by Taiye Selasi
But Fola was absent. Distraught and distracted. She sat in the nursery for most of the day staring out the one window in a torn wicker rocking chair reclaimed from the porch when the seasons had turned. With heat blasting mercilessly. She didn’t make breakfast. She didn’t prevent them from watching cartoons. She didn’t make dinner. She didn’t make phone calls. Just sat looking out at the slow-falling snow.
Olu served breakfast to himself and his siblings. They looked at him expectantly, nibbling their toast. Four amber eyes throwing sparks at his forehead. They seemed newly strange to him, frightening almost.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” Taiwo asked him.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Are you going to know soon?”
Olu frowned. “I don’t know. She’s scared about the baby.”
“But Dad’s with the baby.”
“I know.” Olu stood but didn’t know where to go. He went to the sink and washed his hands, which weren’t dirty.
“Don’t worry,” said Kehinde. “He’ll save her.”
“I know. That isn’t the question.” They waited for the question. He dried his hands, feeling his eyes well with tears. He used the scratchy dishrag for his face, too, surreptitiously, then hurried from the kitchen, down the hall, out the door.
He stood in the yard in his Brookline High jacket, where the air was too cold for the tears to re-form, watching station wagons headed for the underpass, slowly—the street slick with ice under grayish-brown sludge—but determined, it seemed, to leave Boston for Brookline (where he, too, was bused in for school) up the road. There were less than two miles to that ENTERING BROOKLINE sign, white with black letters in definitive font, and it still seemed like “distance” from this to that zip code: more trees, Carvel Ice Cream, lights hung by the town. Their corner seemed particularly ugly that morning, the trees and the houses alike drained of life with a thin coat of filth overlaying the snow banks, a lone pit bull barking, a bass line somewhere. The odd plastic Santa and halfhearted Christmas lights flung across branches like strings of paste gems only made matters worse. They were futile. It was useless. The grayness defeated all semblance of cheer.
Why do we live here, he wondered, suddenly angry, in grayness, like shadows, like things made of ash, with their frail dreams of wealth overwhelmed by faint dread that the whole thing might one day just up and collapse? Was there something about them that kept them in limbo despite their intelligence and all their hard work? And if so, could they not just accept their position and settle in here among the dignified poor? He thought of his classmates, the rich ones in Brookline, the poor ones in Metco, and he in between, somehow stuck in the middle with none of the comforts of in-group belonging, ashamed and afraid. He knew, though they hid it, that his parents had suffered, perhaps were still suffering in some unseen way; that it lightened their burden to think that their children would not have to suffer—and yet here he was. Top of his class: at a high school he hated foremost for the school bus that ferried him in, like an immigrant, a foreigner, a native to brilliance but stranger to privilege, bused in, then sent home. Formidable athlete: who loathed competition, was nauseated with dread before taking the field, though he hid it, the panic, the sheer desperation that launched him to victory still breathless with fear. Having learned that his father was saving for prep school, he’d determined to perform at the height of his gifts (for if only he lived where he learned, as a boarder, as a permanent resident, surrounded by green, he could shake off the grayness that clung to his corner, his place in the shadowy gap between worlds).
He was thinking of shadows when he looked up and saw her at the window of the nursery, a shadow herself. It seemed she couldn’t see him. Or saw but saw through him, as if he were part of the grayness, a ghost. He wanted her to smile or to call from the window to admonish him for wearing such a featherweight jacket, but Fola just stared, rocking backward and forward. He went back inside, to the nursery (née closet).
“Mom?” he said softly.
She didn’t stop rocking. She drew on her cigarette. “Come in, love,” she blew. He went to the chair and stood awkwardly beside her, unsure he should touch her. They looked at the snow. “Do you like it? The color?” she asked after a moment.
“The gray?”
“Here. The pink.”
He considered the walls. “Seems good for a girl.”
