by Taiye Selasi
The light above the garage came on. All the lights in the house were on. Neither he nor Kehinde stirred nor spoke to acknowledge not moving. They sat as men do: side by side, facing forward, both silent and patient, waiting for something to say. “Do you want to see my painting?” Kehinde asked after a while. Kweku turned to him, embarrassed. He hadn’t thought to ask.
“Thank you, I would, please.”
Kehinde nodded. “One second.” He unzipped his portfolio and pulled out the piece.
• • •
Even in bad light it was breathtakingly beautiful. Not that Kweku began to know how to judge a piece of art. But it didn’t take an expert to see the achievement, the intelligence of the image, the simplicity of the forms. A boy and a woman, from the back, holding hands. Kweku pointed to the woman. “Who’s that?” Though he knew.
“That’s Mom,” Kehinde answered.
“And that must be you.”
“No, that’s—”
“Olu?”
“Um, no.”
“But it’s a boy, right?”
“It’s you.”
“Me?!” Kweku laughed. A sudden sound in the quiet.
“. . .” Stalling.
Still laughing. “But why am I so small?”
“Because Mom says she always has to be the bigger person.”
Kweku laughed so hard now he started to cry. “Genius.”
A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer. “You like it?”
“I love it. Pure genius.” He caught his breath. “She does say that, doesn’t she?”
“With ‘don’t I’ at the end of it. I always have to be the bigger person, don’t I?”
Kweku laughed harder, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Right.”
Kehinde giggled bashfully and glanced at the house. “It was supposed to be for Mom. But you can have it if you want it.”
“I would love that. She won’t mind?”
“Mom? No. She has loads.”
“Right.” It was he who didn’t know that they had birthed a little Basquiat, not she. She was the parent. He was the provider. He stopped laughing. “I’d l-l-love it.” His voice breaking (other parts of him also). “How do I . . . take it?”
“I roll it. Like this.”
“Wait. Don’t you have to sign it first?”
“Only famous artists sign their paintings.”
“Only foolish artists wait until they’re famous. Do you have a pen?”
Kehinde was smiling too widely to speak. He reached for his backpack. Kweku stopped him.
“Use this.” He plucked the silver pen from his unused scrubs pocket (a graduation gift from Fola, for prescriptions, engraved). Kehinde took the pen and turned it over in his fingers.
“It’s so nice. Where’d you get it?”
“From your mother. Of course.”
Kehinde nodded, smiling. Another glance at the house. He laid the painting on the dashboard to consider where to mark. Kweku considered Kehinde with some wonder at the change in him: how at ease he became as his hand touched the paper, how his shoulders relaxed, breath released, standing down. He was the same with a body on a table, silver knife in lieu of silver pen. How had he missed it?
So often he’d confided in Fola at night that he just didn’t “get” this slim good-looking boy; unlike Olu who reminded him so much of himself, Kehinde was a veritable black hole. Fola always said something vague in reply about the inscrutable nature of the second-born twin or recited again with great jingoistic pride the Yoruba myth of ibeji.
The myth:
ibeji (twins) are two halves of one spirit, a spirit too massive to fit in one body, and liminal beings, half human, half deity, to be honored, even worshipped accordingly. The second twin specifically—the changeling and the trickster, less fascinated by the affairs of the world than the first—comes to earth with great reluctance and remains with greater effort, homesick for the spiritual realms. On the eve of their birth into physical bodies, this skeptical second twin says to the first, “Go out and see if the world is good. If it’s good, stay there. If it’s not, come back.” The first twin Taiyewo (from the Yoruba to aiye wo, “to see and taste the world,” shortened Taiye or Taiwo) obediently leaves the womb on his reconnaissance mission and likes the world enough to remain. Kehinde (from the Yoruba kehin de, “to arrive next”), on noting that his other half hasn’t returned, sets out at his leisure to join his Taiyewo, deigning to assume human form. The Yoruba thus consider Kehinde the elder: born second, but wiser, so “older.”
