Olu pressed the doorbell, and Taiwo started crying. At his sister’s distress Kehinde promptly started wailing. Fola started screaming in her head; crying silently, she opened the door to stunned Olu. “Hold your brother.” Olu took Kehinde, and Fola grabbed Taiwo, ushering them all up the stairs and away from the cold. But the girl kept on crying, a very tired cry, untiringly, for hours, until evening when her father came home.
Fola looks at Taiwo and can feel the girl’s heaving, her wide eyes unyielding, dry, heartbroken, seething. This is the thing that has come in between them, this rage, Fola knows, since the twins went to Lagos—but neither will tell her what happened with Femi, and Sena, who found them, alleged not to know. There was just the one phone call at sunrise in summer ten months from the day that she left them at Logan: Uncle Sena, last seen on a tarmac in Ghana, now calling from Nigeria at five in the morning. “I knew they were yours from the moment I saw them. Those are Somayina’s grandkids, I said to myself,” Sena blubbered while Fola sat fumbling for a light switch, still sleeping on the couch. “From the beginning. Start again.”
His story was confusing—the more for the static, and how Sena told it, both rushing and halting, conflicted, determined to help, hiding something—but Fola got the gist of it. The first bit she knew:
when her father was murdered his mistress decided his house was now hers and moved in with their son. The two lived together as queen and little prince running a brothel for soldiers through the end of Biafra. In this way young Femi began his career as a dealer of women, small arms, and cocaine, striking out on his own as an underworld wunderkid when Bimbo OD’d at the end of the war. This Fola learned on her last trip to Lagos, in 1975, to beg Femi for help, having heard from a Nigerian in Baltimore by chance that her brother was knee deep in naira. Reunion. They’d never been close. He was four years her junior. He’d come to the house now and then with his mother, this Bimbo, a tall, hard, and wiry woman who in another life may well have modeled, not whored. Her father had never sought to hide them from Fola (“her mother was dead and a man had his needs”), and she knew that the boy who would wait in the kitchen while Bimbo went upstairs was her
aburo
.
But didn’t care. Had never even thought the names Bimbo and Femi—they were extras, unnamed in the cast of her youth, without lines, manly woman and womanly boy—until then, when she learned of the money. Too late. Femi alleged that he thought she had died with their father that night in the fire in Kaduna; otherwise, he claimed, he would never have excluded her entirely from their father’s inheritance. Alas. Too late now to redistribute the monies but Fola need only but ask for his help; they were siblings after all, you could see the resemblance, never mind that their father never claimed him as a son. Fola left Lagos with the money she needed to get to Accra to see Kweku’s ill mum, but vowed never again to give Femi the pleasure of offering help. She broke this vow for the twins.
This time her brother refused to send cash but proposed a small trade as an alternative solution: if Fola would send her
ibeji
to him, he would pay all their school fees plus college tuition. At some point he’d wed the only daughter of a general turned oil entrepreneur; he was tricked, she was barren. Having
ibeji
in the household might “cure” this wife Niké, he explained, as
ibeji
were magic. A deal. Fola sent the twins to Nigeria in August and forty weeks later Sena sent them back home.
From what she can gather, her twisted half-brother had hosted some bacchanal that Sena attended (the details, to do with drugs, prostitutes, orgy, have always been largely unclear). Sena had his own tragic tale to unburden: of expulsion from Lagos under “Ghana Must Go,” winter 1983, with the Nigerian government’s summarily deporting two million Ghanaians; of return to East Cantonments, impecunious and affronted, to build up a practice from scratch in Accra, only two fragile years past a barbarous coup in his homeland, no longer his home; death of parents. One hard decade on—his first week back in Lagos, having arrived at a house party driven by friends, unaware that the house was Kayo Savage’s townhouse, unaware that the party was Femi’s—he found them. Just saw them there huddled up, children among adults, and knew who they were and that something was wrong; they were both wearing makeup and spoke as if drugged, in a monotone, clutching their elbows, eyes down. He took them at once in the clothes they were wearing, got a taxi to the Sheraton in Ikeja where he was staying, called at midnight in a panic to explain he was sending them back on the first thing moving. End of story.
