The Man from the Story.
How he valiantly saved her.
A memory of Fola’s, of Olu’s, not hers—and yet crying at midnight, undone by her sadness, a hurt without cause until Taiwo calls back. “Our father is dead.” But not now. There is nothing now, hearing the news. Not so much as surprise. She looks out the window at the Davenport courtyard, remembering a poem she memorized once.
Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though
. “‘Then he will not see me sitting here,’” she murmurs. Taiwo hasn’t heard. Marches on, “I realize that you didn’t really know him that well . . .” while Sadie’s thoughts drift to the smaller of things, to the oldest of things, the most trivial, really: the sense that her sister doesn’t like her.
Never has.
It started that summer when they came back from Lagos, when Sadie was five, almost six, they fourteen. Olu had gone off to school the year prior, leaving Fola and her in that house with the twins, “little house on the highway” as Kehinde had called it, its back to Star Market, single story, no yard. Sadie was meant to share a bedroom with Taiwo but most nights her sister would slip down the hall to the boys’ room (i.e., Kehinde’s, with an air bed for Olu), hardly talking to Sadie, hardly talking at all. Kehinde spent the bulk of his time in his bedroom with Discman and old sheets for canvases, painting, Fola at work at the shop until late, and she, Sadie, on play dates with friends after school—but she never knew exactly what Taiwo was doing, where she went in the daytime, on the weekends, with whom. She never had boyfriends, at least none she spoke of. She had, but seemed bored with, her few female friends. She was prodigiously gifted at playing piano but hardly ever practiced and quit at sixteen. Fola found weed in the bathroom that one time and, dramatically and defensively, Taiwo confessed. But hiding in her bedroom with the window half open to the front stoop below it, just after the scene, Sadie heard Kehinde say, “Thank you, I’m sorry,” and Taiwo, “Stop
saying
that. Stop saying sorry.” Sadie peered down at them, backs bronzed by streetlamp. “Anyway, she wouldn’t have believed it was yours.”
So not getting high.
What had Taiwo been doing? Getting As, getting taller, getting attention, getting angry, picking fights with their mother or picking on Sadie or simply not speaking for days at a go. Kehinde assures her that their sister doesn’t hate her, that Taiwo’s “just like that” with everyone else, but Kehinde
would
say that, playing peacemaker always, and Sadie thinks Olu is telling the truth. “She resents you for getting to stay,” he says plainly. “They got sent to Nigeria. You got to stay here.” Maybe. Or maybe like Olu and Kehinde, who aren’t exactly bosom buddies, they just don’t
match:
mismatched siblings, the one dutiful, unrebellious, fair-to-middling if affable. The wind beneath. The other the bird.
• • •
A bird squawking. “Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Make noise then. I thought you hung up.”
“No, I’m here. I’m still here. I’m just . . . quiet when I listen.”
“I know this is hard—”
“It’s not hard. It’s surprising. I’m listening. You said?”
Taiwo is saying, “I
said
, if you’d been listening, that we need to get our visas from the consulate at ten, so you need to take a train down to the city soon as possible,” when Sadie thinks suddenly of Kehinde, of the card. “Have you spoken to Kehinde?”
“W-what? Not yet.” Here, Taiwo’s voice catches. “Did you hear what I said? You need to come down to the city.”
“I . . . I can’t. I have to submit an essay.”
“You w
hat now?”
“I have to submit it in person.”
“Why?”
“It has to be signed for. To show, like, the date.”
“Our father is dead.”
“It’s half of our grade.” (Which touches the nerve.)
“Are you
joking
right now?”
Taiwo continues, the usual ramble about socialite values in her gravelly voice while Sadie sorts, frantic and silent, through the trash until she finds the FedEx envelope in which the card came. She hears a brief silence, then “again with the silence,” lifts the phone to her lips. “No, I’m here. I’m still here. And you’re right. I just thought of something. I can bring it to her apartment.”
“Whose apartment?”
“My professor’s.”
“Okay, where?”
“In New York.”
“Okay,
where
in New York?”
“I think somewhere in Brooklyn.” (Scribbled on the FedEx form, a Greenpoint address.)
“Sadie, fine.” Taiwo sighs. “Come. I’ll take you to Brooklyn. How soon can you get here?”
“I’ll take Metro-North. If I leave around seven, I’ll be there around nine-ish?”
