Ghana Must Go

1

Fola wakes breathless that Sunday at sunrise, hot, dreaming of drowning, a roaring like waves. Dark. Curtains drawn, humid, the wet bed an ocean: half sleeping still, eyes closed, she sits up, cries out. But her “Kweku!” is silent, two bubbles in water that now, her lips parted, run in down her throat, where they find, being water, more water within her, her belly, below that, her thighs, dripping wet — the once-white satin nightdress soaked, wet from the inside, and outside, a second skin, now brown with sweat — and, becoming a tide, turn, return up the middle, thighs, belly, heart, higher, then burst through her chest.

The sob is so loud that it rouses her fully. She opens her eyes and the water pours out. She is sobbing uncontrollably when the tide subsides abruptly, leaving no trace whatsoever of the dream as it does (much as waves erase sand-script, washing in without warning, wiping the writings of children and of lovers away). Only fear remains vaguely, come unhooked from its storyline, left on damp sand like a thin sparkling foam. And the roaring: sharp racket in dull humid darkness, the A/C as noisy as one that still works.

Sparkling fear-foam, and roaring.

She sits up, disoriented, unable to see for the drawn mustard drapes so just sitting there, baffled, unclear what’s just happened, or why she was crying, or why she’s just stopped. With the usual questions: what time is it? where is she? In Ghana, something answers, the bulbul outside, so-called “pepper birds” bemusedly joining the racket in ode to oblivion to things that don’t work. So not nighttime, then: pepper birds, the morning in Ghana, the place that she’s moved to, or fled to.

Again.

Without fanfare or forethought, as flocks move, or soldiers, on instinct, without luggage, setting off at first light:

found the letter on a Monday, in the morning, in Boston, sorting mail at the counter (coffee, WBUR, “a member station supported by listeners like her”), bills for school fees, utilities. One dropped to the floor. Rather, floated to: pastel blue, flimsy, a feather, slipping silently from the catalogs of Monday’s thick mail. A proper letter. And lay there. In the white light of winter, that cheap “air mail” paper no one uses anymore.

She opened it. Read it. Twice. Set it on the countertop. Left for the flower shop, leaving it there. Came home in the dark to the emptiness, retrieved it. Read again that Sena Wosornu, surrogate father, was dead. Was dead and had left her, “Miss” Folasadé Savage, a three-bedroom house in West Airport, Accra. Stood, stunned, in her coat in the kitchen and silence, soft silver-black darkness, tiles iced by the moon. Monday evening. Left Friday. JFK to Kotoka. Nonstop. Without fanfare. Just packed up and left.

• • •

Now she squints at the darkness and makes out the bedroom, unfamiliar entirely after only six weeks. Unfamiliar shapes, shadows, and the space here beside her, unfamiliar entirely after sixteen years, still.

She touches her nightdress, alarmed at the wetness. She peels the drenched satin away from her skin. She touches her stomach as she does when this happens, when fear hovers shyly, not showing its face yet, when something is wrong but she doesn’t know what or with which of the offspring that sprang from this spot. And the stomach answers always (the “womb” maybe, more, but the word sounds absurd to her, womb, always has. A womb. Something cavernous, mysterious, a basement. A word with a shadow, a draft. Rhymes with tomb). She touches her stomach in the four different places, the quadrants of her torso between waist and chest: first the upper right (Olu) beneath her right breast, then the lower right (Taiwo) where she has the small scar, then the lower left (Kehinde) adjacent to Taiwo, then the upper left (Sadie), the baby, her heart. Stopping briefly at each to observe the sensation, the movement or stillness beneath the one palm. Sensing:

Olu — all quiet. The sadness as usual, as soft and persistent as the sound of a fan. Taiwo — the tension. Light tugging sensation. But no sense of danger, no cause for alarm. Kehinde — the absence, the echoing absence made bearable by the certainty that if, she would know (as she knew when it happened, as she knew the very instant, cutting pastel-blue hydrangea at the counter in the shop, suddenly feeling a sort of seizure, lower left, crying, “Kehinde!” with the knife slipping sideways and slicing her hand. Dripping blood on the counter, on the stems and the blossoms, on the phone as she dialed, already knowing which it was; getting voicemail, “This is Keh—” call waiting, clicking over, frantic sobbing, “Mom, it’s Taiwo. Something happened.” “I know.” She knew as did Taiwo the very instant that it happened, as the blade made its way through the skin, the first wrist. So that now, a year later — more, nearly two years later — having neither seen nor heard from him, she knows. That she’d know). Last, Sadie — fluttering, butterflies, a new thing this restlessness, this looking for something, not finding it.

Fine.

Sadness, tension, absence, angst — but fine, as she birthed them, alive if not well, in the world, fish in water, in the condition she delivered them (breathing and struggling) and this is enough. Perhaps not for others, Fola thinks, other mothers who pray for great fortune and fame for their young, epic romance and joy (better mothers quite likely; small, bright-smiling, hard-driving, minivan-mothers), but for her who would kill, maim, and die for each child but who knows that the willingness to die has its limits.

That death is indifferent.

Not she (though she seems), but her age-old opponent, her enemy, theirs, the common enemy of all mothers — death, harm to the child — which will defeat her, she knows.

But not today.

• • •

The fear recedes. The roaring persists. The rough snuffling slosh of the broken machine. The heat grows assertive, as if feeing ignored. The bedsheet and nightgown go suddenly cold.

She gets out of bed, knocking her knee as she does, quietly cursing the house, its deficient A/C. The night watchman Mr. Ghartey was meant to have fixed it, or meant to have had his electrician-cousin come fix it, or meant to have called the white man who installed it to come fix it — the plan remains largely unclear. “He is coming” is the answer whenever she asks. “I beg, he is coming.” For weeks now, hot air. But the relationship is young, between her and her staff, and she knows to go slow, to tread lightly. She is a woman, first; unmarried, worse; a Nigerian, worst; and fair-skinned. As suspicious persons go in Ghana, she might as well be a known terrorist. The staff, whom she inherited along with the house and its 1970s orange-wool-upholstered wooden furniture, sort of tiptoes around her poorly masking their shock. That she moved here alone. To sell flowers.

Worse: that she arrived on that Saturday, from the airport, in the morning, in the white linen outfit and open-toe shoes and, alighting the cab, said, “How are you?” incomprehensibly, with British a and American r. Worst: that no man alighted the taxi thereafter.

That she shook their hands, seeking their eyes.

That, leaving her suitcases (three? were there more? was this all? a whole life in America?) by the cab, she proceeded directly to the wall to put her face in the crawlers. “Bougainviiiillea!” Still incomprehensible.

That she greets them in the morning with this same odd “How are you?” and thanks them as bizarrely for doing their jobs. “Thank you” to the houseboy when he washes her clothing. “Thank you” to the cook when he sets out her meals. “Thank you” to the gatekeeper when he opens the gate and again as he closes it.

That she smokes.

That she wears shorts.

That she wanders around the garden in these shorts and a sun hat with cigarettes and clippers, snipping this, snipping that, hauling her catch into the kitchen, where she stands at the counter, not pounding yam, not shelling beans, but arranging flowers. It amuses her, always has, this disregard of Africans for flowers, the indifference of the abundantly blessed (or psychologically battered — the chronic self-loather who can’t accept, even with evidence, that anything native to him, occurring in abundance, in excess, without effort, has value). They watch as research scientists observe a new species, a hybrid, herbivorous, likely harmless, maybe not. Masked, feeding her, washing for her, examining her clothing when they think she’s not looking, whispering, watching her eat. She hasn’t yet told them that she once lived in Ghana, that she speaks and understands all they say in hushed Twi about her flowers, flowered nightdresses, distressing eating habits like pulling out and eating the weeds (lemongrass). She learned this from her father, who spoke the major Nigerian languages plus French, Swahili, Arabic, and snatches of Twi. “Always learn the local language. Never let on to the locals,” he’d say, a cigar at the end of its life on his lips, giving birth to a laugh—

• • •

upper left.

There it is.

The movement she was feeling for.

Left upper quadrant, in the vicinity of Sadie but closer to the heart, not a tugging or a tightening or a throbbing of dread but an echo, an emptiness, an emptying out. A familiar sensation. Not the one she was feeling for, fearful of (auguring harm done the child) but remembered, unmistakable, from four decades prior, a memory she forgot she still has.

• • •

She sits back down absently, abandoning her mission, whatever it was, a word with Mr. Ghartey perhaps, or a smack to the side of the wall-mounted machine, or a fresh set of bedsheets, a postnightmare drink. And thinks: odd, to be returned to the death of her father, which she thinks of so rarely, as one recounts dreams, out of focus, diluted, not the event but the emotion, a sadness that’s faded, dried, curled, lost its color. The event she can see clear as day even now: Lagos, July 1966, the short chain of events:

first the waking up gasping, cold, thirteen years old, all her posters of the Beatles stuck with tacks to the walls, sitting alarmed in the dark with that space in her chest, unfamiliar with the feeling (same odd emptiness as now). Second: making her way from her room down the hall, to her father’s room, forgetting that he’d traveled to the North, gone to see about his in-laws, her “grandparents,” the Nwaneris, whom she’d never actually met and never would. No one said it. Never him, her kind, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired father, who wept for the loss of his bride every night, kneeling down by his bed beneath the portrait above it, Somayina Nwaneri, fair, gold-eyed. A ghost.

Twenty-seven.

Fairy ghostmother.

Had bled out in labor.

A stranger to Fola, no more than a face, so unusually pale that she looked in her portrait as if she’d been born without blood, cut from ice. Still so pretty. Stuff of legend. Local celebrity in Kaduna, Igbo father as famous for his post in the North as for plucking one rose from the grounds of the mission and marrying her, a Scotswoman, auburn-haired Maud. And the rest of it: shame, stillborn son, successive miscarriages, the shaking of heads and the wagging of tongues, see, the Scotswoman can’t bear the Igbo man’s child, then the one white-skinned daughter, the magic mulatto. Little princess of Kaduna. Colonial Administrator’s daughter. Won a bursary to study nursing in London after the war, promptly met and immediately married Kayo Savage, Fola’s father, lawyer, late of the Royal Air Force. Felled in childbirth, etc. No one said it. No one mentioned that they never came to see her, Rt. Hon. John and Maud. Nwaneri, never called nor sent a gift, but she could guess it: that they blamed her for their only daughter’s early death, as she would come to hate them for his.

But not yet.

First: waking at midnight with space in her chest. Second: slipping down the hallway to her father’s bedroom, vacant. Third: ascending to his empty bed, still warm with scent (rum, soap, Russian Leather) and covering her face with his thick kente blanket, then lying, unmoving, eyes open, heart racing. Still as a corpse, swathed in cotton and sweating, with the A/C not on, with her father not there, gone to Kaduna that morning, having heard from some friends that the Igbos in the North were in trouble again.

“Again?” she’d sighed, sulking, loudly slurping her breakfast (gari, sugar water, ice), already knowing he was going by his having prepared this. “A bush girl’s breakfast” as he called it, mocking. Powdered yam in ice water, her favorite. If this grandfather of hers was as rich as they said, with his Cyclone CJ and his split-level ranch, then why must her father go “check on him” always, she’d asked, crunching ice, but she knew. He had to go, always, to appease them, to redeem himself, to beg again forgiveness for the death of Somayina (which was, technically speaking, not his fault but hers, infant Fola’s, the doctor’s at least, or the womb’s).

“They’re always in trouble, these Igbos. Na wow o.”

“Your mother was an Igbo.”

“Half.”

“That’s quite enough.” But when she looked he was laughing, coming to kiss her head, leaving. “I’ll be back before Sunday. I love you.”

“Mo n mo.”

There was no equivalent expression for I love you in Yoruba. “If you love someone, you show them,” her father liked to say. But said it nevertheless in English, to which she’d answer in Yoruba, “I know,” mo n mo.

Out the door.

Just like that.

Stood, set down his coffee cup, kissed her on the forehead once, hand each on her Afro puffs, walked out the door. Gone. Woolly hair and woolen suit and broad and buoyant shoulders bobbing, bobbing, bobbing out of view. The swinging door swung open, shut.

Fourth: fourteen hours later in his bed beneath the blanket, sliding down beneath the kente into darkness, absence, scent and heat, a still and silent ocean. And remaining. In the quiet. Lying ramrod straight, not moving, knowing.

That something had been removed.

That a thing that had been in the world had just left it, as surely and simply as people leave rooms or the dust of dead dandelion lifts into wind, silent, leaving behind it this empty space, openness. Incredible, unbearable, interminable openness appearing now around her, above her, beyond her, a gaping, inside her, a hole, or a mouth: unfamiliar, wet, hollow and hungry. Un-appeasable.

The details came later — such as details ever come, such as one can know the details of a death besides one’s own, how it went, how long or calming, cold or terrifying, lonely — but the thing happened there in the bedroom. The loss. Later, if ever alone, she’ll consider it, the uncanny similarity between that and this moment: alone in the dark in the sweltering heat in a room not her own in a bed far too big. Mirror endings. The last of a life as she’d known it, that midnight in Lagos, never suspecting what had happened (it simply wouldn’t have occurred to her, that evil existed, that death was indifferent), yet knowing somehow. This was the event for her, the loss in the concrete, the hours in which she crossed between knowing and knowledge and onward to “loss” in the abstract, to sadness. Six, seven hours of openness slowly hardening into loneliness.

The details came later — how a truckload of soldiers, Hausas, high on cheap heroin and hatred, had killed them, setting fire to the mansion, piling rocks at the exits — but the details never hardened into pictures in her head. So she never really believed it, not really, couldn’t see it, never settled on a sight that would have made the thing stick, put some meat on the words (roaring fire, burning wood), put a face on the corpses. The words remained bones. They were no one, the “soldiers.” They were shadow-things, not human beings. The “Nwaneris” were what they’d always been: a portrait on the wall, a name. A pallid cast of characters. Not even characters, but categories: civilian, soldier, Hausa, Igbo, villain, victim. Too vague to be true.

And not him.

It was him. He was there without question (though they never could confirm it, his bones turned to ashes, in REM, dreaming, his “Fola!” two bubbles), as rampant anti-Igbo pogroms kicked off the war. But she simply couldn’t see him, not her father as she knew him, as she’d seen him from the table, bobbing, bobbing out of view. It was someone else they’d killed that night, these “soldiers” whom she couldn’t see, this “victim” whom they didn’t know, anonymous as are all victims.

The indifference of it.

This was the problem and would be ever after, the block on which she sometimes feels her whole being stumbled: that he (and so she) became so unspecific. In an instant. That the details didn’t matter in the end. Her life until that moment had seemed so original, a richly spun tale with a bright cast of characters — she: motherless princess of vertical palace, their four-story apartment on Victoria Island; they: passionate, glamorous friends of her father’s, staff; he: widowed king of the castle. Had he died a death germane to this life as she’d known it — in a car crash, for example, in his beloved Deux Chevaux, or from liver cancer, lung, to the end puffing Caos, swilling rum — she could have abided the loss. Would have mourned. Would have found herself an orphan in a four-story apartment, having lost both her parents at thirteen years old, but would have been, thus bereaved, a thing she recognized (tragic) instead of what she became: a part of history (generic).

She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes, all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course. Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her grandmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter. She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened. That she’d stopped being Folasadé Somayina Savage and had become instead the native of a generic War-Torn Nation. Without specifics. Without the smell of rum or posters of the Beatles or a kente blanket tossed across a king-size bed or portraits. Just some war-torn nation, hopeless and inhuman and as humid as a war-torn nation anywhere, all war-torn nations everywhere. “I’m sorry,” they’d say, nodding yes in agreement, as one says I’m sorry when the elderly die, “that’s too bad” (but not that bad, more “how these things go” in this world), in their eyes not a hint of surprise. Surely, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired fathers of natives of hot war-torn countries got killed all the time?

How had this happened?

It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendor, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy — but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïveté of her former individuality. After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death — didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

• • •

This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a shore in the dark: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.

That is that.

One pepper bird, pluckier than its bickering playmates, pecks at the glass at the back of the drapes. “Kookoo, kookoo, kookoo,” it cries, and she is reminded for a moment of what she said as she woke. What was it? She can’t remember. A nightmare. It was nothing. “Koo-koo,” insists the bulbul, but the A/C cuts in.

“Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.” A death rattle. It dies, and the bedroom falls silent.

Fola waits a minute, then laughs at her waiting. Waiting for what? There is nothing, she thinks. He is gone, she remains, that is that, tat-tat-tat. She changes and goes back to sleep.

But doesn’t sleep deeply.

The telephone rings.

At first she thinks: no, I’m still dreaming. Ignores it. But then wonders how, if she’s dreaming, she’s thinking. So opens one eye. Hears the ringing. Picks up. “Hello?” she murmurs.

“Fola,” he answers.

A man. But who has this number? Not him. Not Olu. Not Kehinde. The voice is too deep. “Who is this?”

“It’s Benson,” he says.

“Benson, hi. What time is it?” she asks, looking around for a clock.

“I’m sorry to call you so early…”

No clock. “What time is it?” she repeats.

“Just, you gave me this number last Thursday…”

A man who is stalling.

She perceives this in an instant and sits up now, worried. “What is it?” A very brief silence ensues. “I’m sorry,” he begins — so she runs through the quadrants: alive if not well, fish in water, they’re fine. She knows that he’s crying though doesn’t know how. She hears nothing. She comforts, on instinct, “Don’t cry. The children are fine.”

Which he thinks is a question. “Yes,” he says quickly. “I’m sure they’re all fine.” A cough, one soft sniffle, and then there is nothing.

“Benson?”

“I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry.”

Now she knows what and knows who and is silent.

