Ghana Must Go

1

Mr. Lamptey sleeps balanced at the edge of the ocean, a foot from the foam line, legs crossed and eyes closed, palms on kneecaps, back upright, the stray waiting, patient, its eyes on the water, its chin on its paws. The ocean moves, lazily, forward and backward, advancing to a point near the paws and then not, a few inches, no more, of net movement, indecisive, redrawing its borders then rolling them back. Does the water not wish to come further, in conquest, own more beachfront property? Subdue more damp sand? Apparently not. Forward, backward, net change a few inches, while bored with this, watching, the clouds start to yawn.

In trickles light, weakly, drab, without color, its single distinction not being the darkness. A star, blinking slowly, vivacious by contrast, alerts the dog, waiting, that this is the dawn. The dog leaps up, legs out in adho mukha svanasana, then licks its wake up to the sleeping man’s soles.

• • •

The garden is empty of all but its shadows. He hears but can’t see for the eyes going off. The issue is the cataracts, he knows, without minding. The surgeon minds terribly and offers to help. (A friend, an operation, no cost to Mr. Lamptey. The surgeon is foolish, if determined and kind. An unusual combination, determination and kindness. An unusual individual, the surgeon.)

The birds.

They are clustered in the fountain, all but covering the statue. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. Ten of them, twenty, or thirty. A conference. He enters the garden and hears first, then sees.

“Good morning,” he says to the birds, bows politely. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. “Really?” he says, with some shock, and great sorrow.

The dog whimpers sadly and sits by his feet.

A light flickers on in the house-with-a-hole-in. A shape through the window, slow moving and round. The woman, young, plumpish, her face like a cushion with buttons for features, as pleasant and soft. He likes her, this woman. There is nothing not to like in her. Usually he likes to have something to dislike, finds the likable dull, but he’s not the right age for it, too old for effort, too young for ennui. At ninety he’ll dislike her. He’ll mock her bad English and semiautonomous buttocks that move one at a time; he’ll say that the country will never move forward so long as the common man moves in this way. Without line. Unambitious thighs and shoulders rolling over, all round edges, like amoeba, like an early form of life. Like the ocean. He watches her move through the shadow and feels for her something as soft as her shape.

She walks to the kitchen where she turns another light on. She stands for a moment, a cloud at the glass. She comes to the door to the sunroom and pauses, then opens the door and comes out with a drink, Milk and Milo. She is crying, he can see by the moonlight, the breasts trembling lightly against the sateen, but she doesn’t seem to notice all the birds in the fountain nor the man by the mango, bare feet, saffron cloth. She goes back inside, turning each of the lights off, the kitchen, the bedroom, a shadow of light.

He rolls out his mat by the base of the mango and sits. Padma asana.

Five after four.

ii

They fly into Ghana, Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder, Kehinde’s head on Taiwo’s head, before they wake and detach. Olu sits upright, his arms on the armrests, his leg bouncing lightly, Ling’s hand on his thigh. Sadie, behind them, with no one beside her, her head on the window, legs tucked on her seat, gazes listlessly out at the clouds, also listless, the sunrise a flatline, bright red in the black.

iii

Fola hauls her catch in, from garden to kitchen, still dark: couldn’t sleep, went to snip this and that, spongy earth, damp with dawn, dripping blossoms and dirt, sets the boughs on the countertop, wipes off her hands. She fills four small vases with just enough water, stands six boughs in each and sets two in each room. On each nightstand, just so. And is turning to go when it hits her: There aren’t enough rooms anymore.

There are just these two small ones apart from the master, a shortage she hadn’t perceived until now, always thinking (rather dreaming) if they all came to visit, the girls would take the queen bed, the boys the two twins. Now that there’s Ling, there’s the question of etiquette. She knows that they’re grown, frankly couldn’t care less, would quite like that they seek some small respite from sorrow in dancing together to breath after hours, but he’s always so scrupulous, Olu, so proper, saying grace before eating, Sunday service and that (not that she is a heathen, good friend of hers Jesus, but one that she speaks to as such, as a friend, a wise, good-natured friend with an air of detachment, not Olu’s stern Jesus with long face and hair) and she doesn’t want to make him feel awkward, self-conscious, not least as he’s never brought Ling to the house. Olu would do better in the bedroom with Kehinde, less blushing and bumbling at bedtime, less suffering, but that leaves the question of where to put Ling as she can’t very well put a guest on the couch. To put her with Taiwo would border on callous as Taiwo tends not to treat other girls well (not that she fares much better with the gender, in general: they all seem to find her aloof or too proud, insufficiently histrionic while she tires of their tragedies, cosmetic, romantic, long faces, long hair), and she wishes for Ling to feel part of the family, whatever “the family” in their case might mean. Better in the bedroom with the queen bed with Sadie — a lover of girls skinny, pretty, like Ling; of things girlish, shared soap and told secrets — but Taiwo, left bedless, would think she was being left out. And mightn’t then Sadie feel awkward, self-conscious, to share the one bed with a woman like that, when she’s taken to acting like Olu, puritanical, and hasn’t done the stating of the obvious yet? Not that she minds in the least whom they love—where they love for that matter, be it guest bed or couch — just as long as they’re happy or not too unhappy, in the condition she delivered them, etc., no worse. If the baby likes girls or this one girl, this Philae (who seems to be cheerful and clueless enough not to break a heart badly), then so be it, bully, but what does it mean for the rooming? she asks. Can the baby double up with a woman in comfort? Or might she take this as a comment on what Fola knows. Rather, what Fola thinks. Perhaps she doesn’t know Sadie, not really, and not the baby, mustn’t call her daughter “baby.” She is twenty years old, as she said, as of—

“Yesterday.” She breathes this aloud, with a twinge, upper left.

Yesterday was her birthday.

She forgot Sadie’s birthday.

She covers her mouth, shakes her head. Of all days. She laughs for not knowing what else she can do, leaves the room, and goes back to the kitchen.

Never mind. Sadie can share the big bed in her bedroom; let Olu get over his issues with sex. She starts to call Amina, then remembers, too early. She takes down the flour for a cake.

iv

“Why did your mother move to Ghana?” Ling asks him. “I thought she was Nigerian.”

Olu thought she was asleep. He smiles at her, shifting positions. “Something different.”

Behind them, Sadie, listening, sotto voce, “Because of me.”

Taiwo, in the aisle seat, peers out the window. “You haven’t been back,” Kehinde says, looking, too.

“Did I say that aloud?” she asks quickly, snapping backward. He hasn’t meant to bother her. He shakes his head no. “I do that now,” she mumbles, frowning, rubbing her forehead.

“I can hear what you’re thinking,” he says in his head.

“No, you can’t read my thoughts,” she adds, leaning back over to pull down the window shade, closing her eyes.

v

A plane overhead.

2

Fola stops at MaxMart to pick up the candles. The cashier smiles blandly. “Yes, ma. Right this way.” She looks at the candles and laughs. “No, not this kind. The small ones, for a birthday cake.”

“This is all we have.”

She drives to the airport, unnerved by the silence. She turns on the radio. It appears not to work. Then blasting through static comes Joshua’s gospel, off-key and forlorn, like a shrill cry for help. She switches the station. Evangelical Mormons. She switches again. BBC, all bad news. She turns off the radio and peers at the traffic. The usual crush on the new Spintex Road. She rolls down the window and peers at the junction where a policeman appears to be making things worse, shouting, “Bra, bra, bra, stop,” with conflicting gesticulations, the newly installed stoplight not working (no power). She rolls up the window and hums, without thinking of it, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” two bars of it, stops. Where did that come from? she thinks, frowning, honking. That hymn, which he always used to sing before work, perfect pitch, though if ever she mentioned it, his singing voice, he’d shake his head, laughing, “Just sound waves,” and stop.

• • •

Arrivals is teeming with Christmas returnees deplaning in coats with freight tons of checked luggage. She pushes her way to the front of those waiting, not roughly, but firmly, in the Nigerian tradition. And stands. She is early, she knows, thirty minutes, but couldn’t brook waiting alone in the house with the cake on the countertop sitting there, done, with the look of one waiting for something as well. Better here: closeness, the throng, humans being, aunties wailing as prodigals appear half-asleep, pushing forth from the crowd to grab, hug, sob, and welcome, the tearful theatrics of old women’s happiness. Better here, sweating, surrounded by talking, the low steady throbbing of heartbeats in wait, hundreds, all of them waiting in collective anticipation of some beloved somebody’s coming back home. Bodies. Familiar. She never told him how familiar, she is thinking, thoughts drifting as thoughts will in heat as one waits standing still with still time all around one, a space into which enters Past, seeing room. Some motion, slight movement, away from the moment, and off one goes, drifting, from this day to that:

to the airport, same airport:

“Be careful, this is Ghana!”

“My friend, I’m from Lagos.”

And I’ve been here before.

Why didn’t she tell him? It wasn’t a secret. He knew that she’d fled at the start of the war, that she’d somehow left Lagos to finish her studies and showed up at Lincoln in bell-bottom denim, but he never asked how, how she got to Pennsylvania, as if her life had begun where their shared life began, and she never proffered answers at night in the dark after he had gone diving and held to her, wet. Then, it seemed normal to lie there beside him alive in the present and dead to the past with the man in her bed, in her heart, in her body but not in her memory and she not in his. It was almost as if they had taken some oath — not just they, their whole circle at Lincoln those years, clever grandsons of servants, bright fugitive immigrants — an oath to uphold their shared right to stay silent (so not to stay the prior selves, the broken, battered, embarrassed selves who lived in stories and died in silence). An oath between sufferers. But also between lovers?

She doesn’t know. Maybe. So much she never asked him. So much she never told him. The aching for example. “Enough,” she would say, which he took to mean “stop,” and he would: floating gently to the surface, coming up, thinking she was exhausted when in fact it was the opposite: she feared his exhaustion. She was aching for more. More, always more of it, more of him, all: having opened, having been opened, wanting only to be filled: but never saying it, just holding him, lying, in silence, he sleeping beside her, he fulfilled, she unfilled. Why didn’t she tell him? And other things also. Why she never said yes when he asked her to come to those parties in Cambridge with colleagues in khakis and cheese cubes on toothpicks and immigrant maids and the requisite child trotted out after drinks to rend “Für Elise” proficiently before trotting to bed. Yes, they were boring. But the more it was heartbreaking, to watch him seek approval from far lesser men in his own fresh-pressed khakis, small eyes wide with hope that he, too, might soon be so at home in the world. Why didn’t she tell him? “You don’t have to impress them,” she might have said, “your excellence speaks for itself.” Instead of “the dishes” or “Sadie has a recital” or “Olu needs help with his science fair booth.” Instead of the silence, protective, destructive, like mites on a daylily nibbling away undetected for decades. And the biggest thing. The precedent. How she got to Pennsylvania.

How she packed up and left.

• • •

How: she had lain in that bedroom, in Lagos, unable to move or to think or to breathe with her head under covers, her hands on her ribcage, her chest emptied out, until nightfall. The housegirl returned as she did every Sunday and let herself in through the door at the back. She’d prepared the whole dinner and laid out the table before she thought strange that the house was so quiet. “Master!” she called, up the stairs, down the corridor. “Master, are you home? Miss Folasadé? Ah-ah.” Only then had Fola left his bed covered in sweat to ride, trembling, to the second-floor kitchen. “I’m here.”

The housegirl Mariama grabbed her forehead when she saw her. “A fever, you have a fever, where’s your father?” she cried.

Fola shrugged, groggy. “He went to Kaduna.”

“No!” cried Mariama, slumping promptly to the floor.

How: they’d just sat there, neither speaking nor eating, at a dining table set for two, built for fourteen. The Nwaneris from their portrait watched them sitting, black John seated, too, white Maud beside him standing, hand on husband’s epaulette. The food was set out, Fola’s favorite, egusi, but neither of them touched it; after an hour it was cold. After two her father’s partner at the law firm, Sena Wosornu, leaned frantically on the doorbell. Fola looked at Mariama. The housegirl was trembling, rocking, clutching her elbows and shaking her head, noiselessly mouthing some prayer. Fola took the shaking of the head to mean “don’t get the door” and stayed seated. Mariama lost her nerve. She stumbled to the entry, from which Fola heard whispers, then loud sudden sobbing, then Sena’s high voice. “The baby will hear you,” he scolded. The baby. What her father always called her, even then, and his friends.

Later that evening Sena came to her bedroom. He knocked on the door, came to sit on her bed. She was lying on her back with her feet on the wall on a poster of Lennon, her head hanging off.

“Fola,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

She didn’t lift her head up. “I know, I know, I know.” Sena was upside down, bending to face her.

“Your father—”

“Don’t say it,” she said, and sat up.

He said she should pack. They would leave in the morning. His parents lived in Ghana. She’d be safer with them. If anything ever happens, take the baby to Ghana. Don’t leave her in Nigeria, her father had said. She packed a gold aso-oke, a birthday gift, records, his thick kente blanket and bell-bottom jeans. She didn’t pack photos or dresses or teddy bears. The details came later. They left before dawn.

How: at this airport, much smaller, as crowded, they landed, midsummer, July 1966, all the colors so different from Lagos, more yellows, the smell like the smell of a broken clay pot. A man with an Afro gone gray came to greet them, all bushy white beard, laughing eyes, wings of wrinkles. “You must be Fola!” He shook her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know who she must be anymore. “People call me ‘Reverend.’ Reverend Mawuli Wosornu. Sena’s father,” he said, though he looked far too young.

