the cave. The big witch finds you and says, Do you want to be a witch like me? Yes, yes, la la la . . . And the big witch says: eat these crickets and then weâll see. Mmmm, mmmm, yummy in my tummy, the little witch says. Weâll take lightning and make the crickets turn blue, la la la. Weâll sell them and make lots of money.â
âThatâs stupid. Who would want to buy crickets?â Natasha asks.
Daphne looks at her imperiously. âAll the vampires and ghosts will buy crickets and then at night theyâll come to your bed and eat you, too! Mmmm!â
Natasha shrieks. My eyes, meanwhile, have filled with tears.
âWhatâs that on the kitchen table?â Kayo asks. Heâs opened his suitcase back up and put his little plastic animals back where they belong. He even made onion soup to butter me up.
âA drawing Daphne did.â
âI guess things are getting serious.â
âI brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.â
âWhat do you think youâre going to learn from it?â
âWhat goes on in their house.â
âDonât you think youâre overestimating yourself, Maria?â
Not at all. If thereâs anything I know how to interpret, itâs childrenâs drawings. Iâve read a lot on the subject, but more importantly,I remember. I remember the kind of need that drives you to draw caves and rain. Sure, I may have talked to her about caves and witches who eat crickets, but she was the one who thought up the lightning that slices across the page like tiny swastikas. And she added those reddish-brown splotches of mudâas if the landscape had come down with the chicken pox.
Daphne draws the way her mother did, with sweeping gestures, practically tearing the page as she goes. Sheâs not afraid of the color gray. She made the witch enormous and the witchlet microscopically small, suggesting a certain balance of power. A strong female presence in the familyâwho else but Anna? And the cave, symbolizing protection. I imagine a house ruled by underground terror. Either thereâs no father at all or heâs completely powerless, since thereâs no sign of him in the drawing. No siblings, either. The mother witch and the little daughter witchlet. They climb onto their magic carpet and head off to help the poor. Another witch, flying by, reaches out a hand and shakes the carpet. The witch and the witchlet grab hold of the tassels just in the nick of time. Come here, my pretty. You thought you could escape me, but you canât.
âWhatâs wrong, child? Did a bakery burn down?â
Thatâs how Mom scolds me for my long absences. Itâs a common enough idiom, but the subtext to her irony is that I only come to see them when somethingâs gone wrong in my life. Sheâs a busy woman now, fairly well-known as a childrenâs writer, but she still plays the stereotypical Greek mother to perfection.
âI just missed you guys, thatâs all.â
The house on Aegina, behind the fish market, was built in the â70s. The yard is like a faint memory of Nigeria: a well instead of a goldfish pond, pistachio trees instead of banana trees. On theverandaârain or shineâa wrought-iron table with a marble top, just like the one we had in Ikeja. I have no idea how they managed it, but as soon as I set foot in the house, Iâm half expecting Gwendolyn to appear, and Iâm surprised to see Dad sitting there in his armchair. He was always at work. Now he folds his newspaper and gives me a thorough once-over, from my face down to my shoes.
âDid you wipe your feet on the way in?â
âYes, old man.â I kiss him on the top of his head, the way he used to kiss me once Iâd reached the age when youâre too big to be carried, but still too little for an adult to bend down as far as your cheek. Itâs as if he shrank. Of course heâs sitting down, and