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?”
“Twenty-nine,” they say in unison, the same husky tone.
“October,” offers Kehinde. “We’ll be thirty next October.”
“And you.” He turns to Sadie, next to Kehinde, less obscured. “
You
. . . were just a glimmer in—”
“My ovary,” says Fola. Preempting. “More precisely.”
“That’s obscene,” Sadie says. This is the part she dreads most: when the stranger starts asking their ages, what each of them does. She senses it coming just as sure as a key change the moment a pop song approaches its bridge and looks ruefully at the man at the head of the table, wondering why he is here but not minding too much. At least with a guest, there’s a guise for the dolor that hovered above them in silence before, doubly massive for being unnamed, unacknowledged, the size of itself
and
its shadow, a blob. Now they can pin, each, their anguish to Benson, who took the seat no one else wanted to take and who said the thing no else wanted to say and who cut the grim picture in half with his flowers.
He
is the reason they all sit so upright, speak softly, smile politely,
because there’s a Guest
, as ensconced in the drama that attends family dinners (even absent a death in the family) as they, but a visitor, an innocent, in need of protection. They must ensure, all, that the Guest is okay. She smiles at him wanly. “Right. I was born later. I’m Sadie.”
Ling contributes her finger bell laugh. “Ovaries aren’t
‘obscene.’”
Turning quickly to Benson, “She’s an ob-gyn. I’m in ortho,” Olu says.
“Two doctors!” exclaims Benson. “So it runs in the family. I didn’t get your first name.” Ling tells him. “Well, Ling. Ghana is wanting for excellent doctors, foremost in obstetrics and maternal and child health. I opened a little hospital in town seven years ago. We
still
have a wait list for consults.” He laughs. “We could also use surgeons,” with a gesture to Olu, “and knowing your father, I know that you’re good.” He pauses. They all do. To see where he’s going, to see if the Guest is now stuck in the weeds, but he laughs again softly and presses on strongly, “The top of our class at Johns Hopkins, bar none. No one could touch him. And I don’t mean the Africans.
No one
was better. No one even came close. I remember when he got there I thought, who’s this bumpkin? From this Lincoln University? Never heard of it before. I
should
have, I know it. God. Kwame Nkrumah. But I’d been in Poland, of all places, for school. Funny times, those. Cold war scholarships for Africans. You could study in Warsaw and not pay a dime. I arrived in East Baltimore with an Eastern Bloc accent. I think they all thought I was deaf for a while.” Another laugh. “But we managed. We banded together. Everybody wanted to be friends with your dad. And Kweku was . . .” He pauses, smiling, turning to Fola. Seeing her face, he turns back. “He was shy. A geek, if we’re honest. But handsome, so meticulous. All the girls loved him. But he only loved one.”
Fola says, “Really. I don’t think—”
“Keep going,” says Sadie, not loudly. “He only loved one?”
Benson looks at Fola, who tips her head, sighing. He looks back at Sadie, returns the sad smile. “There were four of us. Africans—well, five counting Trevor. Jamaican—”
“Trinidadian,” Fola corrects.
“Ah, right. Trinidadian. Five of us brethren,” says Benson. “Prodigious, but desperately poor. We got stipends with our scholarships but blew them on airfare so no one had much; we shared all that we had. We used to eat dinner together, in rotation, so Monday to Friday a different one cooked. Wednesday was Kweku. He always cooked
banku
. We hated his
banku
;
it tasted like glue. But we’d all get there early to talk to your mother. Or stare at her. No one could work up the nerve. And we’d look at your father, this shy guy from Ghana, not strapping like Trevor, or tall, not like me, with these shirts buttoned up to the uppermost button like a Ghanaian Lumumba, with glasses—with her.”
A silence has settled on all of them, thickly. They stare at the flowers as if at a hearse. No one quite knows what the other is thinking or whether to speak and reveal the wrong thought.
Finally, Fola. “For goodness sake, Benson.” She laughs with such sadness, they start to laugh, too. “That isn’t what happened—”
“It’s true—”
“No, it isn’t. He also made bacon and eggs. Which were worse.” She stands up to pick out a fern from the rice pot. “The food’s getting cold,” she says. “Eat,” and they do.
Joloff,
egusi
. They muddle through bravely, evading fraught silence with pleasant requests:
pass the wine please, what time is it
,
do you have enough space there, more wine please
,
what’s in this, should we open another bottle?
When Fola observes that the questions are waning, she stands, disappears, and returns with the cake. “I am not to be forgiven,” she says, “for not writing or calling on time, but I didn’t forget.” She sings the first notes, then the rest join in, smiling, while Sadie sits blushing and chewing her lip. On the last long “to yooou . . . !” Fola settles the cake on the tabletop, bending over Sadie to do so and pausing, so stationed, to kiss her and say, “You were right,” and that’s that, the thing finished, “talked out.” Taiwo and Kehinde say “The wish!,” again in unison, which makes them both frown and which makes Benson laugh. “So they really
are
twins!” That daft oft-repeated comment, which makes Olu tense. He recovers and chuckles. Sadie laughs, too, suddenly noticing the candle: one big white utility candle dripping thick wax.