The house was on a tree-lined street, wide with white houses for friends of the British, the odd Lebanese. They took her to a bedroom painted pink, a funny shade of pink she’d find decades later while shopping for mulch. (Home Depot. She was passing through the paint aisle when she saw it, from a distance, just the color swatch, familiar at once. She read the name. Innocence. Laughed out loud, bought it. Four gallons for the nursery for the child who follows twins.) She stood in the doorway and looked at the bedroom. Reverend Wosornu, behind her, “And this is your room.” She walked in and sat on the narrow twin bed, the stiff mattress; she stared at the candy pink walls. She looked at the man in the doorway. Said, “Thank you,” then lay down and slept, without eating, three days. On the fourth day the wife Vera Wosornu came to see her. Mrs. Wosornu looked older, looked old (fifty-four). A fat woman, haggard, no light in her pupils. She wore a black wig that slipped back, showing grays. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “Come eat your breakfast.” When Fola rolled over the woman was gone.

Breakfast was cocoa bread, pawpaw, eggs, coffee. Mrs. Wosornu ate noisily. Thick, buttered lips. Reverend Wosornu sipped his coffee, listening attentively to the radio. Pogroms in Nigeria ongoing. He switched this off. “Sir Charles Arden Clarke is a friend of the parish. Do you know who that is?”

Fola shook her head no.

“Eat,” said Mrs. Wosornu.

“Former governor of Gold Coast. And the founder of the Gold Coast International School.”

“It’s Ghana International School now,” snapped Mrs. Wosornu. “Eat,” she snapped at Fola.

Fola picked up her fork. The woman’s commands were so tactlessly forceful; it was almost a relief to be told what to do. She put a piece of pawpaw in her mouth but couldn’t chew it. She moved it around until it dissolved on her tongue.

“They’ve agreed to accept you,” said Reverend Wosornu, excited. “In ten years they’ve built quite a fine little school.”

“You’ll take your GCEs, then go to college in America.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Mother.”

“Yes, Mother,” Fola said. The word sounded strange to her. Empty.

“That’s better.”

“Me, I’m just ‘Reverend.’ Not Father, not yet.”

“Speaking of fathers, yours was kind to our Sena.”

“Vera,” sighed the reverend, but his wife forged ahead.

“He can’t have any children, our Sena. Such a pity. Only son. And you know what the villagers say.” Fola didn’t know what the villagers said. The proverb was recited with mouth full of egg, “‘The woman who has one child only, has no child.’”

The reverend kept smiling. “Infant mortality,” he explained.

How: she finished high school, seldom speaking, barely eating. When the war came next summer, she didn’t much care. She skimmed the local papers, saw the pictures, heard the rumors (slaughtered civilians, starving children, German mercenaries, Welsh) but this “Nigeria” they spoke of was nowhere she knew of, not home, not a place she could see, so not real. She lost too much weight and excelled in her studies, having done it all in Lagos with her erstwhile private tutor. Her classmates took to calling her “Biafran,” but jealously. They envied her hair, glowing marks, tragic glamour. She allowed herself to be fondled by one out of boredom. He lived up the road in East Cantonments. Yaw. He was actually quite handsome, an athlete, later soldier, but modest in ambition (how: Kweku was her first). She sat her exams and came first in the year. She cut off her hair, tired of brushing. A scholarship was arranged by more friends of the parish at Lincoln University, where Nkrumah had gone. She’d wanted to go to Kings College as her father had, but didn’t object.

To the airport again.

How: she crossed the tarmac to the aircraft with the smell of dripping evening in her nostrils thick with soon-arriving rain. She didn’t turn to smile or wave or look back at the terminal at the reverend, whom she’d rather liked, or Vera, whom she’d hated. So almost didn’t see him coming running in his three-piece suit. The passenger behind her had to tap her on the shoulder. “Miss?”

And there was chubby Sena, jacket flapping out behind him like a broken magic mantle. “Fola, stop!” Fola stopped. He was wheezing when he reached her. “Thank goodness I caught you. How are you?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve been meaning to come. The firm is still operating, if you can believe it, in Lagos.”

She shrugged.

“But I should have come sooner, I know.” He hugged her now, pressing an object against her. An envelope. “He left this. Don’t open it yet. I was afraid that my mother would steal it so I waited.” He hugged until she had it, then he backed away. “Go.”

How: when she got there she opened the envelope. United States dollars in crisp bounded stacks. Enough to start over, to remain in America, enough not to have to watch fat women eat or take handouts or need them or ever go hungry or go back to that airport in Ghana again.

• • •

A passenger behind her is tapping her shoulder. “Miss?”

She turns, startled. The passenger points.

And there they are, all of them, watching her, waiting, here, back at this airport in Ghana again.

ii

“She doesn’t look happy to see us,” says Sadie.

“I’m sure she’s still shocked,” Kehinde tells her. “Don’t worry.” But pulls down his sweatshirt sleeves, covering his wrists with them, worried that Fola has noticed the scars.

“You remember my mother,” Olu murmurs to Ling, thinking how much this airport has changed since he came.

Ling whispers, awestruck, “She’s beautiful, Jesus.”

Taiwo feels inexplicably angry.

• • •

All of them slow to a stop and stand staring. Someone should do something, everyone thinks. Kehinde steps forward to hug her but Fola, thrown, cradles his face, rather thwarting the hug. “A beard,” she says, laughing.

“Don’t cry,” he says gently.

“Oh, am I?” Still laughing, she wipes off her cheeks.

The others come forward now, forming a huddle, and taking their turns with their hugs and hellos. “Ling,” breathes out Fola. “I’m so glad you made it,” while Sadie waits, watching them, trying not to scowl.

• • •

She knows this moment. This welcoming smile. This weightless expression of genuine warmth such as only exists for like-a-member of the family. Actual members get heavier welcomes. “And Sadie,” says Fola, her two hands extended, her mouth folded over, head tipped to the side. Sadie shuffles forward, suddenly nervous at the audience, intending a calm, very grown-up embrace, a stiff “Mom. Good to see you,” but the smell is overwhelming, and she feels herself crumbling, sobbing desperately instead.

The smell of her mother — so instantaneously familiar, the smell of baked goods and Dax Indian Hemp, Fola’s twenty-year-old hair product, green with brown speckles like something she uses for gardening, too — and the feel of her mother, so impossibly yielding, the skin on her arms and her hands like a child’s, are a welcome too warm, undiluted, wide open for Sadie to bear it, to feel she deserves it. She buries her face in her mother’s soft shoulder and grips her waist tightly. “I’m sorry,” she slurs.

• • •

Fola laughs softly, stroking Sadie’s braids lightly. Olu watches, wishing that they’d do this at home. At least without Ling looking awkwardly at her sandals, remnant smile from “you made it” gone stiff with surprise. Fola lifts her chin up to peer over Sadie and gestures that the rest of them join in the hug. Olu looks at Taiwo, who looks inexplicably angry, and worries that she won’t accept Fola’s soft “Come.” By way of good example, he takes a step forward and wraps a long arm around Fola’s tall frame. Kehinde moves also to stand behind Sadie, pressing gently between her shoulder blades, calming her down. Ling touches Olu, too, maintaining some distance, reaching quickly for his elbow, squeezing once, letting go. Taiwo watches, thinking that she wants to go forward, for once in her life to feel part of the thing, however loose and misshapen the form of the huddle to feel somehow inside it. But she can’t.

iii

There isn’t enough room in the Mercedes for all of them. Taiwo and Kehinde follow behind in a cab.

iv

She is sitting with her face to the window, her back to Kehinde, remembering seeing Lagos for the first time: the grayness, the haze and the chaos, the road from Ikeja, the hawkers with trinkets and live death-row chickens, the way Femi clapped when they reached the apartment, his cocaine-cold lips on her browbone, his laugh, how her brother looked standing there colder and harder than she’d ever before seen him except when he slept—

when the memory jump-cuts to Barrow Street, November, nude, sitting in the windowsill, blowing out O’s—

and then onward to the end of it, sunrise, late summer, the wife in Apuglia in search of wet cheese, little inn on the oceanfront ideal for endings, the paper between them, the silence a knell.

• • •

It was always the ocean they came to on weekends. He called her his “water girl,” appropriately so: she was happiest the closest she was to the water, the ocean foremost, though the Hudson would do. (A matter of astrology, he says, she’s a water sign. Nonsense, says Taiwo, just doesn’t make sense. The scorpion is terrestrial, but Scorpio a water sign? And Aquarius an air sign? The logic is flawed.) A wind from the water washed over the porch where they sat, and she drew in a breath of the salt.

“I’ll withdraw,” she exhaled.

“No. I can’t let you do that.”

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she said, with some bite. She ran her middle finger along the incriminating headline. Allegations of Infidelity Mire Elite Law School Dean. “You didn’t even think I should be a law student.”

“Two years ago, Taiwo. You’re at the top of your class.”

“I’m always at the top of my class,” she snapped quickly. “Has it ever occurred to you it’s bullshit, the ‘class’? What is this ‘class’? Just the same group of cowards seeking solace in schoolwork. How smart can we be?”

Helpless laughter. “You’re relentless.”

“I’m honest.”

“No difference. I can’t let you quit.”

“Well you can’t make me stay.” She stood in demonstration and walked down the porch steps. “Taiwo!” he called, but he didn’t give chase. She walked and then jogged and then ran to the beachfront, and sat looking out at the Atlantic alone. How wonderful it would be to walk in, she was thinking, just follow the path of the sunrise on waves, pinkish-gold, in her flip-flops and lover’s wool cardigan, to walk and keep walking, onward, under, away. Instead she just sat there, an hour, maybe longer, just long enough to hurt him, to ensure he felt pain. She wasn’t particularly angry — at least not with her lover; she’d been angry with her lot now for fifteen odd years — but she wanted him to suffer, and not from disgrace, but from a sense of having failed her. Of having caused her to fail.

Why did she want this?

He never deceived her. Neither chased the other, nor clung, nor insisted. They’d simply fallen into it, both, in an instant. Succumbed to the sucking-down feeling, and drowned. Now there were whispers and photos and rumors, a manner of discourse she’d never before known, as if some well-trained robot were spitting out stories involving some facts from her life but not her. This wasn’t his doing. He was clumsy and lovestruck with modest amounts of what one might call power; had been able to entertain her where no one could see them but unable to resist his own need to be seen. Two years of sex in a room in the Village and sweet beachfront inns up and down the East Coast, and he’d started to long for an audience to applaud him, to see his great conquest, to know his great joy. A dinner did them in. There were friends of his wife’s there and friends of his enemies from government days. In less than a month there was scandal in the offing. University president and board were apprised. In the middle of August they repaired to Cape May to negotiate the terms of surrender. End scene.

They were allies still, lovers. There was no cause for anger. She’d never asked nor wanted that he tell or leave his wife. She had no particular interest in being a wife, for rather obvious reasons, and none in being his. But she wanted that he suffer. To know that he’d failed her. She was determined to withdraw so that he’d know that she’d failed; so that all of them, seeing her failure, would puzzle, would ask in hushed tones how this girl, this success—summa cum laude, NYU! PPE, Magdalen College! summer associate, Wachtell! — came to fall on her sword, whereon the answer would come, if not to them who were asking, then to him:

Because he let her.

And not him alone.

There was the other one, the first one, the one they’d deleted, the one who had backed down a sunset-lit drive while she watched from the window obscured by the darkness, having played with the lights to bid Kehinde inside: first off, then on, then off, then on: just sufficiently dark now to see in the car, the man’s face through the windshield, soft, narrow eyes narrower, fighting: then filling with, tears — but resolute.

He would know, too, she thought, sitting there silent as one sits on beaches: with knees to the chest, and the chin on the knees, and the breeze in the hair, and the taste of one’s tears bearing salt from the breeze. She would find him and tell him. He was somewhere in Ghana (according to Olu); she’d go there and wait. She’d be seated on his stoop when he came home from work, in a Volvo as she saw it, the sunset full swing. He’d see her from the driveway and slow to a stop with that look on his face per that scene in such films when a man on the run returns home before dark and the hit man is waiting, at ease, in plain sight, with his boots on the railing, a gun in one boot where the man in the driveway can see it. Like that. He’d stop, kill the engine, and stare from the car with his eyes meeting hers, hers unblinking, his wet, for he’d see in her face that a light had gone out and would know without words that his daughter was dead, that the girl he had left on a street in North America was not the one sitting on this stoop in West Africa, with boots propped on railing and pistol in boots, that she’d died because no one would save her. Indeed. She would drop out of law school and earn waiting tables the thousand-odd dollars to fly to Accra (against prior beliefs about the injustice of such pricing, an insult to immigrants the cost to fly east) so that he, too, would know, and would suffer from knowing, that he’d been too weak to protect her.

Or rather: this is how she planned it.

She should have come sooner.

She laughs, looking out at the streets of Accra. Two years imagining the look on his face, she is here and her father is gone.

v

He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it was, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green. This is familiar.

What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts. A man without legs has a boy without shoes wheel him carefully through the traffic in the middle of the road to the cab, where he knocks on the passenger window and holds up a hand missing fingers for coins.

“Go, go, go,” shoos the driver, suddenly agitated. He rolls down his window to shout in coarse Twi.

Kehinde peers down, sees the man, is embarrassed. He rifles through his sweatshirt for five single bills. “Don’t shout at them, please, sir,” he says to the driver. The driver looks back at him, sweating and stunned. Kehinde rolls his window down and holds out the dollars. “Here,” he says. “Take it.” The driver sucks his teeth. The boy without shoes takes just one of the dollars. The man without legs smiles, a smile without teeth. “Take the rest,” Kehinde says, but the boy doesn’t hear, and the taxi starts moving as the stoplight turns green.

“They’re thieves,” says the driver. “They come from Mauritania. They steal from the tourists.”

“We’re not tourists,” Kehinde says.

The driver starts laughing, one golden tooth glinting, as if to say only tourists give beggars U.S. dollars, but quickly recovers and rolls up his window, asking casually, “So where are you from?”

Kehinde looks at Taiwo, who is paying no attention, then back at the driver, not much older than they. He can sense in the man a very particular form of aggression, mounting, familiar from Lagos and London and New York, to do with the fact that they’re both brown-skinned males unequally yoked by the side effects. He’d rather be ferrying some tense blond-haired couple in his taxi than them — brown, well dressed, the same age — whom he takes for American and assumes to be rich, at least richer than he by some cruel twist of fate. “Have you ever been to Africa?” he adds proprietarily.

