All Waf’s Exes Are Crazy III
Chapter III: You Can Look But…
A man’s word is his bond. That is the command of Were when he was made. It is the measure of his being. He is only as good as his word, and when they were younger, when Winona and Peace were closer, Lucas had promised to always be there for his friend. He took his promises seriously. After he went cold, when Lucas didn’t have a lot to do, which was often, he would watch over him. No one can really pinpoint the genesis of their relationship. It was not like Peace and Winona, whose union began with their mothers at the clinic and lasted only eleven short years.
He, however, recalls a time before Waf. “It was a quieter existence, punctuated by a yearning for a sibling. “Days when I would do anything to gain the absence of my parents’ escalating arguments. If they asked me, I’d have supported their divorce when I was in preschool.” On the first day of school, their teacher placed him next to Waf, launching his career as a silent observer of his friend’s whining about his mother’s shifting attention to the new baby.
As an only child, Lucas could only imagine how annoying a crying baby in the downstairs bedroom could be. Now, a more complex web of emotions keep him close. He harbors a lingering sense of obligation perhaps, or the echo of a void Waf had unknowingly filled in those solitary childhood hours. In their first few weeks together, a subtle puppeteer resided within Waf. He held a quiet understanding of Lucas’s deep-seated need for belonging. When boarding school stole his friend, Lucas’s desperate plea had almost swayed his father, but his mother’s firm ‘no’ was absolute, a premonition of a darkness she couldn’t articulate.
Still, when the time came to find a school for him to start class one, her boy had begged and pleaded and done everything but grovel, followed by sleepless nights filled with him crying in bed, annoying his parents enough to let him join Wafula at Friends Academy as a day scholar. This compromise was born of his own silent rebellion against food. When he stopped eating as a last resort, she couldn’t watch her child hurt himself. She cried herself to sleep every night for a month after he enrolled. Reunited, their days blended into a shared landscape, yet even then, a subtle imbalance existed. The truth lay in his mother who noticed when his deliberate academic slump in class four had allowed Waf’s perceived brilliance to shine brighter. It was a sacrifice Lucas had made willingly, unknowingly setting a pattern for their uneven path. A quiet voice that sometimes resembled his mother’s worried tone, would occasionally whisper doubts about Waf’s easy acceptance of their dynamic, but Lucas always silenced it, mistaking his unease for mere overthinking.Lucas would often joke that he was Waf’s errand man. From a young age, he was the clandestine mailman when his friend had letters, folded into precise squares, to smuggle to girls.
Their friendship became a thrill both illicit and bonding. He ferried messages, sometimes accompanied by crisp banknotes, from Waf’s mother who had been reduced to a silent accomplice in her son’s teenage escapades. A sense of purpose, however manufactured, bloomed in Lucas with each task.
Lucas’ parents existed on the periphery of Wafula’s privileged world. His mother, a quiet, hardworking woman, was the Havis’ househelp, her family housed in the modest servants’ quarters. The Havis had lived on the same sprawling street as Wafula’s parents’ for two decades. Lucas’s mother had dedicated the last two of those decades to the Havis household, orchestrating the household’s children’s upbringing. Her own child had naturally gravitated towards the Havis offspring, creating a casual mingling across the class divide, most notably with the house’s lastborn, Winona Michaels, who attended the same school as her son. The Havis, recognizing Lucas’s quiet intelligence, had generously sponsored his education, a debt Lucas felt keenly. After the first day of school, when the teacher placed him next to Waf, Lucas ventured into the neighbors’ manicured lawns, looking for his newfound brother. At that tender age of three, his search for a kindred spirit his own small house couldn’t provide, blossomed into a friendship that felt as immutable as the ancient trees lining their street. His own mother, initially wary, hadn’t minded the boys’ early camaraderie, their innocent games unfolding under her watchful eye as she navigated her chores.
Once, when the boys were about four, their bond still nascent, Mrs. Wafula herself had pressed money into Lucas’s mother’s hand for watching them, a gesture met with a polite but firm refusal. “They keep each other company,” she’d said, a truth that belied the free childcare Mrs. Wafula gratefully accepted. The favor was rarely returned when the boys were at the Wafula mansion as Waf preferred to orchestrate their escapes from the confines of his home, and Lucas provided the willing accomplice. From then, their lives intertwined, almost every waking hour a shared experience. Wafula would materialize at the Havi’s every morning after breakfast, a casual invasion of Lucas’s more modest space, and usually only retreat to his own opulent home well after darkness had fallen, leaving Lucas with a strange mix of fulfillment and exhaustion.
They had walked that path countless times, the familiar cracks in the pavement a silent testament to their shared history. After she first noticed the small, mewling creatures abandoned near their gates, Winona made it her ritual to carry a can of her mother’s tuna, a small act of kindness in a world that often felt indifferent. She sometimes used the cats, their pathetic cries a convenient lure, to get Lucas to accompany her on these missions of mercy.
Not that Lucas truly minded being used in this way, especially when the destination was the imposing Wafula mansion. Who could refuse such pretty eyes? Certainly not this Lucas, whose spectral form still felt the pull of her gaze. So he went by her whim, becoming a silent shadow beside her vibrant presence. He’d feign a token resistance when she’d casually ask whether he knew if his friend was home, if they could possibly visit. Her true aim, Lucas knew even in his state, was to see Peace. Did he mind going to see if Peace was over her latest heartbreak? Certainly not. He would have followed Winona to the ends of the earth, even in a submarine bound for Mars, if she’d asked.