She drove in the dirty blue hatchback, four hours, got to JFK early, and sat there and waited, not moving, not eating, just clutching her stomach, asking Jesus her friend to go easy this time. They appeared in arrivals in thin summer clothing, the lipstick rubbed off to a bloodstain, dark orange, their hands clasped together, their eyes still turned downward, too skinny, not speaking, not Kehinde, not Taiwo. How many times did she ask them to tell her? “Just tell me what happened,” “Please tell me,” “I’m begging.” She telephoned Femi; she screamed, wept, and threatened. “How
dare
you take my darlings
away?” Femi sneered. And hung up. They were shadows. They slept in the daytime and whispered at night in the bedroom they shared in that house that she loathed, with no yard to grow flowers. She couldn’t afford therapy but begged for financial aid. The prep school assented on the basis of Olu’s spectacular performance the four years before. They started in autumn as freshmen, repeating the year they’d just done at international school, Kehinde quiet and sullen, Taiwo restless and furious, the both of them mute on the subject of
why
.
She still doesn’t know.
She looks at Taiwo unknowingly, so longing to hold her, to squeeze out this
why
—and the sorrow and fury and shadow out with it, to hold her so tightly it all rushes forth, leaving breath bubbling out as when Taiwo was one and still longed to be held, and by
her
. But she can’t. She imagines that baby—slick-wet and defenseless, in every sense, naked and mute where she’d dropped her—and seizes with guilt, a ghost, half a life later. She wants to but can’t take the three steps between them.
“What
happened . . . ?” she asks weakly from the dining room table, but Taiwo doesn’t hear and walks away.
iv
Kehinde finds Sadie in the garden in a beach chair, her feet on the palm trunk, eyes closed, tilting back. The distance from the house to the edge of the garden is such that no light source illumines this spot. There is only the starlight, a thin coat of silver that muddies the blackness a dark opaque gray. He hesitates for a moment in the shadow behind her, not sure if she’s sleeping. “May I join you?” he asks. She hasn’t heard the footsteps and starts, veering forward.
“You scared me,” she gasps. “It’s so dark. You’re so
quiet
.”
He whispers, embarrassed, “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was counting,” she says. (They both speak in hushed tones as if they were hiding or planning a break and in spite of themselves, overcome by the context, the dark of the garden, the confessional implications of chitchat in moonlight.) “Sit,” she adds, rising.
“No, stay there,” he murmurs. He positions himself neatly on the ground by the tree. They are silent, slightly awkward. The shadow a comfort. Sadie speaks presently, unnerved by the lull.
“Don’t you think it’s weird? That she
lives
here? In Ghana?” She slaps at a mosquito.
“Is it? I don’t know. Maybe.”
“She didn’t even tell me she was moving.”
“Me either.” He shrugs. “But she’s like that.”
“I know, but it’s
Ghana
.” She rubs her arm, scowling as if particularly offended by having been bitten by an insect from
Ghana
. “If she wanted to do that whole thing, back to Africa, then why not Nigeria? At least she’s from there.”
“It’s quieter,” says Kehinde, not saying as he thinks it that he’d never return to Nigeria, even if Fola moved there permanently. “The same thing in Mali, the house where I stayed in Douentza, the quiet. You could
see
it. You could think.”
“Did you like it there? Mali? Oh, wait. Are you thinking? Am I talking too much?”
“I like talking to you.” He smiles at the smile he can feel in the darkness. “I never get to talk to you.”
“You mean you never call.” But she’s laughing. “And thank you.”
“For what?”
“The tuition. Mom told me last year that you’re helping her out. And that you told her not to tell me. But she kind of tells me everything. Except that she’s moving to
Ghana
.”
He laughs. “You’re welcome.”
“So, you’re famous?”
Laughs harder. “Not really, no.”
“Yeah you are, Kehinde, I see you online. My best friend, her family’s super into the art thing. They bought one, I think. Of your new ones.”
“That right?”
“I like them. The mud cloths.”
“You do?”
“They’re enormous, though. How do you make them?”
“With mud. And big cloths.”
They laugh again together. She kicks his shin. “Jesus. I’ve never been to Africa, I know, but come on.”
“How is that possible? That you’ve never been to Africa?”
“Shocking but true.”
