• • •
She knows this moment. This welcoming smile. This weightless expression of genuine warmth such as only exists for like-a-member of the family.
Actual
members get heavier welcomes. “And Sadie,” says Fola, her two hands extended, her mouth folded over, head tipped to the side. Sadie shuffles forward, suddenly nervous at the audience, intending a calm, very grown-up embrace, a stiff “Mom. Good to see you,” but the smell is overwhelming, and she feels herself crumbling, sobbing desperately instead.
The smell of her mother—so instantaneously familiar, the smell of baked goods and Dax Indian Hemp, Fola’s twenty-year-old hair product, green with brown speckles like something she uses for gardening, too—and the
feel
of her mother, so impossibly yielding, the skin on her arms and her hands like a child’s, are a welcome too warm, undiluted, wide open for Sadie to bear it, to feel she deserves it. She buries her face in her mother’s soft shoulder and grips her waist tightly. “I’m sorry,” she slurs.
• • •
Fola laughs softly, stroking Sadie’s braids lightly. Olu watches, wishing that they’d do this at home. At least without Ling looking awkwardly at her sandals, remnant smile from “you made it” gone stiff with surprise. Fola lifts her chin up to peer over Sadie and gestures that the rest of them join in the hug. Olu looks at Taiwo, who looks inexplicably angry, and worries that she won’t accept Fola’s soft “Come.” By way of good example, he takes a step forward and wraps a long arm around Fola’s tall frame. Kehinde moves also to stand behind Sadie, pressing gently between her shoulder blades, calming her down. Ling touches Olu, too, maintaining some distance, reaching quickly for his elbow, squeezing once, letting go. Taiwo watches, thinking that she wants
to go forward, for once in her life to feel
part
of the thing, however loose and misshapen the form of the huddle to feel somehow inside it. But she can’t.
iii
There isn’t enough room in the Mercedes for all of them. Taiwo and Kehinde follow behind in a cab.
iv
She is sitting with her face to the window, her back to Kehinde, remembering seeing Lagos for the first time: the grayness, the haze and the chaos, the road from Ikeja, the hawkers with trinkets and live death-row chickens, the way Femi clapped when they reached the apartment, his cocaine-cold lips on her browbone, his laugh, how her brother looked standing there colder and harder than she’d ever before seen him except when he slept—
when the memory jump-cuts to Barrow Street, November, nude, sitting in the windowsill, blowing out
O
’s—
and then onward to the end of it, sunrise, late summer, the wife in Apuglia in search of wet cheese, little inn on the oceanfront ideal for endings, the paper between them, the silence a knell.
• • •
It was always the ocean they came to on weekends. He called her his “water girl,” appropriately so: she was happiest the closest she was to the water, the ocean foremost, though the Hudson would do. (A matter of astrology, he says, she’s a water sign. Nonsense, says Taiwo, just doesn’t make sense. The scorpion is terrestrial, but Scorpio a water sign? And Aquarius an air sign? The logic is flawed.) A wind from the water washed over the porch where they sat, and she drew in a breath of the salt.
“I’ll withdraw,” she exhaled.
“No. I can’t let you do that.”
“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she said, with some bite. She ran her middle finger along the incriminating headline.
Allegations of Infidelity Mire Elite Law School Dean
. “You didn’t even think I should be a law student.”
“Two years ago, Taiwo. You’re at the top of your class.”
“I’m always at the top of my class,” she snapped quickly. “Has it ever occurred to you it’s bullshit, the ‘class’? What is this ‘class’? Just the same group of cowards seeking solace in schoolwork. How smart can we be?”
Helpless laughter. “You’re relentless.”
“I’m honest.”
“No difference. I can’t let you quit.”
