by Taiye Selasi
iii
Taiwo is on her side when he returns from the garden. He thinks she is sleeping and leaves the light off. He sets down his cell phone beside the pink flowers, on the small wooden nightstand, and kicks off his shoes.
“Who was on the phone?” she asks, not turning over. “I could hear you through the window.”
“My assistant,” he says. “We’re doing a show with those paintings you saw, of the Muses, in Greenpoint. A gallery show. They’re not done yet, I know, but I think I might like them. I think you might like them.” He is nervous. He stops.
“They’re incredible, K.”
She rolls over to face him, her cheek on the pillow, her hands just beneath—but he hears something else. Three other words, in her voice, in his head, just a snippet. Her thought among his. He feels his heart swell to have heard what she’s thinking, this briefest transmission, but something. Reception. Three words in silence, in the space between beds, her low voice in his head as he once used to hear. He looks at his sister, or tries, in the darkness. She looks at him back, a sad smile on her lips. They don’t state the obvious: that both have been crying. They look at each other with raw, swollen eyes.
“She’s pretty,” says Taiwo. “Your assistant.”
“I think so.” He hears her breath catch, the small knot in her throat. He remembers this sensation from their early adolescence, so particular a sensation that it has its own smell: teenage lotion, kiwi-strawberry. Jealousy. Or possessiveness. Possessiveness and embarrassment, which she needn’t have felt (for he’d felt the same way, that he was Taiwo’s possession. A thing that belonged to and with her. Box set).
“Do you like her?” asks Taiwo.
“I think so,” says Kehinde.
She rubs her eyes, sleepily. “I always kind of thought.”
The knot comes untangled. She shifts her position and lies on her back with her hands on her ribs. He stays where he is at the edge of the bed, seated upright across from her, too exhausted to move. He closes his eyes for an instant and hears them again, those three words, her low voice, close to his. Almost too close, he thinks. Is he hearing his sister, her thoughts in his head, or just hearing himself? His heart starts to sink, a small dip of a kite. He has waited so long to hear Taiwo again. To hear anything, any thought, much less this thought that he’s longed all these years to believe, dare believe. Was it his raspy voice that he heard and not Taiwo’s? The three words in silence his pardon, not hers? He opens his eyes, starts to ask her the question, but finds that her eyes have slipped shut.
She’s asleep.
He leans in to stare at her, elbows on kneecaps. Her face in the moon is impossibly still. When a thin film of sweat forms above her top lip, in an hour, he rises and wipes it away. He is tired. He sits on the bed by his sister. He smoothes down her dreadlocks, a tangle of snakes. He kisses her hands and he whispers, “Forgive me.” His body too weak from the day, he lies down.
iv
Later, a bit later, an hour before sunrise Taiwo wakes up as one does from a dream, as one does when she’s gone to sleep crying with clothes on; finds Kehinde beside her, his head by her feet. She sits up and looks at him, still in his clothing, his hand by his mouth, by the beard that he’s grown. She stands up very quietly and is heading to the bathroom when, thinking he has spoken, she turns back around. He is snoring. Lips moving. Three words, she thinks, maybe. She comes to the foot of the bed and looks down. His eyes are still bulbous as a child’s after tearshed. She looks at the hand, palm turned up, by his mouth. She touches the scar there, the T, only barely, but his hand shuts, a reflex, and squeezes her thumb. She stands there, not moving, not wanting to wake him. The birds in the garden begin their lament. She thinks it, though it hurts to, though she cannot yet speak it. His fingers relax and she slips out her thumb. She stands there and stares at his face until she sees it, fifteen seconds and not longer. A smile in his sleep.
v
In this way comes morning (death to wan gray, etc.); feeling something is missing, Sadie opens her eyes. Fola is missing, though her scent lies there lightly. The butterflies, too, have abandoned her chest. She feels with some wonder and a touch of suspicion the void in her middle, her shirt damp with sweat. She peers at the alarm by the little framed photo and laughs at the date on the analog clock. Christmas. No chestnuts, no baked beans, no sleigh bells. Pink blossoms, palms, bulbul, an Aspen chalet. She stands up the frame, tries to straighten the photo by tapping. Nothing doing. A terrible shot. But likely the last of the old family photos with all six together, she now understands. With everybody looking in a different direction, her father at the camera, she down at his head, her mother at her tutu, her brother at her mother, the twins at who knows what, all blurry, all there.
