break ties with you. You may as well forget you ever had a sister."

While this assault of words went on, Mrs Mobijilade barely heard a word. In her heart of hearts, she waged a war on anything, spirit or human that wanted to snatch her child from her. At that moment, she had been prepared to engage God himself in combat over the life of her child. Apparently, the shock of what lay before her, and the situation that had birthed this particular situation had acted like a defibrillator to her unconscious mother instincts. Now, the mother in her had overridden the abandoned wife that had being in control for so long.