The second time Chidubem died, his mother was ready.
She had gone to Mama Titi in Agege—the one who kept three cages of live chickens in her parlor and wore her grey locs wrapped in red cloth. The taxi driver who took her there said nothing for the entire journey, which she took as either a very bad or a very good sign depending on how you chose to read silence. The compound where Mama Titi lived was down a narrow unpaved track that the taxi driver would not enter, which was fine; Mama Chisom was past the point where inconvenience meant anything to her.
Mama Titi had listened without surprise, asked only one question—"What color are his eyes when he's sleeping?"—and then sat for a long time in the chair across from Mama Chisom with her hands folded in her lap, looking at a point somewhere past the middle distance.
"The Ogbanje are not evil," she said, finally, in the tone of someone clarifying a widely held misunderstanding. "They are homesick. They belong to somewhere else and they keep going back. Your job is to make him not want to leave."
She gave Mama Chisom two things: a small bundle of something that smelled of iron filings and rotting sweet potato, and a set of instructions she was told never to write down. The price was named once and not discussed further.
The bundle went under the boy's mattress. The instructions were performed at dusk on the day of the new moon, in the courtyard, by Mama Chisom alone, in the dark. She did not feel foolish doing them. That, she thought, was either a sign of how far gone she was, or of how necessary they were. Possibly both.
And for three years—three almost-ordinary years during which Chidubem attended St. Michael's Primary School, learned to ride a bicycle with the fearless commitment of someone with no particular investment in self-preservation, and developed an irrational dread of the color yellow—Mama Chisom began to believe that it had worked.
Then the dry season came, and with it, the sound.
It started as something she might have explained away: a low-frequency hum she felt more in her teeth than heard in her ears. It was loudest near Chidubem's bed. She told herself it was the electricity. She told herself this for four nights.
On the fifth night, she stood outside his door and put her ear against the wood and the hum stopped, replaced by something she felt rather than heard—a pull, like the air pressure changing before rain. Her vision went strange at the edges. She stepped back.
In the morning, Chidubem ate his breakfast and asked if he could go to Emeka's house after school and was given permission and went, and came home, and did his homework, and said his prayers, and slept.
But on the fourteenth night, she heard it stop.
Not the hum—she had stopped hearing the hum weeks ago and convinced herself it had resolved. What stopped was something else. A quality of presence in the house that she had not noticed until it was gone, the way you only notice a clock when it stops ticking.
She went to his room at three in the morning and found him lying in his bed, his eyes open, his chest still.
The second time, she did not call the doctors.