“For a girl.” She was laughing. “Yes. I had a room with the same color walls.” Then abruptly, disjointed, “You can’t just keep losing and accepting the losses, or else what’s the point? I don’t know. That’s the question. If they just keep on dying—my baba, my baby—then why love at all?” She looked at him blankly. “Do you know what I mean?”
He didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant.
“Look at you. You’re trembling,” she said. “Is the heat on?”
The closet was sweltering, the heat on full blast. “I’ll check,” he lied, eager to make a swift exit. “Do you need anything?” he asked her.
“My daughter. Alive.”
His father returned, and his mother recovered, but something was different, still hard to say what. Fola was enraptured by “Sadé” the newborn, Kweku by buying a five-bedroom house, newly finished with training, now paid as a surgeon; the new house was massive, a cavity. Hollow. The center of gravity had shifted for the family, though no one seemed to notice the movement but him: instead of Kweku and Fola at the center, together, a twosome talking softly, laughing softly, present, home, there was now the small open space left by their absence, she lost to the baby, he lost to the work. Into this space slipped their Dreams for the Future, a vision of home a good decade ahead in which both of their projects had come to fruition (grown-up babies, private practice) and they could re-merge. This became the nucleus, of nuclear family fame—Future—with rings fanning out from the core, a new order, decentralized, disaggregated efforts to climb up the mountain each man for himself. Gone was his place between twosomes, the Eldest, a broker midway between parents and children; he no longer seemed special to Kweku or Fola, their firstborn, the prize horse, nor close to the twins.
With the center dissolved, they’d closed ranks, turning inward. An autonomous unit, they stopped seeming fragile. They whispered and chuckled, conspiring with glances. They didn’t need protecting. They didn’t need their brother.
And perhaps because this brother was fourteen years old and had just had a growth spurt and lost his old voice and was stranded in the anteroom of Awkward before Handsome, ejected from boyhood with one graceless thrust, he noticed very suddenly that he was not beautiful, at least not like they, not a beautiful boy. The privilege was Kehinde’s, both beauty and boyhood, two states he had never quite noticed before but missed desperately now that he knew what he wasn’t. Around this time someone said, meeting them both, “One got the beauty, the other the brains,” with a >, not a =, there implied in the equation, by the reaction (patted shoulders, forced laughter, changed subject) while Olu stood smiling, gone red with the ache, so it was true, he was lesser than . . . Jealous of Kehinde.
Some twenty years later the feeling returns: the same clamoring ache as they stood in the drive and he followed the feeling of being observed to his brother observing his girlfriend, lips pursed. Ling would choose Kehinde was what he thought next, promptly losing the scent of the past of the smell of the sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil, as he reddened himself. If ever it came to it, Ling would choose Kehinde; any woman in her right mind would make the same choice. He was glamorous and famous and wealthy, an artist, whereas Olu was a resident. Cause and effect. Though he couldn’t quite bear it, to lose her, he thinks, with his hands on the ache and his eyes on the fan and his brother beside him as silent as threat is. Or more to the point, to lose her, too.
v
Kehinde can sense that his brother’s not sleeping, perhaps that his eye
s are still open (and filling) but lies there unspeaking, unnerved by the feeling he’s had since they got to the house and got out. “He died,” he said, hurting, she laughing, choir bellowing (“no shadow of turning”)—and then they were here: at the front of a house that brought to mind Colorado, a houseboy appearing with cash for the taxi. A very pretty housegirl was fussing with Fola, the others climbing out of the dusty Mercedes, the houseboy lifting cases from the trunk of the taxi, the rusty door grating as Taiwo alighted. He opened his door and stepped out, blinking slowly, assailed by the light and the sting of her laugh and the thought, she was right, though she’d said it to hurt him, though he used to be able:
he can’t read her thoughts.
For years he had. Read—or more accurately heard—them. As if they were words in her voice in his head, only snippets but clear ones, and clearer the feelings that went with the thoughts; he could feel what she felt.