“Nigeria and Mali.”

“But not Ghana,” he insists.

Kehinde shakes his head, and the driver looks satisfied. Kehinde feels the need to add, “Our father’s from here.” The instant he says it he wishes he hadn’t, for now comes the surge he’s been keeping at bay in the form of a headache, a sudden searing something in the space between his eyebrows so sharp he gasps, “Was.”

The driver doesn’t hear this. “Where’s ‘here’?” he asks, challenging.

“Ghana,” mumbles Kehinde. It sounds like a lie.

“Oh yeah? Where in Ghana?” The driver is smirking.

“I don’t know where,” says Kehinde, now closing his eyes.

“You don’t know where he’s from, your own father,” says the driver. He sucks his teeth, glancing at Taiwo, still mute. “Why don’t you ask him?”

As it finally hits him, “He died,” Kehinde answers and starts, at the laugh.

He can’t quite imagine what his sister finds funny, but she appears to be laughing, outright, her back turned. “Taiwo,” he whispers, thinking maybe she’s crying, but she turns to him dry-eyed.

“He’s gone.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t stop laughing.

The driver looks incredulous. “Father na’ dead and she laugh for,” he scoffs. But says nothing further, just turns on the radio (inconsolate gospel) and looks straight ahead.

3

Both the taxi and Mercedes pull into the drive where the house staff stands waiting at attention, in a line. Sadie has been sleeping for the twenty-minute ride and now opening her eyes says, “Where are we?” Olu and Ling side by side in the back, neither moving nor speaking, peer out at the house. Fola peers also with hands on the wheel as if considering whether this is the right place or not. One breath, then she stirs, pulling the key from the ignition and her sunglasses from her forehead. “We’re home, I suppose.”

The staff comes forward as the car doors open. Everyone alights and stands looking at the house (except Kehinde who — much to the annoyance of Taiwo and the disturbance of Olu — stands looking at Ling). There is the usual combination of disorder and determination that occasions the arrival of a group at a residence: half of the bodies moving busily, lugging suitcases, half of the bodies looking awkward, out of place, trying to help, to be of use but not to get in the way of the bodies who know where to go, what to do. With the lightly frantic energy of awkward introductions, with no one quite knowing what to say or to whom, smiling at no one, shifting positions, making lax observations. Where’s the bathroom? Longing suddenly to be on one’s own.

Fola holds shoulders, steers bodies down hallways. “This is the room where you two boys will sleep.” She pushes in Olu and Kehinde and continues, “The girls in here,” pushing in Taiwo and Ling. “The baby—” she stops herself. “Sadie’s with me. I’d suggest a good nap now. We’ll eat at half six.” Any questions? No questions. “Good. Welcome to Ghana.” She takes Sadie to her bedroom, and leaves them to sleep.

ii

Sadie stares up at the wood-paneled ceiling, alone in this room down the hall from the rest.

“The bloody A/C died this morning—” said Fola, then bent as if nauseous and didn’t go on.

“Mom, are you sick?” Sadie asked, stepping forward, but Fola stood straight, waved a hand, shook her head. “Comes and goes. Going” was her cryptic nonanswer. She turned on the fan, left the room, closed the door.

Sadie stares up at the blades in the shadow, like bats on the ceiling, too hot all the same. Through the thin bedroom walls she can hear other voices but can’t extract words from the soft throbbing din. Olu, maybe Kehinde. A phone in the hallway. The pretty girl, Amelia or something like that. “Please, Madame. Telephone.” The rustling of footsteps, then Fola’s voice, gravelly, the words indistinct. Someone’s laughter. Her mother’s, she realizes after a moment. But higher than normal, a burst of it, false.

She rolls to her side, where she glimpses a photo in light slipping in from the stiff wooden blinds. Just barely she makes out the faces, the location, and suddenly remembers: why Greenpoint seemed familiar: this strange-looking warehouse on Oak Street in Newton, the famed home of Paulette’s Ballet Studio. Winter. Her family stands bundled in coats close together on the sidewalk outside, the recital just over. The Man from the Story holds her up on his shoulders; she is still in her costume, red lips, pink tulle tutu, her four-year-old potbelly pushing unabashedly against the pink skin of the leotard, laughing. Taiwo and Kehinde wear matching red earmuffs, neither looking at the camera, Fola looking at her. Olu looks dwarfed by a massive brown coat. A stranger, another parent, must have taken the picture.

She wonders why Fola has this, of all photos, here framed on the nightstand, the frame the wrong size so the photo slips sideways, the shot out of focus, some Christmas performance of no real consequence. She abandoned ballet sophomore year, first semester, despite great potential and greater “commitment.” Had seen it: could lift her big toe to her forehead, demanded a split of her muscular legs, had defied her flat arches to bend into pointe shoes, could do all the steps in her sleep, no mistakes, but had stood at the bar in a line that September and noticed the palette, the pinks and the whites, light brown hair, light brown wood, clean-straight lines in the sunlight, and noticed herself, neither long, straight, nor light, and had seen in an instant what was meant by commitment: she was great at ballet but was no ballerina. (Philae had suggested that she take up Team Management to meet her requirement for after-school sports, and indeed she had found a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her light-brown-haired classmates in skirts — yellow mouth-guards bared, snarling, browned legs churning earth, drawing blood from bare shins with their field hockey sticks, later ice hockey, lacrosse sticks, so bafflingly violent, “Blood makes the grass grow!”—while she ticked off stats.)

She rolls the other way but feels the photo-faces watching her. She turns the photo over so it’s lying facedown. The position has promise. Unseen and unseeing. She rolls to her stomach and lies there facedown. At first she finds comfort: the intensified silence, the absolute darkness befitting the occasion. She isn’t quite sure what she’s meant to be feeling, but this here would seem the appropriate pose, sort of prostrate with grief (that won’t come) for her father and guilt at the thing with her mother, what’s left. If she embarrassed them all with that scene at the airport, she unburdened a bit of the anguish at least. Maybe they’ll talk a bit more a bit later. Probably not. It is not Fola’s thing, “talking out.” More likely they’ll act as if the thing never happened, not least as there’s now this more solid despair that her siblings won’t mention, not once at the airport, not once in the car, as if it’s not really true, as if they’re all here in Ghana — where no one has been except Olu, someone mentioned, when he was just born — just by chance, here for Christmas, a family vacation, and not for their father, unmentioned and gone.

The comfort becomes panic, with her face in the pillow, unable to breathe for the cloth and the heat, and now, rolling back over, she finds that she’s crying for nothing more epic than feeling left out. There they are, the lot of them, somewhere else, talking, their voices drowned out by the overhead fan while she’s here on her own, the one not like the others, feeling inferior as she always does whenever they’re home. With one of them (two max, the twins for example), she can generally rise above it but not with all three, so much older and taller, inexplicably taller, and surer, more spectacular, more shiny than she.

Her siblings are shiny. Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde. They shine into rooms with their confident strides, their impressive achievements, and she with her beauty; they glow with their talent, their stuffed bag of tricks. There is Olu’s calm brilliance, his mastery of science, his deep steady voice sure with knowledge of facts. There is Taiwo’s dark genius, her hoarse luring whisper aglow with long words and the odd phrase in French; all her life she has had it, since Sadie can remember, this thick air of mystery, of effortless grace, as have only those women whose beauty is given, not open to interpretation by beholder, a fact. There is Kehinde’s pure talent, the gift of the image, that quiet assurance with which he looks out as if all of the world were overlaid with some pattern indescribably beautiful and meaningful, a grid, and if only you could see it as clearly as he could, then you too would take to blank easel with brush just as simply as one watches movies, the news, without commitment, simply seeing and understanding the seen. And there’s she. Baby Sadie. A good decade tardy, arriving in winter, a cheerful mistake, with her grab bag of competencies — photographic memory, battement développé, making lanyards — but lacking entirely in gifts.

Fola is convinced that the thing is there latent; for years now she’s said, “Just you wait. It will out.” Nothing has outed. She has done all her homework and studied with diligence so done well in school, not like Olu or Taiwo, more so eighty-fifth percentile; has made it to Yale (off the wait list but still); has settled in comfortably to a life of B-pluses and management positions on teams and class councils; has basked in the attention refracted by Philae of tow-headed frat boys endeared by her braids — but has yet to unearth any particular gift that might place her in league with her siblings at last.

Panic. Rising gently from the place in her stomach such panic lies waiting for moments like this. She runs from the bed to the adjoining master bathroom and kneels by the toilet to let the thing out. Up come the peanuts and Coke and six bread rolls she ate on the plane behind Olu and Ling, tearing the bread into pieces more appropriate for pigeons before scarfing them down when the rest fell asleep.

iii

Taiwo and Ling in the one-bedded bedroom.

Awkwardly pretending to begin to unpack.

Ling sees the vase on the nightstand and thinks of it. “Your mother’s so gorgeous.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Taiwo says. She is crouching on the floor by the bed with her suitcase, looking vaguely for a shirt for the household-wide nap. She can feel Ling behind her trying to strike up conversation as if they were roommates, day one at the dorm, by turns nervous and excited at the distinct possibility that this stranger might well be a lifelong best friend. They’ve met on other occasions — Olu’s various celebrations, mostly birthdays, when the family would drive down to Yale in the little blue hatchback, a mess from the flowers, Baby Sadie in grade school, and they just returned — but those were the years that she, Taiwo, spent mute, when she’d sit there in silence at Sally’s, and eat, so it wasn’t until later, circa med school graduation, that she spoke to Ling really, got to know the girl some.

It was then she discovered that Ling, much like Olu, is dead set on things going well at all times and so cannot sit still: flutters, flits, laughing constantly as if trying to keep a beach ball from touching the ground. The problem, to boot, is the lack of a filter. She says what she’s thinking, then laughs at her thoughts to an endearing effect (if exhausting, adolescent). If she weren’t pretty, she’d be annoying. Instead she is cute.

This more than anything is what disturbs Taiwo, how cute is Ling, barely five feet off the ground, with her skinny black ponytail bobbing along as she bobs beside Olu double-step to keep stride. She doesn’t find cute women trustworthy, not grown-ups. A cute girl is one thing, cute adult another. Such women always seem to have something to hide, to be playing at helplessness, masking desire. Invariably, she sees in their sweet long-lashed eyes the same smoldering want that burns blatant in hers, if not more of it, cunning, more clarity of purpose, obscured by the girlishness, false to its core. They are women in the truest sense, ripe with soft power, yet pretending not to know what they want, that they want — as if want were unbecoming, a flaw cleverly masked by the appearance of being both needy and content.

As invariably, it is she who seems flawed in their presence, who feels herself strangely too present, exposed, somehow pungent, almost threatening, too much of a woman, exposed for a woman, a dark thing, black swan. While Ling laughs and flits from one thought to the next like some erudite Tinker Bell with ADHD (and with forceps), she Taiwo looms solid and livid, unyielding compared, a thing fallen to earth. She wants now that Ling feel this same sense of weightiness, awkwardness at failing to get her to chat — so abandons the search for a T-shirt to sleep in and lies on her back on her side of the bed fully dressed, yawning loudly and covering her face with her forearm to mean that she’s moments from sleep.

Ling doesn’t notice, her back turned to Taiwo, unfolding small clothes at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think your brother likes me.” She laughs, after a moment.

“Olu’s just like that,” Taiwo mumbles. But smiles. Does this mean that Olu has abandoned the pretense of being in love with his college best friend? Fair enough, only fools rush, but this is excessive: some fifteen years in and no wedding in sight. Her brother never kisses the woman in public nor touches her unthinkingly when putting on coats; all but left her there standing in the driveway on arrival; displays nothing of the clinging that passion begets. Taiwo has long since suspected a cover-up (asexuality, abortion in college, that sort) and imagines that, compelled by the tragedy upon them, the two of them might be at last coming clean.

Instead, Ling says, “Kehinde. He looks at me strangely.”

At the name Taiwo tenses, the age-old reflex, as if her name were spoken and not her twin brother’s. She peels off her forearm to glower at Ling. “What do you mean, strangely?” Without waiting for an answer, “It’s a difficult time for our family—”

“Of course.”

“So if Kehinde looks strange,” as if the words were not English, “it isn’t because he is… looking at… you.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest…”

The suggestions float there between them.

“I’m tired,” says Taiwo, as if this were Ling’s fault. She turns to the window, heart racing from lying, from the surge of aggression that still coats her throat, an old feeling resurfacing: thick, visceral, inexplicable, unnatural that she should feel jealous.

iv

While Olu and Kehinde lie looking at the ceiling.

“Sure is strange,” Olu says, “sleeping like this.”

“Like the old days,” says Kehinde, to say something. Silence. They agree, by soft laughter, to leave it untouched.

• • •

Olu folds his hands on his stomach, eyes open. He is thinking that the smell is familiar, though strange, the thick/sweet combination of sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil. He knew it the moment he alighted the Mercedes and stood in the pebbled drive breathing it in and was seconds from placing it (1997, Accra) when he noticed that Kehinde was staring at Ling.

Staring, not looking, unaware he was staring so squinting, lips pursed as if finding the word, until Olu said, “Shall we,” and picked up a suitcase and, leaving Ling standing there, marched for the door. He’d never seen his brother interact with a woman and had always kind of vaguely thought Kehinde was gay, less so interested in men than uninterested in women, almost womanly himself, like a dancer, the hair. It startled him therefore to find himself threatened, offended, by Kehinde’s reaction to Ling. The feeling, like the smell, was both strange and familiar, an old one, gone rusty and loud with disuse. The last time he felt this they would have been children, he fourteen or fifteen, his brother not ten, when some friend of their parents, more careless than callous, said, “One got the beauty, the other the brains.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the difference between the reaction of others to Kehinde and to him. They were extraordinarily good-looking, his two younger siblings, and twins; there were two, more extraordinary still. It was perfectly logical the way people ogled, a matter of science, of cause and effect. Causes: the infrequent occurrence in nature of greenish-gold eyes against deeply brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared. If anything, he felt that he had to protect them, not least on account of their relative size. To him they seemed frail, not just younger but weaker, thin-wristed and — waisted, his brother the more. Compared to his body, athletic and solid, his brother looked fragile. The opposite of threat.