7.
Mr. Lamptey sits, silent, at the edge of the garden, his legs wet with dewdrops, his joint dwindling down, with the saffron replaced by a heavy black linen, obscured by the shadow, the more for the black. He has done this since Monday, his three days of mourning: has sat by the wall at the edge of the grass, taking leave before sunrise, unseen by the woman who comes to the kitchen at a quarter past six. She doesn’t come out to the garden, or look; she just stands at the counter and fixes her drink with the frozen expression of grief before sorrow, the soft, pretty features gone hard with her shock. The dog came on Tuesday but found it too doleful and remained on the beach when he set off at dawn. The birds that he found in the fountain on Monday have yet to return, so he mourns on his own.
In a way he has come here to see the soft woman, to bid her “wake up” with his blue-bellied gaze, with the sense that his presence might send her a message, that all is not lost, that she isn’t alone. (In fact it is he who is lonely, uncharacteristically. He misses the man in the sunroom he built. He misses the wave of the napkin, the glasses, the spilling of coffee on trousers, their dance.) He sits with his joint at the back of the garden and puffs with great rue, idly stroking the grass. He wonders if the man ever noticed the plant here, the lush marijuana set back from the pinks? Likely not. He laughs sadly. He closes his eyes and exhales. It is sunrise. It is time to go home.
He is thinking he’ll wait just a few minutes longer to see her once more before leaving for good, when he hears someone parking a car in the driveway, the crunching of tires on the pebbles, beep-beep. He opens his eyes, laughs again. What is this now? He waits there, unmoving, amused by surprise. Someone rings the bell at the gate, a nasal buzzer. He looks at the house as if watching a film. The door doesn’t open. The buzzer, for longer. The person raps once on the person-height gate. Mr. Lamptey puffs, torn. Should he wait for the woman? Should he let in the person? The man never had guests. At least not for the years that he slept in the tent or on Mondays. Only Kofi, and later the nurse.
Here she is. Nightdress and pink furry slippers. She opens the doors to the house and steps out. (The man demanded double doors—simple bamboo with a K on one handle, an F on the other—for the entrance to the gray-not-green courtyard, the main entrance, with the heatable walkway around the small square. Mr. Lamptey would have thought a K and S more appropriate but carved out the letters with no questions asked.) The woman steps out of these doors in her nightdress and walks down the path of flat stones to the gate, a straight line of gray slate through the sea of white pebbles, as sketched on a napkin in faded blue ink.
“Hello?” she says warily.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice.
But a different sort of woman’s voice, a different sort of woman.
He has never heard her speak before, the woman-in-pink, but her voice is exactly as he’d thought it would be: very sweet, very innocent, awaiting instruction, the voice of someone used to being told what to do. The woman-at-the-gate’s hummed “Hello” is a river, the bottom of a river, an echo, a tide. The voice does not wait for instruction but gives it, and gently. The woman-in-pink acquiesces. She pulls out the bar at the top of
the gate, rather trustingly, and pushes it open.
The river-woman enters, her arms full of flowers. Mr. Lamptey laughs softly again, with surprise: they are the very same flowers he chose for this garden, a raucous arrangement, bright pinks and deep reds. Her appearance is arresting, the effect beyond “striking.” It doesn’t stir up, neither jealousy or awe. It quiets. The woman-in-pink stares in silence. He pauses his puffing to squint from his perch. Even from here by the wall, at this distance, his eyes going bad, he can see the effect. The woman laughs, embarrassed. “I’m sorry to bother. It’s terribly early, I know, for a guest, but Benson, er, Dr. Adoo, he gave me this address, and I thought that I’d come by to pay my respects.”
The woman-in-pink stares in silence.