She starts to ask why, glancing back at her mother, who shrugs, laughing also, then changes her mind.
The sturdier the candle
, she thinks, leaning forward,
the better for bearing such wishes
.
ii
Taiwo retreats to the den after dinner, three shallow steps down from the dining room table. She sits on the love seat’s strange orange plaid wool with a copy of
Ghana Ovation
. Behind her Fola, at the table with Benson, is discussing the tradition of fantasy coffins; she hears them there, faintly, conferring in whispers like grown-ups evading the hearing of children. They felt like that,
children
, she thinks, during dinner, as watchful and rule-bound as Catholic school pupils—and wonders why all of them do this, still now, even now, the African Filial Piety act? Lowered eyes, lowered voices, feigned shyness, bent shoulders, the curse of their culture, exaltation of deference, that beaten-in impulse to show oneself obedient and worthy of praise for one’s reverence of Order (never mind that the Order is crumbling, corrupted, departed, dysfunctional; respect must be shown it). She loathes them for doing it, herself and her siblings, the house staff, her African classmates. Quite simply, she isn’t convinced that “respect” is the basis, not for them the respectful nor for them the respected. She suspects that it’s laziness, a defaulting to the familiar, or cowardice in the former and power in the latter. Most African parents, she’d guess, grew up powerless, with no one on whom to impose their own will, and so bully their children, through beatings and screaming, to lighten the load of postcolonial angst . . .
or assorted observations along the same lines, when she flips to a page and is yanked back from thought. By the name first. The caption, fine print amid faces (weddings, polo matches, funerals, glossy chaos of society photos), “Femi and Niké Savage at . . . ,” and then by the photograph:
the shoes
and suit
and shirt
and neck
and smile
and nose
and eyes.
Those eyes.
Black, thick-lidded eyes gazing back at her, red-rimmed, the wild sort of gaze of a man on a drug, matching smile (hard, unfocused), the wife there beside him gone ashen with age, the new wig a blond bob.
She hurls the magazine across the room, gut reaction. It lands with the splatter of pages on wood. Fola and Benson look up from the table. “Darling?” says Fola, but Taiwo can’t speak. “What is it? What happened?”
“A bug,” breathes out Taiwo. She points to the magazine splayed on the floor. “I was k-killing a bug.”
“Ah, yes. Welcome to Ghana.” Benson doesn’t notice her tremulous voice. “That reminds me. Are you all on antimalarial medication? The mosquitoes can be killer. I’ve got Aralen in the car.” Taiwo shakes her head. “I’ll go grab it. No worries. I might just have enough to get you started for now.” He glances at Fola as he stands from the table.
Fola nods, distracted. “Great, thanks,” as he goes.
iii
Fola stands also and stares at her daughter, aware of a heartbeat too fast and too loud, throbbing ache, lower right, where she has the small scar from the day she went tumbling down the stairs with the girl. Almost hard to believe she was just twenty-eight, half a lifetime away, with three children (first girl: a complete mystery to her mother next to Olu and Kehinde, a new thing entirely, more perilous somehow). Already at one she was beautiful, Taiwo. They both were. Wherever they went, they were stopped. Strangers always thought they were both baby girls and would gush in high voices, “How bea
uuu
tiful.” They were. But it made Fola nervous. To handle such children. Too precious, too perfect, the girl in particular, like a very expensive gift made of breakable material that one should just look at and try not to touch. Kehinde was easy, like Olu, even easier, but Taiwo would cry whenever Fola put her down and would wail without pause until Fola returned—only Fola, never Kweku—to pick her back up. It was this that confused her: how much Fola
liked
this, the thrill she’d receive when she picked up the girl, and she’d immediately stop crying to smile at her mother, to cling to her, burying her face in her neck. The neediness touched her, overwhelmed her, unhinged her; she worried about favoring or spoiling the child, or confusing her, leading her to believe that the world was less patently apathetic than it actually was.
On the occasion of note she was washing the babies in the bathtub upstairs when the front doorbell rang. It was Olu, then five, driven home by a teacher who lived down the street and now honked, pulling off. The door was at the bottom of those two narrow staircases, too long a trip down with the twins unattended. She picked them up, dripping suds, one in each arm, and went rushing down the stairs to get Olu. And slipped. She can remember the feeling still now, that pure panic that flooded her lungs as her slipper flew out and her back hit the stairs and she tumbled down clinging to babies’ wet skin slick with sweet-smelling suds. When she came to a stop she was holding Kehinde only, having somehow nicked her ribcage on the stair edge, and bleeding. Taiwo had landed, by some act of mercy, at the bottom of the staircase completely unharmed. She was sitting there staring as Fola rose, bleeding, her arms around Kehinde. Not crying, just staring. But the look in the eyes was more piercing than screaming. The eyes seemed to say
you let go, you let me go
. Those eyes—which she’d found so unnerving, in the beginning, having only ever seen them in a painting, unblinking—now stared at her, heartbroken, heartbreaking, accusing: a dead woman’s eyes on a baby girl’s face.