“Fola?”

She wonders how she missed it. Not the child. “Where are you?” she asks.

“At the house,” Benson answers. “His wife—” then stops short. “I’m so sorry.”

Not the father. The roaring returns without warning and, rising, the tide from the middle. “Not him,” Fola breathes.

“She called me at home and I came straightaway, but the heart had — he — it was too late.”

Benson continues in his sonorous voice, a dead ringer for Luther Vandross. Among the various disjointed things she now thinks, Fola remembers meeting Benson at Hopkins that day. Twenty-three years old in the hospital lobby with Olu tucked into her wrappa, asleep. Benson in scrubs with his skin of burnt umber, the taller of the handsome Ghanaians.

The other one.

“Kookoo!” the bulbul cries.

“Please…” Fola whispers. “Not yet please no Kweku-no.”

2

Olu walks in no particular hurry out of the hospital, puts down his coffee, puts down his phone and starts to cry. Five quick sobs, drumbeats—your-fa-ther-is-dead—then he wipes his face, closes his eyes. Snowflakes fall, land on his nose and his lips. It is one A.M., zero degrees Celsius.

“So sorry.”

He opens his eyes to find an elderly woman, not five feet tall, fur coat, below him. She has just made her way through the handicapped exit and stopped by his side on the sidewalk outside. In the peculiar silence that invariably accompanies the opening act of a storm in the nighttime, they stand there together and watch the snow swirl through the black then the bright of the hospital sign.

She gestures to the lobby through the glass doors behind them, then touches him, winking. She says in a rush, “I know I should have stayed with the kids. Well. The kids. Jesus. Forty years old is our youngest, my youngest. Two boys. Brett and Junior. Bruce Junior, like my husband. He’s always had impeccable timing, my Bruce. Twelve twenty-one A.M., December twenty-first, time of death. How’s that for good timing? Yes, sir. I love it at night when it just starts to snow. It just goes by so quickly, though. Who did you lose?”

“—a doctor,” he says, his voice cracking on I’m. “I’m a doctor.”

“I could tell by your outfit,” she says. “But I assumed you weren’t standing here mourning a patient.” After a moment she laughs and he joins, clouds of breath. She pulls out a Cohiba Esplendido in a handkerchief. A small silver lighter. Sparks, loses the flame. Olu cups his hand around the lighter, fingers trembling. “Your fingers are shaking,” she says.

“Sure is cold.” He says foolish things like this whenever he’s nervous, short sentences that start with sure is and how ’bout.

“Dressed in those,” touching him, “cotton pajamas? You know we’re in a blizzard here, darling. Yes, sir. Doesn’t look like much now, never does to begin with, but wait until sunrise. Not here. Don’t wait here. You’ll catch a death of a cold — oh dear me. Did I say that? Not what one says at such times. Here, take this.”

“No. I’m a—”

“Doctor. You said.”

“I don’t—”

“Take it. I promised my Bruce that I’d smoke it for him. If he died, when he died. Like he did when our children were born, our two boys. Pack of three. But I’m old.” She laughs again, takes one good drag with her eyes closed, then puts the cigar—“That’s a dear”—in his mouth. A nurse inserting a thermometer. He bends to receive it. With his face there before her, she touches his cheek. “You’re crying.” A statement. She holds his chin, gently, and wipes off his cheek with her handkerchief. “There.” She pats his cheek, smiling, and adds before leaving, “The cold always makes me cry, too.”

• • •

Olu walks, smoking, up Huntington Ave. Streetlamps drip gold into puddles of light. The snow gathers strength as he makes his way home, leaning forward, lips chapping, arms naked. No coat. Saturday-night revelers stumble and shout. A few cars pass slowly, no traction, in fear. No one seems to notice someone walking in the street itself. Nude arms, blue scrubs, and the drumbeat.

• • •

Ling is asleep with her back to the door. He stands in the doorway and watches her sleep. The light cuts her body in two on an angle, her hair on the pillow an oil spill. Slick black. The bedroom is white, all white, everything white. She thinks it excessive, a sham wouldn’t hurt. She’s left her red shirt on the floor, a suggestion. He picks this up, making no noise. Looks around. He goes to the Eames chair (white), clutching the shirt as a child would a blanket or bear, for the smell of it. Chanel No. 5, Jergens lotion, cherry-almond. He tries to say her name, wants to hear it. Says, “L—.” But hears instead Fola, her voice flat and distant, the shoddy connection, “Your father is dead,” and the few things she told him, the pause that came after, that hush between heard and received, before hurt.

He asked every question and heard every detail—“on his face,” “in the grass,” “Benson found him like that,” “seems he walked outside, fell down, and couldn’t get up,” “six A.M.”—but she didn’t have answers. She wept. He set down his stirrer, dripping soymilk on the tabletop. He looked around the house staff lounge, packed at this hour. Emergency department interns, coked, Red Bulled, and coffeed, their eyes dim and bloodshot with fear and fatigue. Days before Christmas, wee hours, Sunday morning, the sorrows of the Saturday left at their door: desperate barroom brawls, suicide attempts, crashes presnowstorm, hypothermia among the homeless. He didn’t want to go home. This is what he misses in his second year of ortho now, buzzing through shifts high on sports drink and drive. Orthopedic surgery is intensity by appointment: fallen grandpas, fallen quarterbacks, procedural, well paid. He chose it for these reasons, the procedures above others, the physicality, the precision, nostalgia for track. But he misses the rush of ED, the desperation, the prospect and hovering presence of death.

Fola. “Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Please call your siblings? To tell them that…?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind? You’re okay?”

“Yes.”

“I just need to rest for a moment. Long morning. I love you, my darling. You know that.”

“I know.”

• • •

He sits in his scrubs with the shirt in the dark, with the moon making ice of the floor and the walls, and thinks maybe she’s right, all this white is oppressive, apathetic; a bedroom shouldn’t be an OR. In the sunlight it’s gorgeous, hard angles and harder the light crashing brilliantly against its own shade, to an eerie effect, white on white, like an echo, the sun staring at its reflection. Not now. Now it is lonely and cold in the darkness that isn’t quite darkness, a cold and dark light. With the snow falling onto itself out the window as noiseless as hopelessness, more white on white.

He watches her chest as it rises and falls. She stirs in her sleep, shifting here, shifting there, as she’s wont, tossing, turning. He tries again, “L—,” with the ing getting stuck in his throat, thick with shame. Of all things. Not with sorrow or grief, thick with tears, but a shame he feels spreading like warmth down his throat and below to his chest, to his stomach, his groin, where it stops, gathers strength, and spreads out to his knees. Of all places. Warm knees as he sits in not-darkness, her T-shirt pressed up to his mouth like a mute. And why this? Why this candle-wax-melting sensation that renders him too weak to stand or to speak and now turns into burning, a fierce, violent burning so caustic he bends at the waist, crying “H—!”?

The T-shirt reverses the outpour, red cotton ball pressed to his lips muting fury and shame, so back in goes the outburst, down, back down his throat to his stomach and lands there with one breathless “—ow.”

How is the question (does an exceptional surgeon just die in a garden of cardiac arrest?). How, when his whole life he’s sought to be like him, has forgiven the sins in the name of the gift, has admired the brilliance and told of the prowess, general surgeon without equal, remembered even now. “Sai, you say? I knew a Sai once. Ghanaian. A knife-wielding artist. You know who I mean?” “Yes. That’s my father.” “Your father! How is he? Oh my, it’s been years…” “Sixteen years, yes.”

He’s dead.

Dead in a garden of cardiac arrest, basic coronary thrombosis, easy peasy, act fast, Kweku Sai, prodigal prodigy, a phenom, a failure.

A doctor who failed to prevent his own death.

How is the shame Olu holds in his stomach, bent over, while Ling in her sleep turns away. How can he wake up this woman and tell her the father he’s told of died this kind of death? How, when he’s promised for years, fourteen years now, that one day he’ll take her to meet him at last and she’ll love him, he knows it, a doctor like they are, a mind such as they have, for everything else. Ling, whom he’s loved since they touched pouring punch at the Asian American Cultural Center Open House at Yale. (“I’m sorry,” said the greeter, embarrassed, to Olu. “We thought Sai was Asian. You’re welcome to stay.”) Ling who, not looking, reached out for the ladle the moment that he did, soft skin finding skin. Ling, whom he’s loved since, still touching, now flushing, she frowned. “You’re not Asian. Wait. Why are you here? Do you play a stringed instrument? Excel in mathematics? Attend a kind of cult-like Korean-American Christian church?”

Laughing, still touching, “Piano. And science. A Catholic church, no, but the priest is from Laos.”

“Then what am I saying? Stupid me. You are Asian.”

“I’m Olu.”

“I’m Ling.”

And the rest on from there: making flash cards and kissing in CCL cubicles, eating ramen over o-chem, then Harvard, four years, they both matching in Boston (he ortho, she obstetrics), the “golden couple,” nicknamed, wherever they went. Ling-and-Olu, tall, tiny, a study in contrasts, their photos like print ads for Benetton clothes: Ling-and-Olu in Guam building homes for the homeless, Ling-and-Olu in Kenya digging wells for the waterless, Ling-and-Olu in Rio giving vaccinations to vagrants, Ling-and-Olu at Pepe’s, enlarged, black-and-whites. “The love of his life,” though he finds the term cloying, “the independent variable” rather more to the point, across time and place always held constant, his confidante, the only to whom he tells all.

But not this.

How, when he sat there and looked at her father and said in despair and defense of his own, “He’s a surgeon like I am, the best in his field,” with Ling listening from the bathroom the day he proposed?

• • •

October: a little congress, a glass box apartment, Dr. Wei on the slipper chair, Ling on the couch, holding Olu by the elbow, via vise grip, an announcement, the ring-bearing hand on her self-bouncing knee. Dr. Wei sipped his tea, looking calmly at Olu, who looked him right back as he’d learned at Beth Israel. (“Always look a patient in the eye,” said Dr. Soto. “No matter what you have to tell him. Look your patient in the eye.”) What Olu had to tell him was he’d come to ask to marry Ling, but all the patient Dr. Wei replied was, “Well. I see.”

• • •

They’d met once before, at the medical school commencement, both smiling politely as if at a child. Mrs. Wei was there, healthy, with Ling’s older sister, who goes by Lee-Ann, née Lìhúa, and her husband. Olu brought Fola to meet them at last (he had skipped Yale commencement). “Fola Savage. My mother.”

“Mrs. Savage. Pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Wei nodded, smiling.

“Likewise,” said Fola. “Ms. Savage is fine.”

“Ms. Savage?” Dr. Wei said. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“Rather unfortunate,” laughed Fola. “But what can you do?”

The husband, whose name Olu can never remember (standard-issue Caucasian, like Brian or Tim, a Californian, beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers), erupted in laughter. “Of what provenance?” he asked.

“Empire,” said Fola, still chuckling. “The British.”

Brian/Tim laughed, as did Ling and Lee-Ann. Mrs. and Dr. Wei tensed, as did Olu. He peered at the sky. Early June. “Sure is warm.”

• • •

Twice all these years he’d met both of Ling’s parents, though they’d raised her in Newton, a T ride away. Dr. Wei lived in Cambridge now, facing the river, in faculty housing (engineering, MIT). He was slender like Ling, with the same narrow frame, less so fragile than streamlined. From concentrate. Compact. Sixty years old with the same slick-black hair streaked with silver, worn long, to his ears. Rimless frames. At regular intervals he smoothed down his hair with his hand, without need, on the right, near his neck, one calm movement so slow that the casual observer might not recognize it as a nervous tic. In repose he wore trousers, a button-down shirt, and a blue V-neck sweater with slippers, Olu saw. Olu wore socks, there being a shortage of slippers, there being a shortage of guests since “the Loss,” Ling explained. A photo of the Lost hung behind her thin widower, the only thing mounted on the one nonglass wall, the other three making a fish tank of the living room, the river view heightening the piscine effect.

A huge Ru ware vase standing guard in one corner, a piano in the other as upright and stern, yellow books at its feet familiar instantly to Olu, Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, in piles.

Jingdezhen tea set.

Mozart playing softly. “Lacrimosa” from Requiem.

Ling gripped his arm.

• • •

“,” she said finally in Mandarin.

“Speak English, my dear. There’s a guest in our house.”

“Our house,” said Ling, “is on Huntington Avenue.”

“Well,” said her father, and said nothing else.

Olu shifted positions, wishing Ling would let go, feeling incarcerated rather than claimed by her grip. “Ling was against it,” he spoke up politely. “But I thought it only right that we ask, that I ask.”

“For my ‘daughter’s hand in marriage,’” Dr. Wei said bemusedly. “Which one?”

“Of your daughters?” Olu frowned.

“Of her hands. The one with the ring would appear to be taken—”

“I knew you would do this! I knew it,” Ling seethed. “And it’s not your decision! I’ve already said yes. I told you.” She turned to face Olu. Let go.

Olu, ungripped, felt his stomach turn over. Dr. Wei smoothed his hair down and said, “Well. I see.” Ling stood abruptly and left the room, crying, her small shoulders shaking. A door slammed somewhere.

Then Dr. Wei laughed — rather shockingly, warmly, a rich and deep sound in the space Ling had left. He took off his glasses and wiped them off, tearing. More rumbles of laughter then, smiling, he spoke. “I’m laughing at myself. I should have known this was coming. Ling’s mother always said you were friends. ‘They’re just friends.’ For fifteen years? No, I didn’t think so.” Another rumble. “So often one knows, without seeing, the truth.” He put on his glasses, looking closely at Olu. Smoothed down his hair again. “Olu, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I knew an Olu. Oluwalekun Abayomi.” He pronounced the name perfectly. “Nigerian. As you’d know. Top of our class at UPitt by a long shot. It’s not that I’m racist. Far from it.”

“Sir—”

“Please.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself to continue and crossed his legs, crossing his hands on his knees. “It is true that you don’t have my blessing. And won’t have. But not for the reasons that you may suspect. Certainly not the reasons that she does. That Ling does.” He glanced at the hallway down which she had stormed. Olu shifted, too, but to settle in, listening, lulled by the cadence, the professorial tone. Odd how this happened, even now in his thirties, this defaulting to Student at the first sign of Teacher. “When I was in grad school in Pittsburgh — fine city — I befriended a fair number of Africans. Men. All of them men, unsurprisingly. Engineering. Just grown-up boys playing with toys.” Sipped his tea. “They’d come from all over, some wealthy, some destitute, but all of them brilliant, pure genius, those five. The hardest-working men in our cohort, I tell you. All bafflingly good at the math.” Smoothed his hair. “Americans call Asians the ‘model minority.’ At one point this may have been true. Recent past. But now it’s the Africans. I see it in the classroom. Asians are through. We got fat — no, don’t laugh. You never saw overweight Asians, not young ones, not back when we came, when the girls were still young. I see them all over now, Koreans, Chinese, on the train, on the campus. It’s the beginning of the end. A fat Asian child can win a spelling bee maybe, but a science fair? No. It’s the Africans now. I’m serious. You’re laughing.”

But Olu couldn’t help it.

Dr. Wei started also, his deep, bossed gong laugh. “I say this to say that I admire the culture, your culture, its respect for education above all. Every African man I have ever encountered in an academic setting excelled, barring none. I haven’t met a single lazy African student, or a fat one for that matter, in forty years here. I know it sounds crazy, we laugh, but believe me. I teach undergraduates. I see it every day. African immigrants are the future of the academy. And the Indians.” He paused here to finish his tea.

While Olu sat, smiling, an odder thing still: to be enjoying Dr. Wei’s conversation. Ling had always reviled him as arrogant, unyielding, charming to a point and indifferent beyond. She’d never gone home for vacation in college, finding overseas community service work to do instead. She’d skipped her sister’s wedding so as not to see her father, and ignored the man’s calls when they came, twice a year, the one — September second — for an off-key “Happy Birthday,” the other Chinese New Year for “Kung Hei Fat Choy.” Olu knew better than to probe, and he didn’t, for fifteen years almost had never once asked: honey, why don’t we drive out to Newton to see them? or what did he do to you? Never once asked. And Ling didn’t either: what had happened to his father, why they’d never been to Ghana (they’d been everywhere else), why he’d balked only recently at an e-mail from Fola inviting them for dinner on Christmas? Instead, they hung there between them, in Allston, New Haven, now a ten-minute walk from where Olu once lived: all the questions and heartbreaks, unanswered, untreated, just left there to dry in the silence and sun.

So Olu was shocked now to find himself smiling, at ease with this man whom Ling hated so much. There was something even appealing about Dr. Wei’s manner, the efforts of the fastidious mathematician to make friends. As smug as he seemed, the hair smoothing betrayed him: Dr. Wei was self-conscious, of what was unclear. Perhaps of the accent that coated his consonants, a threat to the facile delivery, the r’s? Perhaps of the slightness of build, further slighted by nearness to Olu’s own wide-chested frame? Perhaps of the sadness alive in his pupils, as present as laugh lines around his bright eyes? Or of something else, dark, Olu couldn’t see what, but could sense that this man was no stranger to shame. And was opening his mouth to say “Interesting” or suchlike when Dr. Wei smoothed down his hair and went on.

“You know, I never understood the dysfunctions of Africa. The greed of the leaders, disease, civil war. Still dying of malaria in the twenty-first century, still hacking and raping, cutting genitals off? Young children and nuns slitting throats with machetes, those girls in the Congo, this thing in Sudan? As a young man in China, I assumed it was ignorance. Intellectual incapacity, inferiority perhaps. Needless to say I was wrong, as I’ve noted. When I came here I saw I was wrong. Fair enough. But the backwardness persists even now, and why is that? When African men are so bright? as we’ve said. And the women, too, don’t get me wrong, I’m not sexist. But why is that place still so backward? I ask. And you know what I think? No respect for the family. The fathers don’t honor their children or wives. The Olu I knew, Oluwalekun Abayomi? Had two bastard children plus three by the wife. A brain without equal but no moral backbone. That’s why you have the child soldier, the rape. How can you value another man’s daughter, or son, when you don’t even value your own?”