He still doesn’t know when he lost good reception. It wasn’t in Nigeria, for all of the horror. After college or the last time he saw her or earlier? He doesn’t trust his memory when he tries to think back. The wrist-slitting scrambled his memories, rearranged them. The archives remain but are all out of order. He can’t tell what age he was when such-and-such happened; couldn’t say in which country he was in which year. He knows that at some point the line filled with static, then little by little went properly dead. He senses his sister—still experiences her presence like the space between magnets to a finger passing through—but can’t hear, so doesn’t know, her now.
Radio silence.
“He’s gone” made her laugh, and he couldn’t hear why.
He was blinking with sadness when he stepped from the taxi and stood for a moment to steady himself with the sun slanting down at an angle toward him, his eyes blurring slightly against the rich light, and was bringing a hand to his eyes for some shadow when, shifting, he caught that quick glimpse of Ling’s face. They bear no resemblance. It was just a distortion—the angle, the sunlight, the sadness, the shadow—but there beside Olu she looked in that moment exactly like one Dr. Yuki.
vi
Fola pauses briefly in the hall between bedrooms to listen for voices behind the closed doors. Even in silence she senses the bodies, their presence as strange as their absence once was. She remembers the first time she felt it, one morning, unremarkable among mornings when she thinks of it now (though it goes that way always, it seems, with revelations, the banality of the context as striking as the content):
the odd Monday morning in Boston in April, that strangely named month, so misleading somehow, the very sound of it, April, all open, pastel, telling none of the truth of relentless gray rains. Her husband had called from a Baltimore pay phone to say he was gone and was not coming home (late October); she’d lain in their bedroom that evening and remembered him leaving the kitchen that day. She’d been standing at the counter fixing breakfast for the children and had glimpsed him only briefly as he floated from the room, but had heard him calling “’Bye!” from the foyer, then “I love you!” She’d answered in Yoruba, I know, “Mo n mo.” His phone call at midnight came so unexpectedly, so thoroughly out of nowhere, that she couldn’t quite think. Couldn’t listen, couldn’t reason, could only lie sobbing, remembering the morning, his voice from the door. By the time she woke up that next morning, eyes swollen, her tear ducts were dry and her grief had gone cold. Gone, he was gone, very well, getting on with it, one could mourn only so much in one life; they were broke, she discovered, so sold the house (winter), moved the children to a rental at the edge of a lot overlooking Route 9 but at least the same school district, two little bedrooms, her “bed” on the couch; settled debts, found a lawyer, got divorced (early spring); brought the twins to the airport and Olu to Yale (end of summer); blurry autumn, then Christmas, she and Sadie, then New Year, then snow warming slowly to rain . . .
until one day in April, an unremarkable morning, she was heading to the kitchen to make herself tea, having dropped off the baby at the bus stop in wellies, the radio playing softly, and softer the rain—when she paused in the hall in between the two bedrooms and noticed the silence. And that she was alone. Gone, they were gone, all the voices, the bodies, one lover, four children, their heartbeats, the hum, heat and motion and murmur, the rush and the babble, a river gone dry while she’d wept. She remained. She stood there, a remnant, as conspicuously alone as a thing left behind on a beach in the night, suddenly aware of the silence, its newness and strangeness, the sound of her solitude, clear, absolute.
As strange was that silence, their absence that morning, is what she feels now: that she isn’t alone. She stands in the hall in between the two bedrooms and feels them there, silent if not yet asleep. She chuckles at the feeling. She doesn’t quite trust it. She returns to the kitchen. Is there something she forgot? She turns off the radio so as not to wake Sadie; the walls are so thin in that bedroom. Something else? The phone call from Benson, who is coming for dinner. Amina to prepare the egusi at four.
Nothing needs doing.
She is stuck with the thinking.
She returns to the chair in the garden to smoke.
