Ghana Must Go

1

Kweku dies barefoot on a Sunday before sunrise, his slippers by the doorway to the bedroom like dogs. At the moment he is on the threshold between sunroom and garden considering whether to go back to get them. He won’t. His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom, her lips parted loosely, her brow lightly furrowed, her cheek hotly seeking some cool patch of pillow, and he doesn’t want to wake her.

He couldn’t if he tried.

She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world. Their house could be robbed — by Nigerians in flip-flops rolling right up to their door in rusting Russian Army tanks, eschewing subtlety entirely as they’ve taken to doing on Victoria Island (or so he hears from his friends: the crude oil kings and cowboys demobbed to Greater Lagos, that odd breed of African: fearless and rich) — and she’d go on snoring sweetly, a kind of musical arrangement, dreaming sugarplums and Tchaikovsky.

She sleeps like a child.

But he’s carried the thought anyway, from bedroom to sunroom, making a production of being careful. A show for himself. He does this, has always done this since leaving the village, little open-air performances for an audience of one. Or for two: him and his cameraman, that silent-invisible cameraman who stole away beside him all those decades ago in the darkness before daybreak with the ocean beside, and who has followed him every day everywhere since. Quietly filming his life. Or: the life of the Man Who He Wishes to Be and Who He Left to Become.

In this scene, a bedroom scene: The Considerate Husband.

Who doesn’t make a peep as he slips from the bed, moving the covers aside noiselessly, setting each foot down separately, taking pains not to wake his unwakable wife, not to get up too quickly thus unsettling the mattress, crossing the room very quietly, closing the door without sound. And down the hall in this manner, through the door into the courtyard where she clearly can’t hear him, but still on his toes. Across the short heated walkway, from Master Wing to Living Wing, where he pauses for a moment to admire his house.

• • •

It’s a brilliant arrangement this one-story compound, by no means novel, but functional, and elegantly planned: simple courtyard in the middle with a door at each corner to the Living, Dining, Master, and (Guest) Bedroom Wings. He sketched it on a napkin in a hospital cafeteria in his third year of residency, at thirty-one years old. At forty-eight bought the plot off a Neapolitan patient, a rich land speculator with Mafia ties and Type II diabetes who moved to Accra because it reminds him of Naples in the fifties, he says (the wealth pressed against want, fresh sea air against sewage, filthy poor against filthier rich at the beach). At forty-nine found a carpenter who was willing to build it, the only Ghanaian who didn’t balk at putting a hole in a house. The carpenter was seventy with cataracts and a six-pack. He finished in two years working impeccably and alone.

At fifty-one moved his things in, but found it too quiet.

At fifty-three took a second wife.

Elegantly planned.

Now he stops at the top of the square, between doorways, where the blueprint is obvious, where he can see the design, and considers it as the painter must consider the painting or the mother the newborn: with confusion and awe, that this thing which sprang to life there inside the mind or body has made it here to the outside, a life of its own. Slightly baffled. How did it get here, from in him to in front? (Of course he knows: with the proper application of the appropriate instruments; it’s the same for the painter, the mother, the amateur architect — but still it’s a wonder to look at.)

His house.

His beautiful, functional, elegant house, which appeared to him whole, the whole ethos, in an instant, like a fertilized zygote spinning inexplicably out of darkness in possession of an entire genetic code. An entire logic. The four quadrants: a nod to symmetry, to his training days, to graph paper, to the compass, perpetual journey/perpetual return, etc., etc., a gray courtyard, not green, polished rock, slabs of slate, treated concrete, a kind of rebuttal to the tropics, to home: so a homeland re-imagined, all the lines clean and straight, nothing lush, soft, or verdant. In one instant. All there. Now here. Decades later on a street in Old Adabraka, a crumbling suburb of colonial mansions, whitewashed stucco, stray dogs. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created—

except Taiwo, he thinks suddenly, a shock of a thought. Whereon Taiwo herself — with black thicket for eyelash and carved rock for cheekbone and gemstone for eyes, her pink lips the same color as the inside of conch shells, impossibly beautiful, an impossible girl — sort of appears there in front of him interrupting his performance of The Considerate Husband, then goes up in smoke. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created alone, he amends the observation.

• • •

Then continues along the walkway through the door into the Living Wing, through the dining room, to the sunroom, to the threshold.

Where he stops.

2

Later in the morning when the snow has started falling, and the man has finished dying, and a dog has smelled the death, Olu will walk in no particular hurry out of the hospital, hang up his BlackBerry, put down his coffee, and start to cry. He’ll have no way of knowing how the day broke in Ghana; he’ll be miles and oceans and time zones away (and other kinds of distances that are harder to cover, like heartbreak and anger and calcified grief and those questions left too long unasked or unanswered and generations of father-son silence and shame), stirring soymilk into coffee in a hospital cafeteria, blurry-eyed, sleep-deprived, here and not there. But he’ll picture it — his father, there, dead in a garden, healthy male, fifty-seven, in remarkable shape, small-round biceps pushing up against the skin of his arms, small-round belly pushing out against the rib of his top, Fruit of the Loom fine rib A-shirt, stark white on dark brown, worn with the ridiculous MC Hammer pants he hates and Kweku loves — and try though he will (he’s a doctor, he knows better, he hates it when his patients ask him “what if you’re wrong?”), he won’t shake the thought.

That the doctors were wrong.

That these things don’t “sometimes happen.”

That something happened out there.

No physician that experienced, never mind that exceptional — and say what you want, the man was good at his job, even detractors concede this, “a knife-wielding artist,” general surgeon without equal, Ghanaian Carson, and on — could’ve missed all the signs of so slow-building a heart attack. Basic coronary thrombosis. Easy peasy. Act fast. And there would have been time, half an hour on the low side from everything Mom says, thirty minutes to act, to “return to his training,” in the words of Dr. Soto, Olu’s favorite attending, his Xicano patron saint: to run through the symptoms, to spit out a diagnosis, to get up, to go inside, to wake up the wife, and if the wife couldn’t drive — a safe bet, she can’t read — then to drive himself to safety. To put on slippers for God’s sake.

Instead, he did nothing. No run-through, no spit-out. Just strolled through a sunroom, then fell to the grass, where for no apparent reason — or unknowable reasons that Olu can’t divine and damned to unknowing can’t forgive — his father, Kweku Sai, Great Ga Hope, prodigal prodigy, just lay in pajamas doing nothing at all until the sun rose, ferocious, less a rise than an uprising, death to wan gray by gold sword, while inside the wife opened her eyes to find slippers by the doorway and, finding this strange, went to find, and found him dead.

• • •

An exceptional surgeon.

Of unexceptional heart attack.

With forty minutes on average between onset and death, so even if it’s the case that these things “sometimes happen,” i.e., healthy human hearts just “sometimes happen” to cramp up, willy-nilly, out of nowhere, like a hamstring catching a charley, there’s a question of the timing. All those minutes in the gap. Between first pang and last breath. Those particular moments Olu’s great fascination, an obsession all his life, first in childhood as an athlete, then in adulthood as a physician.

The moments that make up an outcome.

The quiet ones.

Those snatches of silence between trigger and action when the challenge of the minute is the sole focus of the mind and the whole world slows down as to watch what will happen. When one acts or one doesn’t. After which it’s Too Late. Not the end—those few, desperate, and cacophonous seconds that precede the final buzzer or the long flatline beep — but the silence beforehand, the break in the action. There is always this break, Olu knows, no exceptions. So, seconds just after the gun goes off and the sprinter keeps driving or pops up too soon, or the gunshot victim, feeling a bullet break skin, brings a hand to his wound or does not, the world stopped. Whether the sprinter will win or the patient will make it has less to do finally with how he crosses the line than with whatever he did in these still prior moments, and Kweku did nothing, and Olu doesn’t know why.

How could his father not realize what was happening and how, if he realized, could he stay there to die? No. Something must have happened to debilitate, to disorient, some strong emotion, mental disturbance, Olu doesn’t know what. What he does know is this: active male under sixty, no known history of illness, raised on freshwater fish, running five miles daily, fucking a nubile village idiot — and say what you want, the new wife is no nurse: it is futile to blame but there might have been hope, chest compressions done right/had she just woken up — doesn’t die in a garden of cardiac arrest.

Something must have arrested him.

3

Dewdrops on grass.

Dewdrops on grass blades like diamonds flung freely from the pouch of some sprite-god who’d just happened by, stepping lightly and lithely through Kweku Sai’s garden just moments before Kweku appeared there himself. Now the whole garden glittering, winking and tittering like schoolgirls who hush themselves, blushing, as their beloveds approach: glittering mango tree, monarch, teeming being at center with her thick bright green leaves and her bright yellow eggs; glittering fountain full of cracks now and weeds with white blossoms, but the statue still standing, the “mother of twins,” iya-ibeji, once a gift for his ex-wife Folasadé, now abandoned in the fountain with her hand-carved stone twins; glittering flowers Folasadé could name by their faces, the English names, Latin names, a million shades of pink; glowing sky the soft gray of the South without sunlight, glittering clouds at its edges.

Glittering garden.

Glittering wet.

Kweku stops on the threshold and stares at this, breathless, his shoulder against the sliding door, halfway slid open. He thinks to himself, with a pang in his chest, that the world is too beautiful sometimes. That there’s simply no weight to it, no way to accept it: the dew on the grass and the light on the dew and the tint to that light, not for a doctor like him, when he knows that such things rarely live through a night; that they’re in but not long for the world as he’s known it, a brutal and senseless and punishing place; that they’ll either be broken or break away free, leaving loss in their wake. That the N.I.C.U. had it right.

• • •

They don’t promote naming in the N.I.C.U., as he discovered during his third-year pediatrics rotation, that heartbreaking winter, 1975, with his mother just dead and his first son just born. If some ill-fated infant wouldn’t last through the weekend, they discouraged its parents from picking a name, scrawling “Baby” with the surname on the incubator label (“A, B, C Surname” on for multiples). Many of his classmates found the practice uncouth, a sort of premature throwing up of hands in defeat. These were Americans, mostly, with their white teeth and cow’s milk, for whom infant mortality was an inconceivable thing. Or rather: conceivable in the aggregate, as a number, a statistic, i.e., x% of babies under two weeks will die. Conceivable in the plural but unacceptable in the singular. The one gray-blue baby.

The late Baby Surname.

To the Africans, by contrast (and the Indians and West Indians and the one escapee Latvian for whom Baltimore was comfortable), a dead neonate was not only conceivable but unremarkable, all the better when unavoidable, i.e., explicable. It was life. To them the nonnaming was logical, even admirable, a way to create distance from existence so from death. Precisely the kind of thing they always thought of in America and never bothered with in places like Riga or Accra. The sterilization of human emotion. The reduction of anguish to Hallmark-card hurt. The washing, as by sedulous scrub-nurse, of all ugliness off grief’s many faces.

Faces Kweku Sai knew.

To him, who could name grief by each one of her faces, the logic was familiar from a warmer third world, where the boy who tails his mother freshly bloodied from labor (fruitless labor) to the edge of an ocean at dawn — who sees her place the little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in froth, then walk away, but who never hears her mention it, ever, not once — learns that “loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.

Even then, at twenty-four, a new father and still a child, a newly motherless child, Kweku knew that.

• • •

Now he stares at the glittering, arrested by beauty, and knows what he knew all those winters ago: that when faced with a thing that is fragile and perfect in a world that is ugly and crushing and cruel the correct course of action is: Give it no name. Pretend that it doesn’t exist.

But it doesn’t work.

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal — logical-admirable refusal — to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality of beauty, much less of beauty in fragility in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places! in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.

He sees this so clearly he closes his eyes. His head begins throbbing. He opens his eyes. He tries but can’t move. He is glued there, overwhelmed.

The last time he felt this was with Sadie.

4

Winter again, 1989.

The delivery ward at the Brigham.

Fola propped up in the hospital bed, still bloody from labor and clutching his arm.

The twins, nine years old, fast asleep in the lounge in those ugly blue chairs with the yellow foam stuffing, arranged as they always were, locked into place like some funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle: Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder and Kehinde’s cheek on Taiwo’s head, a girl and a boy with the same amber eyes throwing sparks from their otherwise gentle young faces.

Olu eating apple slices, already so healthy at fourteen years old, reading Things Fall Apart, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his femur.

And the newborn, yet unnamed, fighting for life in its incubator. Losing.

Baby Sai.

• • •

In the rancid delivery room.

“What’s wrong with Idowu? Where are they taking her?”

She clutched his bare arm. He was still in his scrubs, nothing else, arms uncovered. He’d been stitching when she went into labor (too soon). A friend at the Brigham had had him paged over the intercom, and he’d run through the snow from Beth Israel here with the swirling flakes clouding his vision as he ran, and the words, two words, clouding his thinking. Too soon.

“It was too soon.”

“NO.”

Not a human sound. Animal. A growl rumbling forth from the just-emptied belly. A battle cry. But who was the enemy? Him. The obstetrician. The timing. The belly itself. “Folasadé,” he murmured.

“Kweku, no,” Fola growled, her teeth clenched, her nails piercing his goose-pimpled skin. Drawing blood. “Kweku, no.” Now she started to cry.

“Please,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

She shook her head, crying, still piercing his arm (and other pierce-able parts of him neither perceived). “Kweku, no.” As if changing his name in her mind now from Kweku, just Kweku, to Kweku-No.

He laid his lips gently on the crown of her head. Her crowning glory, Fola’s hair, reduced by half by fresh sweat. A cloud of tiny spirals, each one clinging to the next in solidarity and smelling of Indian Hemp. “We have three healthy children,” he said to her softly. “We are blessed.”

“Kweku-No, Kweku-No, Kweku-No.”

The last one was shrill, nearing rage, accusation. He had never seen Fola unraveled like this. Her two other pregnancies had gone perfectly, medically speaking, the deliveries like clockwork, instructional-video smooth: the first one in Baltimore when they were still children, the second here in Boston, a C-section, the twins. And now this, ten years later, a complete accident, the third (though they were all complete accidents in a way). She was different with this one almost right from the start. She insisted upon knowing the gender at once. Then insisted he not tell anyone, not even the kids, not (a) that she was expecting and then (b) what it was. Both became obvious that evening in summer she returned with four gallons of pastel pink paint. She chose the name without him, for “the child who follows twins.” This didn’t so much surprise him. She’d become kind of precious about her Yoruba heritage after becoming iya-ibeji, a mother to twins. He didn’t like the name, the way Idowu sounded, and less what it meant, something about conflict and pain. But he was relieved that her choice wasn’t something more dramatic, like Yemanja, the way she’d been acting. Building shrines.

And now this. Ten weeks early. There was nothing to be done.

“You have to do something.”

He looked at the nurse.

A drinker, he’d guess, from the paunch and rosacea. Irish, from the trace of a South Boston a. But no trace of bigotry, which often went with this, and gentle eyes, grayish-blue, glistening. The woman managed to frown and to smile simultaneously. Sympathetically. While Fola drew blood from his arm. “Where did they take her?” he asked, though he knew.

The nurse frowned-and-smiled. “To the N.I.C.U.”

• • •

He went to the waiting room.

Olu looked up.

He sat by his son, put a hand on his knee. Olu abandoned Achebe and looked at his knee as if only now aware it was bouncing.

“Watch your brother and sister. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To check on the baby.”

“Can I come with you?”

Kweku looked at the twins.

A funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle. They slept like his mother. Olu looked at them, too. Then pleadingly at Kweku.

“Come on then.”

• • •

They walked down the hospital hallway in silence. His cameraman walked backward in front of them. In this scene: a Well-Respected Doctor goes striding down the hallway to save his unsavable daughter. A Western. He wished he had a weapon. Little six-shooter, silver. Two. Something with more shine than a Hopkins M.D. And a clearer opponent. Or an opponent less formidable than the basics of medical science. The odds.

Presently, Olu. “What is it?”

End scene.

