The driver addresses Mama Beauty. “She can ride there with me for no extra cost since she already paid for the remains to be taken home.”

The remains.

That’s what her mother is now. Remains, but of what? What remains when a small life ends too soon? At least there is a body that can be laid to rest and some closure to be had. Unlike with Dumisa all those years ago and now with the baby.

The baby.

Zodwa hasn’t been able to sleep wondering what became of him. She goes over and over it in her mind, trying to understand how he could have been sickly enough to die so soon after birth when the only thing she remembers about him is the sheer force of his suckling. Besides, it doesn’t align with what Leleti told Zodwa just before she had her first seizure.

If Zodwa was lost in a fog during her entire pregnancy and just after the birth, it’s lifted now, burned away by the overwhelming sense of loss. When Leleti cut the umbilical cord, instead of severing Zodwa from her child, it’s as though that moment sparked her journey back to him. She thinks with wonder of all those months when she felt nothing for the baby at all when now she feels so much.

“My child,” Mama Beauty says, bringing Zodwa back into the moment. “Do you want to go with him?”

“Thank you, Mama Beauty, but no,” Zodwa says, her mind made up.

She doesn’t deserve the comfort of her family, nor the peace that will come from seeing her mother being laid to rest. There will be too many questions and the one person she’s never been able to lie to is her grandmother. It’s better to leave her hungry for the truth than to poison her with answers.

Besides, as Zodwa herself suspected, and as the local township healer confirmed, Zodwa is undoubtedly cursed.

“My child,” the healer said the day after Leleti died. “To lose both your baby and your mother within days of each other . . . it is a fearful thing. An unnatural thing.” She waved burning sage around the shack in an attempt to rid it of bad energy. “You have been cursed by powerful black magic for sure. I don’t know what you have done to deserve such terrible things in your life, but you must go see the sangoma and get muthi to rid yourself of it. It is the only way.”

The healer may not know what she’s done but Zodwa knows. The nyanga she consulted six months ago knew too.