“Well you can’t make me stay.” She stood in demonstration and walked down the porch steps. “Taiwo!” he called, but he didn’t give chase. She walked and then jogged and then ran to the beachfront, and sat looking out at the Atlantic alone. How wonderful it would be to walk
in, she was thinking, just follow the path of the sunrise on waves, pinkish-gold, in her flip-flops and lover’s wool cardigan, to walk and keep walking, onward, under, away. Instead she just sat there, an hour, maybe longer, just long enough to hurt him, to ensure he felt pain. She wasn’t particularly angry—at least not with her lover; she’d been angry with her lot now for fifteen odd years—but she wanted him to suffer, and not from disgrace, but from a sense of having failed her. Of having caused her to fail.
Why did she want this?
He never deceived her. Neither chased the other, nor clung, nor insisted. They’d simply fallen into it, both, in an instant. Succumbed to the sucking-down feeling, and drowned. Now there were whispers and photos and rumors, a manner of discourse she’d never before known, as if some well-trained robot were spitting out stories involving some facts from her life but not
her
. This wasn’t his doing. He was clumsy and lovestruck with modest amounts of what one might call power; had been able to entertain her where no one could see them but unable to resist his own need to be seen. Two years of sex in a room in the Village and sweet beachfront inns up and down the East Coast, and he’d started to long for an audience to applaud him, to
see
his great conquest, to know
his great joy. A dinner did them in. There were friends of his wife’s there and friends of his enemies from government days. In less than a month there was scandal in the offing. University president and board were apprised. In the middle of August they repaired to Cape May to negotiate the terms of surrender. End scene.
They were allies still, lovers. There was no cause for anger. She’d never asked nor wanted that he tell or leave his wife. She had no particular interest in being a wife, for rather obvious reasons, and none in being his. But she wanted that he
suffer
. To know that he’d failed her. She was determined to withdraw so that he’d know that she’d failed; so that all of them, seeing her failure, would puzzle, would ask in hushed tones how this girl, this
success
—summa cum laude, NYU! PPE, Magdalen College! summer associate, Wachtell!—came to fall on her sword, whereon the answer would come, if not to them who were asking, then to him:
Because he let her.
And not him alone.
There was the other one, the first one, the one they’d deleted, the one who had backed down a sunset-lit drive while she watched from the window obscured by the darkness, having played with the lights to bid Kehinde inside: first off, then on, then off, then on: just sufficiently dark now to see in the car, the man’s face through the windshield, soft, narrow eyes narrower, fighting: then filling with, tears—but resolute.
He would know, too,
she thought, sitting there silent as one sits on beaches: with knees to the chest, and the chin on the knees, and the breeze in the hair, and the taste of one’s tears bearing salt from the breeze. She would find him and tell him. He was somewhere in Ghana (according to Olu); she’d go there and wait. She’d be seated on his stoop when he came home from work, in a Volvo as she saw it, the sunset full swing. He’d see her from the driveway and slow to a stop with that look on his face per that scene in such films when a man on the run returns home before dark and the hit man is waiting, at ease, in plain sight, with his boots on the railing, a gun in one boot where the man in the driveway can see it. Like that. He’d stop, kill the engine, and stare from the car with his eyes meeting hers, hers unblinking, his wet, for he’d see in her face that a light had gone out and would know without words that his daughter was dead, that the girl he had left on a street in North America was not the one sitting on this stoop in West Africa, with boots propped on railing and pistol in boots, that she’d died because no one would save her. Indeed. She would drop out of law school and earn waiting tables the thousand-odd dollars to fly to Accra (against prior beliefs about the injustice of such pricing, an insult to immigrants the cost to fly east) so that he, too, would know, and would suffer from knowing, that he’d been too weak to protect her.
Or rather: this is how she planned it.
She should have come sooner.
She laughs, looking out at the streets of Accra. Two years imagining the look on his face, she is here and her father is gone.
v
He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it was, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green. This is familiar.
What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts. A man without legs has a boy without shoes wheel him carefully through the traffic in the middle of the road to the cab, where he knocks on the passenger window and holds up a hand missing fingers for coins.