“Nothing.” Kweku chuckled. “Just tired, that’s all.” He patted his son’s head. Or his son’s browbone more accurately, his son’s head having moved from where he remembered its being. He looked at Olu closely now, surprised by the height (and by other things he’d seen but never noticed before: the wide latissimus dorsi, the angular jawline, the Yoruba nose, Fola’s nose, broad and straight, the taut skin the same shade as his own and so smooth, baby’s bum, even now in adolescence). He wasn’t pretty like Kehinde — who looked like a girl: an impossible, impossibly beautiful girl — but had become in the course of one weekend, it seemed, a really very handsome young man. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder, reassuring him. “I’m fine.”

Olu frowned, tensing. “The baby, I meant. What is it? The gender?”

“Oh. Right.” Kweku smiled. “It was a girl,” then, “It’s a girl,” but too late. Olu heard the past tense and glared at him, wary.

“What’s wrong with the baby?” he asked, his voice tight.

“The curse of her gender. Impatience.” Kweku winked. “She couldn’t wait.”

“Can they save it?”

“Not likely.”

“Can you?”

Kweku laughed aloud, a sudden sound in the quiet. He patted Olu’s head, this time finding his hair. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor never ceased to amaze or delight him. Or appease him. His other son couldn’t have cared less what he did, irrespective of the fact that they lived off his doing it. He didn’t take this personally. At least he didn’t think he did. At least he didn’t show it when his cameraman was around. He was an Intelligent Parent, too rational to pick favorites. A Man’s Man, above petty insecurities. And a Well-Respected Doctor, one of the best in his field, goddammit!, whether Kehinde cared or didn’t. Besides. The boy was un-impressable. Perpetually indifferent. His teachers all said the same year after year. Preternatural ability, exemplary behavior, but doesn’t seem to care about school. What to do?

Kehinde doesn’t care about anything, Kweku told them. Except Taiwo. (Always except Taiwo.)

“No,” he answered Olu, his laugh lingering as a smile. Olu’s eyes lingering on the side of his face. Then falling away. They walked farther down the hallway in silence. Suddenly, Olu looked up.

“Yes, you can.”

• • •

All these years later when Kweku thinks of that moment, he can picture the look on his fourteen-year-old’s face, when Olu seemed to become — in the course of one instant — an infant again, raw with trusting. The boy was transfigured, his whole face wide open, his eyes so undoubting that Kweku looked down. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor broke his heart (for a second time. He hadn’t felt the first). He shook his head weakly and looked at his hands. His fingers still frozen from running through the snow. He was teetering on an edge, though he didn’t know which, some strange gathering force building within and against him. “She doesn’t have the heart for it—” he started, then stopped. They’d reached the glass door to the nursery.

• • •

Kweku peered in.

There it was.

On the left.

Three and a half pounds, barely breathing, barely life.

With all kinds of patches and tubes sticking out of it, it looked like E.T. going home.

Olu pressed his hands to the Plexiglas window. “Which one is it?” he asked, cupping his hands around his eyes. Kweku laughed softly. Olu didn’t say she. Only it, one, the baby. Little surgeon in the making. He pointed to the incubator, the handwritten tag. “That one,” he said. “Baby Sai.”

• • •

It was the simplest thing, really, just the littlest slip (Sai), speaking aloud as he tapped on the glass, but he’d been teetering already on an edge when it happened, when pointing to the incubator he spoke his own name. And the two put together, like combustible compounds — the sound of his name breathed aloud in the space and the sight of the neonate fighting for breath — suddenly somehow made “Baby Sai” his. It was his.

She was his.

And she was perfect.

And she was tiny.

And she was dying. And he felt it, felt this dying, in the center of his chest, the force gathered, raw panic, overwhelming his lungs, filling his chest with a tingling, thick, biting, and sharp. He heard himself whisper, “There she is,” or something like it, but with the constriction of his larynx didn’t recognize his voice.

Neither did Olu, who looked up, alarmed.

“Dad,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

But Kweku couldn’t help it. He was barely even aware of it. The tears came so quickly, fell so quietly. She was his. That precious thing there with her toenails like dewdrops, her ten tiny fingers all curled up in hope, little fists of determination, and her petal-thin skin, like a flower that Fola could name by its face. Fola’s favorite already. And she. Waiting, hopeful, still propped up in bed, sweating, bloodied. His, too.

You have to do something.

He had to do something. He wiped his face quickly with the back of his arm. The salt stung the wound there. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder. Reassuring himself.

“Come on then.”

• • •

The next ninety-six hours he stayed: in the staff lounge, befriending bleary interns who slept there as well, consulting colleagues, researching treatments, obsessively reading, barely sleeping, until his opponent was defeated. Until the newborn was named. And not Idowu, that goat-meat-tough name Fola loved for the long-suffering child born directly after twins. He picked Sadé when they brought the child home from the hospital on the grounds that two Folas would become too confusing. His first choice was Ekua, like his sister, “born on Wednesday,” but Fola had established sovereignty over naming years back (first name: Nigerian, middle name: Ghanaian, third name: Savage, last name: Sai). Sadé picked Sadie when she started junior high on the grounds that her classmates pronounced Sadé like that anyway. But a nurse picked Folasadé in the first place, inadvertently, that last night at the Brigham.

Another accident.

He was alone in the nursery with the infant after midnight, in the scrubs from the appendectomy at Beth Israel days before, fully aware that some parent passing the Plexiglas window might mistake him for a homeless man and very well should. The bloodshot eyes, the matted hair, that half-crazed look of consuming obsession: he looked like a madman, a madman in scrubs, gone broke trying to win against the odds. (He had no way of knowing he would one day become this.) The nursery was dark, save the lamps in the incubators. He rocked in a chair with the girl in his lap. The girl had been asleep for over an hour at this point but he carried on rocking, too exhausted to stand. The chair was too small, one of those tiny plastic rocking chairs that hospitals put in nurseries, apparently for neonates themselves.

The Irish-looking nurse with the paunch and the rosacea appeared in the doorway with her clipboard and paused. “You again.” She leaned against the door, frowning-smiling.

“Me again, yes.”

“No, no. Please don’t get up.”

She entered without switching on the overhead fluorescents, kindly sparing them both the sudden violence of light. She made her rounds quietly, scribbling notes on her clipboard. When she reached the little rocking chair she looked down and laughed.

The infant’s hand, with its five infinitesimal brown fingers, was attached to Kweku’s thumb as if holding on for life.

“You must really love her,” she said. Boston accent. Luff-ha. “You’re here more than I am, I swear it.”

Kweku laughed softly so as not to wake the baby. “I do,” he said simply. “I do.”

The two words returned him to Baltimore, to his wedding day, to Fola, young, resplendent in maternity dress in that low-ceilinged chapel, red carpeting, wood paneling, their first night of marriage, ginger ale, plastic flutes. Whereon two other words came sort of floating like little bubbles to the surface of his thoughts. And popped. Too soon. Had they married too soon? Become parents too soon? If so, what might that mean? That it wasn’t “really love”?

The nurse, still in Boston, turned off the lamp in the incubator. Kweku, still in Baltimore, closed his eyes, rocked back and forth. “But I do really love her.” The nurse didn’t hear this. She checked the label on the incubator. Baby Sai. No given name.

“What’s ha’ name?” she asked him, pen poised over clipboard.

“Folasadé,” Kweku mumbled, too exhausted to think.

“That’s pretty. How do you spell that?”

Without opening his eyes. “F-o-l-a-s-a-d-e.”

• • •

It didn’t even occur to him what the nurse was actually asking until the confusion at the discharge desk. “No Idowu Sai.” A different nurse now, smacking her gum in irritation, slapped the folder on the countertop and pointed. Acrylic nail. Kweku took the folder and looked at the writing. First name: Folasade. Last name: Sai. The nurse, smiling, smug, blew a bubble, let it pop.

“Fola-say-dee Sai. Is that your kid? Fola-say-dee?”

5

The last time he felt this was with “Say-dee,” this sense of epiphany, this same unsettling sort of discovering that he’s gotten it wrong, that a thing he has looked at countless times and found unremarkable, discountable, is in fact beautiful, has been beautiful all the while. How had he missed it? The just-barely-born infant, the just-barely-breathing neonate, hands clenched in hope, not bizarre-looking, alien, as he’d once thought of newborns (even Olu, Taiwo, Kehinde), but glorious, worth the fight. With the accompanying consternation: sudden cinching in the chest, on the left, where he feels dying and other gathering forces, less: blind-but-now-I-see, choir of angels, hallelujah, more: but-what-does-it-all-amount-to-in-the-end, a sharp, a shrill frustration.

Or what he thinks is frustration.

He once read that frustration is self-pity by another name.

Whatever you call it.

The last time he felt it was with Sadie: frustration/pity, that the world is both too beautiful and more beautiful than he knows, than he’s noticed, that he’s missed it, and that he might be missing more but that he might never know and that it might be too late; that it can be too late, that there is such a thing, a Too Late in the first place, that time will run out, and that it might not even matter in the end what he’s noticed, for how can it matter when it all disappears?

Or a sort of spiral of thoughts in this general direction that comes to a point at that final defense, i.e., how can he be faulted for all that he’s missed when it’s all wrapped in meaninglessness, when everything dies? He is pleading his innocence (I didn’t know what was beautiful; I would have fought for it all, had I seen, had I known!), though with whom he is pleading, in the sunroom as in the nursery, remains for the most part unclear. And something else. Something new now. Neither righteousness nor blindness nor blind indignation nor pity.

Acceptance.

Of death.

For he knows, in a strange way, as the spiral comes to rest at when everything dies, that he’s about to.

• • •

He knows — as he stands here in wifebeater and MC Hammer pants, shoulder against sliding door, halfway slid open, sliding deeper into reverie, remembrance and re- other things (regret, remorse, resentment, reassessment) — that he’s dying.

He knows.

But doesn’t notice.

It is knowing, not knowledge. Inconspicuous among his other thoughts. Not even a “thought.” A sound traveling toward him through water, not rushing. A shape forming far off out of negative space. A bubble just beginning its ascent into consciousness, still ten, fifteen minutes from awareness, behind schedule, all the facts being returned to their upright positions, attendants preparing the cabin for arrival. A woman. The voice of a woman. The love of a woman. Love for her and from her, a woman, two women. The mother and lover, where it begins and is ending, as he’s always suspected it must. (More on this in a moment.)

At the moment he is on the threshold, transfixed by the garden.

How in the world has he missed this?

6

In nearly six years of looking — every morning from this sunroom with its floor-to-ceiling windows and architectural-glass roof, pausing midsip of coffee and Milo (poor man’s mocha) to shift his Graphic, distracted, sucking his teeth at the view, thinking he should have insisted upon the pool and the pebbles, that the “love grass” wants water, that this is the trouble with green, that he hopes his bloody carpenter Mr. Lamptey is happy now — he’s never once seen it.

His garden.

Never could.

He didn’t want a garden. He couldn’t have been clearer. Nothing lush, soft, or verdant; all the lines clean, etc. (In fact, he didn’t want the things that he associates with gardens, like Fola or the English, on his property, in his sight.) He wanted pebbles, white pebbles, a wall-to-wall carpet of white like fresh snow, a rectangular pool. With the sun glinting brilliantly off the white and the water, the heat kept at bay by a concrete overhang. This is what he’d sketched in the Beth Israel cafeteria, sipping cheap lukewarm coffee, stinking of disinfectant and death. A chlorine-blue box on a beach of bleached-white. Sterile, square, elemental.

An orderly view.

And the life that came with it: getting out of bed every morning, coming to sit in his little sunroom with the paper and croissants, sipping fresh expensive coffee served by a butler named Kofi to whom he’d speak in a British accent (somewhat inexplicably), “That will be all.” All his children sleeping comfortably in the Bedroom Wing (now the Guest Bedroom Wing). A cook cooking breakfast in the Dining Wing. And Fola. By far the best part of the view in her Bic-blue bikini swimming the last of her morning laps, Afro bejeweled with droplets, rising dripping from the water like Aphrodite from waves (somewhat improbably; she hated getting her hair wet), and waving.

Stick figures on napkin.

She: smiling, dripping, waving.

He: smiling, sipping coffee, waving back.

• • •

Instead, he’s come to sit here all these mornings with his paper and his breakfast (poor man’s mocha, four fat triangles of toasted cocoa bread), beset on all sides by the floor-to-ceiling windows and the vision of a carpenter-cum-mystic.

That bloody man.

Mr. Lamptey.

The carpenter. Now the gardener. Still an enigma. Who built the house in two years working impeccably and alone, smoking hash on the job, rolling blunts during lunch, singing prayers of contrition for any harm done the wood: who came to work in swami clothing (saffron, barefoot, hip-slung tool belt) looking less like a sage than an elderly stripper with his hammer and chisel and bare chiseled thighs: an ancient soul in a younger man’s body with infant eyes in his old man’s face, some seventy odd years old with his cataracts and six-pack: who sabotaged the sunroom and denied Kweku his view. But who understood the vision: simple one-story compound. The only carpenter in Accra who would build it.

All of the other high-end architect-contractors had their own ideas (same one idea) of how a house should look; namely, as gaudy and gargantuan as financially possible, with no reference to any notion of African architecture whatsoever. Kweku tried to explain this as politely as possible in one overly air-conditioned office after another: (a) that his house as envisioned wouldn’t appear “out of place,” as the contractors suggested (“This isn’t the States”); (b) that Accra had always welcomed brave modernist architecture, just look at the futurist genius of Black Star Square; (c) that a compound around a courtyard was in fact a classically Ghanaian structure, expressly suited to Ghana’s environment, which their show homes were not. Those were storehouses — not “homes”—for the stockpiling of purchases: tacky paintings, velour couches, plastic flowers, pounds of kitsch, Persian rugs, velvet drapes, chandeliers, bearskin throw-rugs, all completely out of context in the tropics. And cheap. No matter how massive they made them, with their three-story foyers and pillars and pools, the homes always looked cheap.

To which the contractors responded as politely as possible that he was free to leave their offices and never return. After the seventh such encounter Kweku tucked his little blueprint (the then-thirteen-year-old napkin) in the pocket at his heart and walked in no particular hurry out of the office, down the staircase, out the entrance, onto High Street.

Into brilliant glinting sun.

• • •

The humidity welcomed him back, open arms. He stood still for some moments, obliging the hug. Then hired a taxi to take him to Jamestown — the oldest part of Accra and the smelliest by far, a fetid seaside slum of corrugated tin-and-cardboard shanties in the shadow of the country’s former Presidential Palace — where, braving the stink (re-dried sweat, rotting fish), he inquired in rusty Ga about a carpenter.

“A carpenter?” someone said, and hissed to someone else.

“A carpenter…” murmured someone else, and pointed down the alley.

“Carpenter?” The pointed-to someone laughed loudly, then shouted out, “The carpenter!”

An old woman appeared.

“The old man,” she said, sucking what teeth she had left. A wave of quiet yeses rose and washed across the slum. “Yes. The old man who sleeps by the ocean.” “Yes. The old man who sleeps in the tree.” The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the addenda. “The old man,” she said. “Get the small boy.”

A girl appeared.

She’d been standing behind the woman, who was of such considerable width that she’d obscured the girl entirely, knobby braids and knees and all. Now she sprinted off obediently before Kweku could ask the obvious, e.g., if an “old man” was the answer or why he slept in a tree or what a “small boy” had to do with it. He supposed he’d find out. He leaned against the cab, wiped his face, crossed his feet. It was too hot to wait in the car sans A/C. The driver sat contentedly eating freshly smoked fish, the pride of Jamestown, blasting Joy FM Radio, “Death for Life.” Reggie Rockstone, all the rage in Accra.

• • •

Not sixty seconds later the girl sprinted back, holding what looked to be her brother by the brittle-thin wrist. The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to find things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances.

Amusement with the circumstances.