They exchange parting pleasantries.
Sadie hangs up.
• • •
Quiet. She sits in the darkness, repeats it, “Our father is dead.” Not so much as surprise. Squeals, peals of laughter from the hallway, a sing-along, “‘Under the bridge down-tooooown!’” The snow. “
Your
father is dead,” she says, waiting for (willing) the sadness. Still nothing. She closes her eyes. She wants to feel something, some normal reaction, some sign that it matters that someone is gone, never mind it’s her father now gone for so long that his gone-ness replaced his existence in full. She squeezes her eyes shut, envisioning him sitting at the center of the picture having just saved her life, but feels only the distance, the gathered-up absence like soft piles of snow in between then and now. “Your father is gone,” she tries, squeezing—or hears it, remembered, a memory that rarely comes up, of an afternoon, wintertime, when she was in kindergarten, her mother in the kitchen, her eyes and voice flat.
“Your father is gone,” announced Fola, then, softly. A weekend, it must have been; Olu was home. They were sitting at the table eating breakfast, the four of them, Fola at the counter chopping onion. There was snow. No one asked questions, at least none she remembers; she was marveling at the colors of her Lucky Charmed milk. She looked at their faces, her brothers and sister, one stern Oyo mask and the four amber sparks. Taiwo left the table, saying nothing. Fola nodded. Kehinde left the table, saying, “Taiwo,” giving chase. Olu walked over to their mother and hugged her. Fola said, “I love you,” and Olu, “I know.” Olu left the kitchen, kissing Sadie on the forehead. Fola looked at Sadie. “Just the two of us then.”
Now
comes the sadness, an upswell from silence. She opens her eyes and the sorrow pours out, not the one she was bidding at the loss of her father but longing for Fola. She misses her mother. The simplest of feelings, a low-throbbing longing, though a few minutes pass before she knows what it is, and a few minutes more before she catches her breath and lies back, crying, tired, on her old kente throw. (Rather, Fola’s old throw—threadbare, faded and soft, with the blacks turned to grays and the reds turned to pinks—but her favorite thing, Sadie’s, unearthed in the basement in Brookline playing dress-up with Fola’s old things. She’d wrapped herself up in the kente, delighted, and marched to the kitchen, “I’m a Yoruba queeeen!” Fola had seen her and let out a breath, as if punched in the stomach. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re a princess,” she’d whispered, and hugged her, “a little princess,” but never said more, never speaks of her past.) Sadie lies back with her knees to her chest and the tears rolling down to her ears on both sides, to the pillow. And thinks of it:
Fola, years later.
That look as if punched.
It didn’t need to be said.
• • •
Another house, another kitchen, two months ago (barely, seven weeks, though it feels like two years, Sadie thinks). She was home for the weekend, Halloween, carving pumpkins, Fola’s newest invention, a hit at the shop: scooped-out pumpkins full of foliage, Cottage Apricot chrysanthemums, African marigolds, gold rudbeckia, heather, cranberry branches, all the rage among Chestnut Hill housewives that season since appearing in the
Boston Globe
’s Sunday magazine. Mini pumpkins as flower pots. In every way Fola: the something-from-nothingness, the making of the best of it, an ode to Halloween, her most favorite of rites, what with spirits in costume and giving of gifts. “Like a Yoruba fetish ceremony, with candy,” she’d delighted. Had hand-sewn their costumes, each year an
orisha
, half mocking as ever, never taking things seriously. Anything other than beauty. And sometimes her, Sadie.
The baby. “Baby Sadie,” Fola calls her (or called her), the most like their mother and the closest in a sense, having remained in the house for ten years without siblings, just they, only child and single mother, BFF: used to talk every day at least once on the phone, spend two weekends together each month without fail, making stew, baking cobbler, unbraiding her braids, watching natural disaster movies, discount-shopping downtown. Taiwo says Fola treats Sadie like the favorite (to which Fola, “She’s my favorite second daughter; you’re my favorite first”), but Sadie says it’s more that Taiwo doesn’t
get
their mother who, for whatever reason, Sadie understands, accepts as is. The way Fola thinks, the funny ways Fola acts, with her vague, neutral answers and faraway laughter, the appearance of indifference and impenetrable silence—Sadie finds these things calming, relieving. What is more, Philae says she’s jealous of how “chilled out” Sadie’s mother is, and Sadie rather overflows with pride at Philae’s envy. It’s the only thing that Sadie has that Philae doesn’t (she thinks). Her mother. Her loyal, indispensable, keeper of secrets, secretive, unflappable, beautiful mother.