“Go, go, go,” shoos the driver, suddenly agitated. He rolls down his window to shout in coarse Twi.
Kehinde peers down, sees the man, is embarrassed. He rifles through his sweatshirt for five single bills. “Don’t shout at them, please, sir,” he says to the driver. The driver looks back at him, sweating and stunned. Kehinde rolls his window down and holds out the dollars. “Here,” he says. “Take it.” The driver sucks his teeth. The boy without shoes takes just one of the dollars. The man without legs smiles, a smile without teeth. “Take the rest,” Kehinde says, but the boy doesn’t hear, and the taxi starts moving as the stoplight turns green.
“They’re thieves,” says the driver. “They come from Mauritania. They steal from the tourists.”
“We’re not tourists,” Kehinde says.
The driver starts laughing, one golden tooth glinting, as if to say
only tourists give beggars U.S. dollars
, but quickly recovers and rolls up his window, asking casually, “So where are you from?”
Kehinde looks at Taiwo, who is paying no attention, then back at the driver, not much older than they. He can sense in the man a very particular form of aggression, mounting, familiar from Lagos and London and New York, to do with the fact that they’re both brown-skinned males unequally yoked by the side effects. He’d rather be ferrying some tense blond-haired couple in his taxi than them—brown, well dressed, the same age—whom he takes for American and assumes to be rich, at least richer than he by some cruel twist of fate. “Have you ever been to Africa?” he adds proprietarily.
“Nigeria and Mali.”
“But not Ghana,” he insists.
Kehinde shakes his head, and the driver looks satisfied. Kehinde feels the need to add, “Our father’s from here.” The instant he says it he wishes he hadn’t, for now comes the surge he’s been keeping at bay in the form of a headache, a sudden searing something in the space between his eyebrows so sharp he gasps, “
Was
.”
The driver doesn’t hear this. “Where’s ‘here’?” he asks, challenging.
“Ghana,” mumbles Kehinde. It sounds like a lie.
“Oh yeah? Where
in Ghana?” The driver is smirking.
“I don’t know where,” says Kehinde, now closing his eyes.
“You don’t know where he’s from, your own father,” says the driver. He sucks his teeth, glancing at Taiwo, still mute. “Why don’t you ask him?”
As it finally hits him, “He died,” Kehinde answers and starts, at the laugh.
He can’t quite imagine what his sister finds funny, but she appears to be laughing, outright, her back turned. “Taiwo,” he whispers, thinking maybe she’s crying, but she turns to him dry-eyed.
“He’s gone.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t stop laughing.
The driver looks incredulous. “Father na’ dead and she laugh for,” he scoffs. But says nothing further, just turns on the radio (inconsolate gospel) and looks straight ahead.
3.
Both the taxi and Mercedes pull into the drive where the house staff stands waiting at attention, in a line. Sadie has been sleeping for the twenty-minute ride and now opening her eyes says, “Where are we?” Olu and Ling side by side in the back, neither moving nor speaking, peer out at the house. Fola peers also with hands on the wheel as if considering whether this is the right place or not. One breath, then she stirs, pulling the key from the ignition and her sunglasses from her forehead. “We’re home, I suppose.”
The staff comes forward as the car doors open. Everyone alights and stands looking at the house (except Kehinde who—much to the annoyance of Taiwo and the disturbance of Olu—stands looking at Ling). There is the usual combination of disorder and determination that occasions the arrival of a group at a residence: half of the bodies moving busily, lugging suitcases, half of the bodies looking awkward, out of place, trying to help, to be of use but not to get in the way of the bodies who know where to go, what to do. With the lightly frantic energy of awkward introductions, with no one quite knowing what to say or to whom, smiling at no one, shifting positions, making lax observations.
Where’s the bathroom?
Longing suddenly to be on one’s own.