He’d seen it in the village, in his siblings, or in one: his youngest sister, dead at eleven of treatable TB. As a younger man himself, he’d mistaken it for silliness, the blitheness of the youngest, a kind of blindness to things. To be that happy, that often, in that village, in the fifties, one would’ve had to have been blind or dumb, he’d thought, but he was wrong. His sister saw as much as he, he’d come to see the night she died, when the one village doctor (a maker of coffins) had done all he could before dinner. His mother had gone to the fetish priest with a white baby goat (a fair trade: kid for kid), leaving the four elder siblings in their usual clump outside the hut, the two youngest inside it. Ekua his sister had lain coughing on her side on a raffia mat in a tangle of limbs, as jutting-out thin as a pyre of twigs, and laughing. “What are you doing?”

He was kneeling beside her and touching her neck, wondering how all this blood could just up and run dry, in mere moments, as predicted, just halt its hot flow. It seemed worse than implausible. A cruel joke, a lie. “You’re not going to die,” he’d said, feeling her pulse, with his fingers, his chest, throbbing ache in his lungs. Ekua was his ally, just thirteen months younger, born on Wednesday like him, with the same restless mind. And a glint in her eye and a gap in her teeth (as he’d find between Fola’s five years up ahead). “You are not going to die.” With conviction now, believing, in the spectacular mystery of the pumping of blood above the failure-prone prayers of the villagers outside or the slaughtering of goats or the prognoses of hacks. He’d touched her face, whispering, “You’re not going to die.”

She’d whispered back, smiling, eyes glinting, “I am.”

And had, with a smile on her hollowed-out face, with her hand in her brother’s, his hand on her neck, wide eyes laughing, growing wider and colder as he’d stared at them, seeing that she’d seen through them. Laughing at death. (Later in America he’d see them again, in the emergency room mostly, where eleven-year-olds die: the calm eyes of a child who has lived and died destitute and knows it, both accepting and defying the fact. Not with formal education, his preferred mode of defiance. Not with blindness, as he’d imagined of his sister until then. But with precisely the same heedlessness the world had shown her, and him, all dirt-poor children. The same disregard.) Her eyes were still laughing. Disregarding of everything: tuberculosis, destitution, hack doctors, early death. Looking back at a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too. She’d seen everything he had — all the indignities of their poverty; the seeming unimportance of their being to and in the wider world; the maddening smallness of an existence that didn’t extend past a beach they could walk the whole length of in half of a day — without seeing herself undignified, unimportant, or small.

• • •

That brand of cheerfulness.

It broke Kweku’s heart.

This was the third of his heartbreaks, the cleanest, though he couldn’t have possibly known it was that. The girl approached gripping the wrist of her brother who smiled with his eyes, a small gap in his teeth. Not quite clear why she held him as if he would bolt when he seemed so delighted, so willing, to come. But like this. Kweku saw them and thought of his sister, her wide laughing eyes. Felt a knot in his chest. But not sadness, as the victim of a third-degree burn, a very small one, will feel nothing of the infection beneath. The same reason: severe nerve damage. Loss of sensation. The eschar cemented black over that part of his past.

He could see them all, the images — village doctor, elder siblings, braying kid, setting sun — playing mute in his head, but they were like scenes from a movie with a long-dead child star shot in grainy black and white before his cameraman was born. They inspired no emotion. Or no emotion he could identify. Just the sudden bout of wheezing he attributed to the heat. Not to hurt. He never “hurt” when remembering his childhood, which was rarely, even then, at forty-nine, having returned. He was circling in closer — toward the center, toward the starting point, same points — by then, Jamestown, an hour from home. But didn’t feel it. Was in his mind still moving “forward,” getting “farther,” his whole life a straight line stretching out from the start.

So if ever the odd memory returned to him, caught up to him, billowing forward from behind him like tumbleweed in wind, he would feel only distance, the uncoverable distance, deeply comforting distance, and with it a calm. A calm understanding of how loss worked in the world, of what happened to whom, in what quantities. Never hurt. He didn’t add it all up — loss of sister, later mother, absent father, scourge of colonialism, birth into poverty and all that — and lament that he’d had a sad life, an unfair one, shake his fists at the heavens, asking why. Never rage. He very simply considered it, where he came from, what he’d come through, who he was, and concluded that it was forgettable, all. He had no need for remembering, as if the details were remarkable, as if anyone would forget it all happened if he did. It would happen to someone else, a million and one someone elses: the same senseless losses, the same tearless hurts. This was one perk of growing up poor in the tropics.

No one ever needed the details.

There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy. Custom: boy-child Gets Out, good at science or soccer, dies young, becomes priest, child-soldier or similar. Nothing remarkable and so nothing to remember.

Nothing to remember and so nothing to grieve.

• • •

Just the knot in his chest, which he tried to laugh off, at the sight of those eyes on the face of that boy. The boy started laughing, too, quietly, delightedly, unaware that such laughter could break a grown man.

“Sa, are you fine?” he asked. His sister tugged his hand. The boy tried to stop smiling but couldn’t. He stopped trying.

“I’m fine.” Kweku smiled, straightened up, cleared his throat. He glanced at the old woman, who was glowering, bored. He looked at the girl, who was mopping her brow. He looked at the boy, who smiled hopefully back. And sighed. Could now see where this whole thing was headed. Asked, “You, what’s your name?” though he already knew.

Kofi, the houseboy he’d sketched on the napkin.

“Kofi, sa,” the boy said, holding out his free hand.

The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the pleasantries. “Take him to the carpenter,” she said, and waddled off.

• • •

Mr. Lamptey.

The yogi.

Who “slept by the ocean” as advertised, a treehouse some thirteen feet high. Here, he served tea, a bitter brew of moringa he had harvested during Harmattan, he said. Lit a joint. “That’s very old!” objected Kweku, reaching protectively for the napkin Mr. Lamptey was scanning intently mere inches from the joint. “So am I,” quipped Mr. Lamptey, not lowering the napkin. In Ga: “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go up in smoke.”

Kofi laughed. Kweku didn’t. Mr. Lamptey returned to the blueprint. A gentle breeze wafted in smelling of salt. They were sitting on the floor on braided raffia mats, the only seats in the large, airy cabinlike space. Decor notwithstanding, it was phenomenally well done: in lieu of walls slatted shutters, floorboards sanded down to silk. Kweku sipped his tea, mute, admiring the workmanship. After a moment ran his palm across the floor by his mat. Smooth. This was why he wanted to find a Ghanaian to build his dreamhouse. No one in the world did better woodwork (when they tried).

When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was watching him, smiling. “When did you build this?”

“It hasn’t been built.”

Mr. Lamptey chuckled softly. “But it has,” he said firmly. Kweku waited for him to continue. He didn’t. He puffed his joint.

“What do you mean, ‘built’? You’ve seen a house like this in Ghana?”

“No,” said Mr. Lamptey. “But you have, have you not?”

“Seen it where?” Kweku chuckled, not following the logic. But the answer drifted toward him: in one instant, all there. Mr. Lamptey tapped his forehead and pointed at Kweku. Kweku grew uncomfortable and shifted on his mat. “If you mean ‘where did I design it,’ I designed it in med school.”

“In med school?”

“Yes. Medical school.”

“But why would you do that?”

“Design a house?”

“Go to medical school.”

“To become a doctor.” Kweku laughed.

Mr. Lamptey laughed harder. “But why would you do that?”

Kweku stopped laughing. “Do what?”

“Become a doctor. You’re an artist.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I’m very old.” The man winked. He held up Kweku’s napkin. “And these? All of these rooms? They’re for all of your children?”

“No.”

“Patients?”

“Just me.”

“Hmm.” He turned over the napkin as if looking for a better answer.

Kweku said quickly, defensive, “There’s nothing else.”

“Just you.” Another puff. Mr. Lamptey pointed to Kofi. “And him.” Held up the napkin. “And this. ‘Nothing else.’”

Kweku got up. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at…” Mr. Lamptey exhaled a curling little tendril of smoke. But said nothing. “But I’m looking for a builder, not a Buddha.”

“And have you found one?”

Kweku faltered. He said nothing. He had not.

This was his eighth such encounter and counting. The plot had been vacant for over a year. He looked at the carpenter, the “old man,” this Mr. Lamptey, there cross-legged and cloth-clad, the six-pack contracted, the cataracts glowing bluish like the bellies of candle flames. He looked like some bizarre sort of African Gandhi. With ganja. Nonviolent. Nonplussing. Triumphant. Kweku wiped his face, took a breath as to speak. But for the first time since arriving noticed the shhh of the waves. So fell quiet. And stood there, feeling foolish now for standing, his head a few inches from the thatch roof above.

He considered the thatch pattern, which was vaguely familiar (though the memory was too heavy to catch up from behind: rounded hut in Kokrobité not an hour from this treehouse, its roof, also thatch, much, much higher than this one, conceived of by an eccentric not so different from Mr. Lamptey, absent father, wheezing sister: heavy memory, too slow).

A second breeze, smelling of a pyre of twigs.

Someone burning something somewhere.

Kweku suddenly felt tired. “If you can build it, by all means the project is yours.”

Mr. Lamptey said simply, “I can and I will.”

• • •

And did, in two years, arriving each morning at four, not a moment before or after, while the sky was still dark, to do sun salutations on the then-empty plot, sixty minutes more or less, until sunrise.

Kweku — afraid that his materials would be stolen, by appointment if he got a watchman, by yard boys if not (and they were costly materials, imported marble, slabs of slate; it wasn’t cheap establishing order in overgrown grass) — slept in a tent in those days, the one Olu had forgotten, wiry Kofi keeping guard with their adopted stray dog. Around a quarter past five they’d be woken by the racket song, hammer banging nail, handsaw moving through wood, both more swiftly than a seventy-year-old should have been able to manage, and more elegantly than any blade he’d managed himself. Indeed, six months in he took to shadowing Mr. Lamptey once a week for an hour, sipping coffee, hanging back. Mr. Lamptey, who sang, but never spoke, while he was carpentering, consented to be watched but refused to be helped. So Kweku loitered, attentive, with his Thermos, in his glasses, not helping, merely observing with mounting jealousy and awe, trying to learn what he could of the eyes-half-closed calm with which the man made incisions. “You should’ve been a surgeon,” he’d say.

Mr. Lamptey would suck his teeth, spit, answer opaquely, not pausing his sawing to puff on his joint. “I should have been what I was destined to be. I should be what I am,” and on. But he built the house perfectly, i.e., precisely as instructed, an unprecedented occurrence for Kweku in Ghana. He had never hired a Ghanaian to do anything (or anything aesthetic) without that Ghanaian reinterpreting his instructions somehow. “No starch on my shirts, please,” and the launderer would starch them, insisting, unrepentant, “It’s better this way.” Or “paint the doors white,” and Kofi painted them blue. “Sa, is nice, oh, too nice,” with the indefatigable smile. Mr. Lamptey made no changes, mounted no objections, offered no suggestions, cut no corners whatsoever.

Until his last week of work.

• • •

The issue was the landscaping, such as it was, there being less than a quarter-acre of land left to “scape.” Most of the plot had been cleared for the house, with a remnant patch of jungle off the sunroom.

Mr. Lamptey considered the stick figures. “Hmm. What kind of trees are these?”

“Never mind that,” Kweku muttered, considering the size of the plot. The pool would have to be smaller than he’d drawn it at the hospital, but there were four fewer swimmers to use it, so fair enough. They’d just need to chop down the mango, or uproot it. The thing was looming verdant in the middle of the view.

Mr. Lamptey laughed uproariously. He would do nothing of the sort. Had the mango ever harmed them, done them wrong in any way? To kill it would be like slitting his grandmother’s throat. “A bit rich,” Kweku said.

“I will not harm this tree.”

“For chrissake, you’re a carpenter. You work with harmed trees—”

“Jesus was a carpenter—”

“That’s quite beside the point.”

“You’re the one who brought up Christ—”

“For fuck’s sake, man, enough! Enough!”

Mr. Lamptey stared at Kweku, surprised by the outburst. Kweku stared back at him, surprised by himself. But determined, he imagined, to assert some authority. In fact, he felt his vision slipping slowly from his grasp. No children sleeping peacefully, no Fola swimming glistening, and if the mango remained standing, no beach of bleached white. The tree had to go. “I’ll just hire someone else.”

“You will not.” Mr. Lamptey sat, saying no more.

Cross-legged and cloth-clad at the base of the mango for three days, two nights, smoking hash, keeping guard, rising at dawn for the yoga, otherwise immobile, and smug, Kofi smuggling him coconuts for water. He didn’t eat anything for the duration of the sit-in but the mangoes that dropped to his side, perfectly ripe, and the soft wet white meat of the young hard green coconuts.

Scooping out the jellied flesh with relish.

• • •

“You can’t sit here forever,” Kweku sneered through clenched teeth, coming to stand in front of Lamptey on the second day of protest. Mr. Lamptey puffed his joint, closed his eyes, saying nothing. Kweku sucked his teeth, storming off. On the third day he threatened to call the police to have the carpenter removed from the property for trespassing. But looking at the man — seventy-two now, half-naked, wearing a necklace of red string with a bell on it — he couldn’t. He imagined his cameraman filming the scene: Ghanaian sadhu dragged off by armed, bribe-fattened cops while grim Landowner smiles from the mouth of his tent. “This is silly,” he said finally, unzipping his door, suddenly missing the sound of the hammer and saw. The Master Wing had been suitable for occupation for months, but he preferred Olu’s tent, the plastic skylight. “You’re almost done, man. Let’s just finish what we started.”

“With the tree,” said Mr. Lamptey.

“Come on then.”

• • •

Mr. Lamptey found a stick, began drawing in earth.

His vision for the view from the sunroom.

A garden.

Everything lush, soft, too verdant, nothing orderly or sterile, jagged love grass and fan palms the size of a child and scattered-around banana plants like palm trees without trunks and hibiscus on bushes and gloriosa in flames and those magenta-pink blossoms (Kweku can never remember their names) flowering wildly on crawlers overgrowing the gate. A commotion of color. Rebel uprising of green. “And a fountain here,” Mr. Lamptey concluded.

“Whatever for?”

Some long, baffling answer about the layout of a sacred space, the necessity of water, appropriate proportions, blue, green. Kweku followed none of it. He rubbed his brow, sighing, “Bah! I can’t maintain this.”

“I can and I will.”

“You’re a carpenter. Not a gardener.”

“I’m an artist. Like you—”

“Never mind. Plant your garden—”

“Your garden.”

“Whichever.”

Mr. Lamptey waited for Kweku to continue. Kweku looked away, kicked a rock, a white pebble. When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was walking, a touch naughty, in the direction of the half-finished sunroom. Kweku watched, thinking they should scrap the big windows (keep down the cost of A/C, what was the point with no pool). He pulled out the blueprint and looked at it, rueful.

Stick figures on napkin.

One: waving, dripping wet.

• • •

And the other: every Monday coming to sit in this little sunroom, scanning the Graphic until distracted, somehow happening to glance up, always shocked to find a human being standing in his garden, always forgetting that it’s Monday, Mulching Monday, spilling coffee. Then their dance: the man’s eyes on him waiting for acknowledgment while he dabs at his pants leg, the petulant delay, until he gives up and looks up, sighs, forces a smile. Little wave of the napkin, in salutation and defeat.

There in his swami clothes and gardening gloves is Mr. Lamptey.

Smiling, clipping hedges, waving back.

7

But to look at the mango in the middle of the garden now, gravid, in bloom, bushy head held up high, he cannot for the life of him imagine it gone — though he might have said the same of himself years ago. Then, when he held Sadie in the bowl of his fingertips, her whole being trembling with the effort to be, he’d imagined himself irremovable, a fixture in the landscape. Intrinsic to the picture. The center, somehow. Then, for the life of him, he couldn’t have conceived of it, his absence from the life he was fighting to save. Of the landscape without him. An alternative view. Pulled up by his roots and replaced by a hole.

Still, he thinks of it now and it startles him, as earlier, when Taiwo dissolved silently outside the Living Wing door: with a pang, significantly sharper, so that he starts to fall forward and clutches the edge of the doorframe for balance. He shakes his head lightly, to knock the thought loose, but though it rocks back and forth, it doesn’t tumble, doesn’t fall. So he searches for another thought to bowl this one over, something duller, with more weight than his absence. He thinks:

what are you doing out here staring at a garden?

