We Need To Talk About Kenny

My mother-in-law said something was wrong with Kenny the day she visited us in the hospital to check on the twins. I could barely hear her, I was hurting, aching, cramping and irritable. My breasts were sore, constantly irritated by the itchy fabric of the nursing bra I had to wear. My vagina hurt as if slashed by a blunt knife and doused with cayenne pepper. I shrugged when she told me again that something was wrong with the baby, the second twin that almost took my life and deliberately played hide and seek with the doctors. It was she who conveniently came out the moment they finished preparing the theatre to perform a caesarean to bring her out.

I never liked Kenny and I made a terrible job of hiding that I cared for her in any way. Kenny frustrated me as a baby and became an even annoying toddler. It sounds crazy to say as a mother, but sometimes I feel like I hate my child. Kenny irked me to no end, refusing to be breastfed and refusing formula, deliberately spitting out everything. Peeing in my face when it was time to change her diaper. Making earn looks and clucks of disapproval from paediatrician and the judgy eyes of the nurses whenever I took them for immunizations. Once, one of the nurses accosted me in the parking lot and gave a series of unsolicited advice about how to make Kenny develop like her sister. I forgot most of the conversation because the spit from her mouth and the white buildup at the corners of her lips distracted me.

“As a good moda you have to know how to make sure your child eats!” I nodded automatically, willing myself to gently walk towards my car so she would take the cue and leave me alone. She would not budge until I gave her two 1,000 naira notes for the weekend which she sheepishly collected and tucked into her bra.

My sister said nothing was wrong with Kenny, that no child is the same, when I told her I wished Kenny were as bubbly and cheerful as her sister, Taiwo. She said Kenny may just be more introverted, but that did not explain why Kenny stared unblinkingly as I sang and danced for her entertainment while her twin giggled and cooed.

When the twins turned five, their father hired an Islamic tutor to teach them about the religion at home. On a Saturday evening, I heard a yelp from the veranda where the girls held their lessons. I waddled out as fast as my heavy pregnant legs could carry me to meet the Islamic tutor clutching his eyes and shrieking in anguish.

“What happened!” I yelled, but the response was obvious. Kenny giggled for the first time as she held a bloodied pen in her fingers. In a daze I called her dad, who rushed out of the bathroom to meet Kenny suddenly crying and heaving.

“I isth so sowwy daddy,” she said with a lisp as she cried and stared at her hands in remorse. Her dad hushed her before rushing to pick the car keys to drive the tutor out for urgent medical attention. Kenny’s look of malice as her father drove out stayed with me for days.

The day I had their brother, Lekan, Kenny refused to look at me or come near me for days. When she was forced to hold him she smacked him right across the face. She also routinely stuck out her tongue at him whenever he sat in the high chair and she swatted his hands away anytime he tried to reach for her. She hated my son, her brother.

Kenny’s antics became more brazen as she grew older. She cut off a chunk of Taiwo’s hair the day after a woman stopped me randomly to ask how I cared for Taiwo’s full head of hair. She stuffed her brother’s toy under the settee. She poured sugar into the salt container in the kitchen. She hid my passport the morning of our family vacation and terrorized their home tutors to no end.

I began reading different mothering books to learn how to make her less of the mean girl everyone whispered she was and more like what I envisaged my child would be. I tried to court her friendship and was met with stone-cold indifference. My mother-in-law suggested ruqya, citing jinns or a possible childhood initiation into witchcraft as the reason for Kenny’s behaviour. Her father scoffed at the idea and said we were being dramatic. He did not think anything was wrong with Kenny since she was an A* student and often found a way to talk herself out of everything whenever I reported her to him.

“We need to talk about Kenny” I would say yet again citing another misdemeanour by her. 

“Come on Lade, you are just overreacting how could she possibly do that?.” He had said the day I was summoned to Kenny’s school because her seatmates accused Kenny of killing her pet guinea pig.

“But Flacko died the same way did he not? The pet dog your friend gave us. Hope you remember?” I retorted and my husband shrugged it off saying Flacko died from parvo complications.

Sometimes, Kenny would come into my room and look around before staring at me straight in the eyes.

“How would it feel to suddenly lose all this… just like that… poof!”

I would stare at her, mouth agape, wondering what could have pushed my child to utter such statements. She would walk back out with a smile curling at the sides of her mouth as she closed my door gently. When I followed her back into her room, I would find her buried in one of her textbooks. I tried to have conversations with her but nothing ever worked. Not threats. Not yells. Not spanking.

Kenny would not budge.

One hot afternoon, a few hours before Lekan’s 10th birthday, I left the house to go wash and style my hair. Taiwo was with the caterers in the courtyard munching on spring rolls. Lekan sat in the living room with his friends arguing about whose turn it was on the PlayStation. He wore the undersized PJ Masks shirt he had had since he was seven.

“Papa, go and change that shirt now now!” I said. He grumbled but stood up, eyes still fixed on the screen.

“Where is Kenny?” I looked around for her and Lekan mumbled something about her being somewhere.

As I sat under the dryer in the salon, my soul felt unsettled but I ignored it and concluded it was the heat from the dryer. I kept checking my phone, expecting a call that the ingredients were not enough or that one of the kids had broken something, but no call came.

As I drove into our street, my belly clenched and my chest started beating rapidly, still I drove on. Smoke from the cooking billowed in the air and I made a mental note to caution the caterers the moment I parked. I had already told them to use the firewood for the jollof only. Some of the guests had already arrived with their parents so I could only park a few blocks away. I strolled into the compound to see a huge crowd gathered as my husband ran around while his best friend Toye tried to hold him. I could hear voices wailing and shouting, I saw the Hausa man that sold snacks down the street rushing into the house with metal bars. One of the women rushed at me the moment she saw me and held me to her bosom. My neck felt the impact and I recoiled from the smell of sweat, maggi, and boiled meat clinging to the “Vote APD 2023” party shirt she wore.

I wanted to go inside because something told me to go inside. I searched through the crowd for my children. I could only see Taiwo silently crying, the front of her dress stained with stew. I could not see Kenny or Lekan.

Where are all my children?

I could smell asun burning as I broke free from tight grasps and ran inside the house. The Hausa man was rushing out of the house, the smell of the burning asun stronger now. I yelled absentmindedly at someone to concentrate on the cooking. I saw the shirt first, the bubbly face of the cartoon had melted into a distorted smile. My stomach dropped. Hot mist clouded my eyes as my trembling hands reached for the charred remains held by someone I couldn’t see through my tears. My boy. He looked like he was concentrating. The frown on his face. How tiny he looked in death.

The room was silent except for the hiss of burning oil somewhere in the kitchen. I turned, my wobbling mouth was dry, as I asked, ‘Where is Kenny?’ Heads bowed. Nobody spoke. Nobody looked at me. But I knew. They knew. Something snapped in me in that moment! I wanted to drag Kenny by her hair and yell at her. I wanted to yell and hit her head against the wall as I asked what kind of evil was afoot the day she was conceived! I wanted to choke her and watch life slowly drains out of her as I tell her I brought her forth and might as well send her back! I wanted to pick out her fingernails and her tooth one by one!

My body trembled as I asked again “where is Kenny.”