Peace, as usual, was rarely at the mansion. There was a strained politeness between her and Lucia and distance was a mutually appreciated buffer.When Peace was visiting, in bursts of emotional hurricanes that colored the entire neighborhood, Winona would gladly spend time at the Wafula mansion. It was the perfect excuse, hiding behind friendship to be around the boys. It got her access.
In their earlier years, Winona was shy, worsened by a crush that turned her into a fragile, unspoken thing. She would only visit when Peace was around, using their shared history as a shield, buffering against the intimidating presence of Wafula and Lucas’s aloofness. She’d try to catch Wafula’s eye with a new hairstyle or a particularly witty remark, always failing to elicit more than a casual glance. Peace, ever observant, noticed the subtle shifts in Winona’s demeanor, the way her voice softened when addressing her brother, the lingering glances. Inwardly, a sharp pang of irritation would pierce Peace’s carefully constructed composure. She hated it, this unspoken adoration for her brother, but she would pretend it didn’t bother her, a silent battle fought behind her placid expression.
The tension between Peace and Lucia was a constant hum beneath the surface of the estate’s polished calm. Lucia, barefoot and pregnant, resented Peace’s presence. The girl had inherited her mother’s face, giving her an uncanny resemblance to her brother and a living reminder of Wafula Snr’s past. Peace, in turn, saw Lucia as an interloper, a woman who had displaced her mother.
Their clashes were often subtle, a raised eyebrow from Lucia when Peace left a cup on the counter, a pointed comment from Peace about the lack of traditional food. Once, Lucia had found Peace rummaging through a cupboard for a specific type of tea her mother preferred. “Peace, this is my home now,” Lucia had said, her voice tight with thinly veiled irritation. “You ask before you take.” Peace had simply stared, her eyes wide and unblinking, before deliberately taking the tea and walking away, leaving Lucia fuming. “It is my father’s house,” Peace yelled when she was on top of the staircase. Another time, Lucia had tried to enforce a stricter bedtime, only for Peace to calmly inform her, “My mother allows me to stay up later when I’m reading.”
There was always an unspoken challenge hanging in the air, either a testament to Peace’s quiet defiance or Lucia’s feigned stubbornness. Over the years, the distance widened, both geographically and ideologically.
By the time they were nine, a significant shift had occurred within Peace. An unexplained devotion, bordering on obsession, had taken root, its tendrils wrapping around the teachings of Dr. Owuor, a charismatic religious leader whose influence permeated her entire being. His congregation adhered to strict doctrines, particularly concerning women’s attire: hair perpetually covered, the abandonment of pants, and a layered modesty enforced by wearing two or even three dresses at once. Peace’s transformation was startling. Her vibrant childhood clothes were replaced by long, shapeless dresses, her hair always covered by a scarf, even indoors. Her laughter, once free and unrestrained, became muted, her movements more deliberate.During her increasingly rare visits to Upperhill, Peace’s judgment of Winona became palpable. She would cast disapproving glances at Winona’s trendy outfits, her bare arms, the way she spoke of music and movies. “That skirt is too short, Win,” Peace had once said, her voice devoid of warmth, her eyes fixed on Winona’s knees. “It’s unholy.” Winona, initially bewildered, had responded with a defiant shrug. “It’s just a skirt, Peace. What’s wrong with it?” Peace’s reply was a cold, familiar, dismissive silence.
Winona’s choices, her very being, were now viewed through a prism of unholiness, her laughter deemed frivolous, her interests worldly and sinful. The easy camaraderie of their early childhood had curdled into disapproval and thinly veiled criticism, the chasm between them widening with each passing year and each fervent sermon Peace absorbed. Their friendship, once a default, became a burden, eventually snapping under the weight of Peace’s rigid new beliefs. Winona stopped seeking her out, and Peace offered no resistance to the growing void between them.
Lucas, before his spectral form, observed this fracturing with a melancholic understanding. He remembered the brief, innocent connection between the girls, a fleeting reflection of the simpler times before adolescent complexities and fervent beliefs had driven a wedge between them. He also felt a pang of protective anger towards the judgmental rigidity that had consumed Peace. A rigidity, he now realized, that mirrored, in its own way, Waf’s unyielding self-assurance.One afternoon, as Winona and Lucas approached the familiar gates of the Wafula residence, a scene unfolded that sent a jolt of icy shock through Lucas. Consolata, her face etched with a raw grief he’d only glimpsed during the overheard argument, was being escorted out of the house by two uniformed policemen. Her eyes, red-rimmed and swollen, caught Lucas’s. They locked eyes and it gave him a fleeting, haunted connection before she was guided into the back of a waiting police car. Wafula Snr stood on the porch, his expression a mask of cold indifference, watching her departure as if she were a discarded piece of furniture.
A chilling realization slammed into Lucas, a truth far more horrifying than any overheard argument: Consolata hadn’t just been arguing; she had been accusing. And Wafula Snr hadn’t just been angry; he had been silencing. The weight of the secrets Lucas had unwittingly stumbled upon now felt like an unbearable, spectral burden. His hand reached for Winona, a silent scream trapped in his throat. He had to tell her. He had to make her understand the darkness that lurked beneath the polished surface of the Wafula family. But how could a ghost speak? And would she even believe him, especially now, with the widening gulf between her and Peace, a tangible symbol of the growing darkness surrounding them all? The tuna for the stray cats lay forgotten in Winona’s bag, the small act of kindness overshadowed by the chilling spectacle they had just witnessed, a stark premonition of a danger far closer than either of them could have imagined.