It works. The spell breaks. The pang ebbs. He snaps back. Short of breath. “Grab a hold of yourself,” he mumbles aloud, partly coughing, partly chuckling to ensure that his cameraman knows that he, too, finds these musings absurd, that he’s not going crazy, was just lost in thought; indeed men lose their way in their thoughts all the time. Some oxygen is all, merry jaunt in the blossoms, make peace with the mango, smell roses, all that. He pushes the sliding door the rest of the way open.

He steps off the ledge to the garden and gasps.

• • •

Dewdrops on grass.

On the soles of his feet:

sudden, wet, unexpected, so shocking they hurt.

Only now does he notice that he’s not wearing slippers, with the sting of the cool on his bare-bottomed feet. How long has it been since he’s gone outside barefoot, gone anywhere barefoot, felt wet on his feet? Can’t recall. (Decades prior, in the darkness before daybreak with the ocean beside, moon above, long ago.) He jerks himself back as if jumping off coals, fully conscious. Thinks: where are my slippers?

8

For many years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, she’ll picture him here in the garden like this, with his feet in the grass and the dew on his feet, and she’ll ask herself: where were his slippers? It is the least of all questions unasked and unanswered, the least of what’s wrong with the picture — man down, perhaps poisoned by an illiterate (Olu’s secret belief) or just dead in the tradition of people who just die (Mom’s) or punished by God for his various sins (Sadie’s) or exhausted by them (Kehinde’s) — but Taiwo will ask. Where were his slippers? When she thinks of her father, when she lets the thought form or it slips in disguised through a crack in the wall she and Kehinde erected those first lonely midnights in Lagos.

• • •

It was a game in the beginning, as everything became there, a game between the two of them to keep them both sane somehow: never being allowed to say “father” or “dad” and having to pay if you slipped, a penalty the other twin chose (usually sneaking into the kitchen to steal milk biscuits for the both of them, three-packs wrapped in plastic, perfect for hiding for later use).

That was how they built the base.

Next they rewrote the stories.

This was a game they played mostly at night in that sticky second bedroom with the overhead fan and two creaky twin beds, the only room in the house that wasn’t furnished with a working A/C. Taiwo would go first, telling some story from Boston, like the time he woke them up in the middle of the night and made them put on their snowsuits and piled them in the Volvo and drove them to Lars Andersen Park.

It was two in the morning and the snow had just fallen, the whole vista white, a dog barking somewhere. He pulled five plastic sleds from the trunk of the car while they gawked at him, wide-eyed, Mom sucking her teeth. “Kweku, no,” she hissed softly, just now cottoning on, clapping her fingers together. Woolen mittens. “We’ll get arrested.”

Sadie wasn’t born yet.

The snow fresh and perfect.

The park dark and empty.

Stars winked their consent.

They didn’t get arrested. They sledded until dawn, even Mom, whispering, laughing, delirious with joy, with the mischief of it, ashy-skinned, an improbable picture: an African family playing alone in the snow.

But the way she retold it, their father wasn’t in it. It was Mom’s plan, night-sledding; there were four sleds, not five. Then Kehinde would tell one. And so on and so forth, short stories of snow, until they both fell asleep. Until the man was erased — from their stories and so their childhoods (which only existed as stories, Taiwo knew this, still knows). Not dead. Never dead. They never wished the man dead or pretended he was dead. Just deleted, walled off. Denied existence, present only in absence and silence. Reduced to a notion. No more than a thought. And a thought, which in itself was an arrangement of words, i.e., words they didn’t use — so, a thought they didn’t think.

• • •

Time passed and this wall grew higher.

Time passed and this wall grew weak.

Until, without warning, a thought. Where were his slippers? And again a week later. The crack in the wall. It was the one thing they forgot to erase from their stories, the disease-carrying mosquito on the evacuation plane: not a moment or a memory, a remembered detail in an anecdote, but a detail in every anecdote, omnipresent, the ground. So they missed them, didn’t delete them, let them stay where they were, where they’ve remained, present, latent, fomenting the past.

The slippers.

Battered slip-ons, brown, worn to the soles. Like leather pets with separation issues, loyal, his dogs. And his religion, what he believed in, the very basis of his morality: mash-up cosmopolitan asceticism, ritual, clean lines. The slipper. So simple in composition, so silent on wood, bringing clean, peace and quiet to God’s people the world over, every class and every culture, affordable for all, a unique form of protection against the dangers of home, e.g., splinters and bacteria and harm caused to wood, i.e., hand-scraped oak floorboards, fifty dollars per square foot. He’d visit other houses and take notice first and foremost of whether the family “practiced” slippers, all other judgments from there. And if anyone came to visit — God forbid, Taiwo’s friends, the teeming hordes of high-pitched classmates who had crushes on her twin — there he’d be, at the ready, in the doorway, “Do come in!” Gesturing grandly to the basket that he kept by the door.

Like a bin of rental ice skates.

Every style of slipper. Thick quilted-cotton slippers from fancy hotels, brilliant white with padded insoles and beige rubber treads; shiny polyester slippers bought in Chinatown in bulk, electric blue and hot pink, embroidered dragons on the toes; stiff, Flintstones-looking flip-flops from the airport in Ghana (whence the crazy MC Hammer pants in gye nyame print). Kehinde’s blushing stalkers almost always chose the dragons, glancing encouragingly at one another as they kicked off their Keds, pledging silent solidarity as they bravely marched in to this strange new world smelling of ginger and oil.

“Omigod, Taiwo, your dad’s so adorable!” one would giggle, reaching into her uppermost register for adorable.

“Omigod, Taylor, you’re so artificial,” she’d be mocking when Kehinde appeared at her back. Materializing out of nowhere as only he could, without sound, entering the foyer in Moroccan babouches.

“Hello,” he would greet them, sounding shy, speaking quietly. Not really shy, Taiwo knew. Not really interested was all.

Hi was a three-syllable word in their mouths. Hi-i-i. As they caught sight of Kehinde, and blushed. Taiwo would observe this in Westin Hotel slippers. Four blond ponytails bowed in reverence before her brother’s babouches. Jealousy and bemusement would tangle, a knot. When the girls looked up Kehinde was gone.

Ninja slippers.

• • •

A religion or a fetish, like a form of podophilia — or so it suddenly seemed to Taiwo, encountering the word in eighth-grade Classics. Rather, auto-podophilia. She wrote this neatly in her notebook, shading the o’s in with her pencil while someone asked, “Then what’s a pedophile?”

The teacher’s nervous laughter was a distant sound in Taiwo’s head, the shading of the o’s her more immediate concern. She was thinking of her father and the lavish care he gave his feet: the salt scrubs and the peppermint oils and the vitamin E before bed. Love of feet. But later they’ll return to her, this laughter and its nervousness, the tension in the teacher’s face, the classroom air, the titters, every movement, sound, and image, every instant of that moment, plain: precisely the kind of moment one never knows for what it is.

An end.

A warning shot.

A boundary mark. Between “the way things were” and “when everything changed,” a moment within which one notices nothing, about which one remembers all. Which is the point. The difference between Taiwo’s life at twelve, before everything changed, and the life that came next is this: not noticing. Not having to notice, not knowing to notice. That she never looked out. Not “innocent” as such — she’s never thought herself innocent, not as Kehinde was innocent, of judgment, distrust — but insular, contented in the world in her head, a whole life taking rise from her dreams, her own thoughts.

She was thinking just then of her father’s “love of feet,” of his love of his feet, when someone asked about pedophiles and, half paying attention, she wrote the word down. A person who loves children. Who loves his own children.

Pedophile.

Auto-pedophile.

Auto-podophile.

And then. That familiar tingling in the pit of her stomach, the butterflies she felt when she knew she was right. Excitement and comfort and satisfaction mixed together with a touch of something heavier, more sinister: relief. Relief that she knew, that she’d gotten it right, tinged with terror at what might happen were she one day to be wrong. This is what she remembers most clearly ever after and laughs at most cruelly, her self-satisfaction that day: that she’d answered correctly, as she might have at a spelling bee, the question of who was her father?

One who loved his own feet and who loved his own children.

Misunderstanding the Greek phile, the connotation of “love.” And misunderstanding her father, who would abandon his children and who hated his feet, as she discovered that night.

• • •

Rather, morning.

Four A.M., the house frozen in silence, Taiwo staring at the ceiling, her hands on her ribs. Suffering “middle insomnia,” as yet undiagnosed. She got up and went to the kitchen.

• • •

Generally, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak in to Kehinde through the little trap door at the back of her closet. There she’d stand silently at the foot of his bed looking down at his face, watercolored by moon, and marvel how serious he looked fast asleep; he could only look serious, only frowned, when he slept. Awake, he looked like Kehinde. Like her, but with a secret, his gold-brown eyes hiding a smile from his lips. She’d smile at his frown until he, without waking, smiled back at her, eyes closed, a smile in his sleep. Just the one. A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer, his eyelids still restive with Technicolor dreams. Then she’d blow him a kiss and return through the closet to her bed, where she always fell promptly asleep.

Instead, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen, one of several secret passageways lacing that house. This was the Colonial she hated, in Brookline, which the man had bought proudly after Sadie was born (and though Mom had wanted a townhouse, South End, pregentrification; better value for money, she’d said, and was right). It was perfectly lovely. Red brick with black shutters, white trim, gable roof, ample yard in the back. But comparing it to the massive Tudor mansions of their neighbors, Taiwo found the house lacking. Anemic somehow. (She’d laugh to herself that first evening in Lagos, in the car passing streets that made Brookline look broke.)

She went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard.

Then opened another.

Then reopened the first.

Olu had just started at Milton Academy and was insistent upon eating what prep school kids ate. The cupboards were now stocked with mysteriously named products like Mi-Del Organic Lemon Snaps. She closed the cupboard. Opened the fridge.

There was a remnant Capri Sun behind the Apple & Eve apple juice. She stabbed in the straw, drank the juice in one sip. Then threw out the carton and glanced out the window, clamping her hand against her mouth to stop the scream.

There, gazing back at her, alarming in moonlight, was the statue of the mother with the hand-carved stone twins. It looked like a child between the silhouetted fir trees, a four-foot-tall alien-child, glowing pale gray. She hated that thing. They all hated that thing. Even Mom sort of secretly hated that thing. She’d unwrapped it on Christmas, said, “I love it, Kweku! Thank you,” and stood it after dinner by itself in the snow.

Taiwo laughed softly, her heart pounding loudly. She decided she should check all the locks on the doors. Just in case some little alien-child was roaming around Brookline trolling for lemon snaps. The back door was locked. She tiptoed through the dining room, which no one ever dined in, to the cold, empty foyer to check the front door. She almost didn’t notice the figure huddled in the sitting room, which no one ever sat in (except important, slippered guests), to the left, off the foyer through the grand Moorish arch with the two sets of couches and red Turkmen rug.

Almost.

She was slipping through the darkness to the doorway when she turned her head a half-inch to the left and there he was.

• • •

Slumped on the couch, his feet propped on a footrest, his head tipped down, leaden, his lips hanging slack. He was still in blue scrubs, lightly spattered with red, as if he’d left the OR and gone straight to the car. His white coat was pooled on the floor where he’d dropped it. Both slippers had slipped from his feet to the rug. The moon from the window behind him fell brightly on the bottle of liquor still clutched in his palm.

She froze in the foyer. Her heart resumed pounding. She glanced at the stairs, trying to think, walk or run? She knew she’d get in trouble if he woke up and saw her, not for sneaking, for not sleeping, but for seeing him like this. Collapsed on the couch with his mouth hanging open, his coat on the floor, his head slumped to his chest. She’d never seen her father so—loose. Without tension. He was always so rigid, so upright, strung taut. Now he looked like a marionette abandoned by its manipulator, puddled in a jumble of wood, limbs and string. She knew he’d be furious to know he’d been seen so. She knew she should tiptoe-sprint back up the stairs.

But couldn’t. Or didn’t want to. She wanted to disturb him. She wanted to revive him, make him wake up, sit up. So, she went and stood in front of him as if he were Kehinde, at the edge of the footstool in front of his feet, then recoiled, hand to mouth again to keep herself from crying out with shock at all the bruises on the bottom of his feet.

• • •

How she’d never seen them was beyond her, is beyond her now, to think she’d only ever seen the one side of his feet, the smooth. The soles, by sharp contrast, were chafed, calloused, raw, the skin black in some places, puffed up at the toes. It was as if he’d quite literally crossed burning sands barefoot (in fact, had gone shoeless for most of his youth). Taiwo pursed her lips shut to mute her revulsion, but what she felt next had no shape and no sound:

an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if for a moment she’d ceased to exist: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear. In the future, in adulthood, when she feels this same airlessness, when she feels her very being rushing out of her like breath, she’ll long to touch and be touched, to make contact (and will, with an assortment of consequences). This longing, like most things, was innocent at birth, taking root in her hands and her fluttering heart: the urge to touch, to kiss his feet, to kiss-and-make-them better. Put her father back together. But she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the answer. She didn’t know this father. She knelt. Began to cry.

She was frightened for reasons she couldn’t explain, by a sense beyond reason but clear all the same: that something was about to go horribly wrong if it hadn’t already, that something had changed. Most of this was her inexplicably keen intuition (along with middle insomnia, undiagnosed at age twelve). But it came without thought, a feeling completely without narrative. An opening up.

Something had opened somewhere.

The fact of her father here slumped in the moonlight meant something was possible that she hadn’t perceived: that he was vulnerable. And that if he was — their solid wooden father — then that she was, they all were, and worse, might not know. He had hidden the soles of his feet her whole life, for twelve years; he could hide (anyone could hide) anything else. And finally, that he’d tried, that he had a thing to hide, meant her father felt shame. Which was unbearable somehow.

She rested her head on the stool by his feet. Whispered, “Daddy,” touched him lightly. He continued to snore. “Wake up,” she persisted. “Wake up.” But he didn’t. She noticed the slippers by her knees on the rug.

As gently as possible and as silently as she could, she slipped one of the slippers onto one of his feet. It dangled like a shoe on a shoe tree. Then the other. At the very least the bruises were hidden from view.

“No,” he said, barely.

Taiwo leapt up in panic, taking a single bound back from the window and moon into the depth of the dark where, concealed by the shadow, she closed her eyes, waiting for yelling. It didn’t come. He made another noise, a wet, fast-asleep noise, murmured “no” again, softly, then silence. Then snoring. She opened her eyes and stepped forward, still fearful. His head was now upright. He was talking in his sleep.

“It was too late,” he said, just as perfectly clearly as if he knew she was standing there watching him speak. But didn’t smile in his sleep as Kehinde would have at this juncture. His head slumped back over.

She ran for the stairs.

• • •

For all the years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, when the thought slips in slyly through that crack in the wall — and the picture of him dead in a garden slips with it, his soles purpled, naked, for anyone to see — she’ll ask herself hopelessly, “Where were his slippers?” and as she did when she was twelve, she’ll start to cry.

9

Where are his slippers?

In the bedroom.

He considers.

His second wife Ama is asleep in that room, plum-brown lips slipped apart, the plump inside-pink showing, and he doesn’t want to wake her. A wonder the change.

Quite apart from the performances for himself and his cameraman, there is this new and genuine desire to accommodate his wife. It’s as if he’s a different (kinder) man in this marriage, which that Other Woman would argue is not his second but his third. That Other Woman is lying and the both of them know it: they were never close to married (though she’d lived in his house. He’d been desperate for warmth, for the weight of a body, the smell of perfume, even cheap Jean Naté. The thing had gone bust when she’d broken her promise to leave the apartment that morning in May, so as not to see Olu, who’d come for his birthday at last and who left at the first sight of June). With Ama, whom he married in a simple village ceremony, her incredulous extended-family members watching, mouths agape, he is gentle in a way that he wasn’t with Fola. Not that he was brutish with Fola. But this is different.

For instance.