Then Sadie was born, and the thing sort of shifted. Their father disappeared for four, almost five days. Olu knew where he was — down the street at the Brigham — but couldn’t shake the fear that his father was gone, gone away, called away to some faraway battle, with mothers and children left to fend for themselves. It would have been one thing if Fola were present. He was close to his mother, unusually so. In those days they went every Friday for ice cream, Carvel, on Route 9, just the two of them alone eating Rocky Road sprinkled with fine cookie crumbles, he prattling away on the short ride back home. On weekends, if his father had parties with colleagues, she’d take him for dinner at the Chestnut Hill Mall, leaving Taiwo and Kehinde with the kind Mr. Chalé while they ate clam chowder at Legal’s. He took a quiet pride in their physical resemblance; almost everybody noticed, and she smiled when they did. Furthermore, his father looked awed when he looked at her, and Olu thought he saw a sparkling residue of awe when his father turned to look at him, now and then, a hint of it, in the hospital for instance, when the baby was born.

But Fola was absent. Distraught and distracted. She sat in the nursery for most of the day staring out the one window in a torn wicker rocking chair reclaimed from the porch when the seasons had turned. With heat blasting mercilessly. She didn’t make breakfast. She didn’t prevent them from watching cartoons. She didn’t make dinner. She didn’t make phone calls. Just sat looking out at the slow-falling snow.

Olu served breakfast to himself and his siblings. They looked at him expectantly, nibbling their toast. Four amber eyes throwing sparks at his forehead. They seemed newly strange to him, frightening almost.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” Taiwo asked him.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Are you going to know soon?”

Olu frowned. “I don’t know. She’s scared about the baby.”

“But Dad’s with the baby.”

“I know.” Olu stood but didn’t know where to go. He went to the sink and washed his hands, which weren’t dirty.

“Don’t worry,” said Kehinde. “He’ll save her.”

“I know. That isn’t the question.” They waited for the question. He dried his hands, feeling his eyes well with tears. He used the scratchy dishrag for his face, too, surreptitiously, then hurried from the kitchen, down the hall, out the door.

He stood in the yard in his Brookline High jacket, where the air was too cold for the tears to re-form, watching station wagons headed for the underpass, slowly — the street slick with ice under grayish-brown sludge — but determined, it seemed, to leave Boston for Brookline (where he, too, was bused in for school) up the road. There were less than two miles to that ENTERING BROOKLINE sign, white with black letters in definitive font, and it still seemed like “distance” from this to that zip code: more trees, Carvel Ice Cream, lights hung by the town. Their corner seemed particularly ugly that morning, the trees and the houses alike drained of life with a thin coat of filth overlaying the snow banks, a lone pit bull barking, a bass line somewhere. The odd plastic Santa and halfhearted Christmas lights flung across branches like strings of paste gems only made matters worse. They were futile. It was useless. The grayness defeated all semblance of cheer.

Why do we live here, he wondered, suddenly angry, in grayness, like shadows, like things made of ash, with their frail dreams of wealth overwhelmed by faint dread that the whole thing might one day just up and collapse? Was there something about them that kept them in limbo despite their intelligence and all their hard work? And if so, could they not just accept their position and settle in here among the dignified poor? He thought of his classmates, the rich ones in Brookline, the poor ones in Metco, and he in between, somehow stuck in the middle with none of the comforts of in-group belonging, ashamed and afraid. He knew, though they hid it, that his parents had suffered, perhaps were still suffering in some unseen way; that it lightened their burden to think that their children would not have to suffer — and yet here he was. Top of his class: at a high school he hated foremost for the school bus that ferried him in, like an immigrant, a foreigner, a native to brilliance but stranger to privilege, bused in, then sent home. Formidable athlete: who loathed competition, was nauseated with dread before taking the field, though he hid it, the panic, the sheer desperation that launched him to victory still breathless with fear. Having learned that his father was saving for prep school, he’d determined to perform at the height of his gifts (for if only he lived where he learned, as a boarder, as a permanent resident, surrounded by green, he could shake off the grayness that clung to his corner, his place in the shadowy gap between worlds).

He was thinking of shadows when he looked up and saw her at the window of the nursery, a shadow herself. It seemed she couldn’t see him. Or saw but saw through him, as if he were part of the grayness, a ghost. He wanted her to smile or to call from the window to admonish him for wearing such a featherweight jacket, but Fola just stared, rocking backward and forward. He went back inside, to the nursery (née closet).

“Mom?” he said softly.

She didn’t stop rocking. She drew on her cigarette. “Come in, love,” she blew. He went to the chair and stood awkwardly beside her, unsure he should touch her. They looked at the snow. “Do you like it? The color?” she asked after a moment.

“The gray?”

“Here. The pink.”

He considered the walls. “Seems good for a girl.”

“For a girl.” She was laughing. “Yes. I had a room with the same color walls.” Then abruptly, disjointed, “You can’t just keep losing and accepting the losses, or else what’s the point? I don’t know. That’s the question. If they just keep on dying — my baba, my baby — then why love at all?” She looked at him blankly. “Do you know what I mean?”

He didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant.

“Look at you. You’re trembling,” she said. “Is the heat on?”

The closet was sweltering, the heat on full blast. “I’ll check,” he lied, eager to make a swift exit. “Do you need anything?” he asked her.

“My daughter. Alive.”

His father returned, and his mother recovered, but something was different, still hard to say what. Fola was enraptured by “Sadé” the newborn, Kweku by buying a five-bedroom house, newly finished with training, now paid as a surgeon; the new house was massive, a cavity. Hollow. The center of gravity had shifted for the family, though no one seemed to notice the movement but him: instead of Kweku and Fola at the center, together, a twosome talking softly, laughing softly, present, home, there was now the small open space left by their absence, she lost to the baby, he lost to the work. Into this space slipped their Dreams for the Future, a vision of home a good decade ahead in which both of their projects had come to fruition (grown-up babies, private practice) and they could re-merge. This became the nucleus, of nuclear family fame — Future — with rings fanning out from the core, a new order, decentralized, disaggregated efforts to climb up the mountain each man for himself. Gone was his place between twosomes, the Eldest, a broker midway between parents and children; he no longer seemed special to Kweku or Fola, their firstborn, the prize horse, nor close to the twins.

With the center dissolved, they’d closed ranks, turning inward. An autonomous unit, they stopped seeming fragile. They whispered and chuckled, conspiring with glances. They didn’t need protecting. They didn’t need their brother.

And perhaps because this brother was fourteen years old and had just had a growth spurt and lost his old voice and was stranded in the anteroom of Awkward before Handsome, ejected from boyhood with one graceless thrust, he noticed very suddenly that he was not beautiful, at least not like they, not a beautiful boy. The privilege was Kehinde’s, both beauty and boyhood, two states he had never quite noticed before but missed desperately now that he knew what he wasn’t. Around this time someone said, meeting them both, “One got the beauty, the other the brains,” with a >, not a =, there implied in the equation, by the reaction (patted shoulders, forced laughter, changed subject) while Olu stood smiling, gone red with the ache, so it was true, he was lesser than… Jealous of Kehinde.

Some twenty years later the feeling returns: the same clamoring ache as they stood in the drive and he followed the feeling of being observed to his brother observing his girlfriend, lips pursed. Ling would choose Kehinde was what he thought next, promptly losing the scent of the past of the smell of the sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil, as he reddened himself. If ever it came to it, Ling would choose Kehinde; any woman in her right mind would make the same choice. He was glamorous and famous and wealthy, an artist, whereas Olu was a resident. Cause and effect. Though he couldn’t quite bear it, to lose her, he thinks, with his hands on the ache and his eyes on the fan and his brother beside him as silent as threat is. Or more to the point, to lose her, too.

v

Kehinde can sense that his brother’s not sleeping, perhaps that his eyes are still open (and filling) but lies there unspeaking, unnerved by the feeling he’s had since they got to the house and got out. “He died,” he said, hurting, she laughing, choir bellowing (“no shadow of turning”) — and then they were here: at the front of a house that brought to mind Colorado, a houseboy appearing with cash for the taxi. A very pretty housegirl was fussing with Fola, the others climbing out of the dusty Mercedes, the houseboy lifting cases from the trunk of the taxi, the rusty door grating as Taiwo alighted. He opened his door and stepped out, blinking slowly, assailed by the light and the sting of her laugh and the thought, she was right, though she’d said it to hurt him, though he used to be able:

he can’t read her thoughts.

For years he had. Read — or more accurately heard—them. As if they were words in her voice in his head, only snippets but clear ones, and clearer the feelings that went with the thoughts; he could feel what she felt.

He still doesn’t know when he lost good reception. It wasn’t in Nigeria, for all of the horror. After college or the last time he saw her or earlier? He doesn’t trust his memory when he tries to think back. The wrist-slitting scrambled his memories, rearranged them. The archives remain but are all out of order. He can’t tell what age he was when such-and-such happened; couldn’t say in which country he was in which year. He knows that at some point the line filled with static, then little by little went properly dead. He senses his sister — still experiences her presence like the space between magnets to a finger passing through — but can’t hear, so doesn’t know, her now.

Radio silence.

“He’s gone” made her laugh, and he couldn’t hear why.

He was blinking with sadness when he stepped from the taxi and stood for a moment to steady himself with the sun slanting down at an angle toward him, his eyes blurring slightly against the rich light, and was bringing a hand to his eyes for some shadow when, shifting, he caught that quick glimpse of Ling’s face. They bear no resemblance. It was just a distortion — the angle, the sunlight, the sadness, the shadow — but there beside Olu she looked in that moment exactly like one Dr. Yuki.

vi

Fola pauses briefly in the hall between bedrooms to listen for voices behind the closed doors. Even in silence she senses the bodies, their presence as strange as their absence once was. She remembers the first time she felt it, one morning, unremarkable among mornings when she thinks of it now (though it goes that way always, it seems, with revelations, the banality of the context as striking as the content):

the odd Monday morning in Boston in April, that strangely named month, so misleading somehow, the very sound of it, April, all open, pastel, telling none of the truth of relentless gray rains. Her husband had called from a Baltimore pay phone to say he was gone and was not coming home (late October); she’d lain in their bedroom that evening and remembered him leaving the kitchen that day. She’d been standing at the counter fixing breakfast for the children and had glimpsed him only briefly as he floated from the room, but had heard him calling “’Bye!” from the foyer, then “I love you!” She’d answered in Yoruba, I know, “Mo n mo.” His phone call at midnight came so unexpectedly, so thoroughly out of nowhere, that she couldn’t quite think. Couldn’t listen, couldn’t reason, could only lie sobbing, remembering the morning, his voice from the door. By the time she woke up that next morning, eyes swollen, her tear ducts were dry and her grief had gone cold. Gone, he was gone, very well, getting on with it, one could mourn only so much in one life; they were broke, she discovered, so sold the house (winter), moved the children to a rental at the edge of a lot overlooking Route 9 but at least the same school district, two little bedrooms, her “bed” on the couch; settled debts, found a lawyer, got divorced (early spring); brought the twins to the airport and Olu to Yale (end of summer); blurry autumn, then Christmas, she and Sadie, then New Year, then snow warming slowly to rain…

until one day in April, an unremarkable morning, she was heading to the kitchen to make herself tea, having dropped off the baby at the bus stop in wellies, the radio playing softly, and softer the rain — when she paused in the hall in between the two bedrooms and noticed the silence. And that she was alone. Gone, they were gone, all the voices, the bodies, one lover, four children, their heartbeats, the hum, heat and motion and murmur, the rush and the babble, a river gone dry while she’d wept. She remained. She stood there, a remnant, as conspicuously alone as a thing left behind on a beach in the night, suddenly aware of the silence, its newness and strangeness, the sound of her solitude, clear, absolute.

As strange was that silence, their absence that morning, is what she feels now: that she isn’t alone. She stands in the hall in between the two bedrooms and feels them there, silent if not yet asleep. She chuckles at the feeling. She doesn’t quite trust it. She returns to the kitchen. Is there something she forgot? She turns off the radio so as not to wake Sadie; the walls are so thin in that bedroom. Something else? The phone call from Benson, who is coming for dinner. Amina to prepare the egusi at four.

Nothing needs doing.

She is stuck with the thinking.

She returns to the chair in the garden to smoke.

It is foolish, she knows, at her age to address it, to let the thing in as a fully formed thought, but it forms itself anyway; she thinks I’ve been lonely and laughs with surprise at the tears that spring up. It should not perhaps come as so shocking a revelation, seems obvious now that she’s met the truth’s eye, but it hurts all the same: a dull aching, like hunger, a hunger for a taste that she almost forgot.

Almost, but didn’t.

She closes her eyes, hugs her waist with one arm as she blows out the smoke, with the taste of companionship mingling with nicotine, hurting with happiness to have them all home.

4

Dinner. They are scooting their chairs to the table — a change in the air, each one sensing the weight, with the Reason They’re Here dawning jointly on all of them now that they’re formally gathered like this: a collective: beholden to collective desperation, to meanings that flourish in long-lasting silences, in down-turning glances, in moments of awkwardness masked as politeness — when someone turns up.

The bell, out of nowhere; a sound out of context; even Fola forgets she’s expecting a guest. They hover, midscoot, with their hands on the chair legs and wait for some seconds for someone to speak.

“Madame,” says Amina, from the dining-room entrance, three steps leading down to the den. “Please, a guest.”

“Who is it?” says Fola.

“A sir please.”

“Where is he?”

“Outside please.”