Fola holds shoulders, steers bodies down hallways. “This is the room where you two boys will sleep.” She pushes in Olu and Kehinde and continues, “The girls in here,” pushing in Taiwo and Ling. “The baby—” she stops herself. “Sadie’s with me. I’d suggest a good nap now. We’ll eat at half six.” Any questions? No questions. “Good. Welcome to Ghana.” She takes Sadie to her bedroom, and leaves them to sleep.
ii
Sadie stares up at the wood-paneled ceiling, alone in this room down the hall from the rest.
“The bloody A/C died this morning—” said Fola, then bent as if nauseous and didn’t go on.
“Mom, are you sick?” Sadie asked, stepping forward, but Fola stood straight, waved a hand, shook her head. “Comes and goes. Going” was her cryptic nonanswer. She turned on the fan, left the room, closed the door.
Sadie stares up at the blades in the shadow, like bats on the ceiling, too hot all the same. Through the thin bedroom walls she can hear other voices but can’t extract words from the soft throbbing din. Olu, maybe Kehinde. A phone in the hallway. The pretty girl, Amelia or something like that. “Please, Madame. Telephone.” The rustling of footsteps, then Fola’s voice, gravelly, the words indistinct. Someone’s laughter. Her mother’s, she realizes after a moment. But higher than normal, a burst of it, false.
She rolls to her side, where she glimpses a photo in light slipping in from the stiff wooden blinds. Just barely she makes out the faces, the location, and suddenly remembers: why Greenpoint seemed familiar: this strange-looking warehouse on Oak Street in Newton, the famed home of Paulette’s Ballet Studio. Winter. Her family stands bundled in coats close together on the sidewalk outside, the recital just over. The Man from the Story holds her up on his shoulders; she is still in her costume, red lips, pink tulle tutu, her four-year-old potbelly pushing unabashedly against the pink skin of the leotard, laughing. Taiwo and Kehinde wear matching red earmuffs, neither looking at the camera, Fola looking at her. Olu looks dwarfed by a massive brown coat. A stranger, another parent, must have taken the picture.
She wonders why Fola has this, of all photos, here framed on the nightstand, the frame the wrong size so the photo slips sideways, the shot out of focus, some Christmas performance of no real consequence. She abandoned ballet sophomore year, first semester, despite great potential and greater “commitment.” Had seen it: could lift her big toe to her forehead, demanded a split of her muscular legs, had defied her flat arches to bend into pointe shoes, could do all the steps in her sleep, no mistakes, but had stood at the bar in a line that September and noticed the palette, the pinks and the whites, light brown hair, light brown wood, clean-straight lines in the sunlight, and noticed herself, neither long, straight, nor light, and had seen in an instant what was meant by commitment: she was great at ballet but was no ballerina. (Philae had suggested that she take up Team Management to meet her requirement for after-school sports, and indeed she had found a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her light-brown-haired classmates in skirts—yellow mouth-guards bared, snarling, browned legs churning earth, drawing blood from bare shins with their field hockey sticks, later ice hockey, lacrosse sticks, so bafflingly violent, “Blood makes the grass grow!”—while she ticked off stats.)
She rolls the other way but feels the photo-faces watching her. She turns the photo over so it’s lying facedown. The position has promise. Unseen and unseeing. She rolls to her stomach and lies there facedown. At first she finds comfort: the intensified silence, the absolute darkness befitting the occasion. She isn’t quite sure what she’s meant to be feeling, but this here would seem the appropriate pose, sort of prostrate with grief (that won’t come) for her father and guilt at the thing with her mother, what’s left. If she embarrassed them all with that scene at the airport, she unburdened a bit of the anguish at least. Maybe they’ll talk a bit more a bit later. Probably not. It is not Fola’s thing, “talking out.” More likely they’ll act as if the thing never happened, not least as there’s now this more solid despair that her siblings won’t mention, not once at the airport, not once in the car, as if it’s not really true, as if they’re all here in Ghana—where no one has been except Olu, someone mentioned, when he was just born—just by chance, here for Christmas, a family vacation, and not for their father, unmentioned and gone.
