Stay With Me

In 1987, Akin arrives home from a business trip in Lagos and finds Funmi living in the spare room. He wants her gone but fears that if he asks her to leave, she will confront him about his impotence. He hopes that a moment like the 1981 student protest march that he and Yejide attended will provide an opportunity for him to divorce Funmi agreeably. He attributes the bloodshed at the protest to Yejide’s acceptance of his marriage proposal.

Yejide visits a psychiatrist following Funmi’s move-in, and a new salon opens next door to hers. A ransom note comes to all the neighbors of the estate, demanding 1,000 naira as insurance against violence. The men of the estate hire private police, but the robber assures them that the police are on their payroll.

The upwardly mobile people of the estate do not believe the levels of corruption in Babangida’s administration, and only Iya Bolu, the owner of the new salon, takes the ransom seriously. She calls a women’s meeting and instructs the women to stain sanitary pads with red zobo leaves to discourage rape when the robbers come. The women dismiss her as paranoid, despite her reminders that the journalist Dele Giwa believed himself safe, only to be assassinated by an innocuous-looking parcel bomb.

Dotun visits and congratulates Yejide on her pregnancy, which angers Akin because he has told Dotun about her pseudocyesis. Dotun defends Yejide’s conviction that her body is experiencing real symptoms, and Akin leaves for the club in anger.

Under the guise of comfort, Dotun entices Yejide to go to bed with him. Although Yejide feels that his sexual performance is lacking, she desires him. Akin returns and apologizes. He then initiates sex. In the aftermath, Yejide feels her false pregnancy dissolving like a miscarriage.

The robbers arrive and drink soda while Akin, Funmi, and Yejide load all their electronics into a van outside. The robbers do the same to other houses in the estate and fire their guns wildly when they leave. Akin dives over the now-pregnant Yejide but leaves Funmi uncovered.

Though the estate complains, they realize that the police helped facilitate the robbery. Yejide stays focused on her pregnancy, doing all she can to mitigate bad luck, including extending kindness to Funmi.

Yejide and Akin name their child Olamide and prepare for her naming ceremony, which is a raucous party. The day after the ceremony, Yejide finds Funmi dead at the bottom of the stairs. Although she fears that people will suspect her, everyone agrees that she must have fallen in her drunkenness. Yejide and Akin settle into parental bliss, and Yejide imagines a bright future for Olamide.

Akin recalls Funmi’s death as the catalyst for his return to regular church services. He is plagued with guilty nightmares for accidentally pushing Funmi down the stairs during a rare drunken argument. He reveals in later chapters that her loud discussion of his impotence in the quiet house led him to forcibly cover her mouth; she then lost her balance, falling to her death.

Yejide tells her own version of the legend of Oluronbi and the Iroko tree because she never liked the versions her stepmothers told their children while she was locked in the hallway alone each night. Yejide never believed that a mother would give up her child to the tree in exchange for better market sales, so in her version, Oluronbi promises an unborn child to the tree in exchange for the return of her family. She then tries to keep her daughter from the forest so that the Iroko tree cannot take her. Her daughter eventually enters the forest and is lost forever. Oluronbi never conceives another child, which Yejide believes is the real tragedy since children shape the memory of their parents’ choices when they are gone.

When Olamide is six months old, Yejide leaves Olamide napping upstairs while she makes food. When she returns, Olamide is not breathing, and Yejide curses herself for not recognizing the signs.

Akin meets Yejide at the hospital. Yejide tells him that they have taken Olamide to the morgue. After he completes the paperwork because Yejide is too grief-stricken, he notices breastmilk leaking through her top. He believes that he can neither understand her grief nor comfort her.

Yejide chafes under condolences for Olamide because they are so impersonal and false. She believes that the condolences imply that since Olamide was so young and she can conceive again, she should forget the past. Her in-laws will not reveal the place of Olamide’s grave out of fear that the knowledge will allow evil to torment her.

Yejide becomes pregnant again but does not tell anyone until her stomach is large. When she resumes work at the salon, she asks the women to shave her head in mourning, but they will not because of her new pregnancy. Only Akin agrees to shave the rest of her hair. He cries over her stomach and validates her grief.

