I was twenty-three years old when my girlfriend then, Aku, called and said there was trouble. “You and I need to prepare our graves because we are dead,” she said. My heart stopped beating for a while. Before I could ask what we were dead for, she said she was pregnant. “My dad would slaughter me if he finds out, and it also means the end of my education. We better do something quickly before my dad gets to know.”

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I was at Level 200 then, but she had completed senior high school and was waiting for her results. I remember being scared of what the future held for me because my dad too had warned me that if I didn’t take care and I brought a pregnancy home, it would be the end of me and my future.

I asked her what we were going to do. She said she knew a friend who could prepare a potent concoction to bring the thing out. I sent her the last money I had on me. “Do everything you can to get rid of it,” I urged her.

The next day she called. “There’s bad news. My mom found out. She heard the conversation I was having with my friend. Tomorrow we are going to meet your father.”

I collapsed on the ground. All of a sudden, my knees couldn’t support my weight. I blamed her for being careless. I told her I wouldn’t forgive her if my dad stopped taking care of me. She cried while I lamented on the phone as if we’d received the news of a dead loved one.

I saw my dad’s call and I shivered. His voice was calm, too calm for a man expecting a grandchild. “Aku is here with her parents. They say you made Aku pregnant. Say the truth. Did you do it?” I was quiet. All I did was breathe heavily on the phone. “You better talk before you lose the ability to breathe stupidly on the phone.”

I responded, “She said I did it, so it’s me.”

My dad cut the phone, and I didn’t hear anything again until the next day when my mom called. She was so disappointed I could sense it in her voice. “Why would you do this to me, James? Why? At your age, what do you need a child for?” I heard my dad’s voice in the background. “He’ll marry her. Tell him no matter what, as far as I’m alive, he’ll marry Aku.”

During vacation, when I was home, my dad and my mom held my hand and dragged me to Aku’s parents’ house. For the first time, the two of us sat down while our parents decided our fate. Aku would give birth, and when the child was weaned, she would go back to school. My dad agreed to bear all the costs until Aku delivered. And then my dad repeated, “Look at her very well. That’s your wife. Until I’m dead and gone, you’re not bringing any woman home except Aku.”

We had a boy. I was in the exam hall when Aku gave birth. I couldn’t go home until after my last paper. I went home to see them. The baby looked at me, and I couldn’t believe I was a father at my age. We named him Joshua, a name my dad chose.

My dad took responsibility for him, celebrating each birthday and every milestone. Joshua became my father’s child. He was three when Aku went back to school. I had already completed national service and was looking for a job. Before Joshua turned nine, I married Aku in a very small traditional wedding. Only a few friends and family members were invited.

She was working with the Forestry Commission outside Accra, but I stayed in Accra because of my work. I visited her on weekends, and some weekends she also came to visit. During one of my visits, I was looking for scissors I thought were in her handbag. I went through her bag and found a little black bag tied firmly like it contained something illegal.

I opened the bag, and it was a man’s boxer shorts. They weren’t new. They looked like they had seen seasons and many drops of the last pee that drop no matter how hard you shake your manhood before putting it back after urinating. I wondered who they were for, and I wondered how they got into my wife’s handbag.

I asked no questions but instead decided to investigate. I set spies on her around her area to check her outgoings and incomings. My two spies kept a log and reported to me each day they saw something unusual.

“There’s a man,” one told me. “He brings her home often, and on Fridays she comes home late in the night or doesn’t come at all until sometimes on Sunday.”

I visited unannounced one Friday after work, and my wife came home at dawn in a black Land Cruiser. Meanwhile, she had texted me at 9:27 p.m. that she was sleeping.

When she saw me, she shivered. I welcomed her home and asked where she was coming from. She couldn’t string two sentences together without stuttering. But she said they travelled out of town for work and were coming that late because it was a long journey. “Office trip in this dinner cloth?”

I didn’t demand the truth because I already knew what she was doing. It all made sense to me why she would leave our child with her mom and decide to live alone. She said her apologies. She said it wasn’t as deep as I was making it look. She came back to Accra to spend a week so we could resolve the issue. She was my first love, the woman who gave me a child even when I wasn’t ready to be a father.

I was ready to forgive if only she admitted the obvious truth, but she didn’t. One day, out of curiosity, I carried Joshua to a facility to have a DNA test done. The results came, and Joshua wasn’t my child. The first question I asked myself was, “What am I going to tell my dad? This truth will not set him free. It will kill him instead.”

I showed the results to her, and she said I was lying. That I connived with the facility to do that because I was looking for a reason to leave. She was so sure I was lying until she did the test herself, and the result was the same.

It took courage and a strange sense of madness to be able to tell my dad. He screamed, “It’s a lie!” I responded, “I wish it was.” My mom came to meet us sitting there like statues—not talking, not moving, and not blinking. When I told her, she also became a statue, with eyes wide open and mouth opened in an oval shape at the same time.

When we regained composure, my dad asked if her parents knew about it. I said no. He said, “Don’t tell anyone until later. I believe the child is still yours.”

To me, the marriage had come to an end. She cheated in our past and cheated in our present. If I chose to forgive, which one would I forgive? It’s the past that brought us to our present. The two were conjoined twins; there was no one without the other.

My dad never recovered to date. He even wanted me to keep the child. He said science could be wrong. He was so attached to the story, he broke down while I was the one going through the hurt and shame.

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We are currently divorced, but it’s so hard for me to believe a woman again. She cut short my adulthood and made me a father prematurely. How do I get the lost moments back? How do I go back to when I was young and live without the knowledge of a child? It all hurts when I think about it. So I’ve stopped thinking and rather started living.

—Elvis

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