Olu was silent, too startled to speak.

“You can’t.” Dr. Wei opened his hands: QED. “Your mother, for example. Ms. Savage. Not Mrs. With a different last name than yours. Sai. Is that right? I’m assuming—and it is just an assumption, I acknowledge — that your father left your mother to raise you alone?”

Olu sat, frozen, too angry to move.

“Exactly. And there’s your example. Your father. The father is always the example.” He paused. “Now you may say, ‘No, no, I’m not like my father—’”

“No,” Olu mumbled.

“And that’s what you think, but—”

“I’m just like my father. I’m proud to be like him.” Just barely a whisper through Olu’s clenched teeth. Dr. Wei, caught off guard, tipped his head and looked at Olu — who, hands and chest trembling, looked steadily back. Said, “He’s a surgeon like I am, the best in his field,” and the rest in an outpour, one soft seething rush: “The problem isn’t Ling wants to marry an African. It’s not that she’s marrying me, and she will. No, the problem is you, Dr. Wei. Your example. You’re the example of what they don’t want. Both of them, Ling and Lee-Ann, and why is that? Why aren’t there pictures of them in your place? What was it, ‘the father is always the example’? Both of your daughters prefer something else.”

Ling appeared now in her coat, holding Olu’s.

Aaaaaaa-men. “Lacrimosa,” the choral climax.

Dr. Wei cleared his throat, but before he could speak Ling grabbed Olu and left. Out the door, just like that.

• • •

Then laughing together, a flute and a cello, the car windows open to birds and a breeze.

“You were there the whole time?”

“I was listening from the bathroom. Lee-Ann was on speaker. I love you so much.” She was crying. “Let’s get married. Tonight. Go to Vegas.”

“Right now?”

“It’s been fourteen years, fuck it, why not? Have we ever been to Nevada? Wait, where’s the Grand Canyon?”

“Arizona.”

“Go to Logan,” she said, and he did.

• • •

Then the Little White Wedding Chapel six hours later.

Ling-and-Olu in Vegas.

Of all places.

• • •

Now she wakes herself up with her tossing and turning. “Hey,” she says groggily, rubbing her eyes. She peers at him sitting in scrubs in the chair and assumes that he’s sliding his shoes off, or on. “Coming or going?”

Caught. “Going,” he lies. He puts down her T-shirt, embarrassed, and stands. He goes to the bedside and kisses her softly. Says, “Go back to sleep,” and she does.

• • •

He goes to the bathroom and closes the door. He sits on the toilet seat, taut from the lie. The mirror in front of him shows him a face, raw and ashen, eyes red from the thing, and the cold, and a phone peeking out from his little scrubs pocket. He pulls this out, sighing, and dials.

3

And what was it this time that bade her from bed to the closet, the coat and the short coat-length dress, to the street, to the gray of the soon-coming snow, to the cab, to the Village, and (back) to his bed?

What was it this time? Insomnia? A nightmare?

Was midnight already uptown when she left: just the man and his pug hurrying home saw her go, turned their heads as she passed in the thigh-length fur coat. (She does this, has always done this since Everything Changed, these little scenes from the movie she shoots in her head: frazzled lead enters frame, looking right, looking left, spots the taxi, leaps in, and zips off in the night.) She didn’t zip. She rode slowly through Saturday traffic, the streets of New York clogged with seekers of love, to the old stately home of her old stately lover where Taiwo got out, paused to look at the snow. Downward it danced through the black and the quiet, the yellow-gold lamplight, and onto the ground where some stuck and some melted, a funny thing, really, that something so soft could remain, could endure.

And pausing looked down the short block at the windows — some black and some gold, after midnight downtown — as she’d done as a child driving home in the Volvo, her hands pressed against the cold glass in the back. Those houses had seemed so impressive, imposing, set back from the road on low slopes or with gates, Brookline brick with black shutters or Tudors with turrets, ten bedrooms at least as compared to their five. But it wasn’t this grandeur that dazzled her mute. What bewitched her was all those warm windows. The glow. All those warm, wealthy people she peered at inside, with their dining rooms yellowed by chandelier light or their bedrooms turned amber against the night darkness, against the outsideness. The families implied. For though they, too, lived there—her family, in Brookline, not five or ten minutes from where she now passed — she had never once felt what she saw in those windows, that warm-yellow-glowing-inside-ness of home.

Even in the beginning, before things went pear-shaped (before Kehinde came in from the car without sound, up the stairs, down the hall, to her room where she’d been watching, where she was waiting in the windowsill, sat down, and wept), there was the sense in her house of an ongoing effort, of an upswing midmotion, a thing being built: A Successful Family, with the six of them involved in the effort, all, striving for the common goal, as yet unreached. They were unfinished, in rehearsal, a production in progress, each performing his role with an affected aplomb, and with the stress of performance ever-present for all as a soft sort of sound in the background. A hum.

There was “him,” straining daily to perform the Provider, and Fola’s star turn as Suburban Housewife, and Olu’s as fastidious-cum-favored First Son; the Artist, gifted, awkward; and the Baby. Then she. Determined to deliver a flawless performance, to fly from the stage chased by thunderous applause, Darling Daughter of champions, elementary school standout, the brightest of pupils in bright-eyed class pictures. No one asked her to do this. Not him, never Fola. No one mapped their joint progress toward the one goal — were they there yet? had they made it? had they become a Successful Family — but she knew to keep going, to keep striving, by the hum.

The families in the windows were Successful Families already, had finished the heavy lifting generations ago, were not building or straining or making an effort; the goal had been reached. They could rest now, calm down. At night, through their windows, she saw them there, finished, with silence between them in place of the hum, placid familyness captured in paint above mantels, with feet up on cushions, at rest and at home.

But how could she answer when Fola would ask her, about to start laughing, perpetually amused, “What are you always staring at back there, my darling?”

“The houses.”

“The houses? You have a house of your own.”

But not a home was the difference she saw even then, peering in from the car, from outside, as they passed — and saw now as she paused on the sidewalk outside. Lighting a cigarette. The cliché. But not a home.

“Is it you?”

He had cracked the door open at the top of the stoop to look down at the sidewalk. At first she didn’t turn. She stared down his block at his neighbors’ lit windows, thinking partially of how she looked to him. Short white fur coat. “For God’s sake, it’s freezing out. What are you looking at?” He followed her gaze down the block. Now she turned.

And there he was, lovely and solid and ruffled in sweatpants and sweater, an incongruous scarf.

“It is I,” she said, blowing out smoke with a flourish. “Did you miss me?”

With aching. “Come here.”

And she went.

• • •

What was it this time, at midnight, near sleeping, that bade her to rise, to get dressed, and to go? When she knows, she thinks now, that to go is to start the thing over right back where they ended it last?

She rides in the cab with her head on the window, her coat rather flattened for its hours on the floor, looking out at the Hudson, New Jersey in lights, feeling light-headed, empty, an odd sort of calm. And remembers now: midnight, alone in her room, having gone to sleep early, the rare weekend off, bolting up in the bed in the dark barely breathing, then crying for no reason at all.

She forgot.

It happened so quickly — this moment on waking, the tears which began without cause and then stopped — that she didn’t remember, not two minutes later, and not until now, what had woken her up. It wasn’t the insomnia, her lifelong companion, nor the “feelings of emptiness,” as Dr. Hass says (a misnomer, says Taiwo: there is just the one feeling, only one way to be empty, only one way to feel it). It was something entirely different, what she felt before going and remembers (too late) as she makes her way home, those forgotten few seconds of some bizarre sorrow, intense beyond reason, a force field of grief. Yes. This is what woke her. A force field of sorrow. But how can she answer Dr. Hass, who will sigh, “So we saw him…,” Monday morning on Central Park West, with the trees out the window all dressed up in snow, bare brown branches like legs in a short white fur coat, with the gesture, ceremonial, that goes with the sigh: the raising of the glasses (which may well be fake, Taiwo thinks, fashion glasses, a therapist prop) from the tip of her nose to the top of her head. “Did he call you?”

“No.”

“But you saw him.”

“Yes.”

“It was you who called him.”

“I didn’t call. I just went.”

Further sighing. Furious scribbling. “Spent the night.”

“Early morning.”

“Let’s start with our decision. Do we know why we went?”

And what can she say to this? Why did “we” see him? We felt our very being rushing out of us like breath and longed to touch and be touched, to make contact, and did.

We missed our father.

• • •

“You said?”

The cab driver peers through his rear view at Taiwo, who stirs, caught off guard, lifts her head off the glass. “I’m sorry?”

“You said something.” The driver is Ghanaian. She can tell by his accent. “‘I missed my father,’ you said.”

“I did?” Taiwo flushes. The driver nods, smiles. Their eyes meet in the mirror, and she sees him react: looking quickly away and then back, at her eyes, as one caught doing something he should but can’t stop.

“W-where are y-you from?” he stammers shyly. “What are you?” But means what they all mean. What are your eyes?

“I don’t know.”

“You sound English.”

“I studied in England.”

“Me, I’m from—”

“Ghana. I know. I could tell.”

“Ey! How did you know that?”

“My mother’s Nigerian.”

“Bella naija!” He beams. “And this father you missed?”

“Did I say that?”

“You must have been thinking out loud.”

“Did I think that?” She’s smiling. Her BlackBerry rings.

“It’s your father!” He’s laughing, glancing back through the mirror.

She fumbles for the phone in the bag at her feet. It stops ringing. She finds it. “It’s my brother.” She’s frowning. She puts down the phone and leans back and is quiet. The radio plays softly, Wagadu-Gu, “Sweet Mother,” the merry Sierra Leonean Afro-pop hit. The driver stops laughing now, focused on the road again, knowing as cab drivers do when to stop, when the moment is over, how to exit a scene: keep one’s eyes on the road, turn the radio up.

Taiwo rests her head on the glass, out of habit, the phone in her fingers, “O. Sai” on the screen. She is glad that she missed him, she thinks (donning armor), does not need a lecture this time of the night, Olu’s five-minute speech about Sai family glory, what Others Must Think of Them, oh the shame.

No.

What would he know about shame, Perfect Olu, as clean cut and taut as the other once was, with his cold little life in cold Boston, his girlfriend, their cold-white apartment, white smiles on the walls, Ling-and-Olu do good in warm weather, two robots, degree-getting, grant-winning, good-doing androids, a picture of perfection, New Immigrant Perfection, of cowardice rewarded, she thinks (readied bow), an old habit, this, bad one, to attack her attackers or whomever she perceives to be planning attack, right or wrong, noting all of their flaws in her mind, in this manner discrediting them). What would he know?

Yes.

If one had just stayed on that carousel, amassing gold rings, seated, smiling, and safe, going round and round, living the same four years over, at Milton, Yale, med school, a life on repeat — (1) compete for acceptance to elite institution, (2) get accepted, (3) work hard, (4) do well, then start back at (1) four years later — then yes, one might lecture on “shame.” Might call her a “failure” for withdrawing from law school, condemn her as “reckless,” “disappointment to Mom,” the final blow to the production, Successful Family in shambles, curtains closed, theater shuttered forever. But how? How can he know what it is to be stared at and talked about; worse, not to care, to give in to it? He who knows nothing of hot things, of wrong things, of loss, failure, passion, lust, sorrow, or love? When even she can’t explain it, to Dr. Hass, to herself, doesn’t know where it comes from, the ravenous urge to be swallowed, digested, to pass through a body only to drag oneself back to the mouth of the beast?

Olu can’t.

So he lies there, mute, riddled with arrowheads, the fastidious-cum-favored-cum-fallen First Son, as she leans her head back on the cab seat, defended and spent by the act of resenting her brother.

It brings her no comfort, this felling of Olu. Instead, as she draws her mind closer to look, she sees her face, not Olu’s, her body, not his, pierced with sharp flint-knapped stone, bleeding out in the snow.

“No?” says the driver.

“I’m sorry?” says Taiwo.

The driver frowns, worried. “You just told me, ‘No!’”

“I meant no, don’t take 96th,” Taiwo lies quickly, dismayed by this new habit of thinking aloud. “If you exit at 125th it’ll be faster. Just go up to Amsterdam, right, and we’re there.”

“You got it,” says the driver. He glances at Taiwo.

She stares out the window, at blood in the snow.

• • •

And how had this happened?

The death of Darling Daughter. The brightest of pupils, who never looked out, who had spent half her life with her head in a book, learning Latin roots, spewing right answers. Alone. She had never been close to a man, not since Kehinde; her efforts to make or keep friends came to naught: there was always the issue of beauty between them, as envy in women, desire in men, indistinguishable in the end, lust and envy, co-original, the flower and leaf of the same twisted root. Regardless, when the press learned, they made it sound natural: a tale old as time, beauty, power, and sex, dean of law school in love tryst with editor of Law Review, BEAUTY AND THE DEAN! in “Page Six,” and the rest. And it was, in a way; it was natural, that it happened, that Girl in a city that adulates blondes should find Boy (fifty-two, former blond turned to silver-and-gold) in a city that adulates youth. The press didn’t say this. They said that Dean Rudd, born Rudinsky, the fund-raising whiz kid uptown, charming lawyer-turned-scholar with old money wife (noted New York Times food critic Lexi Choate-Rudd), one-time Marshall scholar, White House fellow, intern to Carter, special assistant to Clinton, the crown Prince of Gifts, had at last lost his titular Golden Boy glow and would step down at once, move downtown.

Curtains closed.

Dr. Hass, the psychotherapist appointed by the school to calm hypercompetitive postteens on the eve of exams, found it natural, too, albeit a good deal more interesting than the eating and anxiety disorders du jour. This is why, Taiwo has long since suspected, Dr. Hass had insisted they continue pro bono after the scandal erupted and Taiwo withdrew, with her Columbia Student Medical Insurance Plan abruptly canceled — and continues still now over a year and a half later, insistent that they finish, that they “see the work through.” With the thinly veiled references to quitting and abandoning. A valiant exemplar of how not to do both, Clara Hass, with her buzz cut and tortoiseshell frames and the voice of a DJ of late-night soft rock. Further tales: “father hunger,” “Electra Complex,” perfectly natural.

But nary a word about nature.

As if the thing could be accounted for by psychology, sociology, but not biology, given the different age and race, not by nature. By the basics of nature, senseless baseness of nature, instant-basic attraction, lust, visceral reactions, the thing that simply happens at times between humans as between animals crossing paths in the forest (or jungle): the one sees the other or catches its scent and is drawn as by magnet to mount it, to mate. The press didn’t consider this. Dr. Hass doesn’t believe this. That Taiwo, with no history whatsoever with older men, simply entered a room and saw this older man, this Dean Rudd, and he her, and it simply began.

• • •

“Dean, this is Taiwo.”

The assistant, Marissa.

The interview, March, winter dying outside, with the trees on the quad sprouting shy pinkish blossoms despite the loud protest of sharp, howling wind: female lead enters frame and stops short at the door at the edge of a carpet of mustards and wines — so much different then, younger, determined, believing, just back to New York after three years at Oxford, the god of Approval still fat on its altar — and stands, looking in from the threshold.

Feels tension.

In blue velvet blazer and dress-cum-dashiki, the tongue-in-cheek dress code, half devil-may-care, quarter Yoruba priestess, quarter prim British schoolgirl, her upsweep of locks dripping tendrils, high heels, with that feeling of conquest she still sometimes gets before entering rooms in which points must be won, in which men must be smiled at and women impressed, prey and predator both, stretching forelegs and jaw. Stopping short, with Marissa, both jarred by the tension, the male lead’s expression, the way he just stares.

He didn’t stop staring. Marissa was blushing, the nature of the reaction plain even to her. “Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” she said without irony.

One caught doing something he should but can’t stop. “M-Miss Sai,” he said, coughing. “Come in. Please. Excuse me.” He cleared his throat twice. “Marissa, thank you.”

Marissa left.

Taiwo entered.

Walking slowly across the carpet between the doorway and the armchair, red leather, across from his desk. Repelled and drawn, both, as if pulled by a current, resisting a current, undone by his stare, azure blue in the shadow of inky-black lashes, a see-through stare, seeing through. Seen through, she sat.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, sitting also. They didn’t shake hands, as if knowing not yet. “I was hoping to see you in person, to meet you. After reading your essay.” He held up her file. “I can’t remember the last time I read something like this.” He shook his head, laughed. “You write too well to be a lawyer.”

Unsure where to look — at his eyes, at his smile, at his finger on the folder, at the light in his hair, making silver-gold glitter — she looked at her hands. She said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t be silly. Thank you.” How he laughed. “The only thing I wanted to ask at this meeting is whether you’re certain that law school’s for you? Not Columbia Law. We’d be honored to have you. But law school in general. I know what you wrote. About your mother’s decision to give up on law school, to sacrifice all for the sake of her children.”

“It wasn’t as bad as all that. Did I write that?”

“In glorious prose, yes, you did, Taiwo Sai.” With the light from the window behind him between them. “May I ask where it comes from, your last name?”

“You may.” With the light in her eyes, in his laughter. “From Ghana.”

“Your parents are from Ghana?”

“My father was, yes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Hearing was, thinking death. “And your mother?”

“Less sorry than you are, I think.”