If he raises his voice and Ama flinches, he stops shouting. Without pause. Like a light switch. She flinches, he stops. Or if she passes by his study door and coughs, he looks up; no matter what he’s doing, what he’s reading, Ama coughs, he stops. His children used to do the same, intentionally, just to test him, to weigh his devotion to his profession against his devotion to them. By then he’d moved the sextet to that massive house in Brookline, a veritable palace, although his study door, an original, didn’t close. They’d loiter in the hall outside the half-open door, giggling softly, whispering loudly to attract his attention, then peer in to see if he’d look up from reading his peer-reviewed journal, which he wouldn’t, to teach them. It was a logically flawed experiment. He’d have told them if they’d asked. His devotion to his profession kept a roof over their heads. It wasn’t comparative, a contest, either/or, job v. family. That was specious American logic, dramatic, “married to a job.” How? The hours he worked were an expression of his affection, in direct proportion to his commitment to keeping them well: well educated, well traveled, well regarded by other adults. Well fed. What he wanted, and what he wasn’t, as a child.

When Ama loiters noisily — and she is testing him also, Kweku knows — he marks his sentence and lowers his book. He gestures that she enter and asks if she’s all right. She always says yes. She is always all right. And if they’re riding in the Land Cruiser and she shivers even a little, he orders Kofi, who’s started driving, to turn off the A/C (though he can’t stand the humidity, never could, even in the village; they used to mock him, call him obroni, albeit for other reasons, too). And if he’s watching CNN when she comes padding into the Living Wing in pink furry slippers, pink sponge rollers in her hair, he switches the channel instantly to the mind-numbing cacophony of the Nollywood movies that he hates and she loves.

And so forth: attends church (though he can’t stand the hoopla), buys scented Fa soap (though he can’t stand the smell), instructs Kofi to make the stew to her exact specifications (though he can’t stand the heat, weeps to eat it that hot). He wants her to be satisfied. He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.

She is like no woman he’s known.

• • •

Or like no woman he’s loved.

He isn’t sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he’s loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He’d never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.

They were dreamer-women.

Very dangerous women.

Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, “brutal, senseless,” etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.

So, insatiable women.

Un-pleasable women.

Who wanted above all things what could not be had. Not what they could not have — no such thing for such women — but what wasn’t there to be had in the first place. And worst: who looked at him and saw what he might yet become. More beautiful than he believes he could possibly be.

• • •

Ama doesn’t have that problem.

Or he doesn’t have that problem with Ama.

First of all, she isn’t as smart as the others. Which isn’t to say that she’s stupid. Far from. He knows that people talk, that people call the girl “simple,” and he knows it’s cliché, surgeon shacks up with nurse. But he also knows now that his wife is a genius, of a completely different sort than her predecessors were. She has her own form of genius, a sort of animal genius, the animal’s unwavering devotion to getting what it wants. To getting what it needs, without disrupting the environment. Without tearing down the jungle. Without causing itself harm. He wouldn’t have guessed this a talent at all, but for those smarter women’s gifts of self-flogging, self-doubt.

Ama doesn’t hurt herself. It doesn’t occur to her. To question herself. To exact from her psyche some small payment of sorrow for all worldly pleasure, though the world demands none. But she isn’t a thinker. Isn’t incessantly thinking—about what could be better, about what to do next, about what she’s done wrong, about who may have wronged her, about what he is thinking or feeling but not saying — so her thoughts don’t perpetually bump into his, causing all kinds of friction and firestorms, explosions, inadvertently, collisions here and there around the house. Her thoughts are not dangerous substances. The thoughts of the dreamers were landmines, free radicals. With them breakfast chat could devolve into war. Ama isn’t a fighter. She comes to breakfast without weapons and to bed in the evening undressed and unarmed. She has no vested interest in changing his mind. Her natural state is contented, not curious. And so second of all, she isn’t unhappy.

This was a complete revelation.

• • •

To live in a house with a woman who is happy, who is consistently happy, in her resting state — happy? And who is happy with him, not as an event or a reaction, not in response to one thing that he did and must keep doing if he wants her to remain happy, churning the crank, ever winding the music box, dance, monkey, dance! — but whom he makes happy, has made happy, and who’s miraculously stayed happy? Who has the capacity to stay happy, with him, over time?

Never.

He didn’t know this was humanly possible, or womanly possible, until fifty-three years old, when he packed up his tent and decamped to the Master Wing but finding it too quiet one day considered his nurse, and the rise of her buttocks, and the chime of her laugh, and the odd way she tittered and blushed when he approached, and asked if she might like to join him for dinner?

This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and this symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama — although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius — because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient. To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.

This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

• • •

He is wrong.

In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit — and so pacing.

He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.

Press a towel to it.

Hold.

But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.

With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”

Which he’d wipe away, thinking it’s the least I can do.

For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.

Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.

• • •

In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when he wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses — of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of there, North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of here, hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past — wouldn’t otherwise touch but for Ama.

A bridge.

Loyal and simple and supple young Ama who came from Kokrobité still stinking of salt (and of palm oil, Pink Oil, evaporated Carnation) to sleep by his side in suburban Accra. Ama, whose sweat and whose snores when she’s sleeping close miles of sorrow and ocean and sky, whose soft body is a bridge on which he walks between worlds.

The very bridge he’d been looking for, for thirty-one years.

• • •

He thought when he left that he knew how to build one: by returning home triumphant with a degree and a son, laying the American-born baby before the Ghana-bound grandma like a wreath at a shrine, “See, I told you I’d return.” And with a boy-child on top of it, a luckier-Moses. A father and a doctor. As promised. A success. He imagined this moment every day in Pennsylvania, how his cameraman would film it, panning up to her face. Cue strings. Tears in mother’s eyes. Wonder, joy, amazement. The awe of the siblings. The jubilation. Cue drums. Then the dancing and feasting, fish grilled, a goat slaughtered, red sparks from the fire leaping for joy in the sky, a black sky thick with star, the ocean roaring contentedly. The reunion a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

This is how he planned it.

But this isn’t how it happened.

By the time he returned she was gone.

10

Heartbreaking winter, 1975.

A one-bedroom hovel.

A wife of one year.

Who was sitting at a table in the “kitchen,” i.e., a corner where a stove and sink were shoved against a wall with a tub. He entered in an overcoat. He hated this particular overcoat. A bulk of dull beige from the Goodwill downtown. She’d insisted that he buy it and now demanded that he wear it. It was the warmest thing he owned, but it made him look poor.

He came into the apartment, looking poor. She looked gorgeous. She always looked gorgeous, even angry, to him. She wore bell-bottom jeans and a wraparound sweater, both care of the Goodwill, a scarf in her hair.

No, not a scarf, he saw, looking more closely. A gold-flecked asooke, the Nigerian cloth. Nigerians were far more artful than Ghanaians with their head wraps. “More flamboyant, more ostentatious,” they Ghanaians liked to chide. But at that moment he saw otherwise: more insistent upon beauty. At all times, in all things, insistent upon flair. Even here, in this hovel, wearing secondhand clothing, at a table by a tub, she insisted on flair. Had found this gold cloth, no doubt expensive, from her father, to sort of wind around her Afro puff, true to her name. “Wealth confers my crown.” Folasadé. She looked gorgeous.

He came into the apartment and froze at the door.

Her hands were folded neatly on the red plastic tablecloth, the kind that you buy for a picnic, then bin. They’d snuck it home, embarrassed, from his orientation barbecue. She thought it cheered things up a bit. Flowers, too. Of course. Everything looked as it always looked. The bed was made. The baby was sleeping. And breathing, he checked quickly.

Because something was wrong.

He stopped at the door knowing something was wrong.

• • •

He didn’t see the letter lying flat on the table. Only Fola as she turned her head, neck taut with fear. She didn’t speak. He didn’t move. His cameraman slipped in the window. In this scene: a Young Man receives Horrible News. He set down his bag now. To free both his hands up. For whatever he might have do with them, given whatever she had to say.

She said, “Your mother is ill, love.” She held up the letter. “Your cousin got our address from the college and wrote.”

These were too many words to make sense of at once. Mother. Ill. Cousin. Address. College. And wrote. Which of his cousins even knew how to write? This mean, specious question somehow washed to shore first. “My cousins are illiterates! They know nothing!” he bellowed, not knowing why he was shouting, or at Fola. “It’s a lie!”

She just watched him, with that expression, with her brows knit together and her mouth folded over, an upside-down smile. Only yesterday he’d noticed that she made this face with Olu, too, whenever he was wailing to communicate complaint. The brows knit together, the head slightly sideways. “Okunrin mi,” she’d say. My son. “I know, I know, I know. It hurts.”

And she did. In the literal sense could “feel others’ pain.” A proper empath, a thing he hadn’t believed existed when they met. His questions were endless. Where in her body did she feel it? How did she know it was his pain, not hers? (In her chest, on the left, a purely physical sensation, of foreign origin, now familiar, proper empathy.) That face.

“Darling,” she said.

“It’s a lie,” he repeated. But quietly. And was glad now to find his hands free. He grabbed his head, spinning, his gloves to his forehead, a futile attempt, keep the brain in one piece. “She’s never been ill for a day in her life. How? What are they saying?” He went to her side.

She handed him the letter, touching his free hand with hers. It was that cheap air mail paper no one uses anymore, flimsy pastel-blue sheets that, folded up, became envelopes.

All caps, slanting upward.

Unsteady black pen.

The letter didn’t say that his mother was ill. It said she was dying and would be dead in a month. It was two weeks old yesterday. He dropped it to the table. His hands began to tremble (other parts of him, too). Fola jumped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. For the first time since he bought it, he loved this beige coat. Its thickness put some distance between her chest and his trembling, his wife and his weakness, his quivering limbs. (And his cameraman in position across the room by the window couldn’t shoot the crumbling hero for his dull protective coat.)

“We’ll go to Ghana,” she said.

“With what money?” he mumbled. “We don’t have the money.”

“We’ll ask for it—”

“No.” And carried on, desperate, “They’re overreacting… it’s an infection, not cancer… she’s not even fifty. She’ll be better by New Year… I’ll have the money by New Year…”

“We’ll ask for it, Kweku. We have to.”

They did.

• • •

Rather she did: that day spent the last of her cash on a ticket to Lagos to visit a louse, younger half-brother Femi, whose prostitute mother had taken her dead lover’s money and run.

Then Ghana, and the smell of Ghana, a contradiction, a cracked clay pot: the smell of dryness, wetness, both, the damp of earth and dry of dust. The airport. Bodies pushing, pulling, shouting, begging, touching, breathing. He’d forgotten the bodies. The proximity of bodies. In America the bodies were distant. The warmth of it. Pushing through the jostling throng, warm bodies, clutching Fola’s arm while Fola clutched the baby, leading his squadron on to the taxi rank. “Your purse!” he called over his shoulder. “Be careful! This is Ghana.”

“It is?!”

But when he looked she was laughing. “My friend, I’m from Lagos. Never mind your small Ghana.” She winked. “I’m okay. We’re okay.”

And then home.

• • •

They rode into the village in a ramshackle taxi, a red and yellow jalopy expelling black smoke, bumping awkwardly up the dark red dirt road, no one speaking, even Olu sitting silently, as if in his baby-heart he knew. This wasn’t how he’d envisioned the triumphant return, political hysteria on the radio sans John Williams strings, but this driver was the only one working the rank who both accepted his price and knew the way to his town.

• • •

An hour outside of the city: the ocean.

Unannounced, without fanfare.

Just suddenly there.

From town they’d braved the then-unpaved road to the junction, where they’d turned up the dry empty hill to Kokrobité. The hill brought them down to the coast, blocked from view by the mounds of grass lining the left of the road. Then, abruptly, a clearing: cowed grass lying low before sand, sea, sky, endless. The dramatic reveal. The thing that was there all along, less surprising than startling, the scope, how it changed things. The air.

It was seven in the morning, he could tell without checking, by the men seated tugging in nets from the night: at least ten of them, eleven, in a vertical line along the end of a rope that stretched far out to sea. Heave-ho. Forward, backward, a perfected synchronization, hauling, all, with one movement like rowers on sand in once-bright colored T-shirts (much like the T-shirts sold at Goodwill), all the palm trees leaning with them. Fronds fluttering in the breeze.

He must have made some sound as he stared out the window because Fola laid a hand very lightly on his. As she did. Never taking, never “holding” his hand, just lightly laying hers on top. A choice. To hold or be held. He held her hand absently, not turning from the window. Unable to, glued there, transfixed by the view, with the first few tears forming now, loosely, like cumulus, clouding his eyes, too unripe yet to fall. The effect was to soften the edges, a filter, the beach sparkling gray in celestially blurred light, like a scene from those soaps all the nurses loved watching: irresistibly gripping if you only knew the plot. (And he did. Basic storyline. Dancing, sap, grandmas.) He stared like the nurses, through unfalling tears.

Why had he hated this view? Of this beach, of the backs of these fishermen, glistening brown, of the long wooden boats, evangelical names in bright tricolor paint on their splintering sides, Black Star Jesus, Jah Reign, Christ the Fisher of Men, in the red, yellow, green of the national flag and the national spirit of open-source ethos, this mixing of Anglican, Rastafarian, Ghanaian? What was there to hate in this? There was only openness. As far as he could see. A cheerful openness. An innocence. An innocent beach on the road to Kokrobité at seven A.M., November 1975, little country lurching, cheerful, unaware, to revolution. Little taxi lurching, blasting revolution, to grief.

• • •

And then her.

Not a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

No jubilation, no drumming, no goats, and no fish.

• • •

Fola stayed waiting with his half-sisters Shormeh and Naa, their eyes filed with old hate and new grief. A crowd had gathered excitedly as they’d alighted the taxi and lingered now watching as he entered the hut. No one needed details (irresistibly gripping). His cameraman, among, didn’t follow him in.

He ducked as he entered, forgetting his height. Or its size, this small shanty, his childhood home. He carried his son, half asleep, six months old then, the American-born boy-child, to her.

The one bed.

She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, with the mats on the floor, the same mats he remembered. Dark, and so cool with the dome overhead. It was a well-structured hut, however minimal. Rounded clay walls with the massive thatch roof sixteen feet at its peak, a triangular dome. His father had built it. An artist, they told him, a Fante, a wanderer, a “genius like him.” (He’d been jailed after punching a drunk English sergeant who’d hassled his wife, jailed, then publicly flogged. There by the tree in the middle of the “compound,” this cluster of huts. Stripped to shorts at midday. “He left,” said the villagers simply. Thereafter. Just packed up his things, walked away, as he’d come. Others, now dead, claim he walked into the ocean in a sparkling white bubu, to his waist, then his head, without stopping. Further, forward, under, into the ocean. Like Jesus. With weights. Under moon. Into black.)

His brother looked surprised as he entered but said nothing. “Leave me,” he said to his brother. His brother left.

• • •

She could have been sleeping from the way she was lying there. He’d heard families say this and chuckled before. “We thought she was napping,” of beloved old Grandma, rushed putrefied to hospital days after death. Idiots, he’d think. Now he understood the confusion. She looked like she was sleeping. But was making no noise. Wasn’t dreaming of the places that she’d never been to.

She was dead, in the village, the only place she’d ever go.

His heart broke in one place. The first break. He didn’t feel it. Olu giggled, soft, the only sound in the room. Kweku looked at Olu, suddenly remembering that he was holding him. Olu looked, awestruck, at the butterfly on her toe.

Black and blue (swordtail), just coming to rest, an almost neon shade of turquoise, black markings, white dots. It fluttered around his mother’s foot, a lazy lap, then lifted off, flapping blithely toward the triangular dome and out the little window. Gone.

“This is your grandmother.” Changed the tense. “Was.” Olu looked at Kweku, not recognizing the voice. And he at his mother. “I told you,” he mustered. “I told you I’d return—” but couldn’t manage the rest.

So he sat on the floor, on a raffia mat. In the heat and the smell of it, the stench of new death. He rubbed Olu’s back until the child fell asleep (fifteen minutes, not more, such a well-behaved boy). Then stayed in semidarkness, who knows for how long, maybe hours, with the sunlight changing, shifting, on the wall.

