It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the difference between the reaction of others to Kehinde and to him. They were extraordinarily good-looking, his two younger siblings, and
twins
; there were two, more extraordinary still. It was perfectly logical the way people ogled, a matter of science, of cause and effect. Causes: the infrequent occurrence in nature of greenish-gold eyes against deeply brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared. If anything, he felt that he had to protect them, not least on account of their relative size. To him they seemed frail, not just younger but weaker, thin-wristed and -waisted, his brother the more. Compared to his body, athletic and solid, his brother looked fragile. The opposite of threat.
Then Sadie was born, and the thing sort of shifted. Their father disappeared for four, almost five days. Olu knew where he was—down the street at the Brigham—but couldn’t shake the fear that his father was
gone
, gone away, called away to some faraway battle, with mothers and children left to fend for themselves. It would have been one thing if Fola were present. He was close to his mother, unusually so. In those days they went every Friday for ice cream, Carvel, on Route 9, just the two of them alone eating Rocky Road sprinkled with fine cookie crumbles, he prattling away on the short ride back home. On weekends, if his father had parties with colleagues, she’d take him for dinner at the Chestnut Hill Mall, leaving Taiwo and Kehinde with the kind Mr. Chalé while they ate clam chowder at Legal’s. He took a quiet pride in their physical resemblance; almost everybody noticed, and she smiled when they did. Furthermore, his father looked awed when he looked at her, and Olu thought he saw a sparkling residue of awe when his father turned to look at
him
, now and then, a hint of it, in the hospital for instance, when the baby was born.
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 eyes 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 . . .