And began. Out of nowhere: this ease and this banter, as if they were peers, friends for years and now more: how they laughed and then stopped, half-smiles staining their lips from the laughing, then blushed at each other, and knew. They spoke for an hour politely, pro forma (the usual thing, her unusual past, the twin brother the artist in London, how impressive, a Rhodes, how outstanding, the Latin and Greek), and she spun the tale lightly and loosely as always, a story told well about somebody else, without detail or heat, “I did this,” “I did that,” with great flair but no feeling, no truth past the facts — and he listened intently, the azure eyes burning with knowing that nothing was being revealed, that the facts were a coat with the truth there beneath it, bare skin to be accessed at some other time.

• • •

Some other time.

Raining, November, on Barrow.

Both bashful, the fact of it baffling somehow, what the dean of the school and a student had done quite apart from the blushing and knowing they would.

They’d come from a function at his townhouse on Park, where he’d asked her and three other students along, 1L standouts already in early November, to explain to alumni why they’d chosen the school. After, he’d taken them all down to dinner at Indochine, the five of them squeezed in a booth, with the three others babbling on eagerly and ably, well pleased with their spring rolls and litchi martinis, and Taiwo squeezed next to him watching him charm with his arm on the banquette behind her. Cologne. It wasn’t that she found him so physically attractive — though he was, in his way, for his weight class so to speak, with the lean sort of body of a middle-aged runner, all the tautness intact in the arms and the legs, less the torso, not tall, five foot ten at the outside, a very good frame for a very good suit, with a nose sloping down to a cup of a mouth, a hook nose, pointy chin, heart-shaped mouth, narrow cheeks. Rather, she found him magnetic. A presence. He’d pass in Greene Hall, and she’d feel him go by in a rippling of air. A light tugging sensation. Eyes tugged, she’d turn, see him. “Miss Sai,” he’d say, smile.

After the dinner the others went clubbing, with cold rain just starting and she begging off, “I’m too tired, maybe next time,” and he saying quietly, “At least let me hail you a cab,” but no cabs. They walked some, together, moving closer and closer, as two people do when it’s starting to rain, halfway looking for cabs, halfway looking for excuses. Down Lafayette, over to Washington Square Park.

“I lived here,” she said as they passed Hayden Hall.

“So did I.”

Taiwo objected, “You never went to NYU. It was Yale, then Yale Law School, then the Marshall, then the White House.”

“All that from Wikipedia?”

“Your intro tonight.”

“Of course.” He was blushing. “I grew up in the Village. When the Village was the Village still, Jewish and black.” He reached for her hand, less a pass than punctuation. Without looking.

“The band’s back together.” She laughed. She held up their hands, interlocked, and let go. The rain picking up as they crossed through the park. “From the Village to the Upper East Side, non é male.”

“My parents-in-law gave us that house after school. A wedding gift.” He chuckled. “I hate it.”

“Your house?”

“Well, my wife’s house more precisely; my house is still here. Little two-bed on Barrow. My mother never sold it. A consummate pothead, never held down a job more than three or four months, waiting tables in diners, but bought the apartment, may God bless her soul. Grew her own grass, smoked it three times a day. It was calm in that house. Kissed my first girl just there.” He pointed to a bench. “Lena Freeman.”

“Nice Jewish girl?”

“Member of the Black Panther Party in fact. We met at a protest right here by the fountain.”

“Your first kiss was a black girl?”

“A woman. Twenty-eight.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’re lying.”

“I was, yes. Pretended I was a student at Columbia Law School.”

“Look at you now, kid!” She hit his arm, playful. “It’s a bit past your bedtime, no, speaking of home?”

He didn’t stop laughing. “Yes. Lexi’s in Napa. I should call you a car service. Let’s get inside.”

• • •

Whereon they ran the short distance to Barrow Street, up the three flights to the silence and darkness where feeling for light switch and shaking off jacket, they shifted positions and bumped, chest to chest.

• • •

Presently, they were kissing as one does in darkness in foyers still dripping from running through rain: with one’s hands and the other’s removing wet clothes with an urgent choreography learned without words. Postfinale they lay in his mother’s old bedroom, the downpour a soundtrack, both nude, on their backs, and he took her arm, steel brown in moonlight, and kissed it. “I love how you smell.”

“Like Lena Freeman?” And laughed.

He propped himself up now. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Now, that would impress me.”

“For the first time tonight?” Feigning shock. “You mean to tell me that my speech didn’t impress you? ‘The Gift Is the Giving’? My outfit? Okay. The bow tie was rich. Another gift from the in-laws.”

“A bow for the house?”

Laughing harder, “Touché.” He leaned on his elbow to face her more squarely. With sadness, “You’re thinking I lost it somewhere. That I once had a freedom, a vision, had Lena, a Black Panther girlfriend, a Jew-fro, a fire, had this sense of the world and myself, burning in it, this burning desire to change things somehow, that I went off to school and met Lexi, got married, cashed in, married up, lost the heat, lost the fire, that I’m looking for something, a spark, inspiration, that you’re Lena incarnate, you think. But you’re wrong. I’ve never met anyone like you, not Lena, not anyone, anywhere.”

“Impressive,” she said.

“Besides, there’s your hair. Hers was”—gesturing—“bigger. A cloud. A constellation.”

“An Afro.”

“A world. Yours isn’t”—touching her dreadlocks—“horizontal.”

“You don’t like my white-girl hair?”

“Don’t like your what?”

“My dreadlocks. My white-girl hair.”

Laughing, always laughing, “Aren’t dreadlocks Jamaican? Afrocentric at least? Do people still say that? Afrocentric?”

“Yes. White people.”

“I adore you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Then help me,” he said. “I want to. I want to know you.”

“You can’t. I’m a student. You’re married.”

He was quiet. After a moment, “I know.” He lay down beside her, to face her less squarely. For minutes neither spoke. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

Taiwo was thinking — for the first time in hours, not reacting but thinking—that there had been some mistake, that if casting young women to play the puss/pupil to a professor whose wife was away tasting wine, one should look for a student better suited to scandal (or to the Village or Napa or the Upper East Side), one of the very pretty pill addicts with whom she’d gone to high school, for example, hair tussled, black eyeliner smeared, and not her, an overachiever only playing at temptress, an ex-goody-two-shoes in bad girl footwear. It was a show, the vintage dresses and American Spirits, the rapid-fire wit and implied sex appeal, with learned lines and sharp costumes and dull supporting actors; she was playing at sex but knew nothing of love. There was the Thing That Had Happened in Lagos, and after, the countless encounters with lustful male friends, but not this, never passion (moreover, admiration), the show come to life, manifest, turned to flesh. But what could she say? I don’t know what I’m doing? And how could she answer Dean Rudd when he turned, touched her cheek, found it wet, and said, “Taiwo, don’t cry,” and assorted sweet nothings along the same lines?

She left the bed abruptly and went to the bathroom. She didn’t turn the light on. She stood at the mirror. And here she was: naked and seeking approval, the doer of homework and earner of praise ever desperate to win back her erstwhile Darlingness dazzling the judges, whoever they were. With the body, as always, a stranger post-coitus, the long, lanky limbs and congenital tone, a good body, she’d heard, though she didn’t believe it, or couldn’t quite see it, not least after sex. Now it looked functional, a thing, instrumental. A means to an end, though she didn’t know which. She thought of her sister, who longed for this body. Half laughed at the irony, at how these things worked: that she, Taiwo, had inherited and maintained with no effort the model-esque figure that Sadie so craved — and from Fola, who, frightened by the baby’s low birth weight, had overfed Sadie and babied her sick. (The disorder. Unmentioned. Though all of them saw it. If only she could, she’d have said, “Sadie, here, take my body, I don’t want it. I never even liked it. It’s not like I asked for it.”) Luck of the draw. A cow born in India or Gary, Indiana. Who was to be faulted? The deified cow? And yet she was. Faulted. Was wanted, and faulted, or felt so, and still went on seeking the want. She thought of Dr. Hass in hemp scarf, chunky turquoise. “You don’t have to impress me,” she’d recently said, leaning back in the armchair to lift up the glasses and stare at her client, a strange gentle stare.

“Of course I don’t,” Taiwo had quipped, laughing hoarsely, the sound of the laughter false even to her, in her ears, as she’d shifted, unnerved by the comment, eyes trained out the window. “I already have. You treat me for free, no?”

“I do,” Dr. Hass said. “And why would I do such a thing, do we think? Your unique family background? Your remarkable accomplishments? Your formidable intelligence? Your stunning good looks?”

Taiwo laughed again, but it hurt her to do so. She shrugged, rubbed her elbow. “You got me,” she said. She looked at the clock, built-in bookshelf, O’Keeffe print. Cup of Silver Ginger. Out the window again. A word was taking shape on the tip of her tongue but the tears got there first and she swallowed them both. “Time is up.” Stood.

“I care.” Remained seated.

“I know,” she said, leaving, and meant it.

A fraud.

The word came, belated, and floated before her, a shape in the mirror, a tint to the light. She reached out a finger to touch her reflection, her eyes glowing back at her, strange in the dark (an inheritance, the color, from the Scottish great-grandmother), tracing her lips, conch-shell pink, on the glass. “Taiwo, don’t cry,” she said, softly, in mimicry. She laughed at the sound of it, dropping her hand. What was there to cry about? The same thing as always. The crushing disbelief in the truth of their love.

She returned to the bedroom and stood in the doorway (in armor) and looked at him, noting the flaws. The torso less taut than the arms and the legs with a thinning of hair near the crown of his head. A better cast woman would have asked at this juncture if the man found it strange to be here in this house, in his mother’s old room (albeit remodeled completely, a childhood apartment turned bachelor pad), but it didn’t occur to her, was vaguely familiar, a son in the bed of his mother. Instead, she found her damp purse by the bed where she’d dropped it and went to the windowsill, steel brown, and sat. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Do you mind if I watch?”

She was laughing now, changing the subject, blowing O’s. “Think about it. Barring Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that’s who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman’s privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. I’m serious.”

“You’re gorgeous.”

“You think so?”

“Come here.”

• • •

“Your baby is crying,” says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing. They’ve turned off the highway and onto the street’s unplowed snow. She says, “Thank you,” and, sighing, picks up. “And to what might I owe this anomaly?”

“It’s Olu.”

“Yes, Olu, I know. I have caller ID.”

He ignores this, saying softly, “You sound like you’re crying.”

She notices her tears and his voice. “So do you.”

“What’s wrong?” they say in unison, then laugh as do siblings suddenly reminded of their siblingness after a fight. “You first,” she says, using the old line, “You’re the oldest.” She hears him laugh harder, a choked sort of sound.

He says, “Remember when we used to have something to tell him, and we’d stand by his study, too afraid to go in, and we’d fight over who should go first, when we entered, and I’d say that you should because you were the girl, and you’d say that I should because I was the oldest, and Kehinde would always just go, while we fought?”

She loses her breath for a moment. “W-what are you saying?” But it isn’t her brother. She knows that she’d know. “Olu, what happened?”

“He died today, Taiwo.”

“Who did?”

The drumbeat.

A force field of grief. “How do you know that?”

“Mom called me to tell me.”

Inexplicably, anger. “She couldn’t call me herself?”

“Taiwo.”

She doesn’t answer. She looks out the window. Remembers night sledding, Lars Andersen Park, stars. “How?”

“Of a heart attack.” Here, Olu’s voice catches. “I don’t have Kehinde’s number in London, do you?”

“No.”

“Taiwo.”

“What?”

“You haven’t spoken?”

“No.”

“In two years?”

“It’s been one and a half.”

“He’s your twin—”

“I’m aware of that. Do you have his number? He’s also your brother. It’s not only me.”

“Taiwo.”

“What?! Stop saying my name like that.” Now she is crying.

“Don’t cry,” Olu says.

“Why do people say that? ‘Don’t cry’?” She is trembling. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll find his number. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

“You already called Sadie?”

“I’m calling her next.”

“I should do it.” She wipes off her face. “I’m the girl.”

Olu laughs gently, sniffling softly. They are quiet. After a very long silence he asks, “Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure yet. Are you?”

“Sure.”

She looks out the window. “Well, I’m at my apartment.”

“I should hope so,” he says. “It’s two in the morning.”

She ignores this, counting money. “I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to Sadie.”

“Okay.”

The driver peers back through the mirror, engine idling. She hands him the cash, shoulder to ear to hold the phone.

“Are you there?” Olu asks.

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, listen. She needs to come down to New York for the flight. I’ll try to find something out of JFK tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?”

“For the funeral. We should go straightaway.”

He continues in his Olu voice, logistics, administration, their duty to be there for their mother, the weather. Finally, a silence. He says, “We’ll talk later.”

“I love you,” in unison, and Taiwo hangs up.

• • •

She sits for a moment, looking out at her building, the Christmas wreaths bleeding red droplets of light. The driver knows better than to ask, and he doesn’t; just sits there in silence until she gets out. She is thinking to ask him to drive and keep driving, to wherever, not here, not this house-not-a-home, but to where? There is nothing. There is the lover who is married. There is the job waiting tables at Indochine, a joke, a private joke with herself, the middle finger to Approval; there is her family, all over, in shambles, down one. Where would she go? There is nowhere. She is laughing. No man and his pug see her step from the cab, fancy heels sinking down in the snow on the curbside, enduring and soft, bare legs trembling with cold. It occurs to her suddenly how stupid she must look to this driver from Ghana in his sensible coat as he watches her, waiting to see that she gets from his cab to her building and safely inside. She teeters up the stoop in the platform stilettos and turns to look back at the driver, the snow.

Downward it dances and lands on her shoulders and nose and his windshield, the hush of a storm, with the street emptied out of all seekers of warmth and a wind blowing gently. She holds up a hand.

They are angels in a snow globe, both silent and smiling, two African strangers alone in the snow: kindly man in a cab in a bulky beige coat waving back as he pulls from the curb and honks once and a girl on her steps in a short white fur coat crying quietly watching him go.

4

Someone is banging on the bathroom door. “SADIE!”

She is kneeling at the toilet bowl, fingers down throat. Out comes the alcohol, followed by the birthday cake, followed by a thimble of thin, burning bile. She pulls off some toilet roll, wipes off her mouth with this. She listens for a moment. The someone walks off. Elsewhere in the suite swell the sounds of the party, overlapping, boys’ laughter, girls’ squealing, from a distance, as heard by a child at the bottom of a swimming pool, lying down, looking up, pretending to have drowned. She peers in the toilet as she does at such moments, the patient turned doctor, inspecting the food. It is fascinating, however disgusting, the vomit. How it emerges, with a logic, in the order received. With a touch of the ceremonial, she thinks, in the action, the kneeling and performing the same gruesome rite, the repetition and silence, always this moment of silence just after. A sacrifice. Ribbons of blood. She examines her fingernails, religiously short and still stinking of vomit—

the smell interrupts.

A pin in the bubble, an end to the silence, return to awareness: she’s on a cold floor. And not in an act of enlightened purification but throwing up birthday cake (hers). She stands up. The doctor turned criminal. Disposing of the evidence. She rifles through her tote for the usual tools. Handi Wipes, sanitizer, Scope, travel toothbrush. She cleans off the tiles with the wipes as she’s learned. (Sometimes the person who uses the bathroom next notices, if she doesn’t attend to the floor.) She washes her hands and face, flushes the toilet twice, brushes her teeth, and again. Gargles Scope. Out of habit, without looking, she opens the cabinet. She knows this bathroom cabinet and its contents by heart. On the bottom row Adderall and Zoloft and Ativan; middle: Kiehl’s face washes, Molton Brown lotions; top: sweet perfumes and Trish McEvoy makeup and Vera Bradley pouch with the papers and pot. She taps out an Ativan and swallows without water. The phone again. “SADIE!”

“I’m coming!”

She’s not.

• • •

She learned this at Milton, to hide in a bathroom, a perfect place really, a cocoon, a world away. The peculiar insularity of bathrooms, a comfort. The sameness of bathrooms, pale yellows, blues, greens. And the things in a bathroom, a woman’s especially: not the eyes but the toiletries the window to the soul. She would go to their homes after school, or on vacations, to their summer houses — always invited, every year, dearly beloved of mothers, a Good Influence on daughters, with good grades and good manners, what a peach, so polite! — and she’d slip off at some point, upstairs, to a bathroom, the friend’s, or the mother’s, more fascinating still.

The bathroom of a mother.

A world of concealment.

A chamber of secrets, insecurities, scents, crystal bottles with spray pumps and baby blue boxes, an undue proportion of labels in French. She would twist off the tops, smelling this, smelling that, creamy lotions, perfumes, and the small shell-shaped soaps. She would wash off her fingers with hand soap (a revelation: at home they used black soap for all body parts), then dry them on the monogrammed hand towel provided or, better still, the towel on the back of the door.

She’d always use the towel on the back of the door if there was one, which smelled of defenselessness, skin, of a person in a vulnerable, sweet-smelling state, of a girl in the morning, false tropical fruit. Sometimes she’d press up her face to these towels, overwhelmed by the smell, suddenly wanting to cry. Always, she’d peer in the tote bins, the cabinets, the makeup bags, Kaboodles, and take something with: a kind of clumsy kleptomania, not as professional as the bulimia, not as clinically executed, and nothing of note. A scrunchie or eyedrops or squashed tubes of lip gloss or sample-sized hand creams brought back from the spa or, the one time, an earring, uncharacteristically, a diamond. Until someone called “Sadie!” or knocked on the door.

“Did you get lost in the bathroom?” they’d ask her, eyes smiling, all waiting to hear what smart thing she would say, Clever Sadie, so bright, and so nice, and so cute, like a member of the family. “I locked myself in.” Always this lie. Inexplicable, really, that anyone believed it, but everyone did.

