Chinedu missed the last bus.
He was under the dim lights of Jibowu Motor Park, his hand clutching his carry-on, the other swabbing his neck. Lagos was still in full swing. Conductors shouted destinations. Food and water vendors forced meat pies and water into their hands. Horns argued from all over.
“Benin! Benin! Last seat!” a driver called.
Chinedu looked back, but the bus door slammed in his face. The bus disappeared, dust and laughter in its wake.
“Ah-ah,” Chinedu muttered. “Today do not just like me.”
He checked his phone again. Three calls were missed from his mother in Uromi. One from his youngest sister.
Daddy wants to know if you're coming.
He swallowed hard.
His father was home from hospital that morning after a stroke. Chinedu was supposed to be home today. But he'd been at work at the printing shop, then he'd been stuck in traffic, and now the buses had stopped.
"Where you dey go, brother?"
It was an old man sitting next to a kiosk. He had an aged walking stick and a brown cap.
“Uromi side,” Chinedu said.
The man nodded. “So you can still go.”
Chinedu looked around. “How?”
In the distance, to the left of the bright lines of traffic and noise, there was only one car, parked in a quiet corner of the park. A blue Peugeot wagon, old and unassuming.
“That road is not popular,” said the man. “But it reaches.”
Chinedu hesitated. “Why nobody dey enter?”
The old man smiled. "People dey love noise.
As Chinedu was about to ask a follow-up question a vendor selling roasted corn stood in front of him. When he stepped aside, the old man was gone.
He shrugged, but was still puzzled. There were lots of things in Lagos.
The blue wagon was packed with just one passenger: a woman in office clothes, cradling a sleeping baby. The driver was leaning on the hood, chewing some gum.
“Uromi?” Chinedu asked.
“Go there,” said the driver. “But na old road. Slow road.”
“How much?”
The price was fair. Too fair.
Chinedu looked into the man's eyes. Calm eyes. No rush. No tricks.
He climbed in.
Chinedu drove out of Lagos on streets he had never been on. The city lights became fewer and fewer, and then night. They were flanked by trees. The car window was open and the air was damp.
The woman shifted the child on her lap. “Riding on this road for the first time?”
“Yes.”
“I once walked on it when I was a child,” she replied. “My mother told me that some roads have stories.”
Chinedu smiled politely. He didn't want to hear stories.
An hour later, his phone went dead.
“Perfect,” he sighed.
The driver chuckled. “A dead phone is a good friend of a man.”
Chinedu leaned back. “Oga, abeg face road”.
The woman laughed quietly.
They drove for an hour more before the car slowed to a halt.
"No," the driver said.
The car stopped by a small wooden bridge over a black river.
Chinedu sat upright. “What happened?”
“Pipe in the radiator,” the driver said, opening the door. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen?” Chinedu burst out. "I have to go home because my father is ill.”
The child woke up, crying. The mother gently rocked the child.
The driver lifted the bonnet. A ghost of steam.
Chinedu got out, mad at the night, the road, himself. Crickets sang from the grass. The river flowed under the bridge.
He paced.
“I should have stayed in Lagos,” he said.
“No,” the woman called from the car. “You should have left earlier.”
He stopped, and then he laughed.
“You people like to offend foreigners?”
"I like truth," she said.
He sat on the bridge rail. For the first time in months, there were no engine sounds, no shouts from the customers, no traffic. Just insects, wind and water.
He thought of his father's oily hands. The man had worked on generators his whole life to send Chinedu to school. But for the past six months Chinedu hadn't answered the phone, claiming to be busy.
Busy doing what?
Working late. Chasing extra money. Justifying to his family.
The driver said, “Young man, give me the torch.”
Chinedu hurried over. They held the parts, tightened the bolts, wiped the grease. The driver worked slowly.
“You be mechanic before?” Chinedu asked.
“Long time ago,” the man said.
“My father too.”
“Then you may know something already.”
“What?”
The driver smiled. “Engines go bad through minor neglects.”
In half an hour they were back on the road.
It was still misty over the fields outside Uromi just before dawn. The roosters crowed before the sun rose.
When they pulled up outside his family home, Chinedu almost fell out of the vehicle.
"How much balance?" he asked.
The driver waved him off. “You already paid.”
The woman nodded, the child sleeping.
Chinedu turned to thank the woman and her son, but his mum was sprinting out of the gate.
“Chinedu!”
She hugged him and cuffed him. “You want kill us with worry?”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
In the room, his father was sitting on a chair wrapped in a blanket. He was shrunken, but his eyes blazed.
“Did Lagos let you out?” the old man asked.
Chinedu knelt beside him. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
His father looked at him for a long time, and patted his head.
“You came. That is enough.”
Chinedu turned and looked back out the door.
The road was empty.
No blue wagon. No woman. No driver.
Only the sunrise on the empty street.
His mother looked where he was looking. “Who brought you?”
He smiled slowly.
“People who knew another way.”