And so it was.
Kehinde wasn’t lesser, less outgoing, less social, “in the shadow” of Taiwo, a shadow himself. He was something else. From somewhere else. Otherworldly like Ekua. An empath like Fola. And for whatever it was worth, Kweku saw now with awe, like his father (and his father before him).
• • •
Kehinde signed neatly in the lower right corner. Kweku touched his shoulder. “Why, thank you, Mr. Sai.”
“You’re welcome, Dr. Sai.” Kehinde’s smile quickly faded. The word doctor hung between them like an odor in the car. Dogs began a canon of cacophonous barking. Kehinde looked out at the house a little longer. The light went off in Taiwo’s room. Then on, then off. Like a signal. Then on. Kehinde turned back to Kweku, turning back into a black hole. “Your pen.”
“Yours.”
“But it’s—”
“Keep it.”
“Are you sure?” Turning it over.
“I’d be honored for you to have it.”
“Thank you, Dad.” Another odor.
Kweku reached over and touched Kehinde’s face, rubbing gently with one finger the space between his brows as he often did with Fola, trying to rub away her frown, though it never really worked and didn’t now. “It must be time for dinner.” Though it wasn’t. Thirty minutes yet. “Your mother will want to hear all about class. You go ahead.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Just a second.”
Kehinde nodded, not smiling. “Your painting,” he said.
He rolled it up neatly and handed it to Kweku. The cameraman filmed: The Intelligent Parent Falls Dumb. Kweku gripped the painting as one does when one means I’ll treasure this always but can’t find the words. The words that he found were, “If you could maybe not mention—”
“Don’t worry. I promise. I won’t.”
And then silence.
“Okay,” said Kweku.
“Okay,” said Kehinde. He waited for a moment then got out of the car.
“I love you,” said Kweku, but the door closed on “I.”
Kehinde didn’t hear and went inside.
• • •
He waited one moment, then backed down the driveway. He didn’t stop driving until Baltimore, seven hours, straight, I-95 stretching out like dark ocean. Flat. Driving without seeing, under moon, into black. He checked into a hotel near Hopkins Hospital, one he remembered. When he called home at last she was sobbing, but clear. “Kehinde won’t tell me what happened, says he promised. You’re scaring me. What happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”
He said very simply that he was sorry and he was leaving. That if she sold the house at value, she’d have enough to start again. That it was quite possible that he had never actually deserved her, not really. That he’d wiped them out trying to beat the odds.
“Beat the odds. What does that mean? Are you in danger? Have you been gambling? Are you in physical danger? Where are you?”
(He was nowhere.) He said it was for the best and that again he was sorry. That she’d be better off without him. “I’m letting you go.”
“What does that mean?”
All his love to the children.
“When are you coming home?” she wept.
He wasn’t.
&
nbsp; 13.
Sixteen years on he stands bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, his bare feet in the grass, partly wheezing, partly laughing at what’s happened and how: the heartbreak he fled from has found him.
At last.
Of course when he left he assumed he’d return, to his life as he knew it, his family, his home—perhaps sooner than he did, in some days, not some weeks—but never once did he guess they’d be gone. Up in smoke. And could Fola be faulted? Was it she who overreacted, packing up as she did, shutting down in despair? Left to weep in that house, with its secret interconnections, its drafts and its shadows, original doors that wouldn’t close, and four kids, a serious boy and two liminal beings and the baby—without him? Deserted. Alone. Not “helpless.” Never helpless. She had never been helpless, not as a child even, pampered in V.I. before the war. She was a natural-born warrior, a take-no-shit Egba (or half of one, the Igbo mother dead giving birth), had faced feats far more fearsome than a mountain of debt not her making, than loneliness, than aloneness, despair. But not desertion, she would argue. Not deceit, disappointment. Not placing her trust in, then being let down.