He didn’t think what he thought he’d think. That he shouldn’t have left. Without saying good-bye. That the last time he saw her — when they’d had that horrid argument about whether he should accept the full scholarship or not, when she’d said that he was needed here, not “Pencil-wherever”—he shouldn’t have said what he said.

That she was “jealous.”

Of course she was jealous. She was thirty-eight years old. She had never left Ghana. Her youngest daughter was dead. Her genius-husband had absconded with the tide in the moonlight (or abandoned her, more likely, unable to face her for shame). Now here was her son — her genius-son, sixteen, shoeless — trying to abscond with American missionaries to the president’s alma mater (motto: “if the son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Indeed. And if the son shall win a scholarship?). In her mother-heart she knew.

That he would not “go and come,” that there was nothing to come back to, that he would learn — as she had wanted, a gifted youngster herself, plucked from school at age seven to fetch firewood and water — and leave. As she wanted.

It didn’t need to be said.

• • •

Those thoughts came later. (And for many years after, when he’d try to unsmell the damp stench of new death.) What he thought as he sat was: how different the quiet. It had never been this quiet in this hut, growing up. And that he might have rather liked it if he only could have sat in it, like this, alone and quiet. And that she must have felt the same. This is why she’d made them all wake up so early and leave the hut, all of them, five A.M., out! not for “idle hands” or “early birds,” or whatever else the mission had Ghanaian mothers hawking to their pikin in those days. It was so she could lie on her back on her mattress in silence and solitude, arms at her side. Just looking at the reeds arching in toward the center high above her. Clever structure: on your back it felt huge. Clever lover: hoping, praying, that he’d one day make the widow “wife”—the one with the little black transistor radio that she carried with her everywhere she went like a pet — had designed his mud hut so a girl on his bed would look up and feel distance, expansiveness, height. She’d sent them away so she could: feel some distance. Some quiet. Just lie there. Five, ten minutes max. Soon they’d be back from the well and their washing, six children (then five), two boys, four skinny girls. Soon the whole hut would be full of their motion, then so full of moisture, they’d all go outside.

Now, five A.M., she could lie, still, in silence, the waves nearby making what wasn’t quite noise. Perhaps admiring the genius of her runaway husband? At peace for a moment with the cards she’d been dealt? A woman, born in Gold Coast, in 1941, with the whole world at war with itself. But not here. Here at the edge of the world, the frayed edges. Here frozen in time pounding yam into paste. Fetching firewood and water. Watching boats push off, wistful. Above all things wanting to go.

• • •

Finally, Fola, from outside the hut.

“Darling,” very gently. “Are you in there?”

He wasn’t. He was nowhere, he was missing, he was outside of himself. “I’m here.”

“Is the baby…?”

“The baby’s asleep.”

But he knew what she meant: that it was wrong in some way to have new life so long in the presence of death. He lifted up the baby and handed him out to his mother, leaning in, her head tipped to the side.

“Just another minute.” As if he were in a bathroom.

He stayed until midnight, the tears too unripe.

11

His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom as he loves her most: dreaming, a bridge made of flesh. So he won’t get his slippers. He’ll go make the coffee. It can’t be past four A.M. — what woke him up? — now he doesn’t remember — what day is it? Sunday. Kofi’s day off. No more banging of nails. Just the silence and stillness. Aloneness and quiet. He thinks, I rather like it, this odd sense of pause. Of the morning suspended between darkness and daybreak, and him suspended with it, adrift in the gray. Too late to resume sleeping, too early to get going. On pause for the moment. The coffee, he thinks.

And is turning to go in to decamp to the kitchen when he sees the thing, barely, from the corner of his eye. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to him otherwise, had he not seen, remembered, and thought of her face. Had he continued out of the sunroom through the door into the Dining Wing, through the dining room, to the kitchen, to make mocha and toast. Most likely he’d have noticed the constriction in the chest and the shortness of breath and known instantly: go. Would have tracked down the heparin in the medicine closet — unrushed, hyperfocused — then tracked down a phone. Would have called his friend Benson, another Ghanaian from Hopkins who now runs a high-end private hospital in Accra (and who just yesterday rang and left a very strange voicemail, something about having seen Fola here in Ghana; couldn’t be). Would have gotten hold of Benson, agreed to meet him at the hospital. Would have found his sneakers waiting by the door for his run. Would have tried to think back, as he laced up his laces, to the first of the chest pangs (too beautiful sometimes). Would have glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes. Easy peasy. Would have driven to the hospital, leaving Ama who can’t drive. And so forth.

Would have noticed.

And so known.

And so gone.

But he sees the thing, barely, bright turquoise and black.

• • •

Just coming to rest on a blossom, bright pink. When it comes to him suddenly: the name, by her face.

“Bougainvillaea,” he hears her saying.

“It sounds like a disease. The patient presented with bougainvillaea.”

“You be quiet.” She sucked her teeth.

But when he looked she was laughing. At the sink, hands in blooms, small, magnificent, magenta. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said.

“Yes. Aren’t they?”

“No. You are.”

She laughed again, blushing. “You be quiet,” but quietly. A smile taking shape. The sun from the window behind her a backlight. He thought to go hold her. Beheld her instead.

• • •

Why did I ever leave you? he thinks without warning, and the pang sends him reeling off the ledge to the grass. Once again his bare soles — which for years have known nothing but slipper leather, sock cotton, shower stall — object. The coldness, the wetness, the sharpness of grass blades. He takes these in, trying to unthink it, to breathe. But the words don’t relent, nor the shortness of breath. Just the why did I ever leave you, a song on repeat (with the bridge yet inaudible in the distance, too soon) as he buckles now, gasping, brought low by the pain. “I don’t know,” he says aloud and to no one, but he’s lying. He closes his eyes; in the dark sees her face. Her brows knit together. Her mouth folded over. The voice of a woman. I know, I know, I know.

So it’s come to this, has it? Here barefoot and breathless, alone in his garden, no strength left to shout? Not that it would matter. He is here in the garden; she is there in the bedroom unplugged from the world. The houseboy at home with his sister in Jamestown. The carpenter-cum-gardener-cum-mystic comes tomorrow. Who would hear him shouting? Stray dogs or the beggar. And what would he shout? That it’s finally cracked? No. Somehow he knows that there’s no turning back now.

The last time he felt this was with Kehinde.

12

A hospital again, 1993.

Late afternoon, early autumn.

The lobby.

Fola down the street in her bustling shop, having moved from the stall at the Brigham last year. A natural entrepreneur, a Nigerian’s Nigerian, she’d started her own business when he was in school, peddling flowers on a corner before obtaining a permit for a stand in the hospital (carnations, baby’s breath). When he’d graduated from medical school and moved them to Boston, she’d started all over from the sidewalk again: by the lunch cart (falafel) in the punishing cold, then the lobby of the Brigham, now the stand-alone shop.

Sadie, almost four, in white tights and pink slippers, doing demi-pliés in her class at Paulette’s.

Olu, high school senior and shoo-in at Yale, attempting doggedly to break his own cross-country record.

Taiwo, thirteen, at the Steinway in the den attempting doggedly to play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp while Shoshanna her instructor, a former Israeli soldier, barked instruction over the metronome. “Faster! Da! Fast!”

And Kehinde at the art class Fola insisted he take despite the exorbitant expense at the Museum of Fine Art three short train stops away on the Green Line, up Huntington, where Kweku was to meet him after work.

• • •

Except Kweku never went to work.

He left, calling “Bye!” as he did every morning: in his scrubs and white coat, at a quarter past seven, with Olu waiting for carpool, and the twins eating oatmeal at the breakfast nook table, and Fola braiding Sadie’s hair, and Sadie eating Lucky Charms, and National Public Radio playing loudly as he left. “Bye!” they called back. Three contraltos, one bass, Sadie’s soprano “I love yooou!” just a second delayed, breezing only just barely out the closing front door like a latecomer jumping on an almost-missed train.

He started the Volvo and backed down the driveway. He pushed in the cassette that was waiting in the player. Kind of Blue. He rode slowly down his street listening to Miles. The yellow-orange foliage a feast for the eyes. Pots of gold. In the rearview, a russet brick palace. The grandest thing he’d ever owned, soon to be sold.

• • •

He drove around Jamaica Pond.

He drove under the overpass.

He drove toward their old house on Huntington Ave. He slowed to look out at it. The old house looked back at him. A window cracked, bricks missing, stoop lightly littered. It looked like a face missing teeth and one eye. Mr. Charlie, former owner, would have turned in his grave. Such an attendant to detail. Kweku had liked him so much. American, from the South, with a limp and a drawl. Had lost his wife Pearl over a year before they moved there but still kept her coat on a hook in the hall. He’d given them a 25 percent discount on rent because Fola tended Pearl’s orphaned garden in spring, and because he, Kweku, doled out free medical advice (and free insulin), and because they were “good honest kids.”

Kweku had always greeted him with the Ghanaian Ey Chalé! to which Mr. Charlie always responded, “Tell that story once more ’gain.” (The story: in the forties the officers strewn around Ghana were known as Charlie, all, a suitably generic Caucasian male name. Ghanaian boys would mimic Hey Charlie! in greeting, which in time became Ey Chalé, or so Kweku had heard.) But no matter the man’s insistence, they couldn’t call him by his first name, so well steeped were he and Fola in African gerontocratic mores. Mr. Charlie would hear nothing of sir or Mr. Dyson. (“Mr. Dyson was my daddy, may the bastard rest in peace.”) So “Mr. Charlie.”

Mr. Chalé.

Had driven a bus. Prepared brunch for his sons every Sunday after church, then dispatched them to various DIY projects around the house: rehinging doors, replacing bricks, restoring wood, repainting trim. When he passed (diabetes), the sons inherited the house. The older one said unfortunately the discount was null, effective immediately, given the cost of the funeral next week, to which “Quaker” was invited with “Foola” and the kids. The younger one — the handsome one, his late father’s favorite; a charmer and a drug dealer, unbeknownst to his father — took Kweku to the side at said funeral, a modest funeral, to say in a soft, almost soothing bass murmur, that given their respective lines of work — respectable work, not so different, his and Kweku’s, they both sold “feeling better”—if Kweku could access any meaningful quantities of opiate, a new discount might be arranged.

Now the house was in ruins. A ruin, thought Kweku. Like a temple on a roadside, cracked pillars, heaped trash. Less a lasting commemoration of the efforts of the worshippers than a comment on the uselessness of effort itself. A face missing teeth among similar faces. A falling-apart monument to Charlie’s life’s work: lover, husband, father, bus driver turned homeowner, turned widower, turned statistic (diabetic, black, bested by brunch).

How did we live here? Kweku wondered. All six? And in back, where even sunlight looked dirty somehow? He didn’t know. A car honked. He glanced back. Was blocking traffic. Glanced back at the house, which seemed to say to him: go. He didn’t want to go where he was going, to go forward, but he couldn’t stop moving or stay here or come back. He nodded to the house and pulled out into traffic. In the rearview bricks missing. (He never saw it again.)

• • •

He drove to the Law Offices of Kleinman & Kleinman and parked just a little ways down from the door. It was a free-standing building with a massive front window, the windowsill crowded with overgrown plants. The receptionist, in her sixties, sat facing this window peering idly through the ferns at the road now and then. While still typing. Always typing. She never stopped typing. Her varicosed fingers like robots gone wild.

Kweku had noticed that when he parked outside the window she would peer through the thicket and recognize his car. This gave her just enough lead time to have at the ready that pitying look when he walked through the door. He hated that look. Not the frown-smile of sympathy nor the knit-brow of empathy but the eye-squint of pity. As if by squinting she could make him appear a little less pathetic, soften the edges, blur the details of his face and his fate. Biting her lip as with worry — while still typing. Not that worried.

The pitter-patter rainfall of fingers on keys.

He walked up the sidewalk and entered the building. A bell jingled thinly as he opened the door. “Me again,” he said, as she looked up and squinted.

“You again,” she said with the bitten-lipped smile. “Marty’s waiting to see you.”

Kweku tried to breathe easy. Marty was never in early, liked to make people wait. If he was waiting for Kweku then something was wrong. The cameraman appeared and began setting up his shot. A Well-Respected Doctor receives Horrible News. “All right then.”

“Very well then.”

“So, I’ll just…?”

“Go in, yes.”

“Of course.” Stalling. “Thank you.”

Still typing. “Good luck.”

• • •

Marty didn’t bother with pitying looks. “Listen to me, brother. We fought the good fight.” Frazzled hippie turned attorney, one of the best in Massachusetts, six foot five, massive shoulders, massive belly, massive hair. Had hopped the Green Tortoise to Harvard Law from Humboldt County as the embers of the Movement went from glowing-orange to ashen-gray, etc. A lawyer’s lawyer. Put his feet on the desk. Crossed his hands behind his head, his great shock of silver coils. “You’ve spent hundreds… of thousands… of dollars… trying to fight this. They’re not backing down, man. It’s eating you alive.”

Kweku laughed mirthlessly. Not them, her, the family, but it, nameless, faceless. The monster.

The machine.

• • •

It was what he’d called the hospital when he first got to Hopkins, so awestruck had he been by how well the thing worked. By how shiny, how brilliant, how clean and well ordered, how white-and-bright-chrome, how machinelike it was. He loved it. Loved ironing his clothes in the mornings on a towel on the table by the tub, sink, and stove, his white coat, the short coat worn by students. Loved walking, still wide-eyed with wonder, into the belly of the beast.

He’d step off the elevator and stop for a moment to hear the machine-sounds: clicking, beeping, humming, hush. To breathe the machine-smells: pungent, metallic, disinfectant. To think machine-thoughts: clean, cut, find, pluck, sew, snip. He felt like an astronaut wearing astronaut-white landed recently and unexpectedly on an alien ship. Newly fluent in the language but still foreign to the locals. And later like a convert to the alien race.

Later, in Boston, when he’d finished his training, when he’d actually become a doctor, well regarded at that, he’d stride through the white and chrome halls at Beth Israel feeling part of the machine now and stronger for it. It was a feeling he never dared share with his colleagues, who’d take his pride in the hospital for lack of pride in himself: that he still felt so special, even superior, for being there. For being part of the machinery, when the machine was so strong. In control. The net effect of the show, the audiovisuals, the squeaky clean of the OR, nurse-slippers squeaking on floors, was to communicate control: over every form of messiness, over human emotion, human weakness, dirtiness, sickness, complications. It was the reason, he thought, they built churches so big and investment banks so impressive. To dazzle the faithful. Arrogance by association. The machine was in control. And so he was in control who belonged to it.

• • •

Then the machine turned against him, charged, swallowed him whole, mashed him up, and spat him out of some spout in the back.

• • •

“It was wrongful dismissal,” he said without feeling, his thousandth time saying it.

And Marty’s thousandth and first: “This we know,” pitching a tent of his fingers on the hill of his belly. “We just can’t prove it.” Heavy sigh. “God knows that I want to. God knows that I’ve tried to. You’re an incredible doctor, an incredible man.” He tapped an unwieldy pile of files with his foot. “Have you actually read any of these character references?”

“I have not.”

“You can practice wherever.”

“I was wrongfully dismissed. I should be practicing there—” Kweku heard himself and stopped. He sounded like a teenager, a recently dumped girlfriend still desperate to be back in her tormentor’s arms.

Marty cleared his throat. “Net net. They threw the kitchen sink at us. Shit. You were there. There was too much at stake. With the clout of the Cabots, they had to do something, so they let you go, right? But you took them to task. Then they couldn’t just say, ‘Yeah, okay, we fucked up, we threw you under the bus.’ Though they did. ’Cause you’re black. Right? ’Cause then it becomes: is Beth Israel racist? And this being Boston that question is… booooom!” A sound and a gesture to imply an explosion. “All these hospitals are connected. It’ll be hard to work here. But it’s a big fucking country. Move the kids to California…” and continued, but vaguely, halfhearted, by rote.

He’d said it all before. Kweku had heard it all before. Kweku had said what he’d say in reply all before. They were like a bickering couple headed for certain divorce who, too exhausted to concoct new accusations to hurl, nevertheless keep on slinging the same tired lines, afraid that even a moment of silence will mean an admission of defeat.

