The Meadow 71 as a wedding gift. I expect him to come barreling out of the house, splinters of wood embedded in his skin from his struggle with the door. Frightened at the thought of that happening, I set the car into motion and drive out of the compound. I don’t even bother to lock the main gate, don’t care to know how my husband will release himself from the bedroom with the keys buried deep in my suitcase. There is one thing I am sure of. I’m not coming back. My mother isn’t pleased with my escape. Or rather how I had executed my escape. No sane woman locks her husband in the bedroom, she tells me as she presses a cotton ball soaked with methylated spirit against my cheek. No sane man turns his wife into a punching bag, I want to tell her in a sharp retort, the words ready to slip off my tongue. Instead, I wince and let her apply more pressure on the wound. I am seated on the bed while she hovers over me, her ankara wrapper loose around her waist. It came undone when she rushed down the stairs with Bunmi, her help, at her heels to see who was crazy enough to knock on their door at 11 p.m. in the middle of the night. My mother was more surprised to see the suitcase than she was to see me. “Ni bo lo n lo?” she asked in Yoruba eyeing me as if I had just developed two heads. Where are you going? I didn’t answer her. I simply walked in and handed my suitcase to Bunmi to take to my room. I still called it my room even though I had been married to my husband for six years and hadn’t lived with my parents in a long while. Or at least my mother to be precise. My father passed away while I was still a student at the
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