I

Buchi took a step toward Aunty Ifueko, careful not to make a sound. He’d heard her return from the market moments before, with his mother and Aunty Agnes. Now, she was in the kitchen by herself, humming a Christmas tune as she pulled things out of a plastic bag. He inched forward until he was standing behind her.

He inhaled her familiar lemongrass scent, now mixed with the smell of sweat and something vaguely coppery. She turned suddenly, bumping into him but reaching out in time to steady him on his feet.

“Buchi, there you are,” she said, with that special smile he knew was for him alone. He was pleased at the breathless surprise in her voice, touched that she’d feigned it for him even though she would not have forgotten his old habit of following her around.

“Nnọọ, Aunty.”

Aunty Ifueko laughed. “Look at you, greeting me in Igbo. Soon I’ll be taking lessons from you.”

Buchi wished his father was within earshot. His father didn’t spend much time at home, but the fog of his disapproval hung low and heavy around the house even when he wasn’t there. If he’d heard Aunty Ifueko’s words, maybe he would have smiled, praised Buchi for his effort. But Buchi knew better. His father was not a man who gave grace easily.

Buchi’s father liked to say that language was part of the “great heritage of Ndigbo,” of which he was determined his children, Buchi and his older sister, Chinelo, would partake. And so, even though he’d barred his wife from speaking Igbo with the children at home—terrified that their English would be tainted—he would, every so often, engage Buchi and Chinelo in sporadic Igbo language and culture lessons that sometimes ended with Buchi close to tears. Unlike Chinelo, Buchi was never able to distinguish between all the ways of pronouncing the word “akwa”—each of which meant a different thing in English: bed, cloth, egg, tears—no matter how many times his father pointed out high versus low pitch, his voice taking up so much space it became a fourth presence in the room. When the lessons were over, his father’s disappointed gaze would follow Buchi around like a bad smell.

Aunty Ifueko never looked at Buchi with disappointment. She looked at him like they shared a funny secret she was always on the verge of laughing about. It was a tragedy, a great injustice, that he only got to see her every December, when his father’s siblings, Uncle Michael and Aunty Agnes, travelled to Lagos to spend the holidays with them, Uncle Michael flying in from New Jersey with Aunty Ifueko, his wife, and Aunty Agnes driving down from Aba, where she lived with her son, Ogo.

“I’ve given Chinelo and Ogo their goodies, but don’t think I forgot you,” Aunty Ifueko said, tugging playfully on the soft flesh of his cheek. “How can I forget my own shadow?”

Buchi chuckled. The thought of being Aunty Ifueko’s shadow still tickled him, even though that joke was now old. It was his mother who’d started it, after she noticed how Buchi clung to Aunty Ifueko. “Ifueko,” she’d said, “how come you have a shadow that doesn’t match your body?” Buchi had been six then, and he’d thought it was the coolest thing, being his aunty’s shadow. So he took it upon himself to become the embodiment of the name, sneaking behind Aunty Ifueko, laughing out loud when she turned around to find him there and put her hand over her heart. He could have kept up with their special game forever, but Ogo began teasing him relentlessly whenever there were no adults around to hear. “You look like a kitten crying for his mummy’s breast milk,” Ogo would say.