Somewhere Between Two Homes

The engine just dies. The driver does not say anything about it right away. There has been a low vibration under my seat since Abuja. I had not paid attention to it for hours. It goes still first. A second later, so does the engine noise. The bus rolls a few more seconds on nothing, coasting on whatever was left in it. Then that stops too.

The TV screen above the driver freezes on a woman mid-laugh, mouth open, still lit while the rest of the cabin goes dark. Someone's Bible slides off their lap and hits the floor. A child starts crying two rows back and is shushed. One by one, phone screens come on around me until the cabin is a dim, scattered blue.

The driver eases us off the road, onto the gravel at the edge. He does not say anything for a while. When he speaks, it is to the conductor, his voice hoarse, and I only catch the word "belt." He says it twice.

It is a few minutes past 2 a.m. We left Abuja at 9 p.m. I had let myself believe I would sleep through to Enugu. I am good at sleeping through things I do not want to think about.

We spill out into a rest stop I do not remember passing months ago, heading back to Abuja after a visit home, when I still had a job and an apartment waiting there. A generator behind the mechanic's shed throws one bulb of light over a stretch of cracked concrete. A suya stand sits shuttered, its tarpaulin sagging with old rain, a hand-painted price list still nailed to the post, the prices on it lower than what things cost now. Beyond the light, the bush starts, and I cannot see where it ends.

The rest of us scatter across the gravel. A man in a security uniform, off duty by the look of his half-open shirt, finds a bench and pulls his cap over his face. Clearly, he doesn't find us interesting enough to talk to. A young man in a suit that does not fit him properly paces near the mechanic's shed, phone to his ear. "I'm almost there," he mutters. "I told them I'm almost there." A woman nurses a baby, rocking slightly, her eyes somewhere past the generator light. The mechanic is already on his back under the bus, a torch clenched between his teeth, telling the conductor about a part he does not have and cannot get before morning. Which means we are stuck here until then, on this road, at this hour.

Nobody talks about it, not yet. But the security guard has pushed his cap back, both eyes on the dark end of the road now. The young man in the suit has stopped pacing, his phone back in his pocket.

Two buses were stopped on this road a few months ago. I do not remember the details anymore, just that everyone on board was kidnapped, and one of the drivers was shot trying to run.

"We never reach the Otukpo axis?" a man near me asks, to nobody in particular.

"We don pass small," the conductor calls back from somewhere near the front.

"My wife's brother-in-law's church go for crusade that side, June last year." The man shifts his weight against the wall. "Dem carry the whole bus."

"Carry them go where?" a woman cuts in.

"Kidnap." He does not look up. "Two weeks before anybody hear anything. The church suffer raise one hundred million naira before they release dem."

One hundred million naira. I think of the seven hundred and eighty-five thousand I cannot raise, and put the thought away.

Someone sucks their teeth. A woman further back murmurs, "God forbid."

"They don clear that road since," someone else offers. "Soldiers everywhere now."

"Abeg, I no wan find out if dey don clear am," the first man counters, and nobody argues with that one.

I find a spot near the mechanic's shed and set my two bags down against the wall, where I can see them. Old habit. My eyes go to the tree line first, then the shed door, then the gap under the bus, three ways out if it comes to that. It is the same instinct that used to earn me a paycheck, just pointed at a road now instead of a server.

***

Three months ago, I was a cybersecurity analyst at a fintech startup. The company ran a savings app, the kind that lets you save small amounts daily and locks the money until a set date. I watched the transaction data for fraud, mostly logging into a dashboard every morning, checking whatever had been flagged overnight, and reviewing accounts before payouts went through. I remember the exact meeting where I told my manager the withdrawal patterns on forty-two accounts did not make sense for a savings product.

"Sir, these forty-two accounts don't add up," I said. "Someone needs to look into this."

He did not look up from his laptop. "Noted. We'll look into it."

Nobody looked into it.

Six weeks later, at 8:32 a.m., I was at my desk when six men in plain clothes walked through the front doors and asked, loudly, for the CEO. Within minutes, there were badges on the reception desk and someone reading out a warrant. A woman I did not recognize called my name from across the office and asked me to step away from my computer. They went desk to desk, collecting laptops into black bags, mine among them. Nobody explained what was happening. They held me for two days. In a room with no windows, an investigator slid my own email across the table.

"You reported this yourself?"

"Yes."

"And nobody acted on it?"

"No."

He wrote something down and did not tell me what.