Yejide compares her second child Sesan’s quiet, intimate naming ceremony with Olamide’s large party. Born feet first as a lucky sign, Sesan brings prosperity: They move into a large, gated home safer from robberies and purchase the salon building outright to expand the business. Though Akin’s family assures Yejide that Sesan is a good omen, Yejide cannot forget Olamide and stays vigilant.

Dotun loses his job and moves in with Akin and Yejide on a temporary basis that becomes permanent. He is separated from his wife, who does not appreciate his extramarital affairs, and due to his involvement in an unlawful scheme at his last job, no one will hire him. He confesses this to Yejide when she tries to seduce him and finds him mailing dozens of applications out.

Another coup occurs, and gunfire erupts across Lagos, but Babangida’s administration prevails. When the women at the salon chat about sex, Yejide wants to ask about Akin’s impotence since sex with Dotun is different, but she stays quiet, telling herself that she should not talk to customers about sex.

When Yejide collects results from Sesan’s medical exam, the doctor withholds information that he will only share with Akin. Sesan has sickle cell disorder. Yejide carries the trait, but Akin does not, meaning that Sesan is Dotun’s biological child. Yejide is terrified, but since Akin is out of town, she finds comfort with Dotun.

Yejide sends Sesan to a good Catholic school and spends her days learning about sickle cell at the college. She moves Sesan back into her bedroom to maximize her responsiveness.

Akin goes out of town. Dotun visits her while Sesan sleeps. After they have sex, Dotun apologizes for Akin’s incurable impotence and his own role in Sesan’s illness, though at this point in the narrative, the reader does not know the nature of this confession. Yejide realizes, though the reader does not yet know, that Akin asked Dotun to impregnate her for him, and Dotun thought she had agreed to the arrangement—Akin misled them both.

After Dotun’s apology, Yejide replays her early relationship with Akin. She realizes that her own desire to prove to her stepmothers that she had remained virginal until marriage and to send the stained sheets back as proof after her wedding night, in accordance with Yorùbá custom, enabled Akin to deceive her. Rather than wasting energy confronting Akin for his duplicity, Yejide focuses on caring for Sesan.

Akin visits Sesan’s doctor and does a convincing job conveying outrage when Dr. Bello reveals that Sesan’s sickle cell disorder is proof of Yejide’s unfaithfulness. However, Akin knows that Sesan is his because he fathers Sesan in all the ways that matter.

Though Akin objects to Sesan being in their room because he fears that the boy will awaken during moments of intimacy, Yejide insists, especially after his first sickle cell manifestation is so terrifying. Yejide curses God for taking her mother, her father, and Olamide and threatening Sesan.

Moomi is convinced that Akin and Yejide’s troubles are due to abiku, a spirit child that torments mothers by being born and dying again and again. She advises them to follow traditional steps to break the spirit cycle. During their visit, Dotun arrives drunk and gropes Yejide, but everyone brushes the incident off because he is drunk.

Yejide and a nun from Sesan’s school carry Sesan to the hospital as he writhes in agony due to his sickle cell disorder. The staff recognize them and take him. Yejide blames herself for her half of the genes that cause his suffering, wondering if he also suffers as punishment for her marital infidelities.

At the hospital, Akin is called into the exam room. Yejide is very pregnant, and the doctor asks that she stay behind. Sesan has died. Akin fears telling her the truth and convinces her to go home to cook a healthy meal for Sesan’s recovery.

By the time they arrive, Yejide figures out that he has died. Moomi requests permission to mark Sesan’s body so that the marks will appear on her next child’s body, confirming the presence of an abiku. Akin refuses in anger, but Yejide agrees. Again, they cannot know where the body rests.

Yejide’s relatives name her daughter Rotimi, an abiku name meaning “stay with me,” despite her lack of markings like Sesan’s body. Moomi accuses Yejide of weakness for her overt grief at the ceremony; she leaves early instead of helping with the postpartum period. Akin walks in on Dotun and Yejide having sex soon after Rotimi’s birth.