Then other times she would just sit in the silence or lie in the bathtub, alone, in her clothes, looking up at the ceiling or ducks on the wallpaper, exhausted from making an effort.

As now.

She sits on the toilet seat, feet up beneath her and hugging both shins with her chin on her kneecaps. Again the phone rings, with the shrill “SADIE! PHONE!” from a distance, but no one comes knocking. She counts.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

A game that she plays with herself, or against. Goal: guess how many seconds it will take them to notice that someone’s gone missing, that Sadie’s not there? She made up the game in that first house, in Brookline, with its funny little stairways and secret trap doorways. She’d hide in the bedroom just next to her parents’ (when her parents existed as such, in the plural) and hear them all talking in the kitchen below her, their voices a rumble, a hum through the floor: her father and brother, his voice newly deepened, the twins in eighth grade with their one husky tone, and her mother always laughing, steady rainfall of laughter, pitter patter, like crying, a laugh full of tears.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Which of them would notice that Sadie was gone? It was Olu, usually Olu, a bass in the distance, “Where’s Sadie?” floating up through the floorboards, a flare, but she always somehow hoped that her sister would notice, would come up to look for her. Taiwo never did.

9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

Sitting in the bathroom she shares with her roommate, waiting for Philae to notice she’s gone.

• • •

Philae. “Like a sister” to Sadie. As skinny. The light of her life and the thorn in her side, Philae Frick Negroponte, former darling of Milton, a sophomore-year transfer from Spence in New York, now the darling of Yale, with her Greek magnate father and American mother of Henry Clay fame. Philae, whose smile and gray eyes and blond hair and tan skin and long legs Sadie loves as her own, who had walked into homeroom that day in September knowing no one at Milton and sat next to her. Of all people. Of all miracles.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“Of course not, no.”

“Thank you.” In black leather pants, the first leather pants Sadie had ever seen in person. “Is it me, or is everyone looking at you?”

“You. And I wouldn’t say looking. More staring, or gawking.”

She was laughing. “I’m Philae.”

She was smitten. “I’m Sadie.”

“Philae and Sadie,” proclaimed Philae, smiling brightly. “I like it. I like you.” And the rest on from there: movies, sleepovers, vacations, matching BFF necklaces with BFF in Arabic (gift from Philae from Dubai), applying early to Yale, where Philae’s mother and uncles and grandfather and great-grandfather and Sadie’s brother had gone. Philae and Sadie: the inseparable, the invincible, Miss Popularity in partnership with Most Likely to Succeed, a high school match made in heaven relocated to New Haven as Campus Celebrity and Most Valuable Friend. The loyal, the indispensible, the wing beneath, etc. A role Sadie plays as if made for the part: the Nick to Philae’s Gatsby, the Charles to her Sebastian, the Gene to her Finny: there is always the Friend, Sadie knows, any freshman who’s done all her reading knows the narrator of the story is always the Friend.

Still, Taiwo is wrong when she mocks her for speaking like Philae — overusing whatever and like, or for dressing like Philae, monthly stipend permitting — by saying she, Sadie, secretly wants to be white. It isn’t a matter of “white,” though it’s true that she’s never had many African American friends, neither at Milton nor at Yale where they all seem to find her inappropriately suburban, nor a “secret” as such. For all of the hoopla about race, authentic blackness (which, as far as she’s concerned, confuses identity and musical preference), it is obvious to Sadie that all of them carry this patina of whiteness, or WASP-ness more so: be they Black, Latin, Asian, they’re Ivy League strivers, they all start their comments with overdrawn ums, and they’ll all end up working in law firms or hospitals or consultancies or banks having majored in art. They are ethnically heterogeneous and culturally homogenous, per force of exposure, osmosis, adolescence. She accepts this without anguish as the price of admission. She doesn’t want to be Caucasian.

She wants to be Philae.

Rather, part of Philae’s family, of the Frick Negropontes, of their pictures on the wall along their stairs on the Cape, mother Sibby, sister Calli, Philae, father Andreas, of their photos on the Internet, Fashion Weeks, galas. They are larger than life — at least larger than hers, Sadie’s family, spread out as it is, light, diffuse. Philae’s family is heavy, a solid thing, weighted, perhaps by the money, an anchor of sorts? It holds them together, the wealth, Sadie sees this, it makes them invested in one solid thing and so keeps them together, first Andreas and Sibby, then the Fricks and Negropontes, a gravitational pull. It isn’t only that her family is poorer by contrast that makes Sadie cling to the Negropontes as she does. It is that they are weightless, the Sais, scattered fivesome, a family without gravity, completely unbound. With nothing as heavy as money beneath them, all pulling them down to the same piece of earth, a vertical axis, nor roots spreading out underneath them, with no living grandparent, no history, a horizontal — they’ve floated, have scattered, drifting outward, or inward, barely noticing when someone has slipped off the grid.

• • •

17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.

It was Philae’s idea to throw this party for her birthday. Sadie abhors birthday parties — they always make her feel sick, the crushing pressure to be happy!, to be having a happy birthday! such as she can’t remember having had once in her life — but Philae insisted, and Sadie relented, and now their dorm suite is a mess of drunk friends. They’d gathered at midnight to belt “Happy Birthday!” and cut a massive chocolate cake shipped from Payard, very festive and dramatic, very Philae, who’d hugged her, and kissed her on the lips to the delight of the crowd. In a way she’d been waiting six years for this moment, for Philae to grab her and kiss her like this (perhaps minus the eighty-odd onlookers whooping, lacrosse players shouting with glee, “Girl on girl!”), but just after, as Philae was shouting, “Are you one?! Are you two?! Are you three?!” Sadie wanted to cry.

She looked at her friends (Philae’s friends more precisely) now shouting “Are you seventeen?!” in orangeish light, with the birthday candles twinkling and reflected in the window. She looked out the window. It was starting to snow.

“Are you eighteen?!”

“It’s snowing,” she said, but too softly; the friends kept on shouting.

“Are you nineteen?!”

“I’m twenty.”

She sits in the bathroom and thinks of it. Twenty. She doesn’t feel twenty. She still feels four. With the tears surging up from her stomach, someone banging. “I’m coming,” she mumbles as she sets her feet down.

And here she is, gorgeous, inebriated Philae, her face flushed a pale shade of pink, and the smile, sticking her head in the door without waiting, entitled and smelling of Flower by Kenzo and beer. “Your sister keeps calling.”

“My sister?”

“Yes, Taiwo. She called, like, four times on the phone to the house. You’re missing your party. Wait, why are you crying?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie says.

“You don’t know?” Philae beams. “Is my little girl becoming a woman? Are you rolling?” She claps with delight. “It’s about fucking time! Dare to do drugs, Sadie Sai! Dare to do them!” She grabs Sadie’s shoulders and spins her around. Then hugs her, abruptly, too tightly. She whispers, slurred, “Love you, S. Never forget it.” And leaves.

The landline is ringing again in the hallway. Sadie pushes out through the crowd and picks up. “Taiwo?”

“Where are you?”

“You called me at home.”

“I’ve been calling for hours. What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“The music.”

“It’s a party. For the end of exams.” She doesn’t remind her sister of her birthday.

“… bad news.”

Taiwo continues, but Sadie can’t hear her. “It’s kind of hard to hear. Can you call me on my cell? I can go to my bedroom.” She thinks she hears, “Sure,” and repairs to her room, doesn’t switch on the light. Later, she’ll count back the hours, back to midnight, the start of the snow in New Haven, the kiss, Philae’s lips on her lips, and the tears in her stomach: five hours ahead of her sunrise in Ghana. Did she know? Did she feel it? The loss of her father, the death of a man she had almost not known, who was gone before she was in grade school, a stranger? How could she have? What could she claim to have lost?

A memory.

Someone else’s.

The man in the photo, that one blurry photo of her and her dad in those dull shades of yellow and brown and burnt orange that all of their photos from the eighties seem to have: of him sitting in the rocking chair in the hospital nursery as seen by the nurse from the nursery doorway, she bundled up, newborn, her hand on his finger, he dressed in blue scrubs with an unshaven beard. The Man from the Story. Who barely resembles the man she remembers, the upright, precise, always leaving, clean-shaven and crisp, in the morning, breezing out the front door in a fresh-pressed white coat. But the man she imagines when she thinks of “her father,” this frail, handsome figure with Olu’s dark skin and the same eyes that she has, thin, narrow, and angled, the shape vaguely Asian, as soft as a cow’s (not the eyes that she longs for, the eyes that the twins got, exotically hazel, but gentle dark brown), not so tall, maybe five foot ten, same height as Fola, but large as all heroes are, thirty-eight years old.

The Man from the Story.

How he valiantly saved her.

A memory of Fola’s, of Olu’s, not hers — and yet crying at midnight, undone by her sadness, a hurt without cause until Taiwo calls back. “Our father is dead.” But not now. There is nothing now, hearing the news. Not so much as surprise. She looks out the window at the Davenport courtyard, remembering a poem she memorized once. Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though. “‘Then he will not see me sitting here,’” she murmurs. Taiwo hasn’t heard. Marches on, “I realize that you didn’t really know him that well…” while Sadie’s thoughts drift to the smaller of things, to the oldest of things, the most trivial, really: the sense that her sister doesn’t like her.

Never has.

It started that summer when they came back from Lagos, when Sadie was five, almost six, they fourteen. Olu had gone off to school the year prior, leaving Fola and her in that house with the twins, “little house on the highway” as Kehinde had called it, its back to Star Market, single story, no yard. Sadie was meant to share a bedroom with Taiwo but most nights her sister would slip down the hall to the boys’ room (i.e., Kehinde’s, with an air bed for Olu), hardly talking to Sadie, hardly talking at all. Kehinde spent the bulk of his time in his bedroom with Discman and old sheets for canvases, painting, Fola at work at the shop until late, and she, Sadie, on play dates with friends after school — but she never knew exactly what Taiwo was doing, where she went in the daytime, on the weekends, with whom. She never had boyfriends, at least none she spoke of. She had, but seemed bored with, her few female friends. She was prodigiously gifted at playing piano but hardly ever practiced and quit at sixteen. Fola found weed in the bathroom that one time and, dramatically and defensively, Taiwo confessed. But hiding in her bedroom with the window half open to the front stoop below it, just after the scene, Sadie heard Kehinde say, “Thank you, I’m sorry,” and Taiwo, “Stop saying that. Stop saying sorry.” Sadie peered down at them, backs bronzed by streetlamp. “Anyway, she wouldn’t have believed it was yours.”

So not getting high.

What had Taiwo been doing? Getting As, getting taller, getting attention, getting angry, picking fights with their mother or picking on Sadie or simply not speaking for days at a go. Kehinde assures her that their sister doesn’t hate her, that Taiwo’s “just like that” with everyone else, but Kehinde would say that, playing peacemaker always, and Sadie thinks Olu is telling the truth. “She resents you for getting to stay,” he says plainly. “They got sent to Nigeria. You got to stay here.” Maybe. Or maybe like Olu and Kehinde, who aren’t exactly bosom buddies, they just don’t match: mismatched siblings, the one dutiful, unrebellious, fair-to-middling if affable. The wind beneath. The other the bird.

• • •

A bird squawking. “Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Make noise then. I thought you hung up.”

“No, I’m here. I’m still here. I’m just… quiet when I listen.”

“I know this is hard—”

“It’s not hard. It’s surprising. I’m listening. You said?”

Taiwo is saying, “I said, if you’d been listening, that we need to get our visas from the consulate at ten, so you need to take a train down to the city soon as possible,” when Sadie thinks suddenly of Kehinde, of the card. “Have you spoken to Kehinde?”

“W-what? Not yet.” Here, Taiwo’s voice catches. “Did you hear what I said? You need to come down to the city.”

“I… I can’t. I have to submit an essay.”

“You what now?”

“I have to submit it in person.”

“Why?”

“It has to be signed for. To show, like, the date.”

“Our father is dead.”

“It’s half of our grade.” (Which touches the nerve.)

“Are you joking right now?”

Taiwo continues, the usual ramble about socialite values in her gravelly voice while Sadie sorts, frantic and silent, through the trash until she finds the FedEx envelope in which the card came. She hears a brief silence, then “again with the silence,” lifts the phone to her lips. “No, I’m here. I’m still here. And you’re right. I just thought of something. I can bring it to her apartment.”

“Whose apartment?”

“My professor’s.”

“Okay, where?”

“In New York.”

“Okay, where in New York?”

“I think somewhere in Brooklyn.” (Scribbled on the FedEx form, a Greenpoint address.)

“Sadie, fine.” Taiwo sighs. “Come. I’ll take you to Brooklyn. How soon can you get here?”

“I’ll take Metro-North. If I leave around seven, I’ll be there around nine-ish?”

They exchange parting pleasantries.

Sadie hangs up.

• • •

Quiet. She sits in the darkness, repeats it, “Our father is dead.” Not so much as surprise. Squeals, peals of laughter from the hallway, a sing-along, “‘Under the bridge down-tooooown!’” The snow. “Your father is dead,” she says, waiting for (willing) the sadness. Still nothing. She closes her eyes. She wants to feel something, some normal reaction, some sign that it matters that someone is gone, never mind it’s her father now gone for so long that his gone-ness replaced his existence in full. She squeezes her eyes shut, envisioning him sitting at the center of the picture having just saved her life, but feels only the distance, the gathered-up absence like soft piles of snow in between then and now. “Your father is gone,” she tries, squeezing — or hears it, remembered, a memory that rarely comes up, of an afternoon, wintertime, when she was in kindergarten, her mother in the kitchen, her eyes and voice flat.

“Your father is gone,” announced Fola, then, softly. A weekend, it must have been; Olu was home. They were sitting at the table eating breakfast, the four of them, Fola at the counter chopping onion. There was snow. No one asked questions, at least none she remembers; she was marveling at the colors of her Lucky Charmed milk. She looked at their faces, her brothers and sister, one stern Oyo mask and the four amber sparks. Taiwo left the table, saying nothing. Fola nodded. Kehinde left the table, saying, “Taiwo,” giving chase. Olu walked over to their mother and hugged her. Fola said, “I love you,” and Olu, “I know.” Olu left the kitchen, kissing Sadie on the forehead. Fola looked at Sadie. “Just the two of us then.”

Now comes the sadness, an upswell from silence. She opens her eyes and the sorrow pours out, not the one she was bidding at the loss of her father but longing for Fola. She misses her mother. The simplest of feelings, a low-throbbing longing, though a few minutes pass before she knows what it is, and a few minutes more before she catches her breath and lies back, crying, tired, on her old kente throw. (Rather, Fola’s old throw — threadbare, faded and soft, with the blacks turned to grays and the reds turned to pinks — but her favorite thing, Sadie’s, unearthed in the basement in Brookline playing dress-up with Fola’s old things. She’d wrapped herself up in the kente, delighted, and marched to the kitchen, “I’m a Yoruba queeeen!” Fola had seen her and let out a breath, as if punched in the stomach. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re a princess,” she’d whispered, and hugged her, “a little princess,” but never said more, never speaks of her past.) Sadie lies back with her knees to her chest and the tears rolling down to her ears on both sides, to the pillow. And thinks of it:

Fola, years later.

That look as if punched.

It didn’t need to be said.

• • •

Another house, another kitchen, two months ago (barely, seven weeks, though it feels like two years, Sadie thinks). She was home for the weekend, Halloween, carving pumpkins, Fola’s newest invention, a hit at the shop: scooped-out pumpkins full of foliage, Cottage Apricot chrysanthemums, African marigolds, gold rudbeckia, heather, cranberry branches, all the rage among Chestnut Hill housewives that season since appearing in the Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine. Mini pumpkins as flower pots. In every way Fola: the something-from-nothingness, the making of the best of it, an ode to Halloween, her most favorite of rites, what with spirits in costume and giving of gifts. “Like a Yoruba fetish ceremony, with candy,” she’d delighted. Had hand-sewn their costumes, each year an orisha, half mocking as ever, never taking things seriously. Anything other than beauty. And sometimes her, Sadie.

The baby. “Baby Sadie,” Fola calls her (or called her), the most like their mother and the closest in a sense, having remained in the house for ten years without siblings, just they, only child and single mother, BFF: used to talk every day at least once on the phone, spend two weekends together each month without fail, making stew, baking cobbler, unbraiding her braids, watching natural disaster movies, discount-shopping downtown. Taiwo says Fola treats Sadie like the favorite (to which Fola, “She’s my favorite second daughter; you’re my favorite first”), but Sadie says it’s more that Taiwo doesn’t get their mother who, for whatever reason, Sadie understands, accepts as is. The way Fola thinks, the funny ways Fola acts, with her vague, neutral answers and faraway laughter, the appearance of indifference and impenetrable silence — Sadie finds these things calming, relieving. What is more, Philae says she’s jealous of how “chilled out” Sadie’s mother is, and Sadie rather overflows with pride at Philae’s envy. It’s the only thing that Sadie has that Philae doesn’t (she thinks). Her mother. Her loyal, indispensable, keeper of secrets, secretive, unflappable, beautiful mother.

Whom, nevertheless, as they stood in the kitchen disemboweling pumpkins not two months before — with the afternoon turning to evening unhurried, the leaves in the garden a gem show outside, with that odd film of quiet that settles between them, around them, now forming, as thick as the light — she suddenly begrudged her impenetrable silence. A knot in the stomach. She set down the knife. “So, Mom—” she started.

“Mmm?” said Fola, but distracted, not looking, wet seeds on her hands.

The theme song for All Things Considered began, giving texture to the quiet.