They let me go without charges. I did not go to court. My name was never in the news, only the company's. It did not matter. Recruiters could see where I had worked, and that was enough. I sent out sixty-nine applications in ten weeks. Four people called back. One recruiter got three sentences into asking about "the incident" before her voice changed, thanked me for my time, and never called again. Another company's HR emailed a single line: "We have decided to move forward with other candidates." After a while, I stopped checking my email first thing in the morning.

There was no one to call for help who did not already need it more than I did.

My father runs the POS machine outside my mother's provision store. I am her first child. On our street, mothers are called by their first child's name, so to everyone who knows her, she is Mama Kelechi. I called him once in June and could hear the machine beeping through the whole conversation, customers waiting behind him. He is on his feet eight or nine hours some days, despite what the doctor has told him twice now about his knees and his sugar. My mother runs the shop. She has run it for more than twenty years. Ikenna and Chiamaka came after me.

Ikenna finished camp months ago and was posted to a secondary school outside Port Harcourt, where he teaches Government to a class of more than fifty students, a subject he never studied himself. Half his students look old enough to be his mates. His allowee is seventy-seven thousand naira, and somehow he still sends five home every month. Chiamaka sells plots of land in estates she has never visited, from a Lagos office with framed pictures of buildings that do not exist yet.

I am twenty-nine. My university mates have started sending engagement photos into a WhatsApp group nobody has the courage to leave. I used to send money home on the first of every month, an amount that embarrassed me with how small it was, and embarrassed them, I think, with how much they still needed it, anyway. I have not sent anything since March.

I have eleven thousand naira in my wallet and a phone screen I have not had the money to fix since April. I owe a loan app seven hundred and eighty-five thousand naira. I have not paid it in months, and the interest accumulates daily. Last week, they reached a university roommate I have not spoken to in three years. He forwarded me their message with nothing added, just the message itself and three question marks.

***

A woman a few feet from me has settled onto an overturned crate, sacks of garri and dried fish stacked neatly beside her. She catches me looking and offers, without much ceremony, a handful of roasted groundnuts wrapped in newspaper.

"Chop," she offers. "Na free."

I take them because it feels rude not to, and because I have not eaten since Wuse.

She tells me her son’s name is Ogechi. She buys from farmers in Nasarawa and resells at Ogbete Main Market. She has been making this trip since before Tinubu's government made business tough. I ask, mostly to be polite, where her son is now.

"London," she says, and pauses before continuing. "Four years. He used to call every Sunday. Now na once, sometimes twice, for one month." She is not fishing for sympathy. She just says it, already reaching for another handful of groundnuts.

I do not tell her what I am carrying home. I could not say exactly why. It did not feel like something I could put on her, not after what she had just told me. We sit without talking after that. Neither of us seems to mind. She offers me more groundnuts. I take them too.

***

The shout goes up a little after 3 a.m.

"Wetin be that?" The voice comes from near the mechanic's shed, and in the quiet, it sounds too loud.

Something closes in from the dark end of the road, headlights first, without the small glow a plate light is supposed to give off. People scatter. Mama Ogechi grabs her wrapper, pulling it tight around her shoulders, and leaves the crate and her sacks right where they are. Someone kills the mechanic's work lamp, and everything around us goes darker. For a second, I cannot see anyone, only hear them, shifting, and somewhere close, somebody keeps saying, "Chineke m, Chineke m, Chineke m."

I duck behind the bus. My hand finds the cold metal of the fender and grips it. I think of the church group, the one hundred million naira. My family could not raise a tenth of that. I think of my father trying anyway. I think of the bush. Without the light, I cannot tell anymore where the gravel ends and it begins. It could be a way out. It could be exactly where the danger is already waiting. None of it changes anything. I do not run. I just wait.

The vehicle slows well before it reaches us. In the dark, I can only make out its shape at first, a pickup, and then, closer, letters stenciled on the door. Army.

Someone near me exhales hard enough that it comes out sounding like "Ehhh."

Two men sit in the back, rifles resting across their knees, one of them lit faintly by his phone screen. One leans out of the window.

"Wetin dey happen here?" he calls, first in Hausa, then again in English when nobody answers fast enough. "Una dey fine?"

"Bus break down, sir," the driver says, stepping forward. "Since 2 a.m."

"Una don call anybody?"

"Mechanic dey here already, sir."

The soldier looks past him at the rest of us, pressed against the bus and the shed wall, glances over us once, and nods. He taps the roof of the cab twice. The pickup pulls away, toward Otukpo, its taillights shrinking back into the dark it came from.

