Ademilola Rhodes chanced on the station. She had just returned home after twelve grueling hours in a Brooklyn care-giving home. At 63, she knew she was not supposed to be doing that sort of tedious job, but she had decided long ago to make lemonade out of the lemon America threw at her. Chief Fehintola was the first person she noticed on the broadcast going on when she switched on the television.
“I can’t mistake him for another,” she told herself and sat on the sofa in her neat but small sitting-room not far from the care-fiving home.
Aside the television and the sofa, the sitting-room boasted of a small DVD player, a centre stool atop a small Persian rug and a dining table, with a desktop computer on it. Her jacket was on the sofa, her shoes by the door and her wristwatch was on the television stand.
“This hospital did me evil,” she heard the lady sitting by Chief Fehintola say and she adjusted herself to hear what she had to say. “If the nurse had not swapped my baby, he will still be alive and would not have died of snake bite because I would never have taken him anywhere near snake.”
Ademilola’s eyes caught the graphics underneath the lady speaking’s name on the screen. The graphics read: Lydia Adejonwo, mother of baby swapped at Chapel Hospital, London. The graphics got her thinking: What is the relationship between the lady and Chief Fehintola who was sitting beside her at what looked like a news conference? But there was something about the lady she was trying to put her fingers on and before she could think through it properly, the lady spoke again:
“My father here has had to abandon his life in Lagos to be here with me so that I can get over the trauma.”
Ademilola’s heart sank at the possibility of Lydia being her only child, the one she left at a tender age and relocated abroad without telling anyone. She had followed Chief Fehintola’s public life after then, but had no information about the girl and over 40 years after, here she probably was seeking justice over a child swapped by a hospital.
As memories returned, her thought was broken into by a Caucasian speaking, “This matter will not be swept under the carpet. My law firm will see to its logical conclusion.” The graphics on the screen gave his name as Roy Anderson, senior partner, Roy and Roy Legal Consortium.
The session was soon over and the station began another programme. Ademilola switched off the television. She needed to think. After over one hour of brainstorming about how she would get across to Lydia, she went to the dining area, powered the computer and goggled Roy and Roy Legal Consortium. She clicked on the first result and she smiled when a beautiful website with yellow as the dominant colour popped up. She clicked on about us and saw Roy’s picture; she clicked on contact us and saw phone numbers and Roy’s e-mail address. She wrote down the phone numbers and the e-mail address on a sheet of paper she fished out from her pocket.
Five minutes later, she was dialing Roy, who picked at the first ring.
“This is Roy, how can I help you?”
“My name is Ademilola Rhodes, I am calling from Brooklyn in New York city. I just saw you and Lydia and Chief Fehintola on television. Can I pass a vital information to Lydia through you?”
“Sure!”
“Okay, expect my mail,” she said and dropped the call without saying bye, leaving Roy to wonder about what was coming.
—
When Roy got the mail two hours later, he was literally soaked in sweat and had to put off the heater in his home. The information was too gripping. It threw him into a state of confusion. This would break Lydia, he kept saying to himself hours after reading and re-reading the lengthy mail, which had a preamble telling him the message was for Lydia. It is not possible, he said to himself at some point. This woman must have mistaken Chief Fehintola for someone else, he re-assured himself.
In two weeks, he was supposed to meet with officials of the hospital for a possible Alternative Dispute Resolution advised by the court. He reasoned that exposing Lydia to this kind of information about her father whom she adored and considered a saint would shatter her.
She has been shattered enough, he told himself. I won’t do this to her now, he added. He was to admit to himself that she deserved to know and that if he failed to let her know the truth, Ademilola, whom his English tongue could not pronounce very well, would find a way to get across to Lydia and break the news in such a way that he would not be able to manage.
He loved Lydia and would want to marry her when all this storm was over. Before Lydia, he had dated single girls, all Caucasians like him, but none of them gave him joy and peace of mind like Lydia.
“Teach me how to handle this matter, Jesus,” he said to himself.
At a point he decided he must move to block Ademilola from revealing all she knew to Lydia out of impatience. He wanted to call her, but realised America was still sleeping. He did a mail, explaining why Lydia should not be told of the information yet and why Ademilola should not contact her directly. He was surprised when his phone ring a minute after he sent the e-mail.