Sadie turned to look at the leaves in the sunset, the New England Spectacular, a modest backyard in a grid of small yards for these townhouse apartments (the third and last house to which Fola had moved when she’d started at Yale, up and moved in a week, put their bedrooms in boxes, the boxes in storage), still foreign, the view, after three years of weekends — then back at her mother, trying to gather the thought. What was it, she wonders now, there, out the window, in that firestorm of yellows and umbers and reds in the sun, like a postcard, idyllic Coolidge Corner, Indian summer running long this year, wish you were here! — that made her so lonely, so desperately lonely? Made her feel that their life, hers and Fola’s, was a sham? That they didn’t belong to this picture, in this postcard? That both were impostors? She still doesn’t know. “I know what you wrote about Christmas vacation, but last year was Boston. This year is St. Barth’s.”

“I know that, my darling,” said Fola without looking. “You can double up next year.”

Sadie faltered. What now? She spent every other Christmas in St. Barth’s with the Negropontes, always leaving on the twenty-third with Philae from JFK and always returning on the thirtieth for New Year’s in Boston with Fola, their one family tradition. First Night festivities, then dinner at Uno’s, spinoccoli pizza, then the harbor to count, with the twins never home, Olu always with Ling, just the two of them, huddled up, arms interlinked. Now, for whatever reason, her mother was insistent that Sadie be in Boston two years in a row and that all of them come, Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde, at least for the event, Christmas day. In a wholly uncharacteristic display of emotion and even more uncharacteristic use of electronic communication, she had sent out a message three sentences long on the subject last week, a group e-mail. It read: “My darlings, I would like us to be together this Christmas, all of us. Please let me know. Love, your mother.” A strange salutation, as she’d never once called herself mother, their mother. Sibby, yes: red-faced and sobbing and seething at the bottom of stairs with the shaking of fists, “I am your mo-ther, young la-dy,” each syllable separate, “You’ll do as I say!” Fola doesn’t sob or seethe. She never raises her voice at them. Whenever one of them shouts at her she simply tips her head and waits. It’s not exactly patience, nor dismissal, something in between, an interest in the shouter’s plight, an empathy, with distance.

“That’s not the point,” Sadie said at last, at which Fola looked up, at which Sadie looked down. With the counter between them (and harder things also). “I want to spend Christmas with a family.”

Fola smiled. “You have a family of your own.”

“We’re not a family,” mumbled Sadie. Very quickly, very softly.

That face, as if punched.

“Whatever do you mean?” Fola carried on smiling. But tightly. “I can assure you, you all came from me.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean, baby?”

To which Sadie, “I AM NOT A FUCKING BABY ANYMORE!”

Fola dropped her spoon with shock. Sadie burst into tears with shock. She’d never in her life sworn or shouted at Fola and couldn’t seem to stop herself now. “My baby! Baby Sadie! Baby, baby — at nineteen fucking years old? I’m not a baby! I’m not a child! And I’m not your replacement husband! It’s been, what, Mom, fifteen years, since you left Dad, or Dad left us? I mean, don’t you think you should start to date, to have a life of your own? I’m nineteen — practically twenty — years old. I’m sick of having to be here with you. On the weekends. At Christmas. On the phone. It’s too much. I want to live my life!”

Fola tipped her head to the side, her brows knit together, her lips folded down. But said nothing. She laughed, a sound like sobbing, turned, and left the kitchen.

Sadie waited a moment too long, then followed the sound of the footsteps on wood down the hall, past the room for the children (one bedroom) to the back, the master bedroom, but got there too late. The bathroom door was swinging shut. The clicking of a little lock. “Mom,” she said. She knocked on the door.

“Go,” said Fola. “Go live your life.”

She knocked again. “Please, Mom, I’m sorry.”

But Fola said nothing and didn’t come out. Sadie sat by the door of her mother’s locked bathroom, that chamber of secrets, and waited, an hour, maybe more, while the sun set outside, dripping orange, and the bedroom turned dark and then moonlit, pale gray. Finally she stood, knocked again, said, “I’m leaving,” and waited for Fola to open the door. She didn’t. “I love you.” No reply. Knot in stomach. She went to the bedroom, expunged a late lunch. Then back to the kitchen, the scene of the crime, where she cleaned up the mess, called a Red Cab, and packed; took a cab to the station, the train back to school, still unsure what she’d meant by the things that she’d said.

Fola didn’t call that night. Fola hasn’t called her since. A few days later Olu called to say their mom was moving. “What do you mean, moving?”

“She’s moving to Ghana.”

“When?”

“She’s leaving Friday.”

“What?”

“That’s all she said. And that you still haven’t talked. You should call her.”

“I know.”

But she hasn’t.

She wants to tell Fola that she loves her, that she’s sorry, that she didn’t for a moment mean to say those horrid things, and that however it appears from that apartment in Coolidge Corner, whatever Fola may think, that she isn’t alone — but can’t: for two of the four things aren’t true, and she doesn’t have Fola’s new number.

• • •

Your mother is gone, she thinks, curled on the bed in her clothes on the blanket that smells of the past, of a time, very brief, when they lived in a house with the Man from the Story and they were still whole, and she cries very softly for all that is true, for the loss of that man and for missing her mother, how light things became and how lost she’s become, how alone they all are, how apart, how diffuse. What she couldn’t tell Fola is why she hates Christmas, why she longs to disappear for that week in St. Barth’s: so as not to feel the distance, the heartbreaking difference, between what they’ve become and what a Family should be. At least in St. Barth’s with the bronzed Negropontes she’s spared the iconography: the commercials on TV and the vitrines at the mall and the carols and pronouncements that this is the most wonderful time of the year. At least in St. Barth’s she can observe from the outside the fighting and laughter, the family at play, and a real one, a real family not pretending to be happy because it’s Christmas but happy because it’s St. Barth’s. The beach and the sun and the boats smack of falseness, the truth in the open, that the whole thing’s a sham, roasting chestnuts and sleigh bells, her greatest fear realized: she doesn’t belong. But isn’t meant to. Not here.

What she couldn’t tell Fola is how much less hurtful it is not to belong to a family not her own than to sit there in Boston, just the two of them smiling, rehearsing all the reasons that no one comes home. Even if they do — Ling and Olu and Taiwo, and Kehinde from London — it won’t be the same. Fola thinks she can change things, but Sadie knows better, knows all they will do, all they can do, is lie. And doesn’t wish to brazen it out at the table in the apartment Fola moved to over a weekend on a whim, with her brother and the twins and their mother all lying with their laughter about feeling, each, utterly alone, either eating something Nigerian and delicious made by Fola but out of context somehow, given the tree and the snow, or some traditional Christmas fare even further out of context and not delicious for being bought at Boston Market. She weeps at the thought of it. The lot of them together, scattered fivesome (down one) eating Boston baked beans. And cries herself to sleep in this manner, with her clothing on, with no one coming to look for her, for hours, undisturbed.

Someone is tapping on the bedroom door. “Sadie?”

She is sleeping on the kente throw, still in her clothes. She opens her eyes to the shining gray dorm room and squints out the window: a blanket of snow. Sunrise, pale pinkness, the storm’s grand finale of absolute silence, the whole world washed white. She peers at her iPhone clock. Seven in the morning. She rubs her eyes, swollen from crying and raw. And is thinking that she dreamed it — the phone call, the kiss — when the someone taps lightly, cracks open the door.

There she is. Gorgeous, inappropriately dressed Taiwo, her face flushed a ruddy shade of brown from the cold, peeking her head in the door with the snow on her dreadlocks and furry white coat smelling thickly of cologne. “You’re here,” she says, breathless. “Thank God you haven’t left yet.” And other things also, about having been wrong, having rushed to Grand Central when they finished their call for a train to New Haven, having seen her mistake: it wasn’t true that there was nothing, no one, nowhere to go, there was Sadie turning twenty, Baby Sadie, at school… none of which Sadie follows for her deafening astonishment, the same two words blinking, on, off, in her head. Such that all the years after, when she thinks of this moment — of her sister on the threshold of her dorm room at Yale, covered in snow, in high heels, closing the door, falling silent, coming to lie at her side on the extra-long twin, wrapping her arms around Sadie like wings of white fur that smell strangely of father, someone Sadie doesn’t know — she’ll hear only her voice in her head in the quiet she came she came she came she came she came.

5

They ride to the city, Sadie’s head on Taiwo’s shoulder, Taiwo’s head against the window, both pretending they’re asleep. When they get to the station Taiwo wonders whether Sadie shouldn’t contact this professor, bring the essay over now? They’re closer to Brooklyn, she explains, at Grand Central; they can take a cab there then the subway uptown. Sadie says it’s awkward, like, to call a professor, that she’ll simply leave the essay in the mailbox with a note. She produces a manila envelope, on the back of which, cursive, “N^o 79 Huron Street, Brooklyn, New York.” A gruff Russian driver assents with some grumbling to take them, cash only, over the Queensboro Bridge, wondering what one could possibly want besides maybe kielbasa in Greenpoint on Sunday at ten? Taiwo peers out at the store signs in Polish, white fences, the brick, has never been here before. When they arrive at the building, she frowns out the window. The driver, equally dubious, “Seventy-nine. This is it.” Number seventy-nine Huron looks more like a bunker, a little brick warehouse or garage, than a home, with its huge grid of windows with industrial casings too high to see into, a rusting front door. Taiwo asks Sadie if she’s sure about the address; exactly what kind of professor lives in a two-car garage? Sadie says a professor of feminist theory at Yale and is opening the door on her side when Taiwo, feeling newly protective of her sister, tells the driver, “Run the meter,” and gets out on hers. Sadie, suddenly anxious, hands the envelope to Taiwo. Taiwo, suddenly gallant, says, “Stay in the cab,” and hobbles-slides across the heaps of snow hiding the sidewalk to get to the door of the strange warehouse-home, and is looking for a letter slot or mailbox in the doorway when, squinting, she sees it.

The name by the bell.

6

Kehinde is listening to Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, the screaming of a kettle and the heat’s steady whir. Though he’ll remember hearing rustling sounds and going to investigate, he senses (not hears) that there is someone at the door. In his chest, on the left, a light tugging sensation. He abandons the painting, the kettle, the heat, coming calmly to the entrance, down the hallway to the doorway. Not the mailman on Sunday, he thinks, but who else? The only people who know that he’s living in Brooklyn are his assistant in London and his dealer in Bern. (All the rest seem to think that he’s holed up in Mali or, judging by his auction results, that he’s dead.) He is holding a brush dripping blue on the floor, brilliant ultramarine mixed with white as per Fez. He is wearing what he always wears to work: spattered sweatpants, an NYU T-shirt, Moroccan babouches. He is thinking that he maybe should have turned off the kettle or put down the paintbrush before coming out, that the blue needs more white, that it’s cold in this hallway, a scatter of thoughts, and the fixed one, of her, when he opens the door, scattered-thinking, not looking, so hearing (not seeing) his sister.

“Is it you?”

She is standing in his doorway, a taxi behind her, the passenger door opening and Sadie getting out. Her eyes, which are his eyes, are filling with tears, as are his. She is touching his cheek, jawbone, chin, the faint beard he’s been wearing since summer (a new thing, the one thing that makes his slim face not her face, the one thing of all things that have come in between them in months of not speaking that they can both see), she is touching this, barely, her fingertips skimming, a pianist, a blind woman taking it in, this new difference between them, new distance between them, her eyes open wide as she touches him, just, as if pressing too firmly might cause him to vanish, might ruin the illusion, that they are here, now, after all that was said and unsaid came between them, that all that remains of this distance is fur — when her hands start to shake, with the cold, he might think were it not for the heat in his fingertips.

Shame.

Hers. Of foreign origin, now familiar, unmistakable. Her shame, which he feels as if it were his shame but is not, albeit born of the same place and time, much like they, separate shames at the same sudden thought. We shouldn’t be touching. She thinking, he feeling, she dropping her hand and he dropping his eyes, saying, “Yes,” then, “It’s me,” to his paint-splattered fingers, and she, disbelieving, “Is this where you live?”

• • •

It is: above the studio, a two-story workspace with massive brick walls painted white and skylights and nine half-finished portraits against the back wall that he hopes they won’t see from their chairs by the door, painted blue, the original, a massive garage door that he kept when he purchased the building last year from the elderly Yugoslavian who lives at the corner, who used to fix cars here before he fell ill. Little foyer by the entrance, a “reception” for guests, should they come, with a rug, raw-log table, three chairs, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, a gift from a now-dead admirer, a critic, in exchange for a portrait he’d done. Nothing else. Just the paints and the one work-in-progress stretched out on the concrete, some seven feet long, so-called mudcloth, the new thing, a departure from the portraits he’s made out of beadwork since going abroad.

At the top of the stairs, overlooking the studio, is a mezzanine with kitchen and bathroom and bed, like the top of a duplex with two white-brick walls and one floor-to-ceiling window that leads to a deck. This is where he lives. For a year now, just over, the doctors having decided it was safe for him to do, after six months of in-patient chitchat and relaxants and rehashing all the reasons that he’d wanted to die (just the one) in a room overlooking a garden, very drizzly, very English, but calming somehow, underwater, all greens and grays, porcelain nurses and porcelain service for pain meds and tea, half a year sitting facing and painting that garden, the scars turning taupe and the gray branches green, until one day in August, “You’re ready,” Dr. Shipman, his bushy white eyebrows uplifted, “to live.”

This is where he came to. Left London in August, the flowers gone mad with the heat in the parks, asking Sangna to pack up his flat and to ship it, unable to face it, the scene of the act. As she’s done. Saintly Sangna, the assistant-cum-accountant without whom he’d cease to exist in the world. In his mind, in his skin, sure, could go on without her, a spirit, just visiting, a dream, passing through — but the outside world? object world? art world? the body world? Not without Sangna. No. Not for a day. He’d drift, red balloon-like, away from his body and up through his art to the clouds, where he’d pop but for Sangna, the string twirling earthward below him, unfurling in air like a braid come undone. Sangna who, having been yanked out of RISD by her family and remanded to LSE for reform, had approached him at an opening: “Mr. Sai, I am Sangna. I have a degree in business management, and I can mix paint.” He was twenty-six, young with the newness of money, the strangeness of money and fame and the world; she was thirty, looked twenty, the long braid and glasses, as skinny and browned as he’d been as a child, grounded, grounding, clipped accent, Gujurati, no nonsense: the dealers all feared her, which made them both laugh, on the floor of his flat where they often ate dinner, aloo ghobi and chapati homemade by her aunts. Sangna, who’d flown to New York for the week on a tip from a buyer, “there’s a warehouse for sale,” rode to Greenpoint with cash, spent an hour with Hristo, brought the price down by thousands and bought him a home — and who’d called, early morning, from London, October, “I found her,” voice steady as ever, “New York,” with an address for a place on Lafayette Street in Soho to which he’s gone nightly, bang nine, ever since.

Just to see her.

Sixty seconds, never longer, often shorter, just to peer in from the sidewalk, just to glimpse her whizzing past, dyed-bronze dreadlocks in their upsweep bobbing, bobbing, past the window, just to know that she is near him. Peering in then going home. Miraculous that nobody has noticed nor harassed him, a black man at the window, with dreadlocks, no coat, although it’s always been his magic trick to be there without being there, to muddy his form, not to need to be known. This is what he lives from. The art of not being there. With Sangna, who remains there, sending payments to Yale and attending openings and refusing interviews and generally sitting at the control board of the mother ship in Shoreditch (her loft apartment, formerly his), selling paintings for gazillions on the spreading speculation that he bled to death in bathwater, art world it-boy’s tragic end, a kind of darkly comic comment on the nature of this art world, wherein nothing is so thrilling as an artist’s dying young.

But how can he tell her — now standing before him, the blur at the window resolved into flesh, when she means: have you been here, this close, without calling, this whole time, here in Brooklyn, just over a bridge? — that he doesn’t, doesn’t “live” here, or lives without “living,” by which he means hurting and causing to hurt; that it is all he has wanted and all he was seeking in etching thin T’s into both of his wrists: a way out of the hurting, for her, who is life-full, who lives and has always lived fully on earth, in the world, in and of it, not grounded nor grounding but ground, in her person, the canvas itself?

“Is this where you live?” she says, peering behind him, then at him.

He shakes his head. “…,” then, “come in.”

• • •

Later, indoors, another congress of three blowing, all, on the tea he’d been brewing from leaves (and on other things, hot things, to cool down the anguish, as one soothes a baby, shhhhh) — Sadie explains. “I wanted to call you,” she says to him, sheepish, “but I didn’t have a number. I only had this.” She holds up the card that he made for her birthday, on the one side a drawing in simple pastels, brown and violet and orange, her face vaguely, close up, the other his writing, happy birthday, baby s, which he’d sent to her wrapped in glycine via FedEx, having scribbled on the label the required return address. “So I made up that story about the paper, I mean, kind of, we did have to write one instead of an exam, and the professor said if we needed extra time after Friday, we could leave it with the doorman at her building in New York, but I mean, clearly, I lied,” with a quick glance at Taiwo, “because I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the truth,” with a quick glance at Kehinde, “and you’re, like, in hiding and no one can call you…” and more in this vein, not a word of which Kehinde can hear for the silence his mind sometimes lays on his tongue and his ears. Like a mother, protective, covering the ears of her infant as something too loud makes a sound in its space, or its eyes in the sunlight. Two soft hands of silence that rest on his mouth and his ears. “… Are you mad?” Sadie is frowning, at him, then at Taiwo. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” says Taiwo, sipping tea.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says in his head.

“Why aren’t you talking?”

“I don’t know why,” he says in his head.

“He doesn’t know.” Taiwo nods to Sadie and gestures. “Keep going.”