Marty fell silent.

Kweku felt nothing. Not panic, as he’d suspected, given the money he’d spent. Just numbness. Almost pleasant. He looked around the office. One of Boston’s best lawyers, and the place looked like shit. A dim low-ceilinged unit behind a glorified strip mall with wall-to-wall carpet and cheap plastic blinds. Kweku stared out the window behind Marty, a mirror image of the window at the front of the building. No plants. Gold two-story trophies for basketball and paperweights, those rocks cracked in half to reveal gemstones inside. Crusted amethyst, Fola’s birthstone, refracting the light.

Kweku stared past the gems, at the trees.

• • •

Marty’s view was the parking lot at the back of a strip mall that bordered an incongruous little evergreen wood (or what was left: less a wood than a band of survivors, five firs spared the chain saw). Kweku stared at these trees. So at odds with the landscape. Which must have been forest once, green not this gray, and once theirs, before concrete, B.C., their native landscape. “The trees are native Americans.” He didn’t at first realize he’d said this aloud. His eyes passed by Marty, who was staring at him worriedly, as one regards a crazy who’s finally snapped.

“The trees are native Americans?” Marty repeated. “Is that code?”

“This land is their land.” Kweku pointed. “There, behind you — never mind.”

He fell silent.

Marty shifted: took his feet off the desk, stretched his arms, rubbed his hair, slapped a hand on a file. “So whaddaya wanna do, man? I’ll do as you direct me. I mean, it’s me you’ve paid these hundreds… of thousands… of dollars.” Dry laugh. “But if you want my professional opinion? This is the end of the road.”

Kweku didn’t want Marty’s professional opinion. He wanted his land back, his forest, his green. He got up without speaking and walked out of the office. Into the anteroom, past the receptionist. The rainfall on keys.

“Dr. Sai!” she called after him. “Your invoice—” but Marty stopped her, coming to lean against the doorframe of his office. “Let him go.”

Kweku kept walking. Out of the building (a thin jingle), down the sidewalk, to the Volvo where he’d parked in the shade. Let him go, let him go, let him go, let him go. That’s all these white people were good for was letting him go.

“I am afraid we have to let you go.”

Silence, the length of the table.

So long.

An oval-shaped table with squat-rounded armchairs that looked like they spun, like the Cups ride at fairs. With half-circle armrests and leather upholstery, red with brass studs, and the hospital trustees. A room in the hospital he’d never before seen on the uppermost floors where the offices were, but familiar at once from a lifetime of interviews: med school, scholarship, residency, fellowship, mortgage, loan.

A Room of Judgment.

With the requisite, oppressive Room of Judgment decor: polished wood, Persian rug, unread books with red spines (maximum number, countless books, dark red books no one read), heavy drapes through which dribbled in bright, hopeless light, swirls of color, feasting colors, plums, mustards, and wines. And white faces. The odd woman. An Asian woman.

Who spoke.

“Having reviewed all the details of Mrs. Cabot’s appendectomy and of the complaint that the Cabots lodged against you therewith, this body believes that, though a phenomenal surgeon, you failed…”

But Kweku couldn’t hear her.

• • •

He could hear only Fola — at twenty-three years old, with her law school acceptance letter framed on the wall, with a full ride to Georgetown and Olu in utero — say, “One dream’s enough for the both of us.” She would follow him to Baltimore and postpone studying law and give birth to their baby with not a penny to their name and sell flowers on the sidewalk and take showers in a kitchen so that one of them could realize his dream. Twenty years exactly from that to this moment, the whole thing erected on the foundation of a dream: “general surgeon without equal,” Ghanaian Carson and the rest of it, Boy-child, good at science, Makes Good — and he had. He had seen the thing through, the whole kit and caboodle: the accolades, the piano lessons, the sprawling brick house, the staggering prep school tuition, the calling “Bye!” every morning at a quarter past seven in scrubs and white coat. He had held up his end of the bargain: his success for her sacrifice, two words that they never said aloud. Never success, because what were its units of measurement (U.S. dollars? Framed diplomas?) and what quantity was enough? And never sacrifice, for it always sounded hostile when she said it and absurd when he attempted, like he didn’t know the half. The whole thing was standing on the sand of this bargain, but they never dared broach it after “One dream’s enough.” When they fought they fought around it, about the diapers or the dishes or the dinner parties with colleagues (part of his job, waste of her time). But they knew. Or he knew: that her sacrifice was endless. And as the Sacrifice was endless, so must be the Success.

He would see the thing through — if he could, and he prayed so, he blushed to admit that it was what he wanted most, to be worthy of the Pan-Nigerian Princess as they’d called her, that sophisticated escapee from the ’67 war with the bell-bottom jeans and the gap in her teeth, so much smarter and sexier than everyone else, even him, at little Lincoln, a princess among plebs — not by having succeeded but by being a success. To be worthy of Fola, to make it worth it for Fola, he had to keep being Successful.

• • •

So quite literally couldn’t process the words that came next, if there were words that followed “you failed.”

• • •

Then eleven months arguing that he hadn’t, in court, hadn’t failed, had been fired without cause. Which he had. She’d waited too long to be rushed to the hospital, where they’d taken too long to decide to proceed. Seventy-seven-year-old smoker with a ruptured appendix and a bloodstream infection, days old. Not a chance. Jane “Ginny” Cabot — patron of research sciences, socialite, wife, mother, grandmother, alcoholic, and friend — would be dead before morning, whether in a bed at Beth Israel or in bed on Beacon Hill, the higher thread count. The only reason Kweku had even attempted the appendectomy was because the Cabots had called the president of the hospital, a family friend, to suggest very politely that in light of their donation surely a last-ditch operation wasn’t too much to ask? It wasn’t. And they wanted the very best surgeon. The president found Kweku as he was leaving to go home.

The Cabots looked at Kweku, then back at the president. “A word,” they said politely, then moved into the hall. Kip Cabot, losing his hearing, spoke too loudly for the acoustics. “But he’s a—”

“Very fine surgeon. The finest we have.”

The Cabot family physician, smug, a general practitioner (on retainer, a kept doctor, tanned, salt-and-pepper hair), stayed with Kweku in the office while Kip continued in the hallway. “And where did you do your ‘training’?” Air quotes.

“In the jungle, on beasts,” Kweku answered genteelly. “Chimpanzees taught. Great instructors. Who knew?”

The deliberators returned from the hall at that moment, everyone flushed to varied shades of unnatural pink — but resolute. Whatever else he was, Kweku was fit to operate. Someone thumped him on the shoulder. Kweku addressed himself to Kip. “In my professional opinion, sir, it’s too late for surgery. But the longer I stand here the more useless I become.”

The Cabots didn’t want his professional opinion.

They wanted him to go and scrub in.

• • •

Hours, bloody business, trying to save the woman’s life, with the president there observing from the gallery upstairs (apologetic, so embarrassed, “I gave my word to the Cabots”), but a masterful operation as per usual. His best. Clean, cut, find, pluck, sew, snip. Wipe blood from face. Until a weary nurse called it — time of death three A.M. — and he left, walked out, got into his car, let out his breath.

He still doesn’t know how he drove himself home. The next thing he remembers is waking up, clothed, in the sitting room of all rooms with the Johnnie Walker Gold and his slippers sort of dangling from the tops of his toes and the smell of kiwi-strawberry inexplicably in the air and the sense that something somewhere had changed.

• • •

Then eleven months pretending that it hadn’t.

That nothing had changed.

Getting out of bed every morning, leaving the house (scrubs, coat, briefcase) like the Singaporean protagonist in that movie he never saw but always discussed as if he’d seen it, having read all the reviews, it being fashionable among surgeons to see Asian-language films. According to the reviews, the man is fired from his bank but, too ashamed to tell his family, still pretends to go to work: getting up, suiting up, going to sit in local parks to scan job ads.

Like that.

But no parks.

He’d leave, drive to Kleinman & Kleinman for an update, long-term park, then cross the bridge to Harvard Law School on foot. Once there, he’d flash his plainly fraudulent alumni ID card — care of Marty’s black classmate and doubles partner Aaron Falls — to the plainly underpaid Latino law library security guard whose accent produced the daily joke, “Good morning, Mr. False.”

In the stacks until two o’clock researching cases: wrongful dismissal, discrimination, malpractice. Break for lunch. Then more reading, until evening, when he’d cross back to Boston, the river liquid gold in the gloaming.

Now Marty, too, was letting him go.

He started the car.

But had nowhere to go.

He started to laugh. He had nowhere to go. He laughed harder. Had nowhere to pretend to be going. He was clean out of money. He was defeated. He was delirious. He was driving for some minutes before he realized he was driving. Driving, he discovered, as if these hands were not his, as if this foot were not his, to the hospital.

• • •

A word.

A word with Dr. Yuki, Dr. Michiko “Michelle” Yuki, who had patronized from her Mad Tea Party cup. “This body believes…” she the mouth of the body. Tiny mouth. Monotonic, multisyllable words. Former gymnast. Five foot zero with an asymmetric pageboy and the four-piece Harvard Box Set: B.A., M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A. He’d been to her house for a dinner in Cambridge. She was married to an attorney, a colleague of Marty’s. The dinner was to celebrate her promotion to vice president. There were slippers in the foyer, he had noticed. Lovely home. The husband was a monstrosity, all curse words and bluster, piss drunk before the hors d’oeuvres had lapped the room once, but the room was so elegant, all woods and wind orchids, calligraphy scrolls cascading down the walls. Lacquer bowls.

A word with Dr. Yuki.

Or a question. Just the one. What he’d been wanting to ask and to ask to her face (or to half of her face: a good 50 percent was missing behind the shiny half-curtain of her asymmetric bob). Simply: how was she sleeping? Dr. Yuki the surgeon? Not the M.B.A., the adminstrator. The do-no-harm doctor. For the other one, the aspirant, the suit? Fair enough. Agent Yuki had her bottom line, her shareholders to please. One of Boston’s richest families, one of the hospital’s biggest donors, “the stakes were too high,” as per Marty, not to act. The family had demanded that someone be held accountable. “These things sometimes happen” was not accounting enough. So in a back room over a weekend — a Room of Judgment but with cocktails — it was decided that the surgeon would be fired. Would that work? Would that appease the Cabots? Yes, thank you, it would, please. Fair enough, Agent Yuki.

But Dr. Yuki?

She knew.

She knew what it took, to scrub in, to say, “scalpel,” to saw through the stomach with sharp sterile steel. She knew the great pride that he took in this terror, the joy — not just he but their whole prideful tribe. She knew that the procedure had been flawlessly executed. She knew, Dr. Yuki, and nevertheless when she spoke, it was to fire a good surgeon to appease a strong family, to say that he’d failed to “account for the risks.”

Though no doctor (but one) would agree with her assessment. Though her boss, the hospital president, had watched the surgery himself, that final insult-added-to-injury that almost cost them the lawsuit and would have were the judge not Ginny’s cousin.

Almost.

In the end it didn’t matter. The machine was in motion. It ate all the letters, the petitions, the appeals, colleagues arguing his case, that he’d done all he could, that they couldn’t have done better. To no avail. There was doubt. Dr. Putnam “Putty” Gardener — trusted Cabot family doctor, widowed Kip’s DKE frater, Boston Brahmin, racist, golfer — was insistent that the surgeon had (a) failed to appreciate and (b) failed to communicate the risks.

And that was that.

• • •

Now the surgeon wanted a word with the hospital vice president, to ask her to her face was she sleeping through the night? And so found himself parking (at some remove, out of habit), walking casually through the lobby, just as calm as could be, the Jamaican security guard Ernie smiling warmly as he entered — always happy to see the doctor (one) who knew his first name, who said “Good morning, Mr. Ernie” on arriving every morning and “My best to the kids” on departing every night, instead of blowing by blindly without greeting, without seeing him, as if the guards were inanimate, were lobby decor — then riding up in the elevator, alone, to the offices, here pausing for a breath to hear the uppermost-hush — and onward, down the hallway in his scrubs and white coat, knocking once before barging in her door.

By the time they were dragging him back through the lobby, eyes bloodshot from shouting, a madman in scrubs, he’d forgotten entirely about the Museum of Fine Art class and Kehinde three train stops away.

So almost choked to find the child now appearing in the lobby having waited thirty minutes for his father to turn up before figuring that his father had gotten tied up in the surgery so he’d foot it to the hospital and wait there instead. Until this very moment Kweku would’ve bet money that her younger son couldn’t have said where he worked — not the name of the hospital, one of several in the vicinity, nor the location of the entrance hall — but here Kehinde was: appearing calmly in the lobby at precisely the same moment two men dragged a madman across it.

• • •

“Get your hands off me!” he was shouting at the security guards.

And Ernie at his colleagues, “He’s a doctor here! Stop!”

And Dr. Yuki at Ernie, “He’s not a doctor here, excuse me! He was fired! Last year!”

Just as Kehinde appeared.

Just like that. Out of nowhere. As only he could, without sound, with leather art portfolio tucked underarm.

• • •

The guards, who were white, looked at Dr. Yuki, who was pink, little hands and mouth trembling with rage beyond words. She nodded to them once, a Hong Kong mobstress to her henchmen, and was smoothing down her skirt to go when Kehinde caught her eye. She drew back the curtain to squint at his eyes, as if drawn to some dangerous light source, too bright. Kehinde, squinting back at her, could feel what Dr. Yuki felt, the barrenness, so sad for her. He bit his lip with worry. Dr. Yuki saw his pity, and he felt her stomach fill with shame.

Spinning on her kitten heels, she click-click-clicked away.

• • •

The guards looked at Ernie with genuine regret and shoved Kweku, without, to the sidewalk outside. Kehinde sort of stumbled next — too stunned to speak — through the revolving door, surprised to find the world, too, revolving.

Late afternoon.

Orange sun.

They were still for one instant, Kweku catching his breath with his hands on his knees and his eyes on his knuckles, and Kehinde beside him, portfolio to chest like a float, eyes wide with silence. The very next instant a Brewster pulled up, all assaulting red lights and assaulting red noises, and true to its nature the machine sprang to life as if nothing had happened (nothing important). Paramedics poured out of the back of the ambulance, emergency department residents from the building, en masse, even Ernie had his function: clearing visitors out of the way to let the stretcher (screaming woman, crowning son) come rushing through. From the curb where he stood, Kweku made out Dr. Yuki waiting, stone-faced, by the elevator as the stretcher passed behind her, either deaf or indifferent to the cloud of pure chaos that blew past her back. Getting in, going up.

Out of habit, without looking, he took Kehinde’s elbow. He did this — touched his family when there was chaos in their midst, just to feel them, feel their body warmth, to keep them close as best he could, as close as he came to physical affection — but the gesture felt preposterous now. He in his scrubs, beard unshaven, eyes wet, having been “fired last year!” and now forcibly removed: comforting Kehinde, so collected, spotless shirt tucked in neatly, pressed, always so impassive? Preposterous. He let go.

• • •

So many things Kweku wished in that moment: that he’d spent more time with Kehinde trying to learn to read his face, that the boy was watching him spring to life outside the hospital, saving lives and playing hero through the chaos in their midst, that he’d vetoed the art class (better yet, could afford it), that he’d parked a little closer to avoid this walk of shame. He was burning with the desire to say something brilliant, something wise and overriding, a burn behind the ears. But all he could think of was “I’m sorry you saw that.”

“Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.”

Kehinde looked at Kweku, his head slightly sideways, his brows knit together. An upside-down smile.

• • •

They got in the car.

Kind of Blue.

He turned this off.

He drove around the pond, the sun beginning its descent. He drove without looking, without needing to, from memory. Seeing instead of looking. He drove home by heart. Past the little public school, abandoned in the evening time, seen instead of looked at looking lonely somehow. Past the sprawling mansions — were they always this massive? Their house seeming suddenly so modest, compared. Past the teeming trees — were there always this many? Like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the road. Around the third of four rotaries (the pride of Brookline, gratuitous rotaries). Past a man and dog jogging. Past some point of no return.