The comfort becomes panic, with her face in the pillow, unable to breathe for the cloth and the heat, and now, rolling back over, she finds that she’s crying for nothing more epic than feeling left out. There they are, the lot of them, somewhere else, talking, their voices drowned out by the overhead fan while she’s here on her own, the one not like the others, feeling inferior as she always does whenever they’re home. With one of them (two max, the twins for example), she can generally rise above it but not with all three, so much older and taller, inexplicably
taller
, and surer, more spectacular, more
shiny
than she.
Her siblings are shiny. Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde. They shine into rooms with their confident strides, their impressive achievements, and she with her beauty; they glow with their talent, their stuffed bag of tricks. There is Olu’s calm brilliance, his mastery of science, his deep steady voice sure with knowledge of facts. There is Taiwo’s dark genius, her hoarse luring whisper aglow with long words and the odd phrase in French; all her life she has had it, since Sadie can remember, this thick air of mystery, of effortless grace, as have only those women whose beauty is given, not open to interpretation by beholder, a fact. There is Kehinde’s pure talent, the gift of the image, that quiet assurance with which he looks out as if all of the world were overlaid with some pattern indescribably beautiful and meaningful, a grid, and if only you could see it as clearly as he could, then you too would take to blank easel with brush just as simply as one watches movies, the news, without commitment, simply seeing and understanding the seen. And there’s she. Baby Sadie. A good decade tardy, arriving in winter, a cheerful mistake, with her grab bag of competencies—photographic memory,
battement développé,
making lanyards—but lacking entirely in gifts.
Fola is convinced that the thing is there latent; for years now she’s said, “Just you wait. It will out.” Nothing has outed. She has done all her homework and studied with diligence so done well in school, not like Olu or Taiwo, more so eighty-fifth percentile; has made it to Yale (off the wait list but still); has settled in comfortably to a life of B-pluses and management positions on teams and class councils; has basked in the attention refracted by Philae of tow-headed frat boys endeared by her braids—but has yet to unearth any particular gift that might place her in league with her siblings at last.
Panic. Rising gently from the place in her stomach such panic lies waiting for moments like this. She runs from the bed to the adjoining master bathroom and kneels by the toilet to let the thing out. Up come the peanuts and Coke and six bread rolls she ate on the plane behind Olu and Ling, tearing the bread into pieces more appropriate for pigeons before scarfing them down when the rest fell asleep.
iii
Taiwo and Ling in the one-bedded bedroom.
Awkwardly pretending to begin to unpack.
Ling sees the vase on the nightstand and thinks of it. “Your mother’s so gorgeous.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Taiwo says. She is crouching on the floor by the bed with her suitcase, looking vaguely for a shirt for the household-wide nap. She can feel Ling behind her trying to strike up conversation as if they were roommates, day one at the dorm, by turns nervous and excited at the distinct possibility that this stranger might well be a lifelong best friend. They’ve met on other occasions—Olu’s various celebrations, mostly birthdays, when the family would drive down to Yale in the little blue hatchback, a mess from the flowers, Baby Sadie in grade school, and they just returned—but those were the years that she, Taiwo, spent mute, when she’d sit there in silence at Sally’s, and eat, so it wasn’t until later, circa med school graduation, that she spoke to Ling really, got to know the girl some.
It was then she discovered that Ling, much like Olu, is dead set on things going well at all times and so cannot sit still: flutters, flits, laughing constantly as if trying to keep a beach ball from touching the ground. The problem, to boot, is the lack of a filter. She says what she’s thinking, then laughs at her thoughts to an endearing effect (if exhausting, adolescent). If she weren’t pretty, she’d be annoying. Instead she is cute.