“For God’s sake, at least show him in.” But she hasn’t had company since arriving in Ghana and knows that the staff has no protocol yet. She’s still rather shocked by their efforts this morning, all springing to action with newborn aplomb from the moment they appeared in the driveway, five strangers and she (still the strangest one), no questions asked. Perhaps they prefer it, a house full of people instead of just Fola with clippers in shorts? “Come,” she adds gently, and accompanies Amina. She finds Benson waiting outside the front door.

With a bottle and flowers. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, stepping forward to embrace her.

For a moment she recoils. The velvet bass voice and the smell of black soap and cologne mixed together too strong, too familiar: a wave rises, passes. She clutches the doorframe, then waves her hand, laughing, “I’m fine, really, fine. Please. Thank you, and welcome.” She reaches for the flowers to waylay a second attempt at embrace. “We’re just getting started.”

“I’m not interrupting? In Ghana it’s rude to be early.”

“Thank God. Six is an uncivilized hour for dinner, I know, but with—”

“Jetlag—”

“Exactly.”

“Of course.” He swallows hard, nodding. “And the children?”

“Hardly children.” She laughs. “They’re all here, we’re all here, through the den.” He follows behind her to where they’re all standing, their hands on the table now, eyes on his face. “My darlings, this is Benson. A friend of your f… of the f-family’s,” she stumbles. “From Hopkins.”

“Hello.” He holds up the bottle and smiles at them sadly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry for your loss.”

They stare at him blankly, the expression before coldly, even Ling, as if he were the cause of this loss, being the first one to mention it here in this pause with the facing of facts on the tips of their tongues. Sensing this, Benson adds softly, to Fola, “You all must be shell-shocked. God knows that I am.”

Fola, with a feeling that she hasn’t had in decades, concern that every stranger think her children well behaved, holds up the flowers. “Aren’t they glorious? Gardenias.” She smiles with such force that they all smile back. She places the arrangement, intended for a mantel, in the middle of the table; it doesn’t quite fit. The decorative fern fronds dangle into the rice pot, the height of the blossoms obscuring the view. When everyone sits — as they do now, instructed — they can’t see the person across, for the vase.

Benson takes the empty seat, smiling at Olu. “I knew you looked familiar,” he says, scooting in. The voice is too bass for the others to hear it, and Olu too dark for his blushing to show, but he shakes his head stiffly, left, right, just once, quickly, and Benson nods once — up, down, up — in reply (having somehow understood to abandon the subject as men sometimes do with the slightest of hints: a quick nod, a quick frown, the dark arts of the eyebrows, poof! subjects are changed without changes in tone). “The last time I saw you two, you were in diapers.” He smiles at the twins, faces blocked by the flowers. “My last year of residency. Now you’re what, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine,” they say in unison, the same husky tone.

“October,” offers Kehinde. “We’ll be thirty next October.”

“And you.” He turns to Sadie, next to Kehinde, less obscured. “You… were just a glimmer in—”

“My ovary,” says Fola. Preempting. “More precisely.”

“That’s obscene,” Sadie says. This is the part she dreads most: when the stranger starts asking their ages, what each of them does. She senses it coming just as sure as a key change the moment a pop song approaches its bridge and looks ruefully at the man at the head of the table, wondering why he is here but not minding too much. At least with a guest, there’s a guise for the dolor that hovered above them in silence before, doubly massive for being unnamed, unacknowledged, the size of itself and its shadow, a blob. Now they can pin, each, their anguish to Benson, who took the seat no one else wanted to take and who said the thing no else wanted to say and who cut the grim picture in half with his flowers. He is the reason they all sit so upright, speak softly, smile politely, because there’s a Guest, as ensconced in the drama that attends family dinners (even absent a death in the family) as they, but a visitor, an innocent, in need of protection. They must ensure, all, that the Guest is okay. She smiles at him wanly. “Right. I was born later. I’m Sadie.”

Ling contributes her finger bell laugh. “Ovaries aren’t ‘obscene.’”

Turning quickly to Benson, “She’s an ob-gyn. I’m in ortho,” Olu says.

“Two doctors!” exclaims Benson. “So it runs in the family. I didn’t get your first name.” Ling tells him. “Well, Ling. Ghana is wanting for excellent doctors, foremost in obstetrics and maternal and child health. I opened a little hospital in town seven years ago. We still have a wait list for consults.” He laughs. “We could also use surgeons,” with a gesture to Olu, “and knowing your father, I know that you’re good.” He pauses. They all do. To see where he’s going, to see if the Guest is now stuck in the weeds, but he laughs again softly and presses on strongly, “The top of our class at Johns Hopkins, bar none. No one could touch him. And I don’t mean the Africans. No one was better. No one even came close. I remember when he got there I thought, who’s this bumpkin? From this Lincoln University? Never heard of it before. I should have, I know it. God. Kwame Nkrumah. But I’d been in Poland, of all places, for school. Funny times, those. Cold war scholarships for Africans. You could study in Warsaw and not pay a dime. I arrived in East Baltimore with an Eastern Bloc accent. I think they all thought I was deaf for a while.” Another laugh. “But we managed. We banded together. Everybody wanted to be friends with your dad. And Kweku was…” He pauses, smiling, turning to Fola. Seeing her face, he turns back. “He was shy. A geek, if we’re honest. But handsome, so meticulous. All the girls loved him. But he only loved one.”

Fola says, “Really. I don’t think—”

“Keep going,” says Sadie, not loudly. “He only loved one?”

Benson looks at Fola, who tips her head, sighing. He looks back at Sadie, returns the sad smile. “There were four of us. Africans — well, five counting Trevor. Jamaican—”

“Trinidadian,” Fola corrects.

“Ah, right. Trinidadian. Five of us brethren,” says Benson. “Prodigious, but desperately poor. We got stipends with our scholarships but blew them on airfare so no one had much; we shared all that we had. We used to eat dinner together, in rotation, so Monday to Friday a different one cooked. Wednesday was Kweku. He always cooked banku. We hated his banku; it tasted like glue. But we’d all get there early to talk to your mother. Or stare at her. No one could work up the nerve. And we’d look at your father, this shy guy from Ghana, not strapping like Trevor, or tall, not like me, with these shirts buttoned up to the uppermost button like a Ghanaian Lumumba, with glasses — with her.”

A silence has settled on all of them, thickly. They stare at the flowers as if at a hearse. No one quite knows what the other is thinking or whether to speak and reveal the wrong thought.

Finally, Fola. “For goodness sake, Benson.” She laughs with such sadness, they start to laugh, too. “That isn’t what happened—”

“It’s true—”

“No, it isn’t. He also made bacon and eggs. Which were worse.” She stands up to pick out a fern from the rice pot. “The food’s getting cold,” she says. “Eat,” and they do.

Joloff, egusi. They muddle through bravely, evading fraught silence with pleasant requests: pass the wine please, what time is it, do you have enough space there, more wine please, what’s in this, should we open another bottle? When Fola observes that the questions are waning, she stands, disappears, and returns with the cake. “I am not to be forgiven,” she says, “for not writing or calling on time, but I didn’t forget.” She sings the first notes, then the rest join in, smiling, while Sadie sits blushing and chewing her lip. On the last long “to yooou…!” Fola settles the cake on the tabletop, bending over Sadie to do so and pausing, so stationed, to kiss her and say, “You were right,” and that’s that, the thing finished, “talked out.” Taiwo and Kehinde say “The wish!” again in unison, which makes them both frown and which makes Benson laugh. “So they really are twins!” That daft oft-repeated comment, which makes Olu tense. He recovers and chuckles. Sadie laughs, too, suddenly noticing the candle: one big white utility candle dripping thick wax.She starts to ask why, glancing back at her mother, who shrugs, laughing also, then changes her mind. The sturdier the candle, she thinks, leaning forward, the better for bearing such wishes.

ii

Taiwo retreats to the den after dinner, three shallow steps down from the dining room table. She sits on the love seat’s strange orange plaid wool with a copy of Ghana Ovation. Behind her Fola, at the table with Benson, is discussing the tradition of fantasy coffins; she hears them there, faintly, conferring in whispers like grown-ups evading the hearing of children. They felt like that, children, she thinks, during dinner, as watchful and rule-bound as Catholic school pupils — and wonders why all of them do this, still now, even now, the African Filial Piety act? Lowered eyes, lowered voices, feigned shyness, bent shoulders, the curse of their culture, exaltation of deference, that beaten-in impulse to show oneself obedient and worthy of praise for one’s reverence of Order (never mind that the Order is crumbling, corrupted, departed, dysfunctional; respect must be shown it). She loathes them for doing it, herself and her siblings, the house staff, her African classmates. Quite simply, she isn’t convinced that “respect” is the basis, not for them the respectful nor for them the respected. She suspects that it’s laziness, a defaulting to the familiar, or cowardice in the former and power in the latter. Most African parents, she’d guess, grew up powerless, with no one on whom to impose their own will, and so bully their children, through beatings and screaming, to lighten the load of postcolonial angst…

or assorted observations along the same lines, when she flips to a page and is yanked back from thought. By the name first. The caption, fine print amid faces (weddings, polo matches, funerals, glossy chaos of society photos), “Femi and Niké Savage at…,” and then by the photograph:

the shoes

and suit

and shirt

and neck

and smile

and nose

and eyes.

Those eyes.

Black, thick-lidded eyes gazing back at her, red-rimmed, the wild sort of gaze of a man on a drug, matching smile (hard, unfocused), the wife there beside him gone ashen with age, the new wig a blond bob.

She hurls the magazine across the room, gut reaction. It lands with the splatter of pages on wood. Fola and Benson look up from the table. “Darling?” says Fola, but Taiwo can’t speak. “What is it? What happened?”

“A bug,” breathes out Taiwo. She points to the magazine splayed on the floor. “I was k-killing a bug.”

“Ah, yes. Welcome to Ghana.” Benson doesn’t notice her tremulous voice. “That reminds me. Are you all on antimalarial medication? The mosquitoes can be killer. I’ve got Aralen in the car.” Taiwo shakes her head. “I’ll go grab it. No worries. I might just have enough to get you started for now.” He glances at Fola as he stands from the table.

Fola nods, distracted. “Great, thanks,” as he goes.

iii

Fola stands also and stares at her daughter, aware of a heartbeat too fast and too loud, throbbing ache, lower right, where she has the small scar from the day she went tumbling down the stairs with the girl. Almost hard to believe she was just twenty-eight, half a lifetime away, with three children (first girl: a complete mystery to her mother next to Olu and Kehinde, a new thing entirely, more perilous somehow). Already at one she was beautiful, Taiwo. They both were. Wherever they went, they were stopped. Strangers always thought they were both baby girls and would gush in high voices, “How beauuutiful.” They were. But it made Fola nervous. To handle such children. Too precious, too perfect, the girl in particular, like a very expensive gift made of breakable material that one should just look at and try not to touch. Kehinde was easy, like Olu, even easier, but Taiwo would cry whenever Fola put her down and would wail without pause until Fola returned — only Fola, never Kweku — to pick her back up. It was this that confused her: how much Fola liked this, the thrill she’d receive when she picked up the girl, and she’d immediately stop crying to smile at her mother, to cling to her, burying her face in her neck. The neediness touched her, overwhelmed her, unhinged her; she worried about favoring or spoiling the child, or confusing her, leading her to believe that the world was less patently apathetic than it actually was.

On the occasion of note she was washing the babies in the bathtub upstairs when the front doorbell rang. It was Olu, then five, driven home by a teacher who lived down the street and now honked, pulling off. The door was at the bottom of those two narrow staircases, too long a trip down with the twins unattended. She picked them up, dripping suds, one in each arm, and went rushing down the stairs to get Olu. And slipped. She can remember the feeling still now, that pure panic that flooded her lungs as her slipper flew out and her back hit the stairs and she tumbled down clinging to babies’ wet skin slick with sweet-smelling suds. When she came to a stop she was holding Kehinde only, having somehow nicked her ribcage on the stair edge, and bleeding. Taiwo had landed, by some act of mercy, at the bottom of the staircase completely unharmed. She was sitting there staring as Fola rose, bleeding, her arms around Kehinde. Not crying, just staring. But the look in the eyes was more piercing than screaming. The eyes seemed to say you let go, you let me go. Those eyes — which she’d found so unnerving, in the beginning, having only ever seen them in a painting, unblinking — now stared at her, heartbroken, heartbreaking, accusing: a dead woman’s eyes on a baby girl’s face.

Olu pressed the doorbell, and Taiwo started crying. At his sister’s distress Kehinde promptly started wailing. Fola started screaming in her head; crying silently, she opened the door to stunned Olu. “Hold your brother.” Olu took Kehinde, and Fola grabbed Taiwo, ushering them all up the stairs and away from the cold. But the girl kept on crying, a very tired cry, untiringly, for hours, until evening when her father came home.

Fola looks at Taiwo and can feel the girl’s heaving, her wide eyes unyielding, dry, heartbroken, seething. This is the thing that has come in between them, this rage, Fola knows, since the twins went to Lagos — but neither will tell her what happened with Femi, and Sena, who found them, alleged not to know. There was just the one phone call at sunrise in summer ten months from the day that she left them at Logan: Uncle Sena, last seen on a tarmac in Ghana, now calling from Nigeria at five in the morning. “I knew they were yours from the moment I saw them. Those are Somayina’s grandkids, I said to myself,” Sena blubbered while Fola sat fumbling for a light switch, still sleeping on the couch. “From the beginning. Start again.”