“I understand the points in your mail and I will obey them. I have tried to sleep, but can’t. Now that we are clear on the way forward, I think I will be able to sleep,” Ademilola said, without bothering to exchange pleasantries.
“Thanks for your understanding.”
—
Roy invited Lydia to his duplex overlooking an artificial lake in central London, which he inherited from his father, a sculptor who did many of the sculptural work on buildings across Europe.
Islington, where they were, had existed in a different size since 1005. It had borne different names which eventually got mutated to what it is today. Roy loved this area with over 200,000 people living in it.
“There is something I have been keeping from you in the last one month because I wanted us to be through with the hospital matter,” he said and paused, leaving an impatient Lydia to ask him to go on.
“I have a letter for you from America, but before I give it to you, I need to ask you one or two questions, which will help me know whether or not I should even give you the letter. It is funny that we have dated for some six months and we have always talked about your father and never your mother and I assumed she was dead. Lydia honey, is your mother still alive?”
Lydia stood from the v-shaped chair in the expansive sitting-room, wondering why he was asking. She had thought he wanted to propose.
“She is alive and why do you ask?”
“Where is she?”
“The last I heard she is in the U.S.”
“What is her name?”
“Ademilola Rhodes.”
Roy shifted in his chair because he had hoped the woman would be wrong.
“You are scaring me Roy, why all these questions?”
Roy moved closer to where she was standing by the window and held her hand and walked her back to the chair.
“She saw you on television the day we had our last press conference…”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“How did you know this?”
“She contacted me…”
“How?”
“By phone and by e-mail.”
Lydia wanted to ask how her mother could have gotten Roy’s contact details but it occurred to her that the world was now one huge village connected by the World Wide Web.
“What did she have to say?” Lydia asked, her countenance changing and fire lit on her irises.
Roy went towards the dining area, opened a file and fished out a printed version of the e-mail devoid of the cover note addressed to him. As he handed it over to Lydia, who was now delicately sitting on the edge of the chair, he said: “You have to calm down. If I have my way I would have saved you from this, but you need to know the truth and reading this letter is the beginning of the search for the truth.”
—
Where do I begin this tale that I must tell with all sense of sincerity? Well, I guess the beginning is always the best way to begin a story such as this. I met Fehintola when I was 18. He was seven years older and was already a successful smuggler of rice, textile materials and so on from Republic of Benin into Nigeria.
Six months after I met him he was able to convince my parents to allow him marry me. He was due for a business trip to the UK and he took me along with him and while there I became pregnant with a baby we eventually named Lydia Titilayomi. That was before Margaret Thatcher stopped automatic citizenship for babies born in the UK. I struggled with the demanding status of a new mother. You were always crying as a baby and it almost ran me mad.
We returned to Nigeria after your first birthday. Before then, your father had returned home a number of times to tend to his business. Your father loved you so much and was always showering you with affection. You did not take your first step until you were well-over one year old.
It did not take me time before I realised the affection your father had for you did not extend to me, your mother, when one day when you had just taken your first step, a friend of mine, whose father was a notorious traditionalist, came to our house and said your father was planning to use me for money ritual. At that time, his business was not doing too well, the military government was clamping down on smuggling and your father became desperate. I did not believe this friend of mine. But she asked me to go to your father’s room and that I would discover a calabash in his wardrobe. When I got there, her description of everything in the calabash was correct.
Fear gripped me. I did not want to tell my parents because they would not believe me. Before then I had spoken to your father about going to the U.S. for studies and he agreed that your grand-mother would take care of you in my absence. I could not reconcile this with the information Asake gave me. He had even bought my ticket for the trip. This was why I felt my parents would not believe me. Since self-preservation is the first rule of nature, I ran away from the house and looked for a cheap hotel, where I stayed for one week to monitor development.
Asake had told me that if I was not used for the ritual in one week, your father would suffer some calamities, such as fire gutting his house and others. And in one week, fire did not only gut his house, his car was stolen. I had left you with my unsuspecting mother before I disappeared. He obviously just agreed to my trip abroad as alibi so that he would not be suspected by my parents or if suspected he would mention his plan for me to silence the attacks. At this stage, it was only a few days to my trip and I decided to go away.