This more than anything is what disturbs Taiwo, how
cute
is Ling, barely five feet off the ground, with her skinny black ponytail bobbing along as she bobs beside Olu double-step to keep stride. She doesn’t find cute women trustworthy, not grown-ups. A cute girl is one thing, cute adult another. Such women always seem to have something to hide, to be playing at helplessness, masking desire. Invariably, she sees in their sweet long-lashed eyes the same smoldering want that burns blatant in hers, if not more of it, cunning, more clarity of purpose, obscured by the girlishness, false to its core. They are
women
in the truest sense, ripe with soft power, yet pretending not to know what they want,
that
they want—as if want were unbecoming, a flaw cleverly masked by the appearance of being both needy and content.
As invariably, it is
she
who seems flawed in their presence, who feels herself strangely too present, exposed, somehow pungent, almost threatening, too much of a woman, exposed for a woman, a dark thing, black swan. While Ling laughs and flits from one thought to the next like some erudite Tinker Bell with ADHD (and with forceps), she Taiwo looms solid and livid, unyielding compared, a thing fallen to earth. She wants now that Ling feel this same sense of weightiness, awkwardness at failing to get her to chat—so abandons the search for a T-shirt to sleep in and lies on her back on her side of the bed fully dressed, yawning loudly and covering her face with her forearm to mean that she’s moments from sleep.
Ling doesn’t notice, her back turned to Taiwo, unfolding small clothes at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think your brother likes me.” She laughs, after a moment.
“Olu’s just like that,” Taiwo mumbles. But smiles. Does this mean that Olu has abandoned the pretense of being in love with his college best friend? Fair enough, only fools rush, but this is excessive: some fifteen years in and no wedding in sight. Her brother never kisses the woman in public nor touches her unthinkingly when putting on coats; all but left her there standing in the driveway on arrival; displays nothing of the clinging that passion begets. Taiwo has long since suspected a cover-up (asexuality, abortion in college, that sort) and imagines that, compelled by the tragedy upon them, the two of them might be at last coming clean.
Instead, Ling says, “Kehinde. He looks at me strangely.”
At the name Taiwo tenses, the age-old reflex, as if
her
name were spoken and not her twin brother’s. She peels off her forearm to glower at Ling. “What do you mean, strangely?” Without waiting for an answer, “It’s a difficult time for our family—”
“Of course.”
“So if Kehinde looks
strange
,” as if the words were not English, “it isn’t because he is . . .
looking at
. . . you.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest . . .”
The suggestions float there between them.
“I’m tired,” says Taiwo, as if this were Ling’s fault. She turns to the window, heart racing from lying, from the surge of aggression that still coats her throat, an old feeling resurfacing: thick, visceral, inexplicable,
unnatural
that she should feel jealous.
iv
While Olu and Kehinde lie looking at the ceiling.
“Sure is strange,” Olu says, “sleeping like this.”
“Like the old days,” says Kehinde, to say something. Silence. They agree, by soft laughter, to leave it untouched.
• • •
Olu folds his hands on his stomach, eyes open. He is thinking that the smell is familiar, though strange, the thick/sweet combination of sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil. He knew it the moment he alighted the Mercedes and stood in the pebbled drive breathing it in and was seconds from placing it (1997, Accra) when he noticed that Kehinde was staring at Ling.
Staring
, not looking, unaware he was staring so squinting, lips pursed as if finding the word, until Olu said, “Shall we,” and picked up a suitcase and, leaving Ling standing there, marched for the door. He’d never seen his brother interact with a woman and had always kind of vaguely thought Kehinde was gay, less so interested in men than uninterested in women, almost womanly himself, like a dancer, the hair. It startled him therefore to find himself threatened, offended, by Kehinde’s reaction to Ling. The feeling, like the smell, was both strange and familiar, an old one, gone rusty and loud with disuse. The last time he felt this they would have been children, he fourteen or fifteen, his brother not ten, when some friend of their parents, more careless than callous, said, “One got the beauty, the other the brains.”