• • •

The leaves on their street were ablaze in the sunset. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. He knew, though didn’t think it, that he couldn’t face Fola now (knowing, not knowledge), that he couldn’t brook the sight. To see Fola’s face on Kehinde’s for that instant was sufficient. To see his failure on Fola’s seemed too much to bear.

The light above the garage came on. All the lights in the house were on. Neither he nor Kehinde stirred nor spoke to acknowledge not moving. They sat as men do: side by side, facing forward, both silent and patient, waiting for something to say. “Do you want to see my painting?” Kehinde asked after a while. Kweku turned to him, embarrassed. He hadn’t thought to ask.

“Thank you, I would, please.”

Kehinde nodded. “One second.” He unzipped his portfolio and pulled out the piece.

• • •

Even in bad light it was breathtakingly beautiful. Not that Kweku began to know how to judge a piece of art. But it didn’t take an expert to see the achievement, the intelligence of the image, the simplicity of the forms. A boy and a woman, from the back, holding hands. Kweku pointed to the woman. “Who’s that?” Though he knew.

“That’s Mom,” Kehinde answered.

“And that must be you.”

“No, that’s—”

“Olu?”

“Um, no.”

“But it’s a boy, right?”

“It’s you.”

“Me?!” Kweku laughed. A sudden sound in the quiet.

“…” Stalling.

Still laughing. “But why am I so small?”

“Because Mom says she always has to be the bigger person.”

Kweku laughed so hard now he started to cry. “Genius.”

A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer. “You like it?”

“I love it. Pure genius.” He caught his breath. “She does say that, doesn’t she?”

“With ‘don’t I’ at the end of it. I always have to be the bigger person, don’t I?”

Kweku laughed harder, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Right.”

Kehinde giggled bashfully and glanced at the house. “It was supposed to be for Mom. But you can have it if you want it.”

“I would love that. She won’t mind?”

“Mom? No. She has loads.”

“Right.” It was he who didn’t know that they had birthed a little Basquiat, not she. She was the parent. He was the provider. He stopped laughing. “I’d l-l-love it.” His voice breaking (other parts of him also). “How do I… take it?”

“I roll it. Like this.”

“Wait. Don’t you have to sign it first?”

“Only famous artists sign their paintings.”

“Only foolish artists wait until they’re famous. Do you have a pen?”

Kehinde was smiling too widely to speak. He reached for his backpack. Kweku stopped him.

“Use this.” He plucked the silver pen from his unused scrubs pocket (a graduation gift from Fola, for prescriptions, engraved). Kehinde took the pen and turned it over in his fingers.

“It’s so nice. Where’d you get it?”

“From your mother. Of course.”

Kehinde nodded, smiling. Another glance at the house. He laid the painting on the dashboard to consider where to mark. Kweku considered Kehinde with some wonder at the change in him: how at ease he became as his hand touched the paper, how his shoulders relaxed, breath released, standing down. He was the same with a body on a table, silver knife in lieu of silver pen. How had he missed it?

So often he’d confided in Fola at night that he just didn’t “get” this slim good-looking boy; unlike Olu who reminded him so much of himself, Kehinde was a veritable black hole. Fola always said something vague in reply about the inscrutable nature of the second-born twin or recited again with great jingoistic pride the Yoruba myth of ibeji.

The myth:

ibeji (twins) are two halves of one spirit, a spirit too massive to fit in one body, and liminal beings, half human, half deity, to be honored, even worshipped accordingly. The second twin specifically — the changeling and the trickster, less fascinated by the affairs of the world than the first — comes to earth with great reluctance and remains with greater effort, homesick for the spiritual realms. On the eve of their birth into physical bodies, this skeptical second twin says to the first, “Go out and see if the world is good. If it’s good, stay there. If it’s not, come back.” The first twin Taiyewo (from the Yoruba to aiye wo, “to see and taste the world,” shortened Taiye or Taiwo) obediently leaves the womb on his reconnaissance mission and likes the world enough to remain. Kehinde (from the Yoruba kehin de, “to arrive next”), on noting that his other half hasn’t returned, sets out at his leisure to join his Taiyewo, deigning to assume human form. The Yoruba thus consider Kehinde the elder: born second, but wiser, so “older.”

And so it was.

Kehinde wasn’t lesser, less outgoing, less social, “in the shadow” of Taiwo, a shadow himself. He was something else. From somewhere else. Otherworldly like Ekua. An empath like Fola. And for whatever it was worth, Kweku saw now with awe, like his father (and his father before him).

• • •

Kehinde signed neatly in the lower right corner. Kweku touched his shoulder. “Why, thank you, Mr. Sai.”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Sai.” Kehinde’s smile quickly faded. The word doctor hung between them like an odor in the car. Dogs began a canon of cacophonous barking. Kehinde looked out at the house a little longer. The light went off in Taiwo’s room. Then on, then off. Like a signal. Then on. Kehinde turned back to Kweku, turning back into a black hole. “Your pen.”

“Yours.”

“But it’s—”

“Keep it.”

“Are you sure?” Turning it over.

“I’d be honored for you to have it.”

“Thank you, Dad.” Another odor.

Kweku reached over and touched Kehinde’s face, rubbing gently with one finger the space between his brows as he often did with Fola, trying to rub away her frown, though it never really worked and didn’t now. “It must be time for dinner.” Though it wasn’t. Thirty minutes yet. “Your mother will want to hear all about class. You go ahead.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Just a second.”

Kehinde nodded, not smiling. “Your painting,” he said.

He rolled it up neatly and handed it to Kweku. The cameraman filmed: The Intelligent Parent Falls Dumb. Kweku gripped the painting as one does when one means I’ll treasure this always but can’t find the words. The words that he found were, “If you could maybe not mention—”

“Don’t worry. I promise. I won’t.”

And then silence.

“Okay,” said Kweku.

“Okay,” said Kehinde. He waited for a moment then got out of the car.

“I love you,” said Kweku, but the door closed on “I.”

Kehinde didn’t hear and went inside.

• • •

He waited one moment, then backed down the driveway. He didn’t stop driving until Baltimore, seven hours, straight, I-95 stretching out like dark ocean. Flat. Driving without seeing, under moon, into black. He checked into a hotel near Hopkins Hospital, one he remembered. When he called home at last she was sobbing, but clear. “Kehinde won’t tell me what happened, says he promised. You’re scaring me. What happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”

He said very simply that he was sorry and he was leaving. That if she sold the house at value, she’d have enough to start again. That it was quite possible that he had never actually deserved her, not really. That he’d wiped them out trying to beat the odds.

“Beat the odds. What does that mean? Are you in danger? Have you been gambling? Are you in physical danger? Where are you?”

(He was nowhere.) He said it was for the best and that again he was sorry. That she’d be better off without him. “I’m letting you go.”

“What does that mean?”

All his love to the children.

“When are you coming home?” she wept.

He wasn’t.

13

Sixteen years on he stands bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, his bare feet in the grass, partly wheezing, partly laughing at what’s happened and how: the heartbreak he fled from has found him.

At last.

Of course when he left he assumed he’d return, to his life as he knew it, his family, his home — perhaps sooner than he did, in some days, not some weeks — but never once did he guess they’d be gone. Up in smoke. And could Fola be faulted? Was it she who overreacted, packing up as she did, shutting down in despair? Left to weep in that house, with its secret interconnections, its drafts and its shadows, original doors that wouldn’t close, and four kids, a serious boy and two liminal beings and the baby — without him? Deserted. Alone. Not “helpless.” Never helpless. She had never been helpless, not as a child even, pampered in V.I. before the war. She was a natural-born warrior, a take-no-shit Egba (or half of one, the Igbo mother dead giving birth), had faced feats far more fearsome than a mountain of debt not her making, than loneliness, than aloneness, despair. But not desertion, she would argue. Not deceit, disappointment. Not placing her trust in, then being let down.

Was it she, as he’d argued, perhaps knowing he was wrong, or rather knowing he had lost, that it could never be made right, and so right as one is when he’s being done wrong by a person he’s wronged: unable to believe in his righteousness? Was it she who betrayed him, having herself been betrayed? Who, having left a life twice, simply did it again? Or was it he, packing nothing, driving away in desperation, too exhausted to explain it, too exhausted to think: of other hospitals, of starting over, of finding work in another state, of being reasonable, of being responsible, of being a father, of being forgiven?

So going. With the whole of it down to an instant. Waiting, watching, for that moment (one) then backing down the drive. When if Fola had come to some window, seen the Volvo. When if Kehinde had made some small noise coming in. When if he had reconsidered, somehow come to his senses. Or considered in the first place. Gotten out, gone inside. In his scrubs, bowed and broken, but in, into the foyer, down the hall, into the kitchen smelling of ginger and oil. Instead of a question becoming a body there at sunrise, every morning, there to greet him with its weight and warmth, what if, when he opens his eyes. He thinks of it now and can scarcely comprehend it. That he lost her. That he left her. That she left him.

And how.

Days: in a stupor, barely sleeping, barely thinking, too afraid to call home, eating rice, drinking shame, back to the Goodwill on Broadway to buy a suit for a meeting at Hopkins (no positions), Johnnie Walker, Kind of Blue. Weeks: bled together. Six, eight weeks, then ten. Until one night, past midnight, simply driving back home. Snow beginning as snow begins in Boston, harmless, lazy, light, a blizzard by nightfall but flurries to start, pale fluttering flakes in the pink winter dawn. Fear in his fingertips, quivering belly, but certain he’d be able to argue his case, to confess and explain, beg his children’s forgiveness, to earn back their trust, win her over again. Instead of: arriving at seven A.M. to a FOR SALE sign in front and the statue in back, which he took almost unthinkingly before speeding to the flower shop (shuttered), then the public school (children withdrawn). Racing, now sweating, to Milton in panic, looking desperately for the headmaster to ask for his son and somehow chancing upon Olu himself in that coat, the beige coat, with an L.L. Bean bag on his back. Before either could speak, a shrill bell ringing, steel, slicing clean through the distance from father to son, standing awkward and conspicuous in the sudden swirl of students issuing forth from brick buildings to cheer for the snow. Olu speaking clinically, describing a patient. “She cries every morning. She thinks I don’t hear. She says you up and left us without a dime in the bank. The twins are in Lagos. The baby’s still here.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

“Look at me when you’re speaking to me.”

“I don’t want to either.” Olu looked down, gripped the straps of his bag. Kicked the ground. Another bell. “I have to go.” Walked away.

• • •

The way it unraveled.

As things fall from cliffs. Like Irene, his first flatline, first patient he lost; admitted laughing at sunset, cold dead before dawn. The sheer speed of it. The mind-boggling speed of a death. (Or was it the other way around? Mind-boggling speed of a life?) He’s a doctor, should have known, the body spoils, nothing lasts, not a life, why a love? how loss works in the world and what happens to whom in what quantities, “the only constant is change…” and that business. Still, who would have thought? That she’d flee, refuse to see him, or to let him see them, or to tell him where they were when he got her on the phone? Weeks becoming months becoming seasons: unforgiven. An existence unraveled. Irreversible.

Open, shut.

How could he have known? That a life that had taken them years to put together would take weeks to break apart? A whole life, a whole world, a whole world of their making: dinners, dishes, diapers, deeds, degrees, unspoken agreements, outgoing answering machine messages, You’ve reached the Sais, we’re not here right now. Beep. And won’t be here ever again. Leave a message. Until nothing was left but the statue of the mother in the trunk of the Volvo and the painting, two forms. Oil on canvas. Kehinde Sai, 1993. Signed by the artist. The Bigger Person.

• • •

He laughs.

He takes a step forward and stumbles, and falls. He lands on his stomach, his face in the dew. Why did I ever leave you? The bridge on a loop per that tepid R&B to which Taiwo used to sulk. (To cure a broken heart, there was only Coltrane on vinyl. Coltrane would have cured her. He’d have told her if she’d asked.) But it’s too soon to die. So he lifts up his face. Not today, he thinks, laughing. More “scoffing,” short of breath. He has Coltrane, he has heparin, he has nothing to be concerned about. Jogging daily, Ama nightly. Never smoked. His heart is strong. But it isn’t, and he knows it. It is broken in four places. Just the cracks in the beginning, left untreated now for years. His mother in Kokrobité, Olu in Boston, Kofi in Jamestown, Folasadé all over. That woman, all over him, deep in the fascia, in the muscle, in the tissue, in the matter, in the blood. He is dying of a broken heart. He cannot help but laugh at this. Or try to. Gripping the grass in pain, he rolls to his side. Lifts his head. Looks around. Is there something he can use to hoist himself up? The bougainvillaea, the butterfly, the mango.

And there she is.

Finally.

In the fountain.

A ridiculous place. Though not so surprising for a dreamer. Or for two. Standing (floating) in the fountain with white blossoms in their cotton hair, their bodies swathed in sparkling lace, white bubas flecked with diamonds, gold, with snow on their shoulders and gaps in their teeth, both, one with the radio, the other the camera. He peers at this, laughing. The invisible cameraman’s? How did she wrest this away from his grasp? He gasps for breath, laughing. She is laughing now also. The radio playing softly. Sentimental mood, indeed.

She sets down the camera. It goes up in smoke.

“I love you,” he says.

“I know, I know, I know.”

“It hurts,” he says.

His mother says, “Rest.”

Fola says, “Yes.”

So he lies in the grass. “Love grass” it’s called, of all things. Bloody man.

• • •

He does not think what he thought he would think. That he never said bye or that it goes by so fast or that he should have chased Olu down the stairs when he came or seen Sadie grow up or not driven away. He thinks that he was wrong. About the whole thing being forgettable. Not that he won’t be forgotten — he will, has been already — but about the details being unremarkable. What it amounts to in the balance. There is one detail worth remembering.

That he found her in the end.

Folasadé Savage on the run from a war. Kweku Sai fleeing a peace that could kill. Two boats lost at sea, washed to shore in Pennsylvania (“Pencil-wherever”) of all places, freezing to death, alive, in love. Orphans, escapees, at large in world history, both hailing from countries last great in the eighteenth century — but prideful (braver, hopeful) and brimful and broke — so very desperately seeking home and adventure, finding both. Finding both in each other, being both to each other, the nights that they’d toast with warm Schweppes in cheap flutes or make love in the bathtub in moonlight or laugh until weeping: that he found what he hadn’t dared seek. When it would have been enough to have found his way out, to have started where he started and to have ended up farther, a father and a doctor, whatever else he’s become. To have dared to become. To escape would have sufficed. To be “free,” if one wants swelling strings, to be “human.” Beyond being “citizen,” beyond being “poor.” It was all he was after in the end, a human story, a way to be Kweku beyond being poor. To have somehow unhooked his little story from the larger ones, the stories of Country and of Poverty and of War that had swallowed up the stories of the people around him and spat them up faceless, nameless Villagers, cogs; to have fled, thus unhooked, on the small SS Sai for the vastness and smallness of life free of want: the petty triumphs and defeats of the Self (profession, family) versus those of the State (grinding work, civil war)—yes, this would have been quite enough, Kweku thinks. Born in dust, dead in grass. Progress. Distant shore reached.

That still farther, past “free,” there lay “loved,” in her laughter, lay “home” in her touch, in the soft of her Afro? He almost can’t fathom it. Had never dared dream of it, believing such endings unavailable to him, or to them, who walked shoeless, who smiled in their deaths and who sang in their dreams and who didn’t much matter. That he found her and loved her and made their love flesh four times over — it matters, if only to him. A point to the story. That girl-child met boy-child. And loved him.

Even if he lost her.

So he starts to rise up, to go kiss her in the fountain, not to behold or to be held by but to hold her. Or tries. He makes it as far as a sort of a push-up position before his valves lose the plot.

• • •

And so to death.

He lies here facedown with a smile on his face. Now the butterfly alights, finished drinking. A spectacular contrast, the turquoise against pink. But unconcerned with this, with beauty, with contrast, with loss. It flitters around the garden, coming to hover by his foot. Fluttering its wings against his soles as if to soothe them. Open, shut. The dog smells new death and barks, startling the butterfly. It flaps its wings once, flies away.

Silence.