Years after, news got to me that your father was now a rich man and he was telling people I eloped with another man. I have wondered all these years how he eventually made it really big. My instinct told me it could not have been through any genuine means and when I heard of his philanthropic moves, I thought he was just trying to appease God and the spirit of whoever he eventually used for the ritual.
My life here has not been good. I have been married a couple of times, but I have not been able to have any other child. Seeing you on television and suspecting you are the child I left to save my life made me feel bad, but I consoled myself with the fact that if I had not run, I would have become history and you will still be alive. Today we are both alive and it seems to be the end justifies the means.
I am so sorry to hear about the death of your son. Please take heart my dear. I will understand if you do not wish to see or hear from me again. I just feel I should let you know the truth and nothing but the truth.
—
“This cannot be true,” Lydia said after reading the letter. “Of course, so many of the details about my grandmother raising me are true, but I find it difficult that my father would use a fellow human being for ritual, not alone his wife, my mother.”
She brainstormed with Roy on the next step and it was agreed that the content of the letter must be made known to her father. Lydia put a call through to the old man and told her of the mail.
“Please send me a copy and we will talk later.”
Less than one hour after, her father sent her a mail.
My Dear daughter,
Firstly, let me say this: the source of my wealth may not be sincere but it has nothing to do with rituals. I remember the old man your mother spoke about and I had only gone to him to get a native medicine for a pain I was feeling at my back at the time. After your mother left, Asake, whom your mother said gave her the information about me, made frantic efforts to become my new wife. She had the active support of her father, but despite all their efforts I stood my ground, hoping your mother will return some day. I only married Ranti five years after and unfortunately she left when she could not bear a child for me after ten years of marriage.
With all sense of sincerity, Asake, whose son later benefitted from my scholarship scheme about the same time with Demola, your late husband, later confessed to me that she and her father planned it all to get your mother out of my house to create room for her. They even put the fire that burnt a tiny section of my house to make your mother believe their story. And as for my car, they also arranged for someone to take it away and dumped somewhere where police eventually recovered it after your mother left.
God is my witness my dear daughter and I am prepared to say this before the Almighty.
Roy was with her when she called her father after reading the letter.
“I believe you dad, I believe you and I also do not blame mom. She was young and naïve and those fools cashed in on these factors to make her leave her home.”
“I agree with you my daughter and thanks for believing me. I will never deceive you, not at this stage. And I think we should go see your mom in Brooklyn soon. I will encourage you to speak with her, feed me back and I will speak with her too and the trip will follow. Roy can come along to know his mother-in-law to be,” he said, smiling.
“Yes, dad!”
—
The lure of Brooklyn soon became the beginning of wisdom for Lydia. She wanted to know more about this town, which she felt had hosted a part of her story for over 40 years. She googled the town as if knowing about it was like knowing more about her past.
Every woman looking 63 years of age suddenly started resembling her mother. Since her father told her she was a replica of her mother, she created a 63-year-old version of herself and loved it. Gone was the nonchalance she had felt over the years for this woman she thought abandoned her for no just cause.
Then one day she had a brainwave. She thought of relocating her mother to London so they could be closer. From their discussion, she was obviously suffering in Brooklyn. She broached the idea to her one day and the woman screamed for joy.
“I have seen enough of Brooklyn and America; it will be good to be with my only child at this old age,” she had said.
Lydia told her father of her plans for her mother; she also told Roy and the two of them gave their blessing.
“After all these years, it would not be a bad idea for you guys to do catch up. May be it is time you and Roy took this to another level so that your mother would have a grandchild to help you nurture. You need to let Demola jnr be with her biological mother and black him out of your mind,” Fehintola told Lydia.
With Roy’s assistance, the necessary arrangements were made; her American citizenship made things a lot easier: no visa hassles. And on one beautiful but cold afternoon, mother and daughter held themselves tightly for the first time in over four decades at the Terminal Five of the London Heathrow, with Chief Fehintola and Roy first looking on before joining in the celebration. Tears of joy flowed from them all save Roy. Lydia, Ademilola and Fehintola cried about what could have been, but grateful to God for what was.