His story was confusing — the more for the static, and how Sena told it, both rushing and halting, conflicted, determined to help, hiding something — but Fola got the gist of it. The first bit she knew:

when her father was murdered his mistress decided his house was now hers and moved in with their son. The two lived together as queen and little prince running a brothel for soldiers through the end of Biafra. In this way young Femi began his career as a dealer of women, small arms, and cocaine, striking out on his own as an underworld wunderkid when Bimbo OD’d at the end of the war. This Fola learned on her last trip to Lagos, in 1975, to beg Femi for help, having heard from a Nigerian in Baltimore by chance that her brother was knee deep in naira. Reunion. They’d never been close. He was four years her junior. He’d come to the house now and then with his mother, this Bimbo, a tall, hard, and wiry woman who in another life may well have modeled, not whored. Her father had never sought to hide them from Fola (“her mother was dead and a man had his needs”), and she knew that the boy who would wait in the kitchen while Bimbo went upstairs was her aburo.

But didn’t care. Had never even thought the names Bimbo and Femi — they were extras, unnamed in the cast of her youth, without lines, manly woman and womanly boy — until then, when she learned of the money. Too late. Femi alleged that he thought she had died with their father that night in the fire in Kaduna; otherwise, he claimed, he would never have excluded her entirely from their father’s inheritance. Alas. Too late now to redistribute the monies but Fola need only but ask for his help; they were siblings after all, you could see the resemblance, never mind that their father never claimed him as a son. Fola left Lagos with the money she needed to get to Accra to see Kweku’s ill mum, but vowed never again to give Femi the pleasure of offering help. She broke this vow for the twins.

This time her brother refused to send cash but proposed a small trade as an alternative solution: if Fola would send her ibeji to him, he would pay all their school fees plus college tuition. At some point he’d wed the only daughter of a general turned oil entrepreneur; he was tricked, she was barren. Having ibeji in the household might “cure” this wife Niké, he explained, as ibeji were magic. A deal. Fola sent the twins to Nigeria in August and forty weeks later Sena sent them back home.

From what she can gather, her twisted half-brother had hosted some bacchanal that Sena attended (the details, to do with drugs, prostitutes, orgy, have always been largely unclear). Sena had his own tragic tale to unburden: of expulsion from Lagos under “Ghana Must Go,” winter 1983, with the Nigerian government’s summarily deporting two million Ghanaians; of return to East Cantonments, impecunious and affronted, to build up a practice from scratch in Accra, only two fragile years past a barbarous coup in his homeland, no longer his home; death of parents. One hard decade on — his first week back in Lagos, having arrived at a house party driven by friends, unaware that the house was Kayo Savage’s townhouse, unaware that the party was Femi’s — he found them. Just saw them there huddled up, children among adults, and knew who they were and that something was wrong; they were both wearing makeup and spoke as if drugged, in a monotone, clutching their elbows, eyes down. He took them at once in the clothes they were wearing, got a taxi to the Sheraton in Ikeja where he was staying, called at midnight in a panic to explain he was sending them back on the first thing moving. End of story.

She drove in the dirty blue hatchback, four hours, got to JFK early, and sat there and waited, not moving, not eating, just clutching her stomach, asking Jesus her friend to go easy this time. They appeared in arrivals in thin summer clothing, the lipstick rubbed off to a bloodstain, dark orange, their hands clasped together, their eyes still turned downward, too skinny, not speaking, not Kehinde, not Taiwo. How many times did she ask them to tell her? “Just tell me what happened,” “Please tell me,” “I’m begging.” She telephoned Femi; she screamed, wept, and threatened. “How dare you take my darlings away?” Femi sneered. And hung up. They were shadows. They slept in the daytime and whispered at night in the bedroom they shared in that house that she loathed, with no yard to grow flowers. She couldn’t afford therapy but begged for financial aid. The prep school assented on the basis of Olu’s spectacular performance the four years before. They started in autumn as freshmen, repeating the year they’d just done at international school, Kehinde quiet and sullen, Taiwo restless and furious, the both of them mute on the subject of why.

She still doesn’t know.

She looks at Taiwo unknowingly, so longing to hold her, to squeeze out this why—and the sorrow and fury and shadow out with it, to hold her so tightly it all rushes forth, leaving breath bubbling out as when Taiwo was one and still longed to be held, and by her. But she can’t. She imagines that baby — slick-wet and defenseless, in every sense, naked and mute where she’d dropped her — and seizes with guilt, a ghost, half a life later. She wants to but can’t take the three steps between them.

“What happened…?” she asks weakly from the dining room table, but Taiwo doesn’t hear and walks away.

iv

Kehinde finds Sadie in the garden in a beach chair, her feet on the palm trunk, eyes closed, tilting back. The distance from the house to the edge of the garden is such that no light source illumines this spot. There is only the starlight, a thin coat of silver that muddies the blackness a dark opaque gray. He hesitates for a moment in the shadow behind her, not sure if she’s sleeping. “May I join you?” he asks. She hasn’t heard the footsteps and starts, veering forward.

“You scared me,” she gasps. “It’s so dark. You’re so quiet.”

He whispers, embarrassed, “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was counting,” she says. (They both speak in hushed tones as if they were hiding or planning a break and in spite of themselves, overcome by the context, the dark of the garden, the confessional implications of chitchat in moonlight.) “Sit,” she adds, rising.

“No, stay there,” he murmurs. He positions himself neatly on the ground by the tree. They are silent, slightly awkward. The shadow a comfort. Sadie speaks presently, unnerved by the lull.

“Don’t you think it’s weird? That she lives here? In Ghana?” She slaps at a mosquito.

“Is it? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She didn’t even tell me she was moving.”

“Me either.” He shrugs. “But she’s like that.”

“I know, but it’s Ghana.” She rubs her arm, scowling as if particularly offended by having been bitten by an insect from Ghana. “If she wanted to do that whole thing, back to Africa, then why not Nigeria? At least she’s from there.”

“It’s quieter,” says Kehinde, not saying as he thinks it that he’d never return to Nigeria, even if Fola moved there permanently. “The same thing in Mali, the house where I stayed in Douentza, the quiet. You could see it. You could think.”

“Did you like it there? Mali? Oh, wait. Are you thinking? Am I talking too much?”

“I like talking to you.” He smiles at the smile he can feel in the darkness. “I never get to talk to you.”

“You mean you never call.” But she’s laughing. “And thank you.”

“For what?”

“The tuition. Mom told me last year that you’re helping her out. And that you told her not to tell me. But she kind of tells me everything. Except that she’s moving to Ghana.”

He laughs. “You’re welcome.”

“So, you’re famous?”

Laughs harder. “Not really, no.”

“Yeah you are, Kehinde, I see you online. My best friend, her family’s super into the art thing. They bought one, I think. Of your new ones.”

“That right?”

“I like them. The mud cloths.”

“You do?”

“They’re enormous, though. How do you make them?”

“With mud. And big cloths.”

They laugh again together. She kicks his shin. “Jesus. I’ve never been to Africa, I know, but come on.”

“How is that possible? That you’ve never been to Africa?”

“Shocking but true.”

Kehinde senses the frown. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to her quickly. “Our parents never brought us when we were kids.”

“Why?”

“They were hurt…. Their countries hurt them.”

“But you came. The rest of you.”

“Well, Olu was a baby. And we were fourteen.” He feels his voice catch, clears his throat. “It was different. It’s not like we asked to be sent—” Now he stops. A light has come on above the door to the house, a faint puddle of yellow into which enters Benson. He strides toward the driveway, a man with a purpose. Kehinde and Sadie stop whispering to watch him. Benson doesn’t see them. A driver appears suddenly from the side of the house where the staff takes their dinner. Benson says something that Kehinde can’t hear, then the beep-beep of car doors unlocked, blinking lights. The driver lifts open the SUV trunk, pulls a box out. The two men confer, not in English. Benson takes the box, briskly marches back inside with it. The light above the door goes off. The driver disappears.

Kehinde finds a stick, begins drawing in earth, an old habit. “Reminds me of our first house.” A face. “They used to sell drugs there. The son of our landlord. Right there out our window, me and Olu’s room—”

“Wait. You and Olu shared a room?”

He notes that this is what shocks her. “Until you were born, yes.”

“Of course,” Sadie says. With a hint of aggression.

“Why of course?” He has heard it.

“Until I was born. It’s what all of you say. Like you all lived this whole other lifetime before that, like I was an afterthought. Like I messed it all up.”

“Sadie—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say I’m being sensitive. Don’t say that it’s just that I’m younger or whatever. I’m different from the rest of you, an idiot can see that, shit, strangers do see it, it’s not in my head. I know what I’m feeling,” she whispers, insistent, to which Kehinde replies with a smile, “So do I.” She hears that he’s smiling and, thinking he’s mocking, says, “Thank you for laughing—”

“I know what you feel.” He does laugh now, quietly, to remember the feeling so plainly, to see his own face in her words, that small face, a girl’s face, as had troubled him deeply for ages, the teasing for being so pretty. “I used to feel the same about our family. That I was different. That I didn’t belong—”

“Didn’t belong? You had Taiwo.” She whispers this passionately, with no trace of sympathy, overcome by the possessiveness one feels for one’s suffering, the aggressive insistence on the suffering’s uniqueness, in nature and depth and endurance over time.

“I did. I had Taiwo,” he says, and considers it. “Back then. I had Taiwo. But she was the girl. I was the one who shared the bedroom with Olu. I was supposed to be the doctor, the boy, the other son. That was the dream, Sai and Sons, family business. Except for… I hated them.”

“Who?”

“Math and science.” He laughs again, retracing a line in his drawing, then murmurs the rest, less to her than himself: “See, I know they didn’t mean to, but I hated how they looked at me, like I was the break in the chain, Dad and Olu, like I was a stranger, which maybe I was to them, maybe I was to myself, I don’t know. I just wonder, you know. Being here, seeing Olu, I ask myself, what if it was him in the car? Instead of me, that night with Dad. Would this whole thing be different? If it happened like that, with the good son, you know?”

Sadie doesn’t. “What car? If it was Olu in what car?”

“I’m just rambling,” Kehinde says, tracing over the face.

“No, tell me. What car?” she persists.

Kehinde falters. “I…”

“No one tells me anything,” she mumbles. “Never mind.”

He can feel that heavy silence taking form now around him, the familiar film of silence that shields, locks him in — but his sister would appear to be in it here with him, beside him, locked also, her breath, and her heart. He hears her thin breathing, the sound before crying. He feels her aloneness, a space in his throat. A space, opened up. Through which trickles, unbidden, as thin and uncertain, the sound of his voice. Which tells her, very simply, how he went to meet their father, how he walked into the lobby, saw the guards and Dr. Yuki, how they drove home in the Volvo, parked and sat there in the driveway, how he signed his art class painting with a pen that he still has. He pulls this from his pocket and hands it to Sadie.

“What does it say?” She can’t see in the dark.

“I think Mom engraved it. It’s Yoruba. Keep it.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you. And for telling me that.” She thumbs the pen carefully. “I would have been happy. That it happened with you and not anyone else. I bet he was happy.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“E se,” he says, though it hurts him to do. The music of the language makes him think of Nigeria. His sister. He stands. “We should get back inside.”

“Really?”

“Mosquitoes.”

“But our family’s inside,” she says, laughing.

“I know it.” He kisses her head.

Fola and Benson come out of the house now, Amina behind them with Tupperware containers. “You’re really too kind,” he is saying.

“Please. Take it. It’s just some egusi and joloff for later.”

“I have a small staff—”

“But your cook is Ashanti. He can’t make egusi, at least not like mine.” They are smiling, glancing downward, when Fola, feeling butterflies (lower left, bafflement), squints at the garden. There by the tree she can make out the beach chair, a figure beside it, tall. “K, is that you?”

v

Taiwo comes in and finds Olu there reading, the other bed empty. “Do you mind if we switch?”

Olu looks up from his book, sees she’s crying. “Are you…?” he begins, but it’s clear that she’s not. He stands, slightly awkward, unsure what to do with his body, embrace her? He takes a step forward. Taiwo steps backward, a kneejerk reaction that doesn’t offend him.

“The rooms. Can we switch?”

Unnerved by the crying, he leaves without question. She closes the door and he goes down the hall.

vi

This bedroom is larger, a queen bed, small window, the smell of Ling’s lotion, faint sound from the garden. He thinks to go join them, hears Fola, “Where’s Olu?” his brother, “Nice to meet you,” but doesn’t go out. It doesn’t make sense to distrust this man Benson, to duck him. He’ll be back again, tomorrow it sounds like: was talk of a drive in his car to the village, preparations, picking coffins, greeting family, logistics — which are similar, thinks Olu, to the logistics of a hospital, these logistics of a funeral, clinical, procedural, managerial, what to do with the body the general question, a series of actions sucked dry of emotion — but strange to him, still, to be bothering with the answers, to be carrying out the actions when the body is dead. He doesn’t fear Benson will tell them, not really, but why he can’t tell them himself he doesn’t know.

He shouldn’t have waited. He should have just told them, or her, told his mother at least at the time, senior year, when he’d gotten that ticket to Ghana, the same airline ticket that came every spring. To the College. Wrong address: they all had a box at the New Haven post office for personal use, but the Temple Street address of Timothy Dwight College was all that his father could find from Accra. These, the last days before mass use of e-mail. Every year on his birthday, the twenty-sixth of May, came an envelope for Fola (which he’d send back unopened), a letter for him, and a ticket to Ghana. Thin hard-copy ticket in fading red ink with the three carbon copies of tickets of old, dated 26 May every year for four years until 26 May 1997, when he went.

He’s never really asked himself why, or why then, why he skipped graduation, didn’t want to attend. He’d always been frightened that Kweku would surprise them, showing up in New Haven unannounced and uninvited on a day that he knew that they’d all be together, but it was obvious that his father wasn’t thinking of this. Or wasn’t thinking. Not a stranger to American education, he would have known that graduations happened every four years, and that sometime in springtime in 1997 there would be two commencements (twins from high school, his from college); nevertheless sent the letters and ticket as always, same desperate entreaty that Olu come for his birthday, that he stay for a week, that he hear Kweku out, with no mention at all of the conflict of dates.

