Hollow

The morning the river gave up its dead, I was standing in my grandmother's kitchen, arguing with a ghost.

Not a real ghost. My grandmother was still alive, seventy-six years old and stubborn as a mule, sitting at the Formica table with her reading glasses perched on her nose and the newspaper spread out like a warrant. She'd been dead for three minutes the previous Tuesday, according to the doctors at Mercy General, and she'd come back with opinions.

"You're not eating," she said.

"I ate."

"You ate what? Air? You think I can't see? I got eyes, Adaeze. I got two good eyes and they're telling me you look like a broom."

I poured myself a cup of coffee I didn't want. The kitchen smelled like burnt toast and the lavender sachets she hung in the corners to keep away moths, though the moths had never seemed particularly deterred. Through the window over the sink, I could see the river sliding past the back of the property, brown and slow and indifferent. It had been raining for three days.

"I'm fine, Nne."

"You're lying." She said it without heat. Just a fact, like the weather. "You think I don't know lying? I raised four children. Three of them turned out to be liars and the fourth one joined the church."

My father was the one who joined the church. He'd also been the one to move to Houston, which in my grandmother's cosmology was roughly the same thing as dying.

The knock came at 8:47. I remember the time because I'd been staring at the clock above the stove, the one shaped like a cat whose tail ticked back and forth with each passing second, and I'd been thinking about how time moves differently when you're waiting for something you can't name. Nne looked up from her paper. Her face didn't change, but her hands went still on the table, fingers spread flat against the newsprint like she was bracing for impact.

I opened the door to a policeman I didn't recognize. Young, maybe twenty-five, with a face that hadn't yet learned how to deliver bad news. He held his hat in his hands and looked past me into the house, and I knew.

"Mrs. Okonkwo?"

"That's my grandmother."

"Is she available? We received a call about a body in the river."

The river. Of course. The river that had been eating away at the bank behind our house for as long as I could remember, the river that my grandmother claimed had swallowed her wedding ring in 1972 and had been waiting ever since to give it back. The river that had taken two boys from the neighboring farm in '89 and had never given them back at all.

Nne appeared behind me. She was shorter than me by a full head, but somehow she filled the doorway like a wall.

"You found something," she said. Not a question.

"Yes, ma'am. A man. We're asking residents along the bank if they might know anything."

"A man," Nne repeated. She looked at me, and something passed between us, something old and wordless. Then she turned back to the policeman. "What kind of man?"

"He's... we haven't identified him yet, ma'am. He's been in the water for some time."

"How much time?"

The policeman shifted his weight. "A few days. Maybe a week."

Nne nodded slowly. She reached up and adjusted her glasses, and I saw that her hands were trembling, just slightly, the way they'd trembled when she'd come home from the hospital and sat down in her chair and said, I saw the other side, Adaeze. It's not what they tell you.

"Show me," she said.

"Ma'am, that's not necessary. We just need to know if you've seen anyone unfamiliar in the area, anyone suspicious—"

"I said show me."

The policeman looked at me. I shrugged. You didn't argue with Nne when she used that voice. You just did what she said and hoped the consequences fell on someone else.

We walked down to the river together, the three of us, through the wet grass that soaked my sneakers and clung to my ankles. The air was thick with the smell of mud and rot and something else, something metallic that I couldn't place. The river was higher than I'd ever seen it, swollen and angry, carrying branches and debris downstream in a slow churn. Two more policemen stood on the bank near a shape covered by a blue tarp. The shape was too small to be a man. Or maybe the river had taken parts of him.

Nne stopped ten feet from the tarp. She didn't move closer. She just stood there, breathing, her chest rising and falling under her housedress, and I watched her face for something I could understand. There was no horror there. No surprise. Just a deep, settling recognition, like she'd been waiting for this moment for years and now it had finally arrived.

"It's him," she said.

The young policeman frowned. "Ma'am?"

"It's him. The one I saw."

I grabbed her arm. "Nne, what are you talking about?"

She didn't look at me. She kept her eyes on the tarp, on the outline of the body beneath it, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet and steady and absolutely certain.

"When I died, I saw a man. He was standing at the gate. He told me it wasn't my time, but he said I had to bring him something. He said I had to bring him back."

The river moved behind us, indifferent, carrying everything away.

"Bring who back?" I asked.

Nne finally turned to look at me. Her eyes were wet, but her jaw was set. "You," she said.