She crept under her covers and curled herself as tightly as she could. She still wore her sandals, and she didn’t care. And when she got up in the morning and found an itchy mosquito bite on her arm and two on her left leg, she knew for sure Anyanwu was gone. Who was she now?

16

HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD

When she saw her father that evening, she went to him.

It had been a while since they had watched the local news together, but today Sunny needed his company. Anyanwu was still gone, and Sunny felt lost. She’d seen him settling down in his favorite chair to watch the news, a cold bottle of Guinness on the side table, a bowl of groundnuts on his lap. She sat down on the floor beside his chair, and he’d patted her on the shoulder, pointed at the TV, and said, “You heard about this oil spill in the Niger Delta?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been studying.”

“These idiots are . . . Just watch, here it is. Turn it up,” her father said. She grabbed the remote control and clicked up the volume on the large flat-screen TV.

A thin old man looked deep into the camera, a microphone held to his face. His voice was reedy, his expression perplexed. “I came here when there was no crude, no spillage, everything was so fine. People were enjoying back then,” he said. “It’s a strange thing to us. How could this occur? Are these oil companies stupid? Ah-ah, don’t they know what true wealth is? How could they? These people aren’t from here.”

As he spoke, oil-drenched riverways, creeks, mangroves, and grassy vegetation were shown. The story cut to a journalist walking through the mucky forest in yellow hip boots as he spoke with a short young intense man, also in hip boots, named Murphy Bassey, head of the local watchdog group Friends of the Delta Organization. As they walked, they both pinched their noses.

“What’s that smell?” the journalist asked in a nasally voice.

Murphy stepped over a fallen tree and stopped at a large black puddle in the soaked vegetation. “You see this here? It’s not water.” He brought a piece of yellow paper from his pocket, rolled it up, and stuck the end into the black liquid. Then he brought out a box of matches. When he used one to light the wet part of the paper, it burst into violent flames. “Whoo!” he exclaimed, dropping it on a dry patch of vegetation and quickly stamping it out. “See that?” he said as he stamped. “What is that? This place is already mutilated by oil pipelines; now the forest and waters are poisoned.”

“So all it would probably take to set this whole forest and the towns near it on fire is dropping a match in the wrong place,” the journalist said, looking very worried.

“Correct,” Murphy said with a bitter chuckle. “We won’t do that, though.”

“I should hope not. I don’t even think you should have lit that paper just now.”