The song had no words that Mama Taiwo could identify as words.
She had listened carefully—in the weeks that followed, on the mornings when Taiwo went out to the courtyard and sat facing the tree—and what she heard was not language but was not, either, simply melody. It was structured in a way that language is structured, with the rhythm of something being said rather than something being felt. She played recordings of it to her sister, who listened twice and then handed the phone back and said, "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Play that again." Her sister retrieved her bag from the chair where she had left it. "I need to go. I'll call you."
She did not call.
In the fourth week, Baba Taiwo came home from work early—a thing that had never happened in fifteen years of marriage—and sat in the parlor without taking off his jacket, and asked Mama Taiwo to sit with him. He looked at his hands for a while.
"I saw something today," he said. "On the road outside the office. I was coming out for lunch." He stopped. "There was a girl standing by the gate."
Mama Taiwo waited.
"She was wearing the dress," he said. "The blue one. The one she was buried in." He was using his careful voice, the one he used when the thing being said was too heavy for the ordinary voice. "The first time. She was wearing the blue dress and she was standing by the gate and when I looked at her she—" He stopped again. "She waved at me. The way Taiwo waves. The particular way."
"I know," Mama Taiwo said.
He looked at her.
"I've been watching her," she said. "In the mornings. She sits by the tree and she sings and she's calling something. Or something is calling her. And she's answering." She folded her hands in her lap. "We need to go and see someone."
He did not argue. This was the third time, and he had run out of the specific energy required for arguing.
That Friday, while Taiwo was at school, they drove to the compound of an elderly man in Oke-Bola whose name they had been given by three separate and unconnected people over the past month, as if the name were finding its way to them by whatever route was available. He listened to everything. He asked to see a photograph of Taiwo, which they had brought because they had been told to bring one.
He looked at the photograph for a long time.
"She is not trying to leave," he said, finally, in a tone of some surprise. "That is interesting. Usually they are trying to leave—that is the nature of the Abiku, they come to go, they go to come. This one is not trying to leave. She is trying to bring something back with her."
"What?" Mama Taiwo asked.
"I cannot say yet." He picked up the photograph again. "Something she left behind, the last time. Something she feels is owed to her." He set it down. "This is a different kind of problem."
On the drive home, neither of them spoke. Outside the windows, Ibadan went about the business of a Friday afternoon—the market crowds, the hawkers, the okadas threading through stopped traffic, the whole loud irreducible texture of the city in motion.
When they turned into the compound, Taiwo was already home from school, sitting on the front step eating groundnuts from a paper cone, her school bag on the ground beside her. She looked up when she heard the car.
She was smiling. It was a smile Mama Taiwo had not seen on her face before—not in this life, anyway. It was the smile of someone who has just received confirmation of something they already knew.
"You went to see someone," Taiwo said. Not a question.
Mama Taiwo got out of the car. "Yes."
"Good," Taiwo said, and went back to her groundnuts. "That means it's starting."