It was just a coincidence that the two graduations happened to fall on one day and his birthday at that, but he sat with the tickets — Milton commencement, Yale commencement, Ghana Airways — and wept for the first time in years. That his father had forgotten that his children were graduating, three of the four, somehow drove the point home: that he wasn’t a part of their lives any longer, their schedules, their rhythms, their world; he’d dropped out. It wasn’t that Olu hadn’t ever considered this (he had, once a day, since the Volvo drove off), but despair was dulled first by the sheer numbing shock, which in time became denial, which in time became hope.

Only now does it dawn on him, here at the window where Fola’s deep laughter outside through the screen is a rumble of thunder before rushing rain, that perhaps he went seeking some final betrayal? It seemed obvious enough at the time why he left, with the lie about a poorly timed volunteer trip, “Doctors Without Borders,” he said, producing a pamphlet for Ling, saying that Fola should be with the twins, he didn’t mind: not to face the thing squarely, his father’s indifference. His greatest achievement, and Kweku forgot. He wept in his dorm room, alone, thirty minutes, then typed out a letter to say he would come, wiped his face, slapped his cheek, clenched his teeth in the mirror, silent vow no more crying, man, left the next week. Metro-North to the city, crowded subway to the airport, little shuttle to the terminal space reserved for Ghana Airways (now defunct), a funky alcove on some back lot at the airport where the circus act of check-in was just getting under way, ticketed passengers bumped at random off the flight protesting loudly, louder check-in agents shouting “There is no reason to shout!” entire families pleading mercy for their overweight baggage with tearing of sackcloth and gnashing of teeth, bags unpacked and repacked on the floor around Olu (gifts, foodstuffs, cans, clothing, toys strewn at his feet), up the stairs to the aircraft, then ten hours later down the stairs to Accra.

To forget the occasion.

But there was something else also, apart from the horror at imagining himself on a stage in the sun with no family there cheering, neither parents nor siblings. For proper cauterization, still more was required. To scorch away hope — as he must have intended, he thinks, must have wanted — he needed what happened: a thing still more searing than being forgotten, the burn one knows only at being betrayed.

• • •

His father looked younger, or smaller, than he remembered. He’d always been short, as per Benson, “not tall,” maybe five foot ten, same height as Fola, and sturdy, with strong arms and shoulders, a runner’s lean legs — but looked small in the crowd that was gathered there waiting, a density of primary color and sound, men and women, the men rather short, Olu noticed, all strong-armed and smooth-skinned and, shockingly, brown.

For all of his life when he’d looked for his father, like this, scanning quickly to spot Kweku’s face in the bleachers at meets or the seats at recitals, he’d scanned for the contrast, first and foremost for brown. A bluish color brown appropriately likened to chocolate and coffee, the complexion that he had himself — and that no one else had, no other father in Boston. He could always pick out Kweku in an instant by the color. Here at the airport his eyes, as conditioned, scanned quickly for contrast and blinked at the shock: they were all the same color, more or less, all the fathers, his own blended in, indiscrete, of a piece. When his eyes at last settled at the edge of the gathering on a man in pressed khakis, a crisply white shirt, squarish glasses, brown shoes, with his hands in his pockets, so much smaller than remembered, his feet set apart, Olu saw with some awe that his father stood out like the proverbial thumb from the men in the crowd. Though their skin and their height and their builds were the same, more or less, his own father was different.

He paused at the door between baggage claim and exit hall (the old airport exit, before renovation) and stared through the glass at the throng of brown men, shifting his bag on his shoulders but not stepping out. Not quite recognizing his father, or overwhelmed by recognition, as if seeing the man clearly for the first time in his life, suddenly seeing him singular, without the benefit of contrast, without the backdrop (on white) and still different (on brown). This is what stopped him and held him there staring, the way Kweku looked, like a man on his own, small and strong and apart, the one not like the others; all the familiar peculiarities more peculiar somehow: how his trousers were creased down the front, tightly belted, his cuffs rolled back once, thinning hair neatly cut, those same wire-frame glasses, scientist-immigrant glasses, the same ones as wore his professors at Yale (as if all nonwhite postgrads in America in the seventies had arrived from their homelands and received the same pair). Kweku. Not a father, a surgeon, a Ghanaian, a hero, a monster, just one Kweku Sai, just a man in a crowd with an odd sort of bearing, a stranger in Accra as in Boston. Alone. He couldn’t see Olu concealed by the doorframe so stood like a child told to wait without fuss, with his hands in his pocket, his eyes on the exit, his shoulders relaxed as if all things were well, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his foot on the ground.

Someone clipped Olu on the calf with a luggage cart. “Excuse me,” said the person, Luther Vandross it seemed. Olu turned around and saw Benson (a stranger). “Didn’t realize you were stopping there…”

“Sorry. You’re right.” Olu stepped aside to let the stranger wheel his luggage through the doorway, but he didn’t. He was smiling, pausing, too.

“Were you on the flight from New York?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Yes, I thought so. I saw you. God, this may sound strange, but I thought — just, you look like a woman I knew once. The wife of a friend.” Olu shook his head no. The stranger looked embarrassed. “Well. Welcome to Ghana.” He left with his cart, disappeared in the crowd.

Feeling somehow discovered — as the coward at the door, if not the son of Fola Savage — Olu looked at his dad. What is a man who cannot face his father? he thought. As a shame or a threat or a lark, as a small thing, too small in his lone peculiarity, or a large thing, too large per the shadows he cast: the root angst didn’t matter, the thing was the facing, and here he was hiding, afraid to step out. “Go,” he mumbled softly, rearranging his backpack (the one he always traveled with, the one Taiwo mocked, further proof of the “white boy” who lived inside Olu, guzzling water from Nalgenes, wearing Tevas in snow). He stepped into view, gripped the straps at his chest as if preparing to skydive. Called, “Dad.”

• • •

They drove into town from the airport without speaking, Kweku clutching the wheel, Olu clutching his backpack, the three years of silence a solid between them unsoftened by presence, proximity, flesh. Olu gazed intently out the passenger window, trying to work out the color of what he was seeing: the roads were lined thickly with wild shrubs and palm trees, but somehow the vista read brown and not green. It reminded him of Delhi (without the auto-rickshaws), the small honking taxis, good cheer, dusty haze, well-planned roads somehow wanting for order, retail signboards with hand-painted faces — but something was new. The color, he thought, it was back to the color, the newness of majority, seeming familiar to oneself, chancing to catch his reflection in the window of a passing car and thinking for a moment he was looking at the driver.

When they stopped at the junction between Liberia Road and Independence Avenue, Kweku cleared his throat. “T-this is our N-national Theatre,” he began haltingly. He gestured through his window at the structure. Modern, white. “We have a National Symphony Orchestra and the National Theatre Players. They built it five years ago. A gift from the Chinese.”

“Interesting,” Olu said politely. “Five years ago.” Back when his father was part of their world.

Kweku rubbed his brow, sensing his error, falling silent. The stoplight turned green and he tried a new tack. “It’s changing, this city, not quickly, but changing. I think you might like it.”

“Seems nice,” Olu said.

“You wouldn’t remember your first trip to Ghana.”

“I don’t.”

“No, of course. But the place has transformed. The change is remarkable.”

Olu nodded, saying nothing, unsure if Kweku’s subject was his country or himself.

• • •

They turned into a side street off Independence Avenue and wound their way slowly through a maze of small streets to a clump of large houses set back from the road with chipped white stucco walls overgrown with dry blossoms. Stray dogs milled here and there nosing indifferently the small heaps of trash. Fruit skins, black plastic bags. A woman near the end of the road in a lappa and incongruous red Pop Warner Football T-shirt was turning meat on a grill like the black one they’d had at the first house in Boston, a half of a globe. Behind her the road stopped in overgrown weeds, a huge plot of dry grass with a lone mango tree.

Kweku stopped the car by the woman, engine idling. “I know you must be tired.” He leaned forward, looking out. “I just wanted you to see this before we go back to the house — to my house — to the place where I live.”

Olu peered out at the woman. “Who is she?”

“The land. I’d like to buy it. To build us a house.” He took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully as Olu sat frowning at the sound of this us. His father continued shyly, “It’s just for perspective. We’ll go now. I just thought we’d make that quick stop. The place that I’m living in now is quite humble. I’ve never believed, as you’ve noticed, in rent. I’d rather rent a modest place — some might say an ugly place — until I can purchase on the scale that I want. My father never rented, see, designed his own property. Quite striking—” He caught himself rambling and stopped.

But Olu turned, interest piqued, surprised at the mention of this father, whom Kweku had never discussed. Both of his parents were famously tight-lipped on the subject of who their own parents had been. “Died a long time ago,” was the general impression, to which Fola added only, “My mother died giving birth.” They didn’t have photos, such as Olu found lining the stairs of the homes of his classmates in school, faded, framed and important, generations of family, at which he’d stand staring until someone inquired, “You like our family pictures, ey?” Usually the father, who’d thump him on the shoulder blade, offer a tour (the fathers of friends rather loved to be near him, loved to thump him on the shoulder blade, eyes bright with awe, as if nothing in the world were more wondrous than Olu, a prodigiously intelligent athlete in dark chocolate skin). He’d tour their homes aching with longing, for lineage, for a sense of having descended from faces in frames. That his family was thin in the backbench was troubling; it seemed to suggest they were faking it, false. A legitimate family would have photos on the staircase. At the very least grandparents whose first names he knew. “What did he do?” Olu asked, suddenly hopeful.

But Kweku answered vaguely, “He did the same thing as me.” He put on his glasses and started the engine. “Come on then. Enough. You must be tired, and starved.” He bought them four pieces of chargrilled plantain wrapped in newsprint and served with small bags of smoked nuts, then drove back, past the junction, and parked by a row of low beige concrete buildings, most missing their doors.

“Is this where you live?” Olu asked as they entered, unable to mask his dismay at the stench: two parts deep-frying fish, four parts urine and mothballs intended to neutralize the smell of the urine.

“When one rents in Ghana, one has to pay twelve months upfront,” Kweku said, “and I’m saving for land. As you saw. It’s not much, but the rent is near nothing and no one disturbs me or knows that I’m here.”

Olu didn’t ask him whether this was a good thing, to live without anybody knowing where you were, thinking, later, they’d get to the heart of it later, never suspecting that ten minutes later he’d leave. They climbed up the three flights of stairs to the flat, which was unexpectedly large, the whole uppermost floor. And clean, if monastic, bereft of decoration: a table, two chairs, velvet loveseat, the statue. He didn’t bother asking how his father had shipped it, just swallowed his laughter at seeing her here, this stone thing that they’d hated but could never get rid of. Like everything hated, she never disappeared.

He sat at the table and opened his backpack. He was rifling for his toothbrush at the bottom of the bag when he found the small tent he had squashed there last summer when hiking with Ling in New Hampshire. “My tent.”

“I thought we could share the one bed in the bedroom,” said Kweku, glancing over.

“No, I brought it by mistake.” Now Olu did laugh, and his father did also, a strange sound, much sadder than shouting or crying. He reached in again, found a gray Yale sweatshirt. “It’s graduation.” As he remembered it. “It’s graduation today.”

Kweku was running water into the kettle in the kitchenette. “You said?” He turned the tap off. “Couldn’t hear you. It’s what?”

“It’s Yale graduation. Today’s my graduation.”

The clatter of the metal kettle dropped in the sink.

Kweku turned, heaving. A realization, not a question. “I forgot your graduation.”

“Yes, you did,” Olu said.

“Why did you — how did you — how could you miss it?” He took off his glasses. “Why — why aren’t you there? Why are you here?” Wiped his eyes. “Graduation.”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“How can you say that?”

Olu shrugged. “It didn’t seem worth it.”

“What do you mean?!” Kweku persisted. “You should be there in New Haven, not here—”

“So should you.”

Kweku fell silent. He started several answers with “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” and then settled on, “Look. They’re two separate issues and you know it, Olukayodé.” Olu frowned, recoiling at the use of the name. No one ever called him by his full name but Fola and only when angry, so practically never. “You can’t do that…” his father said, weakly now, faltering. “Give up when you’re hurt. Please. You get that from me. That’s what I do, what I’ve done. But you’re different. You’re different from me, son—”

“I’m just like—”

“You’re better.”

What was the thing that arose out of nowhere now? Pity? Shame? Longing to see the man whole, not to see him here standing in a barebones apartment, his trousers still ironed as if he were home, but not home, in this hellhole, a prison of his making, in exile, cut off from the family and worse: with this look on his face of a man without honor, at least of a man who feels this is my lot? He still couldn’t say what he thought he would find when he touched down in Ghana, but this wasn’t it, this hot, half-finished apartment, the half man here in it, now backing up, sitting down, too shamed to stand. How had his father come to wear this expression: defeated, and willing to accept the defeat, not resisting, not objecting, as if somewhere inside him lived someone who felt quite at home in this place, in these halls, dirty windows, bare bulbs, stink of urine, the concrete, chipped paint, never mind the pressed pants? It was he Olu hated, this man inside Kweku, with whom he felt anger, at whom he now shouted, “It’s you who is better, goddammit, not me, I’m no different. It’s you. You are better than this.”

To which Kweku, very softly, “This? This is what I come from.”

As if this were all that there was to be said.

As if twenty-two years, the whole kit and caboodle, were just a short stop on the way back to this; as if all one could hope for was closing the circle, was ending right back in the gray, in the ash.

“Not good enough, Olu!” shouted Olu. “Not good enough! That’s what you said when my answers were wrong. That’s not good enough, Olu! Lazy thinking! Think smarter! Not good enough, Kweku—” and would have gone on were it not for the sound of a door down the hall creaking open and footsteps approaching. High heels. Hard to say now where the pep talk was heading, or if it had worked where his father might be, whether Olu could really have spurred him to action, convinced him to come back to Boston. Who knows? There she was, suddenly, a shape in the doorway, some slim Other Woman with long tiny braids, rather sharp in her pantsuit — and that was that, really, his second trip to Ghana concluded.