“We haven’t even gotten to the bad part.” Sadie sighs. She looks at him pityingly. She looks like their father. The tilting-up eyes set in valleys of bone. He has always rather envied her this, and his brother, that they bear such a resemblance to the people they come from, Olu a darker-skinned Fola, classically Yoruba, Sadie a lighter-skinned Kweku, classically Ga. “Aboriginal intransigent” he calls this kind of feature set, the marker of a people with a sticky set of genes or else the product of a process of refinement and reinforcement over century upon century of mass reproduction. Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P, in the world. That he can find, and finds familiar, the same squarish lip shape, the high-riding brow bone and regal hooked nose on his mother and brother as carved out of ivory by sixteenth century artisans on ritual masks, that the face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing — is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.

He and Taiwo do not. Their features are a record, yes, but not of a People, the art history of Peoplehood, constant and strong, but the shorter, very messy, lesser history of people, small p, two at least, who one day happened to make love. As children they’d decided they were aliens, or adopted, notwithstanding the funny photo of their mother in the hall (Fola massively pregnant with a smiling Mr. Chalé and the pink twinned tomato she’d grown in his yard). It wasn’t until later, at thirteen, in Lagos, just arrived at Uncle Femi’s, ushered into the lounge, that they’d see, from the threshold, standing frozen with wonder, the face that theirs came from, there, white, on the wall.

• • •

The woman behind them, Auntie Niké, pushed them forward, her ruby red talons digging into their skin. “What is it?” she asked — rather, spat: hostile t sounds, a thick Lagosian accent, matching accent-piece scowl. She’d been pushing and pulling since they got to the airport, both stunned into silence she assumed to be awe, pulling their suitcases, “This way, darrings,” pushing them into the Mercedes, “don’t touch the leather with your fingers, ehn, they’re oily,” as they drove.

Lagos, through the window, was not as he’d pictured, not luscious, the tropics, bright yellow and green. It was gray, urban-gray, the sky smoggy and muted and clogged with tall buildings, a dirty Hong Kong. The highway from the airport was packed with huge lorries and rusting okadas and shiny Mercedes, all honking, one long steady whine of annoyance, the whole city singing the same nasal dirge. The palm trees looked weary. The harbor was gray, the same shade as the sky, full of barges and yachts. As they’d crossed the bridge, leaving the island of Ikeja for the mainland, Lagos Island, he glimpsed a large sign: THIS IS LAGOS. Not Welcome to Lagos, Lagos Welcomes You, but simply THIS IS LAGOS.

“This is Lagos,” Niké spat.

He found her grotesque, this never-heard-of Auntie Niké with her skin chemically bleached to a wan grayish-beige and a tawny-brown wig falling slick to her shoulders, red lipstick and blush bloodying cheekbones and lips. But the black eyes betrayed her — exposing some sorrow, collected and stagnant, rank puddles of grief — when she touched his cheek, pulling, “A pretty boy, ar’t you?” and he wasn’t afraid of her, not then, not yet.

They’d pulled into the gates of their uncle’s apartment, which from the outside didn’t look like much, four or five floors. It was not until they entered the foyer, then the elevator, that they understood the scale of things. The building was his. The whole building, four stories, belonged to the uncle who was waiting in the penthouse, they were told, going up. She pushed them off the elevator, “Leave your luggage for the houseboy,” with the uncontainable joy of a child on Christmas morning, “To the left, ehn, he’s waiting,” down the double-width hallway to doors standing open to opera, full blast.

Indeed, he was. Waiting. This heard-of Uncle Femi who had come, late in the action, out of nowhere, months before: winning solution to the problem of Where the Twins Should Go to High School, what with their father having hoofed it and the prep school fees too high. Alternatives included the very tony public high school that their mother chanced to visit on an unfortunate afternoon, pulling her car into the lot just as a bus of Metco students was off-loading fighting freshmen screaming swears and throwing blows. The most odious of options was to ask (her word, “beg”) that Olu’s high school, Milton Academy, review their eligibility for financial aid, despite the complicating facts that they had paid the full tuition for the three years he had been there and that no one had, say, died. Then out of thin air appeared an uncle in Nigeria with whom they might live, attending international school and avoiding potential indoctrination into a “pathologically criminalized culture” while their mother found her sea legs as a working single parent.

Fola, who had never once mentioned a brother, nor any other family, nor any of her past, had sat them down simply, him and Taiwo, in the kitchen. “I can’t manage at the moment,” she had started, then stopped. She shook her head, closed her eyes, covered her mouth, as if willing the hurt to stay put in her throat. He could feel her tears rising, a tide, up the middle, but stared at her, frozen, unable to speak. He wanted to say, “He’ll come back, Mom. Don’t worry.” He wanted to say, “Dr. Yuki threw him out in his scrubs.” But had promised in the Volvo, if you could maybe not mention—, don’t worry, I won’t, so said nothing at all.

Fola wiped her eyes, took a breath, shook her head again. “Excuse me,” she said.

Kehinde said, “It’s okay.”

Taiwo said, “What can’t you manage?”

“The four of you.” Her eyes and voice flat, “At least not for right now. My b-brother in Lagos, your Uncle Femi, has offered.”

“Offered what?” Taiwo persisted.

“To take you. For now.”

“Take us where?” Taiwo asked, her voice rising. “To Lagos? You’ve never even mentioned a brother before.” Then, “You’re sending us to live with a stranger.” She was laughing. “Is Olu coming also, and Say, or just us?”

Fola shook her head. “He’s a senior in high school.”

“And Sadie?!” Taiwo shouted. “She’s your favorite, is that it?”

Sadie had appeared at the door to the kitchen in pajamas, almost silent. Only Kehinde looked up. “No one came to find me,” Sadie mumbled, softly, sweetly.

“It’s okay,” Kehinde whispered. “Come here. We’re all here.”

“We are not all here,” Taiwo said, standing, voice trembling. “He left us with her, and she’s kicking us out.” She looked at their mother, who looked out the window. Kehinde followed her gaze to the edge of Route 9.

“He took it, he took the statue,” Fola mumbled, distracted.

“He would have never let you do this!” Taiwo raged, and stormed out.

Kehinde looked at Sadie and smiled warmly. “Don’t worry.”

Fola looked at Kehinde and shrugged. “What do I do?”

“Don’t worry,” he repeated. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry. That was kind of your brother. To offer, I mean.”

He’d pictured this brother as a male form of Fola, so an older form of Olu. A Yoruba Daddy Warbucks. Instead, from his position on the fourth-floor parlor threshold, with eyes and feet frozen, refusing to move, he made out a figure, neither balding nor strapping, sprawled loosely on a leopard-skin waterbed, slim. The absurdity of the picture — of Femi there waiting as shahs await ladies-in-waiting with grapes ripe for peeling in an outfit befitting Fela Kuti at the height of the 1970s (it was 1994), in that room with its thicket of palm trees in vases and zebra-skin rugs on the white marble floor — was lost on him, Kehinde, for his shock at the portrait looming, gloomy, above the mantel, looking down on the bed.

He had never seen the subject — a woman, a young woman, a breathtaking woman — before in his life and quite literally could not take his eyes off her eyes, which were his eyes, and Taiwo’s eyes. “Who…? Who is that?” Taiwo was trembling, reaching instinctively for Kehinde. He squeezed her hand, feeling her shock and her fear. She took a step inward and pressed up against him. Neither stopped staring, nor moved to go in.

The figure was stirring, sitting up on the bed, twisting his torso to consider the portrait himself. A loud high-pitched laugh, without mirth, without warmth, broke the silence. He clapped with delight. “You don’t know?” He spoke with an accent very much like their mother’s (the strongest taste “England,” faint notes of “equator”) and softly, even gently, as one who has learned that in a land of shouters the soft-spoken man is king. “Niké, who is that?” He turned to his wife, who was clutching their shoulders like handlebars. “Mmm?” His eyes fell on Kehinde, who, feeling the shadow, extracted his own from the portrait and looked.

The uncle was watching him, standing up, smiling, his eyes hardened, blackened, at odds with the smile, to a hostile effect, as one luring a child left alone in a shopping mall, hard, sparkling black. Standing, he was striking, less attractive than eye-catching, lithe as a woman with long slender limbs, ramrod straight with lean muscle, at ease, like a dancer, but not at all beautiful, not in the face. The face was all angles and thick-lidded eyes too wide open and red-rimmed, a dull shade of brown, upturned nose, low-set mouth, the proportions the problem, thin cheeks far too narrow for features this wide. Almost ugly, thought Kehinde, though he used the word sparingly, and reverently, like beautiful, equally awed. It was a precious thing, ugliness, in humans, in nature; he noticed this, always, in airports, on trains: that for the most part most people looked fine (if unremarkable) with inoffensive features placed well, or well enough. He found he had to look to find ugliness, natural ugliness, no less than natural beauty, and trickier still, that no sooner had he found it and quietly thought a thing ugly than he found there in the ugliness a beauty of a kind. He’d stare at a face as at those Magic Eye stereograms where three-dimensional images emerge out of two-, and the beauty would rise out of nowhere, a distortion, after which he couldn’t recognize the ugliness again. He stared at his uncle, then, squinting, trying to freeze it, the mismatch of features and wanness of skin, but it happened as it always did. The optical illusion. Jimmy Baldwin morphing into Miles Davis.

“And you. What are you staring at? You like it? My outfit?”

Kehinde, realizing he was staring, blinked twice.

“Don’t you speak?” Auntie Niké, behind him, shook him roughly by the shoulder, but Femi was laughing, “Ehn, let the boy be.” He walked toward Taiwo, ignoring Kehinde for the moment. “And this one, and this one,” he repeated. “It’s her.” He stopped in front of Taiwo and took her chin, gently, the touch less aggressive than the look in his eyes, fingers cold, almost freezing, Kehinde felt. Taiwo shivered. Femi laughed. “Look, she’s frightened.”

“Don’t touch her,” Kehinde said.

A very soft sound, equally surprising to all of them.

Niké dug her nails in and sucked her teeth, “Ah-ah! How dare you address an elder in that manner?! Ki lo de ke—” but again Femi stopped her, erupting with glee.

“Omokehindegbegbon speaks! That’s your name. Omokehindegbegbon. Kehinde for short. Do you know what it means? ‘The child that came last becomes the elder.’” To Niké, “God, look at them. They’re perfect. She’s perfect. She’s her.”

At which all of them looked as on cue at the mantel, whence the woman in the portrait looked sullenly back.

Indeed, she was. Taiwo. A lighter-skinned Taiwo in ten, fifteen years, thinner lips, straighter hair. Femi aimed a silver remote at the face like a gun, whispered “Pow!” and the music went off. Kehinde half-expected the woman to fall, mortally wounded, slumping out from her frame to the floor. Or half-wished. As he stared at her, something else happened, the inverse illusion: an ugliness emerged. He found the woman ugly, overwhelmingly ugly; knew ugly things would happen on account of her face; and he hated her, her appearance, her milky-white pallor, he hated this woman, neither African nor white, who belonged to no People, no past he had heard of, who sat on the wall, cold with death, cut from ice, the only member of their family they had ever vaguely looked like, this pale, hateful beauty entrenched in wrought brass.

Femi said, presently, “That woman is your grandmother,” pronouncing that woman with pointed distaste. “The wife of my father Kayo Savage, your grandfather. The mother of Fola, your mother, their child.” He gestured to the painting, his voice growing softer and tighter, a raspy sound pushed through his teeth. “It was always in the bedroom just over his bed, always watching him fucking my mother, his whore. Somayina his wife. Folasadé his daughter. Babafemi his bastard. Olabimbo his whore.” He spread his arms, beaming, eyes bloodshot and shining, and laughed. “There you have it. The Savage family tree.”

Niké sucked her teeth. “Femi, please, oh—”

“Be quiet. I’m telling them a story. It’s clear they don’t know. One should know where one comes from, don’t you think? It’s important. They should know about our family, how we all came to be.” He laughed again, loudly, looking sharply at Taiwo. “And now here you are,” then at Kehinde, “my twins. You know what we Yoruba say about ibeji. You bring us good luck and great fortune, you twins. And you know what my name means, yes? Femi means ‘love me.’ I want you to love me, ibeji, you hear?” He bent down and kissed them now, slowly, on their foreheads, his hands and lips freezing. “I love you so much.” He looked at his wife. “Woman, what are you looking at?” Niké sucked her teeth. “Show our twins to their rooms.”

• • •

Would that he looked like his father, he’s thinking, while Sadie frowns, pitying. The silence abates. His ears sort of pop, and he hears himself saying, “I love your face, Sadie.”

“You can have it,” she says.

“Did you like it? The card?” He is blushing, embarrassed, aware that she, Sadie, must think him insane.

But she giggles, flushing deeply. “I loved it, I really loved it. You made me so… pretty.” She smiles, at her hands.

“I’m sorry. You were saying. About a bad part? What’s the bad part? You’re here, both my sisters. I’d call this part great.” He shifts his chair studiously to the left to face Sadie, as one does when one means now I’m listening; proceed. He is aware of his sister, of Taiwo, beside him, to his right, but can’t look at her, not quite, not yet. Sadie starts to say something, glancing at Taiwo. Eyes trained on Sadie, he doesn’t look right. Instead, he follows Sadie’s eyes following Taiwo, who’s left her chair, mute, for the back of the room.

“No!” he gasps, standing to stop her, “Wait. Taiwo.” Too late, and too softly. She reaches the wall. She stares at the paintings, her back to him, silent, her questions a hollow, a hole in his lungs. Loss of breath. “They’re not done yet…” a weak exhalation. She doesn’t stop staring, and Sadie stands up.

“Now what?” she calls down to Taiwo, who ignores her. Interest piqued, Sadie leaves her chair, goes to look.

He is watching himself springing into authoritative action, making comments and gestures that make them step back, turning the canvases over so the faces aren’t showing — while standing, immobile, unable to move. He is telling them, “No! They’re not done yet! They’re nothing!”—while watching them, silent, unable to speak. The thing that he does, that he hates himself for doing, the mute-and-immobile act, locked off in space. Why does this happen? he’d asked Dr. Shipman. Can you stop it? Can you fix me? I’m a coward, I’m a punk. I stand in the chamber behind the glass walls, I can see all the people there passing me by, but can’t get to them, can’t speak to them, can’t tell them I’m in here; I can’t break the glass, and they can’t hear me shout.

“Protection,” said the doctor.

“Protection from what?”

“From your fear, from your hurt, from your anguish, your rage.”

“I’m not angry,” said Kehinde.

“You are, and you should be. Allow it, your anger. Permit it to be.”

“But it’s not. I’m not angry.”

“You aren’t? With your mother? Your father? Your uncle? Your sister? Yourself?”

“Not my sister,” he’d say, but too sharply, too quickly.

The bushy white eyebrows uplifting, “You’re not?” And after a moment, “Then why did you say it?” That same wretched question, again and again. Half a year facing and painting a garden, and still he can’t answer it. Why the word whore?

He hadn’t felt angry. He hadn’t felt anguish. They were lying in comfort at the Bowery Hotel, he in town for his opening down the street at Sperone, she spending the weekend indoors, on the lam. Someone had seen her and the dean of her law school entwined in some kind of revealing embrace and had snapped a phone photo to send to the papers, specifically the paper at which the wife worked. Such that now, Taiwo said, she was stared at on campus; she’d stopped attending classes and intended to withdraw. Could she stay, for the weekend, eating popcorn in sweatpants and not seeing reporters wherever she went? Of course she could, longer, he’d pay for a hotel room; better yet, she could come back to London with him. No, just the weekend, she said. As per usual. She always said no to his money, his help. Of late he’d stopped offering, afraid that by pushing he’d seem to be bribing or buying her off. Just the one weekend. Alone with her brother. It was all that she needed, she said.

Here they were.

In night clothes. Near sleeping. New York out the window a low lilting chorus of laughter and cars horns, the suite looking incongruously (if comfortingly) like a room in a house on Nantucket: beige, florals and all. Friday night. Quiet. Then:

“K…,” she said faintly.

“Yes?” he said, turning to face her. She didn’t turn. She was lying on her back with her feet by his pillow, his feet by her head (how they always shared beds). She was looking at the ceiling, not turning to face him. He wiggled his toe by her forehead. She laughed.

“I’m serious,” she said.

“About what?” He was laughing. She still didn’t look at him. “You only said K.”

“But that’s what I say when I’m about to be serious. You know what I’m asking. You still haven’t said.” Now he was quiet, his eyes on the ceiling. He could feel her peering down at him, over her toes. After a few seconds she set down her head, and they both lay in silence. “Just tell me,” she said.

“What do you want me to say?” he said softly, but knew what, and knew that she knew that he knew. She wanted to know what he thought about the pictures, her name in the papers slipped under their door, his twin sister, his Taiwo, embroiled in a “scandal,” embroiled in the World, and not the world in their heads but the real one, capital W, where people were ruthless, where stories were written about them, not by, where real men and real women had motives and bodies (and sex, which no longer existed in the world that they shared). He understood the question but didn’t have an answer. The girl in the photos was not one he knew, not his sister, his Taiwo; she was someone else, older, and harder, than the girl he had left in New York. To answer her question he’d have to face that one, the question of why he had left after school, won the Fulbright to Mali, waited tables in Paris, started showing in London, and never came home. She, too, got a scholarship to study in England, two years she had lived there, in Oxford, not far, but he never suggested she visit in Mali, nor the next year in Paris, never said he was there. She left, started law school; he never came to see her. Two years in East London and rarely flew home. “You’re busy becoming a world-famous artist,” she’d tell him, “don’t worry.”

It was his line, not hers.

Kehinde worried.