Kehinde senses the frown. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to her quickly. “Our parents never brought us when we were kids.”
“Why?”
“They were hurt. . . . Their countries hurt them.”
“But
you
came. The rest of you.”
“Well, Olu was a baby. And we were fourteen.” He feels his voice catch, clears his throat. “It was different. It’s not like we asked to be sent—” Now he stops. A light has come on above the door to the house, a faint puddle of yellow into which enters Benson. He strides toward the driveway, a man with a purpose. Kehinde and Sadie stop whispering to watch him. Benson doesn’t see them. A driver appears suddenly from the side of the house where the staff takes their dinner. Benson says something that Kehinde can’t hear, then the
beep-beep
of car doors unlocked, blinking lights. The driver lifts open the SUV trunk, pulls a box out. The two men confer, not in English. Benson takes the box, briskly marches back inside with it. The light above the door goes off. The driver disappears.
Kehinde finds a stick, begins drawing in earth, an old habit. “Reminds me of our first house.” A face. “They used to sell drugs there. The son of our landlord. Right there out our window, me and Olu’s room—”
“Wait. You and Olu shared a room?”
He notes that this is what shocks her. “Until you were born, yes.”
“Of course,” Sadie says. With a hint of aggression.
“Why of course?” He has heard it.
“Until I was born. It’s what all of you say. Like you all lived this whole other lifetime before that, like I was an afterthought. Like I messed it all up.”
“Sadie—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say I’m being sensitive. Don’t say that it’s just that I’m younger or whatever. I’m
different
from the rest of you, an idiot can see that, shit, strangers
do
see it, it’s not in my head. I know what I’m feeling,” she whispers, insistent, to which Kehinde replies with a smile, “So do I.” She hears that he’s smiling and, thinking he’s mocking, says, “Thank you for laughing—”
“I know what you feel.” He
does
laugh now, quietly, to remember the feeling so plainly, to see his own face in her words, that small face, a girl’s face, as had troubled him deeply for ages, the teasing for being so pretty. “I used to feel
the same about our family. That I was different. That I didn’t belong—”
“Didn’t
belong
? You had Taiwo.” She whispers this passionately, with no trace of sympathy, overcome by the possessiveness one feels for one’s suffering, the aggressive insistence on the suffering’s uniqueness, in nature and depth and endurance over time.
“I did. I had Taiwo,” he says, and considers it. “Back then. I had Taiwo. But she was the girl.
I
was the one who shared the bedroom with Olu. I
was supposed to be the doctor, the boy, the other son. That was the dream, Sai and Sons, family business. Except for . . . I hated them.”
“Who?”
“Math and science.” He laughs again, retracing a line in his drawing, then murmurs the rest, less to her than himself: “See, I know they didn’t mean to, but I hated how they
looked
at me, like I was the break in the chain, Dad and Olu, like I was a stranger, which maybe I was to them, maybe I was to myself, I don’t know. I just wonder, you know. Being here, seeing Olu, I ask myself, what if it was him in the car? Instead of me, that night with Dad. Would this whole thing be different? If it happened like that, with the good son, you know?”
Sadie doesn’t. “What car? If it was Olu in what car?”
“I’m just rambling,” Kehinde says, tracing over the face.
“No, tell me. What car?” she persists.
Kehinde falters. “I . . .”
“No one tells me anything,” she mumbles. “Never mind.”
He can feel that heavy silence taking form now around him, the familiar film of silence that shields, locks him in—but his sister would appear to be in it here with him, beside him, locked also, her breath, and her heart. He hears her thin breathing, the sound before crying. He feels her aloneness, a space in his throat. A space, opened up. Through which trickles, unbidden, as thin and uncertain, the sound of his voice. Which tells her, very simply, how he went to meet their father, how he walked into the lobby, saw the guards and Dr. Yuki, how they drove home in the Volvo, parked and sat there in the driveway, how he signed his art class painting with a pen that he still has. He pulls this from his pocket and hands it to Sadie.
“What does it say?” She can’t see in the dark.
“I think Mom engraved it. It’s Yoruba. Keep it.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you. And for telling me that.” She thumbs the pen carefully. “I would have been happy. That it happened with you and not anyone else. I bet he was happy.”