Whom, nevertheless, as they stood in the kitchen disemboweling pumpkins not two months before—with the afternoon turning to evening unhurried, the leaves in the garden a gem show outside, with that odd film of quiet that settles between them, around them, now forming, as thick as the light—she suddenly begrudged her impenetrable silence. A knot in the stomach. She set down the knife. “So, Mom—” she started.
“Mmm?” said Fola, but distracted, not looking, wet seeds on her hands.
The theme song for
All Things Considered
began, giving texture to the quiet.
Sadie turned to look at the leaves in the sunset, the New England Spectacular, a modest backyard in a grid of small yards for these townhouse apartments (the third and last house to which Fola had moved when she’d started at Yale, up and moved in a week, put their bedrooms in boxes, the boxes in storage), still foreign, the view, after three years of weekends—then back at her mother, trying to gather the thought. What was it, she wonders now, there, out the window, in that firestorm of yellows and umbers and reds in the sun, like a postcard, idyllic Coolidge Corner, Indian summer running long this year,
wish you were here!—
that made her so lonely, so desperately lonely? Made her feel that their life, hers and Fola’s, was a sham? That they
didn’t
belong to this picture, in this postcard? That both were impostors? She still doesn’t know. “I know what you wrote about Christmas vacation, but last year was Boston. This year is St. Barth’s.”
“I know that, my darling,” said Fola without looking. “You can double up next year.”
Sadie faltered.
What now?
She spent every other Christmas in St. Barth’s with the Negropontes, always leaving on the twenty-third with Philae from JFK and always returning on the thirtieth for New Year’s in Boston with Fola, their one family tradition. First Night festivities, then dinner at Uno’s, spinoccoli pizza, then the harbor to count, with the twins never home, Olu always with Ling, just the two of them, huddled up, arms interlinked. Now, for whatever reason, her mother was insistent that Sadie be in Boston two years in a row and that
all
of them come, Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde, at least for the event, Christmas day. In a wholly uncharacteristic display of emotion and even more uncharacteristic use of electronic communication, she had sent out a message three sentences long on the subject last week, a group e-mail. It read: “My darlings, I would like us to be together this Christmas, all of us. Please let me know. Love, your mother.” A strange salutation, as she’d never once called herself mother, their mother. Sibby, yes: red-faced and sobbing and seething at the bottom of stairs with the shaking of fists, “I am your
mo
-ther, young
la
-dy,” each syllable separate, “You’ll do as I say!” Fola doesn’t sob or seethe. She never raises her voice at them. Whenever one of them shouts at her she simply tips her head and waits. It’s not exactly patience, nor dismissal, something in between, an interest in the shouter’s plight, an empathy, with distance.
“That’s not the point,” Sadie said at last, at which Fola looked up, at which Sadie looked down. With the counter between them (and harder things also). “I want to spend Christmas with a
family
.”
Fola smiled. “You have a family of your own.”
“We’re not a family,” mumbled Sadie. Very quickly, very softly.
That face, as if punched.
“Whatever do you mean?” Fola carried on smiling. But tightly. “I can assure you, you all came from me.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what
did
you mean, baby?”
To which Sadie, “I AM NOT A FUCKING BABY ANYMORE!”
Fola dropped her spoon with shock. Sadie burst into tears with shock. She’d never in her life sworn or shouted at Fola and couldn’t seem to stop herself now. “My baby! Baby Sadie! Baby, baby—at nineteen
fucking
years old? I’m
not
a baby! I’m
not
a child! And I’m
not
your replacement husband! It’s been, what, Mom, fifteen years, since you left Dad, or Dad left us? I mean, don’t you think you should start to date, to have a life of your
own
? I’m nineteen—practically twenty—years old. I’m sick of having to
be here
with you. On the weekends. At Christmas. On the phone. It’s too much. I want to live my
life
!”
Fola tipped her head to the side, her brows knit together, her lips folded down. But said nothing. She laughed, a sound like sobbing, turned, and left the kitchen.