About what she was doing at a law school to begin with, having never shown an interest in that kind of work, or in that kind of life (it was for Olu or Sadie, good grades and swish schools and top jobs and all that), and now this, with this man, who was handsome enough, but not — what was the word that he wanted? Not him. If Taiwo needed company or someone to talk to or someone to lean on, it should have been him, Kehinde thought, though he’d fled, and had run, and was running. He shouldn’t have left her. It should have been him.

“I want you to say what you think,” she said, weary.

“It should have been me,” Kehinde said in his head. “What I think about what?” he heard, staring at the ceiling.

“What you think about it, K, what happened, about me.” She sat up at her end of the bed to look down at him. Feeling odd lying down, he sat up, then stood up. Feeling odd standing up, he sat down in the armchair. He crossed his leg, tapping his foot on the air. Taiwo — who distrusted all silence, found it threatening — crossed her arms, frowning at, willing him to speak. “For example,” she said finally. “‘I think it’s immoral. To sleep with someone’s husband, to do what you’ve done. I think that you should have rebuffed his advances. I think that it’s sad that you felt so alone.’ For example. ‘I think that you acted like,’”—gesturing—“‘I think that you acted like… Bimbo… a—’”

“Whore.”

The word slipped so quickly from his mind to his mouth, riding the outgoing breath like debris on a tide, that he didn’t even know he had spoken at all until the silence subsided and the word was still there.

“A whore?” Taiwo whispered. “Is that what you said?” He didn’t know what he’d said, why he’d said it, not yet. And was glad for the darkness, this chair in the corner, the shadow obscuring his form and his face. But not hers. He could see her, electric in moonlight, the hurt in her eyes like a light from within. “A whore,” she repeated. She was standing, voice cracking, afraid of the silence. “Y-you called me a whore?”

“No,” he said, barely. “Please, Taiwo—”

“How dare you?”

He stood, stepping forward. “Please—”

“That’s what you think?” She was crying, but noiselessly, tears without respite, a thick, steady downpour. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s not your fault, Taiwo. It’s my fault. You know that—”

“Is that what you think? It’s your fault I’m a whore?”

“No. I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t mean that—” He reached out to touch her.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she screamed.

Not a human sound. Animal. Coming rumbling from under, a snarl in the darkness. She held out her hands. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” She was backing away from him, hands and arms out. “I hate you, don’t touch me,” she was sobbing, near choking.

He took a step forward. “Don’t say that,” he begged.

“Don’t touch me, goddammit, I swear to God, Kehinde, I’ll kill you, don’t touch me, not this time,” she wept. She took a step backward and into the nightstand. She started to fall, caught off guard, reeling back. He reached out and grabbed her to stop her from falling, afraid that she’d land on the back of her head, but she balked at the contact and flailed at him, manic, her nails digging into his skin. “LET ME GO!”

He didn’t. Or couldn’t. He couldn’t let go of her. He held her, more tightly than he knew that he could. He knew he was strong (every morning the yoga, the scale of the artwork, the labor involved) but had never used strength as a means to an end, as against someone else with an opposite goal. He felt her surprise at this strength, and her anger, a physical, equal, and opposite force. She hit him and scratched him and bit him and kicked him, invested entirely in being let go (and the other thing, also, the fury, belated, some fourteen years on, at his touch, they both knew). In this way, they struggled, knocking lamps from the nightstands, Jacob wrestling with the angel, whichever she was.

She screamed until she lost her breath, sobbing, “Don’t touch me.” He held her until someone knocked, once, on their door. “Are you going to go to jail now?” she seethed, a hoarse whisper. “Is that what you want? Another Sai in the news?” He was holding her arms against the wall, pressed against her. For the first time in hours (or in years) their eyes met. She looked at him, squinting, the tears streaming mutely. “I am your sister,” she said.

He let go.

She fled to the bathroom and slammed the door.

Knocking.

He opened the door, dripping sweat and some blood.

“Good evening, Mr. Sai,” said the porter, unblinking. “Is everything all right in here?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Your neighbors heard banging.”

“I was watching a movie.”

“May we ask that you turn down the volume?”

“It’s off.” He gestured to the television. “I’m sorry.”

“No worries. First aid’s in the minibar.”

“Thank you.”

“Good night.”

Kehinde dropped down to the bed in stunned silence. His fingers were trembling. The lights were still off. The shower was running in the bathroom. He waited. Thirty minutes, then an hour, he sat in the dark. At some point he rested his back on the bed with his feet on the carpet, blood dried on his chin. When he opened his eyes there was light at the window. The shower was running still. Taiwo was gone.

• • •

Now she is studiously examining his portraits, her back to him, there, across all of this space, having refused all his phone calls and then changed her number, having told him through their mother to leave her alone, which he attempted to do in irreversible fashion, falling short of his goal by six liters of blood, grâce à Sangna (who, thinking he’d gone on vacation, popped round to ensure that he’d locked all his doors). Nine full-length portraits, the bodies unfinished, but clearly her face, slightly altered in each, with some object, a lyre or a hymnbook or a pencil to make the thing plain to nonreaders of Greek. On the floor by each canvas is an index card label. Sadie walks the line of these, reading aloud. “Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Clio, Thalia, Erato, Urania, Melpomene, Calliope.” She squeals. “Omigod! Calliope! That’s Philae’s little sister.”

“You remembered,” Taiwo says. “Eighth grade. The muses.”

“Hey!” Sadie turns to Kehinde. “She gets nine paintings and I get a card?”

“They’re not finished,” he mumbles, hurrying over to the canvases. Beginning with Erato, he turns them around.

“Stop. What’re you doing?” says Taiwo.

“They’re not finished.”

“Stop,” she says quietly, touches his arm.

And leaves it, her hand on his forearm, turned upward. He looks at her, tensing, too startled to speak. “He’s dead, K. He died. That’s the bad part. In Ghana. A heart attack. Yesterday morning, I think.” He is thinking of the question when she answers, “We’re going. Olu bought tickets. Tomorrow at six.” He looks at her hand on his arm. She squeezes harder. His shirt has slipped back from the scars on his wrist. He starts to pull back, but she holds even harder, stares harder, demanding his eyes with her gaze. He looks at his sister. She looks at his forearm. She drops her hand quickly now, seeing the scars. “I’m sorry,” they say in such similar voices that neither is sure that the other one spoke.

7

Ling is rapping gently on the bathroom door. “Olu?”

He has fallen asleep with his head on his knees. He opens his eyes and coughs roughly, disoriented. “Yes?”

“Are you in there? Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

She opens the door and peers in. “Hello, sleepy. I thought you left.”

“No.”

“You were here all this time then?”

“Yes.”

“You okay?”

“Yes.” He stares at her blankly.

“You smell like smoke.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Yes, dear, I know.”

“A woman at the hospital had just lost her husband,” he says, and, as flatly, “My father is dead.”

“Baby.” She covers her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” She enters the bathroom and kneels on the floor. She places her hands on his kneecaps and rubs them. She hugs his legs, resting her head in his lap. “I’m so sorry. What happened?” She looks at him. “Tell me.”

“A heart attack.”

“When?”

“Their time, morning. I guess.” He speaks in a monotone, entirely without feeling. He shakes his head, squinting, trying to break from the fog. Still, there is nothing but dull, heavy numbness. He stares down at Ling, trying to see her, to feel. “We’re going to Ghana. Tomorrow. My family.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

Too quickly, “You can’t.”

Both of them start, at the clip of this answer. Ling stands up, tensing. He straightens his back. As in fire at will. “Meaning what?” she shoots quickly. He shakes his head, presses his palms to his eyes. “I have the week off. I’ll come with you.”

“I know that. And thank you for thinking to offer to come.”

“Offer to come? You’re my husband, remember? It’s kind of a thing a wife offers to do.”

“Don’t, Ling. Don’t do that.”

“Do what, please?” Reloading.

“We said nothing changes. No name change, no rings.” He rubs his head, frowning. Has not meant to say this, and tries to explain it, “We’re still who we were. You said ‘you’re my husband’—”

“You are.”

“No, I know that. But we said it wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t change things with us. Those words, husband, wife, they’re just words, they’re not mandates—” He stops, grabs his head. “I don’t know what I mean.”

“I think you do, Olu.” She shakes her head quickly. “I won’t come to Ghana.”

He looks at her, pained. “I should go with my family.”

“I thought I was your family.”

“No,” he says, desperate, “you’re better than that.” He squeezes his eyes shut to bid back the tearfall. He feels her small hands on the sides of his face. Her lips on his lips, then the taste of her toothpaste. The smell of her, Jergens, Chanel No. 5. “Ling,” he says, breaking. He still does not touch her. She holds his head gently and he doesn’t resist. “I don’t want to be a family,” he says to her, anguished, as a child says, exhausted, I don’t want to go to bed. “I don’t believe in family. I didn’t want a family. I wanted us to be something better than that.”

The phone in his scrubs pocket rings now, abruptly. For a moment he ignores it, not wanting to move. He wishes to stay here forever, in this posture, his head on her breastbone, her hands on his cheeks, in a space very small and contained, like a bathroom.

“Should you answer,” she says gently. Without the question mark.

He pulls out the phone without looking and answers. “Hello, this is Olu.”

“It’s Kehinde.”

“…” with shock.

“Kehinde. Your brother.”

“I know who you are.” He is smiling. He is lying. He doesn’t, never has. Has never known Kehinde, never really comprehended how he moves through things so loosely, never straining. That he’s somehow in this manner become a remarkably successful artist only confuses Olu further. Still, he’s smiling. “There you are.” The sound of his brother’s soft voice and soft laughter, the same as their mother’s, is soothing somehow. “Where are you?”

“In Brooklyn. With Sadie and Taiwo.”

“…” More shock.

“Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Olu says. He blinks, trying to process. “You said you’re all there, right?”

Here, Kehinde’s voice catches. After a moment, “We’re all here.”

“So, tomorrow,” says Olu. “We’ll meet you at the consulate. We’ll get our rush visas, eat lunch, and go straight.”

“Who’s we?”

“Ling and I. We’re both coming,” he says, as she kisses his forehead, her tears on his face.

“I’m glad.”

“I’ll call Mom, let her know we’re all coming.”

“Great. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

“’Til tomorrow.”

“Take care.”

8

Fola sits smoking at the edge of the lawn in a beach chair she’s lodged by a palm in the shade. She knows that she shouldn’t — she was married to a doctor and raised one; she knows that it’s foolish at best — but she puffs with great relish, as an act of defiance, or acceptance, complicit with the riddle of death. To do or not do this or that to live longer, as if longevity might be purchased with exemplary health, this is foolish, she thinks. Surely vegan nonsmokers get struck by stray bullets and cars all the time?

The house staff is working, pretending to ignore her, Mr. Ghartey at his post by the thick metal gate and the housegirl Amina washing clothes in a bucket, the houseboy little Mustafah, the car in the drive. When she arrived there was a driver, a Brother Joshua, very awkward, a Christian fanatic with a thing for the brake, who had ferried her about in sudden violent lurches forward, blasting Ghanaian gospel music without respite. He is gone. When she ran into Benson at MaxMart last Thursday she mentioned the need and he said he would help, but she rather enjoys getting lost, driving, aimless, windows down, zipping along the ocean. Alone. She’ll coast down La-Teshie Road past the black targets, the training site, gallows of Ghana’s last coup, with the maudlin Atlantic lapping languidly at the seaweed and plastic debris on the poorly kept beach. It could be quite scenic if anyone cleaned it, if anyone cared that an ocean was there. It could be as gorgeous as Togo, Cap Skiring. Instead, it is Ghana, indifferent and blessed.

But seen from her beach chair, the house has some promise: a bungalow built on a half-acre lot, quite a rare thing to find here, she’s told, a full parcel; now developers pack cookie-cutter homes on such plots. The problem is the light flow. There aren’t enough windows, and the windows aren’t big enough and face the wrong way. Instead of a view of the garden, for instance, the den boasts a view of the barbed border wall; the windows in the bedroom are long, skinny rectangles with views of the shrubs at the side of the house. The whole thing looks huddled up against its surroundings, making do, hunkered down, with its eyes tightly shut, as if dreaming of its natural habitat (Aspen), some mountainside wood and not luscious Accra.

Still, the bones are redeemable, she thinks, dragging slowly and squinting her eyes as she blows out the smoke. If she knocked down some walls and inserted some windows, big sliding-door windows, the place might just sing. Kweku would love it, she thinks, without warning, and sits up, alarmed by the visceral pain. He is gone now comes next, with another tsunami, subsuming, washing over and rising within. A bit like contractions. A thing that comes, passes. She bends at the waist, waiting, closing her eyes.

“Madame, are you fine?” Mr. Ghartey is calling.

Amina rushes over with suds on her hands. “Madame, can we help?”

Fola looks at the woman, much prettier than she’d realized when seen this close up. Amina peers down at her, genuinely worried. Fola feels the worry and smiles, nodding, “Yes. Would you mix me a drink in the kitchen, Amina? One quarter cup of vodka from the freezer, not the bar. Three quarter cups of tonic water, four solid ice cubes. A single slice of lemon, no seeds in. All right?”

Amina nods. “Yes, Madame.”

“Thank you, Amina.”

Amina frowns. “Yes, Madame.” Hurries inside.

Fola leans back with her hand on her pelvis. A newly found “quadrant,” the lower-down fifth. A strange and deep longing here, throbbing, almost sexual — in fact, only sexual, she notes with some shock. And why on earth not? she thinks, laughing, now crying, when he was her lover for all of those years, and damn good, if she’s honest, it was that which convinced her, the sheer desperation with which he made love, as if all that he wanted for all of those hours (and hours: he was careful, and thorough, and slow) was to get to the bottom of it, all of the longing and wanting and striving through which they had lived, was to plunge to the depths of it, all the way into it, naked and sweating, afloat in the void.

She still couldn’t say if he ever touched the bottom, ever felt his big toe bump against the pool floor, but he’d drift down all night and she’d hold him, go with him, go find him if ever he stayed down too long. As the one night, in Boston, in the small house, Mr. Chalé’s, when she found him by the pull-out watching Taiwo asleep. She had touched him very gently, but startled him badly. He was still breathing heavily when they went back to bed. When he pulled her, not roughly, toward him, from behind her, and lifted her nightdress with one fluid move, and then entered, heart throbbing, her back to his stomach, his hand on her face, then her breast, then her thigh. His chest was still heaving against her, an hour, two hours. Moving slowly, and deeply, a dive. Downward and downward, until she was aching. “Enough,” she said softly. He came, then he wept.

This was a man, she had felt, one could live with, build a life with, whatever “a life” might yet mean: who gave all to the living, with deep, trembling breathing, his life to protecting the living from death. Though he knew it was futile. The way he made love, as if now were forever, gone deaf to the rest, as if breathing were music and hovels were ballrooms and all that they needed to do was to dance. It was this that convinced her despite his low wages for nearly two decades and everything else, that her husband made love like a man who loved life. That he put up a fight where she conceded defeat.

Now she is laughing and crying in her beach chair. Mr. Ghartey is watching, alarmed, from his perch. Mustafah abandons the car and just stares with his mouth hanging open, the hose on the loose. Amina hurries back with an earthenware tray, with the glass and the drink in a measuring jug. Fola laughs harder, says, “Thank you, Amina,” and swigs from the jug.

Amina stares at her, shocked. “Madame, but, the glass.”

“This is perfect,” says Fola. She takes off her sunglasses, wipes off her eyes. “Thank you, Amina.” The telephone is ringing. Amina goes to get it, comes back, still aghast.

“The telephone, Madame.”

“Who is it, Amina?” She takes another swig from the measuring jug.

“A sir, Madame.”

“Is it? A sir with a name?”

“No, Madame.”

“Very well. To the sir with no name.” She gets up, still laughing, and crosses the garden. Through the doors, to the foyer. She picks up the phone. “Benson,” she says.

“Mom, it’s Olu.”

She straightens. “Olu, my darling, how are you?”

“We’re fine. We’re coming tomorrow. The five of us.”

“Lovely.” For a moment it doesn’t strike her that the number is off. The five of them. Olu and Taiwo and Kehinde and Sadie. And Kweku. She bends at the waist. Another wave passes. She whispers, “Four, darling. The four of you.”

“Ling’s coming also.”

“Of course.” She wipes her eyes quickly. “I’ll make up the guest rooms. I fired my driver so I’ll be there myself.”

“Of course.” Olu laughs. “It’s the Delta.”

“I know it.” They laugh again, together, and, presently, hang up.

• • •

She stands at the table in the mountainside foyer with her hand on the telephone, catching her breath. Olu and Taiwo and Kehinde and Sadie. All four, her whole oeuvre, her body of work. All here, in this house, with its retro wood furniture. And Ling, she thinks, smiling; at last he brings Ling. Her tall, guarded son who feels, more than the rest of them, frightened of loving, uncertain of love. And her baby, whom she hasn’t called once since October, since that day in the kitchen, that horrid exchange. She’d heard Sadie sitting just outside of the bathroom, had heard her “I’m leaving,” but couldn’t reply. Had just sat, staring blankly at the trees out the window, the light in the leaves at that hour like oil, like the light on that evening in the autumn in Brookline when Kehinde came in and she knew one was gone. And they. Her ibeji, whom she hasn’t seen in decades, since watching them walk to their gate in their coats, airline escort beside them, Kehinde turning to face her, to wave and to smile, Taiwo not, marching on. The children who returned to Logan Airport, months later, now fourteen years old with their skin tanned to clay and their eyes — her mother’s eyes, which she’d found so disturbing — were not the same children. Not children at all. All of them. Coming. Together. Tomorrow. She wants to tell someone, to shout of her joy. But looks at her hand on the old Slimline phone and thinks, letting it go, There is no one to call. “Amina!” she calls. “Let’s go make up the bedrooms.”

Amina comes running. “Yes, Madame.”