Was it she, as he’d argued, perhaps knowing he was wrong, or rather knowing he had lost, that it could never be made right, and so right as one is when he’s being done wrong by a person he’s wronged: unable to believe in his righteousness? Was it she who betrayed him, having herself been betrayed? Who, having left a life twice, simply did it again? Or was it he, packing nothing, driving away in desperation, too exhausted to explain it, too exhausted to think: of other hospitals, of starting over, of finding work in another state, of being reasonable, of being responsible, of being a father, of being forgiven?
So going. With the whole of it down to an instant. Waiting, watching, for that moment (one) then backing down the drive. When if Fola had come to some window, seen the Volvo. When if Kehinde had made some small noise coming in. When if he had reconsidered, somehow come to his senses. Or considered in the first place. Gotten out, gone inside. In his scrubs, bowed and broken, but in, into the foyer, down the hall, into the kitchen smelling of ginger and oil. Instead of a question becoming a body there at sunrise, every morning, there to greet him with its weight and warmth, what if, when he opens his eyes. He thinks of it now and can scarcely comprehend it. That he lost her. That he left her. That she left him.
And how.
Days: in a stupor, barely sleeping, barely thinking, too afraid to call home, eating rice, drinking shame, back to the Goodwill on Broadway to buy a suit for a meeting at Hopkins (no positions), Johnnie Walker, Kind of Blue. Weeks: bled together. Six, eight weeks, then ten. Until one night, past midnight, simply driving back home. Snow beginning as snow begins in Boston, harmless, lazy, light, a blizzard by nightfall but flurries to start, pale fluttering flakes in the pink winter dawn. Fear in his fingertips, quivering belly, but certain he’d be able to argue his case, to confess and explain, beg his children’s forgiveness, to earn back their trust, win her over again. Instead of: arriving at seven A.M. to a FOR SALE sign in front and the statue in back, which he took almost unthinkingly before speeding to the flower shop (shuttered), then the public school (children withdrawn). Racing, now sweating, to Milton in panic, looking desperately for the headmaster to ask for his son and somehow chancing upon Olu himself in that coat, the beige coat, with an L.L. Bean bag on his back. Before either could speak, a shrill bell ringing, steel, slicing clean through the distance from father to son, standing awkward and conspicuous in the sudden swirl of students issuing forth from brick buildings to cheer for the snow. Olu speaking clinically, describing a patient. “She cries every morning. She thinks I don’t hear. She says you up and left us without a dime in the bank. The twins are in Lagos. The baby’s still here.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“Look at me when you’re speaking to me.”
“I don’t want to either.” Olu looked down, gripped the straps of his bag. Kicked the ground. Another bell. “I have to go.” Walked away.
• • •
The way it unraveled.
As things fall from cliffs. Like Irene, his first flatline, first patient he lost; admitted laughing at sunset, cold dead before dawn. The sheer speed of it. The mind-boggling speed of a death. (Or was it the other way around? Mind-boggling speed of a life?) He’s a doctor, should have known, the body spoils, nothing lasts, not a life, why a love?, how loss works in the world and what happens to whom in what quantities, “the only constant is change . . .” and that business. Still, who would have thought? That she’d flee, refuse to see him, or to let him see them, or to tell him where they were when he got her on the phone? Weeks becoming months becoming seasons: unforgiven. An existence unraveled. Irreversible.
Open, shut.
How could he have known? That a life that had taken them years to put together would take weeks to break apart? A whole life, a whole world, a whole world of their making: dinners, dishes, diapers, deeds, degrees, unspoken agreements, outgoing answering machine messages, You’ve reached the Sais, we’re not here right now. Beep. And won’t be here ever again. Leave a message. Until nothing was left but the statue of the mother in the trunk of the Volvo and the painting, two forms. Oil on canvas. Kehinde Sai, 1993. Signed by the artist. The Bigger Person.
• • •
He laughs.
