She Is Blind

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Three Years Later

THREE YEARS LATER.

There is nothing more wonderful than time. The more I ponder on the definition of it, the more I realize that I covered something that took four years of happening and choice memories in a few weeks of writing, and to think of how my brain flows through each event ever so quickly is marvellous.

The small child cried out and drew my attention again, and I carried her up and kissed her forehead. She stopped crying instantly, and I smiled at her mother as the two year old eyes stared gladly up at me.

"With the way she goes about you, we might even think you are her real father." her mother smiled.

I looked back at the child, at this Ayo in female form, and she reminded me of Jane, as she had managed to be born among those women you could call black and beautiful, and then I smiled at how I had almost ended with the same fate.

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The sleepless nights that followed when Winifred had told me that she was pregnant came together with tossing and turning on the bed for hours on end. At times I found myself staring into empty space, and other times I just got lost in my own head for no reason.

There was so much on my young head, and I could not even bring myself to tell it to those I trusted, not even AB, or Ayo, or Amina or even Peter. I actually even fell sick, and each time I slept the same dreams haunted me, dreams in which I saw myself playing with twin children who called me father.

And one time, precisely a week after I had arrived in Lagos that year, I decided that God was the only person I could face. I fasted throughout that day, and at night I fell on my knees and prayed, surprising Ayo who woke up in the night and heard me crying and sobbing.

I had asked God to help me to bear the repercussions of my sins more easily, to help me find a good part time job to help in caring for Winnie and her baby, my baby, our baby. I prayed that he never let anyone from home find out that I was about to bring myself to shoulder the responsibilities of a father and cater for a family, and I prayed to keep my child to live long, because it was the only consolation I could get from it all — a child to look at me and call me father.

But God had other plans for me, and the day Winifred met me in tears when Ayo had gone out and told me she saw her period once again had me weeping— but this time for joy. She misunderstood my tears, thinking I was really mourning the fact that she wasn't pregnant, and hugged me like a woman who had just lost a child would have hugged her spouse. She then told me that it wasn't the end of the world, and there was a whole lifetime for us to comfortably have other children.

"Did you never feel the pressure on you, having a baby at your tender age, with a father equally young?" I asked.

She had stunned me with her statement and I could not believe she was really looking forward to having that baby.

"No David. I was only happy that there was someone willing to accept the responsibility for the child, someone to love and cherish me and my child."

Relief had made me able to breathe again, to feel free again, and for the first time in a long time I could actually feel cool breeze blow on my skin. But when I heard her, I clamped my fist, resisting an urge to land her a tight and resounding slap. She only seemed to care that someone would be there to claim her baby and take care of them like her father never did, but I was not ready for such a responsibility, if I had to be honest with myself. I had only done so to fight my fears. When I turned to her again, though, she was looking at me with a loving expression.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I questioned her, wondering what was running through her mind.

"I'm thinking of us, and the future, and how it would be if you finished school and we got married."