“I’m Fola.” She pauses. “I’m Kweku’s—I was Kweku Sai’s wife.” She holds out the flowers. “I’m so very sorry. These are for you. I—I don’t know your name.”
“Ama,” says the woman-in-pink, like a question. “I am Ama?” She sounds baffled, unsure what this means. She repeats Fola’s words as in pursuit of a right answer, as a schoolgirl does dictation, “I was Kweku Sai’s wife.” She pauses to consider the words she’s just spoken, the frozen-stiff features beginning to melt. “Dr. Sai isn’t here,” she adds sweetly, voice quivering, repeating a line clearly used on the phone. The shoulders begin trembling. “May I please take a message?”
“Oh, darling,” says Fola, setting down the bouquet. She wraps both her arms around Ama’s plump shoulders. She is taller, much taller. Mr. Lamptey thinks, a tree. (“What kind of trees are these?” he’d asked, of the napkin. The man was looking murderously at the mango. “Never mind that.”)
The two women stand at the gate for some moments. When Ama can, she pulls away to wipe her button nose. “I am sorry,” she sniffles.
“Never mind that,” says Fola. A deep and short laugh, a small wave of the hand. “We’ve planned a small ceremony, very small, in Kokrobité. You’ll come with us, no? Nothing fancy. Just us.”
They carry on talking, Ama receiving instruction. Mr. Lamptey watches, smiling: so she isn’t alone. Fola says she’s happy just to wait in the driveway if Ama would like to get dressed and come with? Ama insists that Fola come wait in the house, and retrieving the flowers, she leads the way in.
• • •
Fola pauses briefly at the entrance, sees the handles. She touches the K and the neat hand-carved F. Only now does she glance to her right, see the fountain, and laugh at the statue adorned with the weeds. She doesn’t see the man at the edge of the garden. She enters the house and the double doors close. When they come back outside, she and Ama together, the garden is empty. Mr. Lamptey is gone.
ii
They return to the beach, Ama riding with Fola, the others with Benson, a small caravan. No one quite knows what to say to this Ama; they all smile politely and leave it at that. The sisters stand huddled together, suspicious. They exchange a few greetings with Ama in Ga. Benson produces the urn from an official-looking container and hands this to Fola with an official-looking nod. She had it in mind to toss his ash to the sea breeze, to let the man free, end at the beginning and that. But now as she twists off the top, she can’t do it. The idea of him scattered seems wrong in some way. We’ve been scattered enough, she thinks. Broken pot, fragments. Keep him inside, she thinks, let him stay whole. She twists the metal top on and kneels by the water. She doesn’t face her children, afraid that she’ll cry. “Odabo.” Good-bye. Puts the urn in the water. A wave washes in but doesn’t take the urn out. It rolls to the side, sort of drifts a few inches. Another wave comes, but it still doesn’t go. She stands up and watches, an arm at her middle. The urn turns in foam, drifts a bit farther out. As if waiting for something. She thinks but can’t say it. I love you. A wave with some promise appears. Ama makes a squeaking sound, a bit like a bulbul. Fola watches Kweku bobbing, bobbing out of view.
iii
Now she is back in her chair by the fan palm. Amina is busy with the dinner inside. Olu and Ling are very dutifully helping her; Benson took the baby and the twins to find a tree. There are conifers in Ghana, she knows, but not fir trees. She started to warn them, then just let them go. They want to keep busy, she knows, not to say it. Not to let there be stillness or silence or pause. Not to say that they’ve done it. Sixteen years in the making, they’ve lost him. Whatever else, Kweku is gone.
The sun is going down; there will soon be mosquitoes. She takes a long drag, leaning back in the chair. She thinks of plump Ama’s round face, and she chuckles. Just barely a “woman,” how possibly “wife”? Then laughs at her chuckling. Is she jealous? Yes, maybe. Or more so embarrassed, for not moving on? She remembers meeting Benson in the lobby at Hopkins. The skin of burnt umber, black soap, velvet voice. Does Benson rather like her? she wonders. Yes, maybe. She laughs at this, too. Takes another long drag.
