Excerpt from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It turns out you can only scream for so long until you extinguish your own voice. Mine burns itself out like a spent match. I turn my back on my family, who have congregated around my bed and are watching me with matching expressions of horror and helplessness. I am exhausted, but as always when I close my eyes, sleep dances out of reach.

When Dad returns, it is with two pills, which he presses into my palm. I let him hold my hand while I swallow them dry and I wait for darkness. When it comes, I step into it, gratefully blacking out as Gloria calls Dad from the room.

"She's going to have to speak to Aspen, eventually. She's his mother."

2

Tragedy. The great equalizer. My extended family have been informed. Far-flung cousins who, in the Before, filled my WhatsApp with sporadic pleas to cover school fees and requests for the latest Apple gadget but asked little of my general well-being are now offering obligatory condolences. Now I am the one to be pitied. My grandma, when I refuse to pick up the phone, insists that Ma carry her own to my bedside and press it to my face so she can utter exhortations in Igbo.

"Okay, Nnenne," I whisper back.

My phone flashes so often, I am treated to my own personal light show on the ceiling of my bedroom.

Here in the After, where my life is one excruciating open wound, bitterness has started to creep in and pills are my only relief. Ma, who never liked pills, who used to struggle through headaches and twisted ankles with nothing but a pained expression and a prayer on her lips, passed the aversion, along with her hips, to me. The aversion died with Q. Zopiclone provides the type of dreamless sleep I crave. It kills my thoughts and wipes out great chunks of time. The days start blurring together. The Eve of Before would have worried about her supply running low, but my GP, summoned by my parents to the House of Mourning, filled out a repeat prescription and disappeared, worried that my misery might cling to her coat.

Dad doles out my prescriptions, an assortment of antianxiety and sleep meds. He is head of neurosurgery, and because sickness does not stop for compassionate leave, he arrives at the house late, his jacket over his arm. He rations his energy and uses the last of it to check on me. Whenever he enters a room, I calm down, if only for a moment. It has always been this way with us—his proximity directly proportionate to my peace.

Tonight, he rubs my back while I gulp back my pills. I want to thank him for always waiting until I fall asleep before he leaves. I should tell him his presence is an emotional salve. The shoulds are already stacking up; this time will be rife with them, colored with remorse and vital things that remain unsaid. He hums until I can no longer hear him. Mercifully, I slip under.

* * *

My family keep everyone at bay. The news will have spread throughout the congregation of my parents' church. Prayer circles are being held to bring my plight before the Almighty. Dad and my brother, Nate, have stationed themselves by the front door, a duo of sentinels seeing off the pushier of the well-wishers, the ones who don't understand She's not seeing anyone right now and Thank you so much, but she's not up to it. I'm out of it most of the time while remaining oddly aware of a new sternness to Nate's voice, and the increasing force with which the door is shut.

Ma, a veteran handler of business, brings me meals I don't eat and tries to knead feeling back into my feet. On the days it's just the two of us, she sits and reads for hours, and without opening my eyes, I know she is peering at me over the top of her book or laptop, holding her breath while she waits for the confirmatory rise and fall of my chest. She has chosen to ignore my current dependence on prescription drugs and Googles the hell out of natural remedies for grief, and when she stumbles upon a cache of articles claiming that nuts are the juggernauts of serotonin, she aways to Holland & Barrett, and the next day, I can't take a piss without stumbling past a bowl containing walnuts, almonds or cashews. But I don't open my mouth for anything other than pills and bawling, and eventually she sends Gloria to try instead.

Excerpted from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli. Copyright © 2022 by Onyi Nwabineli. Excerpted by permission of Graydon House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.