Somebody laughs, a short bark of a sound, quickly swallowed. "Na wa o," the young man in the suit says, wiping his face with his palm. "Oga, abeg," someone mutters, and he stops. Slowly, the rest stop fills with small sounds again: a cough, someone spitting, the mechanic's radio crackling back to life.

I do not move from behind the bus, not yet. My hands will not stop shaking, even though the danger has already passed. I hope they stop before anyone sees.

***

My phone finds a signal a little after 4 a.m., the first bars it has shown since Makurdi, and it fills at once with everything that could not reach me until now. Three missed calls from an unsaved number. I do not need to look it up to know it's the loan company.

A WhatsApp from Chiamaka, a screenshot of a closed deal, fire emojis underneath, sent to the family group I am still in, but have not spoken in for weeks. Ikenna sends two messages, one after the other. You don reach? Then, You still dey road? Then nothing else. Our conversations have been trailing off these days.

And then my mother.

Kelechi, safe journey. Your papa's sugar rise small yesterday but e don come down. Rest well when you reach. We dey wait for you.

I read it twice. My mother writes carefully, softening things, even now.

I think about what it has actually meant, being the first of the three of us. The year my father's shop failed, I had just started my first job, and I began sending money home within the month. Nobody asked me to. Nobody needed to. When Chiamaka needed money for her final year project, printing, binding, and something extra for her supervisor, I sent it that same week, and nobody mentioned it again. You did not wait to be asked. You noticed, and you paid, and nobody spoke of it again.

Reading her message now, I understand what has actually happened. For years, I was the one who noticed a problem before anyone asked and quietly made it disappear. This time, I might be the problem.

Three weeks ago, my father called me.

"Kelechi, some people don call me," he said. "Say na about loan. I no understand wetin dem dey talk about."

"Wrong number, Papa," I said. "Some of these people just dey call random numbers."

He let it go. He said "okay," but not right away. There was a silence first.

Now I wonder if the calls did not stop there.

I know what those calls could do to him. They would confuse him. They would frighten him. Somewhere in his head, there could be an amount now, seven hundred and eighty-five thousand naira, that his own son never once mentioned to him.

My mother's message tells me almost nothing about how bad my father's sugar spike actually was. That is not an accident. She has always decided how much I am allowed to know. For years, I decided what my family needed to know, and quietly covered the rest. Now she is doing it about my father's own health, and I cannot ask her to stop without also explaining why I am asking.

I type a reply. Almost there. Bus get small issue, nothing serious. Tell Papa make e rest well. I try to add I'm fine. I delete it. I try again. I delete it again. Then I send the rest, put the phone in my pocket, and do not look at it again.

***

By the time the mechanic gets the bus running, a grey light has come up behind the bush, enough to turn the tree line from a wall into individual trees. We board without much talking. The conductor loads Mama Ogechi's sacks into the luggage hold first, then the rest of us climb up, and the bus pulls back onto the road with the TV still frozen on the same laughing woman, because nobody thought to reset it.

The road starts to climb, red soil giving way to the hills that ring Enugu. We pass 9th Mile Corner, crowded even this early, with women selling okpa, boiled groundnuts, and bread. Okada riders line the junction, engines idling. Then the roundabouts start, then the motor park itself, drivers and conductors shouting out destinations to anyone who will listen.

Then I see my father.

He is standing beside a boy selling phone cases, recharge cards, and screen guards off a wheelbarrow. He has never been a tall man, but he looks smaller now, his brown shirt loose over shoulders that used to fill it, his black trousers cinched a notch tighter than they used to be. I look for something else in his face, evidence of what my mother did not say, and find only tiredness, which could mean anything or nothing. One hand rests on the strap of a small bag I know holds his glucometer. It goes everywhere with him now. I am still on the bus steps when he sees me. He lifts one hand halfway, then lets it drop again.

We do not say much. He asks about the journey. I tell him it was fine, with a small delay outside Otukpo, nothing serious. He steps toward me, reaching for one of the bags. I turn my shoulder just enough to put them out of his reach. Neither of us mentions it.

We start walking. Past us, a man swings open the wooden shutters of his provision store and starts carrying crates of soft drinks out to the front, stacking them by the door. My father's car is parked two streets down, away from the touts who gather near the park entrance, looking for any excuse to demand money. It is an old Camry with a cracked side mirror that he has been meaning to fix for a year. He leads the way, and I follow.

"You sleep small for the bus?" my father asks.

"Yes, Papa" I reply. "I sleep small."