It is foolish, she knows, at her age to address it, to let the thing in as a fully formed thought, but it forms itself anyway; she thinks I’ve been lonely and laughs with surprise at the tears that spring up. It should not perhaps come as so shocking a revelation, seems obvious now that she’s met the truth’s eye, but it hurts all the same: a dull aching, like hunger, a hunger for a taste that she almost forgot.
Almost, but didn’t.
She closes her eyes, hugs her waist with one arm as she blows out the smoke, with the taste of companionship mingling with nicotine, hurting with happiness to have them all home.
4.
Dinner. They are scooting their chairs to the table—a change in the air, each one sensing the weight, with the Reason They’re Here dawning jointly on all of them now that they’re formally gathered like this: a collective: beholden to collective desperation, to meanings that flourish in long-lasting silences, in down-turning glances, in moments of awkwardness masked as politeness—when someone turns up.
The bell, out of nowhere; a sound out of context; even Fola forgets she’s expecting a guest. They hover, midscoot, with their hands on the chair legs and wait for some seconds for someone to speak.
“Madame,” says Amina, from the dining-room entrance, three steps leading down to the den. “Please, a guest.”
“Who is it?” says Fola.
“A sir please.”
“Where is he?”
“Outside please.”
“For God’s sake, at least show him in.” But she hasn’t had company since arriving in Ghana and knows that the staff has no protocol yet. She’s still rather shocked by their efforts this morning, all springing to action with newborn aplomb from the moment they appeared in the driveway, five strangers and she (still the strangest one), no questions asked. Perhaps they prefer it, a house full of people instead of just Fola with clippers in shorts? “Come,” she adds gently, and accompanies Amina. She finds Benson waiting outside the front door.
With a bottle and flowers. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, stepping forward to embrace her.
For a moment she recoils. The velvet bass voice and the smell of black soap and cologne mixed together too strong, too familiar: a wave rises, passes. She clutches the doorframe, then waves her hand, laughing, “I’m fine, really, fine. Please. Thank you, and welcome.” She reaches for the flowers to waylay a second attempt at embrace. “We’re just getting started.”
“I’m not interrupting? In Ghana it’s rude to be early.”
“Thank God. Six is an uncivilized hour for dinner, I know, but with—”
“Jetlag—”
“Exactly.”
“Of course.” He swallows hard, nodding. “And the children?”
“Hardly children.” She laughs. “They’re all here, we’re all here, through the den.” He follows behind her to where they’re all standing, their hands on the table now, eyes on his face. “My darlings, this is Benson. A friend of your f . . . of the f-family’s,” she stumbles. “From Hopkins.”
“Hello.” He holds up the bottle and smiles at them sadly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry for your loss.”
They stare at him blankly, the expression before coldly, even Ling, as if he were the cause of this loss, being the first one to mention it here in this pause with the facing of facts on the tips of their tongues. Sensing this, Benson adds softly, to Fola, “You all must be shell-shocked. God knows that I am.”
Fola, with a feeling that she hasn’t had in decades, concern that every stranger think her children well behaved, holds up the flowers. “Aren’t they glorious? Gardenias.” She smiles with such force that they all smile back. She places the arrangement, intended for a mantel, in the middle of the table; it doesn’t quite fit. The decorative fern fronds dangle into the rice pot, the height of the blossoms obscuring the view. When everyone sits—as they do now, instructed—they can’t see the person across, for the vase.
Benson takes the empty seat, smiling at Olu. “I knew you looked familiar,” he says, scooting in. The voice is too bass for the others to hear it, and Olu too dark for his blushing to show, but he shakes his head stiffly, left, right, just once, quickly, and Benson nods once—up, down, up—in reply (having somehow understood to abandon the subject as men sometimes do with the slightest of hints: a quick nod, a quick frown, the dark arts of the eyebrows, poof! subjects are changed without changes in tone). “The last time I saw you two, you were in diapers.” He smiles at the twins, faces blocked by the flowers. “My last year of residency. Now you’re what, thirty?”