He takes a step forward and stumbles, and falls. He lands on his stomach, his face in the dew. Why did I ever leave you? The bridge on a loop per that tepid R&B to which Taiwo used to sulk. (To cure a broken heart, there was only Coltrane on vinyl. Coltrane would have cured her. He’d have told her if she’d asked.) But it’s too soon to die. So he lifts up his face. Not today, he thinks, laughing. More “scoffing,” short of breath. He has Coltrane, he has heparin, he has nothing to be concerned about. Jogging daily, Ama nightly. Never smoked. His heart is strong. But it isn’t, and he knows it. It is broken in four places. Just the cracks in the beginning, left untreated now for years. His mother in Kokrobité, Olu in Boston, Kofi in Jamestown, Folasadé all over. That woman, all over him, deep in the fascia, in the muscle, in the tissue, in the matter, in the blood. He is dying of a broken heart. He cannot help but laugh at this. Or try to. Gripping the grass in pain, he rolls to his side. Lifts his head. Looks around. Is there something he can use to hoist himself up? The bougainvillaea, the butterfly, the mango.
And there she is.
Finally.
In the fountain.
A ridiculous place. Though not so surprising for a dreamer. Or for two. Standing (floating) in the fountain with white blossoms in their cotton hair, their bodies swathed in sparkling lace, white bubas flecked with diamonds, gold, with snow on their shoulders and gaps in their teeth, both, one with the radio, the other the camera. He peers at this, laughing. The invisible cameraman’s? How did she wrest this away from his grasp? He gasps for breath, laughing. She is laughing now also. The radio playing softly. Sentimental mood, indeed.
She sets down the camera. It goes up in smoke.
“I love you,” he says.
“I know, I know, I know.”
“It hurts,” he says.
His mother says, “Rest.”
Fola says, “Yes.”
So he lies in the grass. “Love grass” it’s called, of all things. Bloody man.
• • •
He does not think what he thought he would think. That he never said bye or that it goes by so fast or that he should have chased Olu down the stairs when he came or seen Sadie grow up or not driven away. He thinks that he was wrong. About the whole thing being forgettable. Not that he won’t be forgotten—he will, has been already—but about the details being unremarkable. What it amounts to in the balance. There is one detail worth remembering.
That he found her in the end.
Folasadé Savage on
the run from a war. Kweku Sai fleeing a peace that could kill. Two boats lost at sea, washed to shore in Pennsylvania (“Pencil-wherever”) of all places, freezing to death, alive, in love. Orphans, escapees, at large in world history, both hailing from countries last great in the eighteenth century—but prideful (braver, hopeful) and brimful and broke—so very desperately seeking home and adventure, finding both. Finding both in each other, being both to each other, the nights that they’d toast with warm Schweppes in cheap flutes or make love in the bathtub in moonlight or laugh until weeping: that he found what he hadn’t dared seek. When it would have been enough to have found his way out, to have started where he started and to have ended up farther, a father and a doctor, whatever else he’s become. To have dared to become. To escape would have sufficed. To be “free,” if one wants swelling strings, to be “human.” Beyond being “citizen,” beyond being “poor.” It was all he was after in the end, a human story, a way to be Kweku beyond being poor. To have somehow unhooked his little story from the larger ones, the stories of Country and of Poverty and of War that had swallowed up the stories of the people around him and spat them up faceless, nameless Villagers, cogs; to have fled, thus unhooked, on the small SS Sai for the vastness and smallness of life free of want: the petty triumphs and defeats of the Self (profession, family) versus those of the State (grinding work, civil war)—yes, this would have been quite enough, Kweku thinks. Born in dust, dead in grass. Progress. Distant shore reached.
That still farther, past “free,” there lay “loved,” in her laughter, lay “home” in her touch, in the soft of her Afro? He almost can’t fathom it. Had never dared dream of it, believing such endings unavailable to him, or to them, who walked shoeless, who smiled in their deaths and who sang in their dreams and who didn’t much matter. That he found her and loved her and made their love flesh four times over—it matters, if only to him. A point to the story. That girl-child met boy-child. And loved him.