PART 2
The security officers, it turned out, weren’t there to detain my mother.
They were there because the doctor — Dr. Samuel Okafor, head of the department — had asked for privacy, and in a busy hospital, closing a door quietly sometimes requires help clearing a hallway.
I had misread the whole thing.
We all misread it, at first, because fear makes everything look like a threat.
Dr. Okafor pulled a chair to my mother’s bedside and sat down, and when he spoke, his voice had gone soft and thick.
“Ma’am,” he said. “My name is Samuel. I was born in 1969. I don’t remember my parents — I was two years old the last time I saw them.
What I remember, my whole life, is a woman with a blue flower on her wrist, carrying me through the dark.”
My mother made a sound I had never heard her make.
“I’ve spent fifty years,” Dr. Okafor said, “looking at every wrist I could. I became a doctor partly so I could see thousands of them. I never found another flower.
Until today.”
He turned his own wrist toward her.
“The people who were saved got the flower too. So we’d know each other, if we ever found each other again.
You’re one of the carriers.
Aren’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
My mother — my quiet, ordinary mother, who had never once told me a single interesting thing about her youth — began to cry.
“Mom,” I whispered. “What is he talking about? What carriers? Saved from what?”
She looked at me, fifty years of a secret sitting in her eyes.
And finally, she told me.