Mustafah is hanging up the lights with a ladder. She remembered that she had them and asked him to try. Mr. Ghartey is chewing sugarcane, watching with amusement. All of them start at the bell, at the gate. Fola looks over. “Must be Benson,” she tells them, though wonders why he didn’t honk his car horn instead. Mr. Ghartey opens both of the gates to let the car in. Ama stands there nervously, a taxi behind.
“Madame,” she says shyly, seeing Fola in the beach chair.
Fola scrambles up. “W-w-what a pleasant surprise.” She thinks to hide the cigarette but just can’t be bothered. She goes to greet Ama. “Is everything okay?” They’d dropped her back home when they returned from Kokrobité; Fola invited her to dinner, but Ama refused. She thinks that perhaps she’s changed her mind, and is happy. There is something about the woman that cries out for care. She wouldn’t mind having a new thing to care for, the other things appearing to have all fluttered off.
But Ama shakes her head. “I won’t stay, please,” she says, voice staccato and steady. “I brought these for you.” She holds out a bag, a plastic Ghana Must Go bag, her smile and raised eyebrows belying her pride. Her movements as before seem to replicate Fola’s: she presents the plaid bag as Fola presented the flowers. The mimicry is touching, almost paining. Fola smiles.
“Thank you,” she says. “Are you sure you won’t stay?”
Ama glances back at the taxi. “I won’t, please.” Mirroring Fola’s pained expression, she smiles, then she leaves. Fola, surprised by the sudden departure, holds up one hand as the taxi drives off. She cradles the plastic bag, pulling on her cigarette. Mr. Ghartey steps forward and closes the gate.
She returns to the chair. She peers in the bag. She laughs with such force that Mr. Ghartey looks scared. Cigarette in one hand, she retrieves with the other the slippers: battered slip-ons, thin, worn to the soles. She stubs out her cigarette to free both her hands up and only now sees the face drawn in the dirt. Kweku, however gestural (it must have been Kehinde). She looks at the mouth, at the angled-up eyes. “There you are.”
Here I am.
“Your wife’s a bloody genius. Slippers.” Starts to laugh, picks them up from her lap. “I mean, really.”
Genius. He is laughing. She is laughing. Why did I ever leave you?
“I also left you.” She breathes in the smell of forgotten familiar. She presses the soles to her dampening cheeks. “We did what we knew. It was what we knew. Leaving.”
Was it?
“We were immigrants. Immigrants leave.”
Not good enough.
“Cowards.”
We were lovers.
“We were lovers, too.”
Couldn’t we have learned? Not to leave?
“I don’t know.” She is quiet for a moment. She knows that they’re watching, the staff, from the gate, with confusion, alarm. But still can’t be bothered. She thinks but doesn’t say it: one can learn only so much in one life. “Still there?”
Yes. Forever.
She laughs. Yes, most like
ly. “We learned how to love. Let them learn how to stay.”
How are they? The children?
“They’re here,” she says, pointing. “I got what I wanted. You sent them all home. They’re all here for Christmas. We’re roasting a game fowl. Your Olu insists upon carving, of course.”
My Olu.
“Well, yes. He was always your favorite.”
Your Sadie.
“Then whose—?”
They’re each other’s. The twins.
“The twins . . .” She trails off. Hears a car engine idling. The honk of the horn. “They’ve come back. I should go.” But doesn’t. She sits, slips her fingers in the slippers as if they were mittens and covers her face. “You should go,” she says softly. She squeezes her eyes shut. The gate rattles. Tires turn. “I know, I know, I know.” Then there is quiet. Car doors open, shut. She slips out her fingers and opens her eyes.
• • •
A dawn-colored sunset.
“We found one!” calls Sadie.
She watches them hauling out the tree from the trunk. Benson smiles, waving. Waving back to him: “Coming.” She places one toe on the mouth on the ground. The sketch is remarkable, unmistakably Kweku. She stares at it, waiting to hear something else. Then laughs at her waiting. There is nothing to wait for. She picks up his slippers and brings them inside.