Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“I should never have left home. Doctor, when am I going home? I want to go home.”

“We are going home right now,” Job said calmly. Just like that, he guided him through the bathroom doorway into his hospital room. “We are home, Captain,” Job said, and the old man began softly weeping, shaking his thin fists in front of him.

A mute television, a bed surrounded by an aluminum railing, pictures scattered across a windowsill of people whose faces were cloudy to the old man — a daughter, tall and sturdy, pretty at just the right angle; the little boy whom she wrapped her arms around, the one Captain believed was his son, the one the old man wrote his letters to. The son he’d never had.

Job thought of the child that was growing inside Ifi. He knew nothing of children, how to feed them, how to dress them, how to stop their tears. In spite of this, he had always understood that children must come. Having a child was part of the natural progression of things. For a man his age it was time, yet the thought brought nothing to him. He felt nothing.

“My letters,” Captain said.

Job handed Captain his notepad and pen.

“I’m writing him another letter. He’s been a bad boy, but I forgive him.”

“Good,” Job said. “Fathers should always forgive their sons.” He helped Captain into the bed. “But first, it’s time to sleep.”

Captain looked at him with watery, reddened eyes. “It’s time.”

After his rounds, Job found his way to the break room. Except for the hum of the refrigerator, it was empty and silent. It was a solitude he savored. Glancing one way and then the other, Job opened a foil-covered bowl of soup and warmed it in the microwave. In the past, he’d opened short plastic containers of tasteless Campbell’s soup. Now that Ifi was with him, each night he ate garri and pepper soup. Job quickly lapped the soup up in satisfaction, hoping to finish before a coworker arrived with the questions and complaints about the acrid scent.

During his breaks, away from Ifi’s prying eyes, he would thumb his way through their mail. Each envelope presented a dilemma: how certain was he that his paycheck would make it to his checking account before his payments reached the bill collectors? Until now, it had never been his practice to write out checks at work, but Ifi was at home, and she didn’t need to know about their expenses, or the savings bond with his father’s money.

As always, Ifi’s letter was in the pile, a weekly note to her aunty. Normally, Job stamped the letter and added it to his collection of outgoing checks. But today, he thought of Captain and his unanswered letters, a neat stack in the bottom of one of his drawers. For the first time, he wondered what each short note contained, and why Ifi had chosen not to share their contents with him.

In Job’s absence, Ifi had taken to writing letters, licking and sealing them, and then waiting for Job to return with the stamps that would deliver them to Aunty. It was their regular routine for Ifi to check the mailbox in the afternoons and arrange its contents, along with her letters, on the kitchen counter for Job to collect.

In her first letters, Ifi described the clean streets and the water that did not need to be boiled. Light does not go. Snow is just as it appears in the books, she explained, but only on the first day. And then it soils the legs of your trousers, like the muddy streets in Port Harcourt on wet days. Americans are healthy, so healthy that their bodies do not stop growing. And I am such a queen that my husband will not allow me to lift a finger.

In the next letters, Ifi decided it was best to explain herself. Job has hired a maid — it is even Oyibo woman, an American — because he is so cautious with the baby. Fat red roses fill my garden. In fact, my yard alone is larger than your entire street in Port Harcourt. Instead of the warped walls, riddled with holes; instead of the splatters of paint; instead of the mousetraps and cockroaches, she told Aunty about a big-screen television with one thousand channels, a stereo with a five-CD changer, a three-car garage — all the things she had seen in magazines.

It had started on a flat, gray afternoon as Job and Ifi shrugged their way through the grocery checkout lane. Ifi had seen the glossy magazines: celebrity tabloids with George Clooney and Julia Roberts on the covers, stories about babies born on Mars, and a couple of covers with shiny basketball players, their biceps dancing on the pages. Job picked one up, glanced at it, and murmured something about Hakeem Olajuwon. A misplaced Good Housekeeping magazine was behind it, which Ifi took.

A beautiful home graced the cover, with a manicured lawn, artful shrubbery, and lights that glowed all the way to the arched doorway with Ionic columns on each side. Inside, the pages were filled with cherubic men and women spread on sleeper sofas, attractive and healthy, with mouths flexed into smiles. Every item matched. There was nothing extra, nothing used or soiled. No sandy red grains from the outdoor walkways in Port Harcourt. No mousetraps like the ones that lined the walls of Job’s apartment — because, although she had lived in it for two months, Ifi still considered the apartment his home, not her own. As she glanced at the pictures that afternoon, she knew that one day she would have a beautiful home like the ones in the magazines, and she would do with it as she pleased. A real home. Not an imitation like her fur coat.

She became a regular subscriber to three different interior design catalogs, picking them up from the newsstand during their weekly outings to the grocery store. As her body grew larger each month, the intricacies in the design of her imaginary palace grew bolder. There were low-swinging chandeliers, crown molding, bay windows, and bougainvillea wrapped all along the red brick exterior.

Yes, Ifi wrote in another letter, there are already four bedrooms, but because my husband is considering the inclusion of a home library to store all of his medical diagrams and journals, we are discussing with contractors the possibility of adding a fifth room.

Aunty, she concluded, you would not recognize me for the skinny girl who left home.

Leaning into his open locker, Job folded the letter into squares. As the doors clanked shut around him, he collapsed on the hard wooden bench, stunned, puzzling over the descriptions of a home he didn’t recognize. He folded each square into successive squares until the letter was as small as a business card. Then he unfolded it and stared at the broken lines of Ifi’s longhand against the seams of the folds. What could she mean? They did not have four bed-rooms — but perhaps she was counting the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom. They did not have maids, but perhaps she had a difficult time explaining to her aunt that in America, one relied on machines for help instead of the poor. She had also described a music system, and indeed they had one, a small portable radio with bent wires that worked as well as a brand-new machine. But what puzzled him was the television. Job did not own a television, nothing like it. There must have been a mistake.

At first the sound of his name was a faraway echo, until suddenly the charge nurse was peering into Job’s face. “Job, it’s a phone call, for you,” she said. “But I hope you keep in mind our policy about personal calls. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a place of business. I’m not picking on you, so don’t get that idea. I’m only saying that you can’t make personal calls to friends. You understand? And if it’s long distance, we’ll have to send you a notice.”