Rami slowly came awake, stretching as she turned. The silence told her that the rain had stopped sometime in the early morning. The weather was still cool, though, so she was grateful for the long rain.
As she reached for her phone to check the time, she remembered the strange dream she had the night before. It was 6am, a little early for her to be awake on a Sunday morning after she quit going to church, so she decided to sleep a little more and then wake up later. She stretched her hand to return the phone to her bedside table, then remembered something. She had been expecting a call from her friend Amanda in the US. Had she missed the call?
Turning so that she would be more comfortable on the bed, she brought the phone closer again to check her call log and screamed, dropping the phone on the bed like it burnt her hand when she saw a call from Aba’s number in her call log. Hadn’t that been a dream? What was the meaning of this? Her sister’s phone had not been recovered with her body, so the last thing she expected was someone calling her with the number.
“Maybe someone had found it and wanted to return it,” she reasoned, trying to calm her beating heart.
“But the person who had called you had sounded like Aba,” a treacherous voice said, disabusing her quickly of that hope.
Rami took several deep breaths. There was no need to work herself up. This was simply impossible. Her sister was dead and buried. There was no way she could have called her from the grave with a cryptic message. No way. She could barely remember the confusing words from that dream. Perhaps it was someone else who had found Aba’s phone and wanted to return it.
“But why would they call at midnight to return a phone?” that treacherous voice asked.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Rami chanted, trying fruitlessly to be calm. Perhaps she should just call the number to verify that it was not her sister calling her from heaven.
Making that logical decision calmed her somewhat, and she gingerly picked up the phone to redial the number. A knock on her door startled her into dropping the phone again and scrambling crazily on the bed to cover herself with her blanket.
“Ewurama? Rami, are you okay?”
The sound of her mother’s worried voice through the door had Rami snorting hysterically at her ridiculousness.
“Mom, I’m fine,” she called out in a voice that didn’t sound convincing even to her own ears.
“Are you sure? I heard you shout.”
Rami knew her mother had become more anxious since her sister died. Taking a deep breath, she got off her bed and walked over to her door to open it. “I’m sorry for startling you; I’m fine. I was watching a video on my phone.”
Her mother gave her a reproachful look. “Please consider my blood pressure next time.”
Rami smiled and gave her mother a quick hug. They had gotten closer since Aba’s disappearance. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Her mother looked as pretty as ever with her white robe wrapped around her. She had lost weight and gained some lines on her face in the few months of her sister’s disappearance and then funeral, but at 65, she still looked so young, 55 at most.
“Okay, now that I’m sure you’re fine, let me go and get ready for church,” she said, smiling a little.
“Okay, Mama. Come and show me your beauty before you leave.”
Her mother smiled and turned to leave. When she turned back to Rami, her expression told Rami what she was going to do before she did. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to church with me?”
Rami tried not to be exasperated. “Yes, Mama. I’m sure. I’m no longer a Christian, remember? There is no point for me to keep going.”
Her mother didn’t hide her sigh. “Fine, I was just checking. I will come and say goodbye before I leave.”
“I’ll be waiting!”
Rami was actually surprised by how understanding her mother had been when she had left religion, but since they lost Aba, she had been pestering her to return to church. Rami had decided not to remind her mother that Aba had still been a church-going Christian when she had disappeared. Religion had not saved her.
She closed her door behind her and leaned against it as she remembered what she was doing before the interruption.
“Just keep calm; you’ll realise that it was nothing,” she told herself, walking to her bed to pick up the phone again. Her heart raced when she saw Aba’s name on her call log.
“Okay, so this means that someone did call, but it couldn’t have been Aba.”
Her finger hovered over the call button hesitantly for a few seconds, then she decided to stop being such a wuss and called the number.
“The MTN number you’re calling cannot be reached at the moment. It’s either switched off or out of coverage area.”
Rami didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. She was unreasonably disappointed at hearing the familiar service voice instead of her sister’s voice.
But the fact was that someone had called her at midnight with her sister’s number. Someone who had sounded like her sister. She had been so sleepy and shocked that she didn’t even remember the details of the phone call.
She needed to talk to someone about the situation. Obviously, it couldn’t be her mother. There was no need to raise her hopes up or give her anxiety. Maybe she could tell Lilian? Lilian was good under stressful situations. She had been Aba’s best friend and had been like another older sister as long as Rami could remember. She had also been the one who understood her grief the most because she felt it too, and they had cried together, mourned together, and tried to find Aba together when she first disappeared, before her body was found.
She dialled the number and waited, disappointed when it rang through without Lilian picking up. She lay down again, thinking about the whole situation and then jerked when a piece of memory came to her.
“And please don’t trust anyone, especially no one in the last photo I took.”
Was she imagining it? Or did the voice who called her actually say that?
Rami opened her Whatsapp and checked her chat with Aba. She scrolled through the last batch of photos Aba had sent her from the last get-together with friends that they had attended — one week before Aba’s disappearance. She felt her heart break when she saw the only group photo Aba had sent her. In it was a grinning Aba with her arms around Lilian and Andy, the guy Aba had been talking to for a few weeks prior. Lilian had introduced Andy and Aba.
“Fuck.” Rami cussed and closed her eyes. What the hell was happening?
