Maybe Now, Maybe Never

Photo by Mariana Beltrán / Unsplash

A childless dressmaker must rescue her young niece from an unwanted pregnancy. The family crisis exposes the calcified contours of a sisterhood in which one sister benefits to the other’s detriment. Written by Ukamaka Olisakwe and appearing first in OlongoAfrica, “Maybe Now, Maybe Never” is suffused with quiet suspense as the protagonist navigates the Nigerian city of Aba, its rush and its din, and its idealized notions of womanhood.

Through her rescue mission, the dressmaker finds herself struggling to break free from an old pattern of abuse and patch together an independent identity for herself. The story hovers in the precarious space between hope and despair, leaving the reader to imagine the future of the two sisters’ relationship.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Three years after my divorce, on the very eve of my divorce anniversary, my sister, Oge, texted. At first, it was a call. I was in the kitchen, staring at the fine china my last mother-in-law had given me on my wedding day. It was my ex-husband’s favorite — a set of sixteen plates and bowls and saucers that were free of dents, just white, the soulless white of our brief union. My phone buzzed, followed by a text from my sister. “Uche, Ifeoma is pregnant,” she said. “We can’t keep it. Would you take care of it for me? I will call later.”

I reread the message, sat on the kitchen stool and reread the message, and struggled to understand why Oge could not see cruelty in her message. That she, my only sister, could ask me to “take care of” what I desperately longed for; she, who knew why my two marriages had failed; who saw, firsthand, all I had endured in the past years because of my inability to give my two husbands children. I felt betrayed, the text seeming more like mockery, as though she were cackling all the way from America, reminding me how fertile she was, how fertile her daughter was, both mother and daughter leisurely plucking fruits from the tree that had remained out of reach no matter the ladders I had climbed to reach it, no matter how far I had stretched. For a moment, I considered blocking her number, deleting her from my social media, from my life. Then I put the phone away, showered, and went to my shop to finish the dress I had begun making last night, doing all I could to forget the text message, the content of it, the despair it spurned. By midmorning, the shock, the horror of it all, had dulled to a throbbing ache in my temples. When my phone rang later and I saw it was her calling, I clicked the silence button, then chucked the phone into my bag, shoving her and the ghosts she had ferried in away from sight.

It had been a few weeks since I had spoken with her daughter, Ifeoma, the little girl I had always adored. But look, despite my anger with Oge, I was worried for Ifeoma. Ifeoma, who lived alone at Uli State University, her mother far away in America, chasing dreams; her father prowling the streets of Aba, chasing small girls; her only sibling, Emeka, holed up in a boarding school in Umuahia as if forgotten. My beautiful niece, how feisty she was, how fearlessly she used to speak her mind; this child, when she was only five years old, had ordered me to reprimand the neighbor next door, an older man of about fifty who, in that playful, unsettling tone of entitled Igbo men, had dared to call her “my wife.” She had said to me, “I don’t like that he calls me that,” and I was impressed, not because of what she said but how she said it, her brow and face knitted in rage, her words firm, not in any way puny, like okra trees in