“Hallooo!” A dense local accent very carefully strained through the sieve of affected inflections. “How ah you?” She stepped toward Olu. “Akwaaba. You ah welcome.”

“J-June,” stuttered Kweku. “I didn’t know you were home.”

Olu stood blinking, unable to see her, to take in her features, to move or to speak. The woman said something in Ga to his father, then blew them both kisses and breezed out the door. Kweku tried “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” before choosing, “It isn’t what it looks like. But I should have let you know.”

“Let me know what? That you live with this woman?”

“For now,” answered Kweku. “It’s only for now. She’s helping me set up a practice in Ghana. It’s hard to break into this market. Are you listening?”

Olu wasn’t listening. He was shouldering the backpack and marching, straps gripped, to the still-open door. Kweku reached out to detain him. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and left.

Down the stairs.

Into sun.

Then back to the airport, on foot to the junction, where the backpack made him look like a hitchhiking teen; an old jeep full of students, mostly German, stopped to get him, dropped him kindly on the airport road covered in dust; to the check-in desk, pleading to change his departure to fly out on standby that night. Back to Yale. The day after commencement, the campus half-dressed like a debutante stumbling back home from a ball.

To think of the smell (Jean Naté, fainter: mothball) fills Olu still now with the need for fresh air. He is attempting to yank up the window when someone caresses his back and “Don’t touch me!” bursts out.

“I’m sorry,” says Ling, taken aback, stepping backward. He turns to her, embarrassed, wipes his face with one hand. She frowns at him, worried, reaching up to embrace him, and he feels himself move, ever so slightly, away. “Why do you do that?” she asks. “When I touch you? You flinch when I touch you.” She crosses her arms. “It’s okay if you’re crying—”

“I’m not. I’m not crying.”

“Of course. You never cry.” She sits down on the bed.

He sighs. He can see that he needs to say something to fill in the distance he’s opened between them. “I switched with my sister,” he tells her. “With Taiwo. She’s sharing with Kehinde and I’m here with you.” He sits down beside her and touches her shoulder. She leans in against him, her arms at his waist. He kisses her head but, his own arms gone leaden, he can’t hold her back in the way that she’d like.

vii

Kehinde comes in and sees Olu there sleeping, then sees that the form is too small to be him. He gets into bed and lies waiting for something, a crack in the silence.

“I saw him,” they both say.

Kehinde turns over. He was going to tell Taiwo what he just shared with Sadie. Instead he says, “Who?”

“Uncle Femi,” she whispers, not turning to face him. “In Ovation magazine. There was one in the den.”

The name slices through, a clean line through his center. His lungs spit up air, split in half. “In this house?”

“In a picture with Niké…,” she begins. “Just forget it.”

“I can’t ‘just forget it,’” he says.

“Yeah, well, try.”

“I have tried,” he says.

“Yeah, well, try a little harder.”

“Taiwo,” he says.

“What do you want me to say?”

Kehinde doesn’t know what he wants her to say. Has never known.

“Forget it,” she says. “We should sleep.”

He hears her readjusting her position in bed and is reminded of that other little bedroom they’d shared, of their first night in Lagos; can see them there, dumbstruck; can hear their sick uncle, “Show our twins to their rooms.” Can see Auntie Niké saying, “This one’s for Taiwo,” and pushing in his sister, her face as she turned, a wild pleading in her eyes as she looked at her brother with a look that seemed to say don’t leave me in here alone. But Auntie Niké pushed him forward, down the hall, to the next room, a much smaller bedroom with two little beds. “This is yours,” she said coldly. There was a crib in the corner. Auntie Niké saw him noticing. “We’ll have that removed.” He entered the room while she watched from the doorway. “Someone will bring up your things, ehn? Just wait. Sleep if you want to. We’ll call you for dinner.”

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

“Thank you, Auntie.” She left.

He sat for some moments looking around the little bedroom, the veined marble floor, barred-in windows, large crib. He looked out the window at the back of the building, a large well-kept garden and huge swimming pool. A gardener was working here, trimming the hedges. Reminded of Fola, he turned back around. A houseboy was standing at the door with his suitcase.

“Good evening, sa,” the boy said.

“I’m Kehinde,” he replied.

“Kehinde, sa,” the boy said. Bowed slightly. “Your suitcase.” Before Kehinde could respond, he walked quickly away. The apartment was like that: people appearing in doorways, bowing slightly with their eyes down, then hurrying away, a huge staff, twenty people at least, for the four of them: chefs, gardeners, houseboys, guards, all of them male. All of them dressed in white pants and white shirts, without shoes, slender boys, without names, in their teens, the one blurring into the other, slipping in and out of doorways bearing food and drink and whatever else, then hurrying away.

He lies, stiff, unspeaking, and thinks of his sister a shape in the doorway that first endless night, appearing suddenly in moonlight, her voice like a lifeboat. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” He should have said no. “It’s too cold in my bedroom,” she said. “I can’t sleep.” “Yeah, me either,” he said, and she climbed into bed. The other, by the doorway, too far from the window, too hot in the night with the broken A/C. He’d wake one week later to find that she’d slipped in with him in his bed, with her feet by his pillow: a girl and a boy in thin Disney World nightclothes, a version of themselves that he hasn’t seen since.

viii

Fola lies staring through the darkness at Sadie, who snores as if sighing across the huge bed with her hands in small fists as they are when she’s sleeping, a habit she’s had since the day she was born. Alive if not well, Fola thinks, with a frown, suddenly wondering whether this is enough after all? One of six dead, the five left all unwell? For she feels this, she sees it, she knows they’re not well.

A single sensation overwhelms her, a new one, not dissimilar to panic, or the feeling of drowning, as if she’d been floating in flat lukewarm water — her face to the sky, and her arms and legs out — and abruptly began sinking, unexpectedly, irreversibly, too weary to stop herself, drifting down, down.

She sits up, alarmed, trying to steady her breathing, trying not to wake Sadie, but can’t catch her breath. She slips from the bed, rushing quietly to the bathroom, where she doesn’t turn the light on. Just stands, until calm. She turns on the tap, a little trickle of water to splash on her face, dabs her cheeks with a towel. As she lowers this, she glimpses her reflection in the mirror in the moonlight, and stops, leaning forward to look.

At her face.

Rather shocked by the large, chiseled features, somehow foreign after years of not looking in the mirror — merely rubbing rose lipstick across as she leaves in the morning or patting her hair down, top, back. How long has it been since she’s looked at these features, the angular shapes of the mouth and the nose, the fair skin, still unwrinkled, the wide eyes familiar — yet different. She leans in to peer at her eyes.

The shade and the shape are the same as her father’s (and Olu’s), but something has changed over time; they are more like her father’s than she’s previously noticed, or more like her father’s than they previously were. She thinks of him less frequently than she looks in the mirror, so rarely has occasion to remember his face, to compare it to hers, as she does in this moment. His eyes on her face, where her own used to be. His eyes, with their faint sheen of grief and their laugh lines, the soft brown made softer by sorrow, by aching: these are the eyes Fola finds in the mirror. She stares, disbelieving. She touches the glass. Her father’s eyes glisten in the light from the window behind her, aglow with the gathering tears. One slides down her cheek and she touches the droplet, as one lifts a finger to just-starting rain.

She returns to the bed from the bathroom on tiptoe. She slips back the cover and lies on her back. She touches her stomach but doesn’t feel movement. She weeps until dawn without making a sound.

5

They pile into Benson’s SUV after breakfast, each shut in the silent glass box of his thoughts, seven boxes, locked, soundproof and shatter-resistant; the eighth man, the driver, hums, present, alone. The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. The weather in December is like this in Ghana: an in-taken breath held until the world spins, trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.

ii

An hour outside of the city: the ocean.

Unannounced, unambitious.

Just suddenly there.

They’ve flown up the freshly paved road to the junction, where they turn up a hill lined on both sides by homes. The main road is bustling with noonday commotion, plump women bearing water and goods on their heads, thin children in uniform, dark brown and light orange, trotting briskly down the road to catch a tro-tro to lunch. The men are less visible. A few stand in doorways in loose faded trousers and wifebeater shirts, peering out, partially squinting, partially frowning, undecided, as Benson’s Benz truck rumbles past, stirring dust.

Benson is seated up front with the driver, in straw hat and Ray-Bans, a safari tour guide. Ling, between Fola and Olu, sits tensely. Sadie between Taiwo and Kehinde, behind.

“I remember this road,” murmurs Fola.

“You’ve been here?” Benson turns to face Fola, and Olu shrinks back.

“Only once. And too late.” She touches Olu on the shoulder blade. “You came too, darling.” A twinge, upper right.

• • •

The car crests the hill and descends by the water, the road belted in from the beach by a field. They all turn to stare as one does when he hasn’t seen ocean in months, shocked afresh by the scope. Even Sadie stops pretending to sleep on her brother, sits up, and leans over to stare out the glass.

A halfhearted wall made of mortar and concrete block starts and then stops like a six-year-old’s smile, with huge gaps between bits of it exposing the goats grazing lazily on grass, in no rush, a large herd. To the right of the road the steep hill continues upward, red earth densely greened with tall grass and short trees; to the left a low field, a mile deep, flowering shrubs, knotted crawlers, wild grass thinning out into sand. Then the beach. It is farther than it seems from the car, where one thinks if he wanted he could simply leap out and make a beeline for the water like a toddler, peeling clothes off, kicking shoes off, screaming, joyous, for his freedom as he ran. In fact, it would take more than a little bit of effort to approach through the weeds at this point in the road; better access lies ahead at the edge of the village, where the fishermen have beaten out a trail through the grass.

Still, the water beckons, stretched flat to the horizon, the same moody shade as the clouds overhead, not the prettiest beach in the world but there’s something, a calm getting on with it, calming to behold. Palms stretching forward at forty-five-degree angles appear to be shaking out their hair on the sand over long wooden boats in spectacular colors festooned with black seaweed, white, blue and green nets. Just visible in the distance, three women are walking with babies tucked into their lappas, bare feet, three abreast, with a touch of the patriotic to the lappas, one goldish, one red, one a bright emerald green.

Benson begins speaking to no one in particular, a rambling little speech in a tight, chipper voice. “I came here with Kweku when he first moved to Ghana to treat some young nephew who’d broken his leg, and so happened to meet the local maker of coffins, who was also the local physician, it seemed. Ga people believe that a coffin should be a reflection of the life of the person inside it. So a fisherman’s coffin might be shaped like a fish or a carpenter’s shaped like a hammer, I guess, or a woman who likes shoes, in the shape of a shoe. They can be quite elaborate.”

Fola offers, “Indeed.”

“What’s this town called?” Olu asks. (Benson answers.) “Kokrobité,” repeats Olu. “Sounds Japanese.” Disappointed.

“Reminds me of Jamaica,” Ling murmurs. “Ocho Rios.”

Different palette, thinks Kehinde. Less azure, more red.

“Village,” says Fola. “Less a town than a village.”

“I didn’t know he grew up by the ocean,” Taiwo says.

“That’s why we always had a house near the water. The harbor, the river, in Brookline the pond…” Fola trails off, seeing trees in the distance, the boats beached on sand.

They are silent again.

• • •

The road travels on past the first glimpse of ocean and into the village, where it loses the view — and the paving and straightness, becoming instead a dirt path winding, rock-strewn and rough, through the homes. They’re single-room structures — of wood, brick, or concrete, some mud, with tin roofs, a few thatch, glassless windows, wooden shutters — in clusters, with clotheslines and open-air stoves and bath buckets and trees between clusters. Women bent over these buckets wash clothing and very young children, who wave as they pass. Chickens wander pecking at earth, as do goats, these much dirtier and skinnier than the ones by the beach. The elderly sit watching ancient TVs under shade trees, in a circle beneath the leaf cover. Barbershops mingle with braiding stalls, signboards, BLOOD ON THE CROSS CUT & SHAVE, CROWN OF THORNS BRAIDS, kiosks sell calling cards and top-up cards and aliment, with wares stacked in piles to the roof, blocks of color: yellow (Lipton, Maggi), green (Milo, Wrigley’s), red (oil, tomato paste, corned beef, instant coffee).

The holes in the road make for truly rough going, which inevitably begins to feel like the fault of the driver. When he finally stops abruptly by a small walled-in compound, one tire in a groove, tilting off the main road, they glare at him, nauseous, unaware that he’s parked and not simply run the car into a ditch by mistake. Benson turns to speak, stopping short at their faces. He manages a halting “Yes. Right. Okay. So.”

The air has gone heavy with the stopping of the vehicle, the moment they’ve been waiting for appearing to have come. Fola touches Olu on the knee, which stops the bouncing. Ling observes the gesture, notes that Olu doesn’t flinch. Kehinde mouths to Sadie you okay? She nods her head. He looks across at Taiwo, who is staring out the back. Benson tries again, removing Ray-Bans and sunhat, and forcing a slightly less chipper “We’re here.”

iii

“Here” is a compound at the edge of the village, a square of nine huts in a large patch of dust with a tree in the middle befitting the context, the same type of tree found in every such patch: massive, ancient, gray, twisted, thick trunk a small fortress, raised roots bursting up through the hardened red earth, knotted branches fanned out in imperial fashion, horizontal, dropping leaves on their way to the roofs. A behemoth. Beneath it are five wooden benches arranged in a circle, to a social effect. Around it, six huts form a three-sided square with their doors standing open to dark, bed-less rooms; behind these two more, and behind that the biggest, or tallest, a mud hut with massive thatch roof.

The driver has stopped in the groove by an entrance marked off by a wall made of crumbling red brick. They get out in silence, first Benson, then Olu, then the rest of them, shading their eyes with their hands. A heavyset woman is waiting to meet them in a traditional outfit of simple black cloth. She’s fashioned a swath of this cloth as a head wrap with bow tie in front, short gray hair tucked inside. Her skin is so smooth that she could be much younger, but she stands like a woman of seventy hard years: with her elbow on the wall and her head on her fist and her hip pushing out, other hand on that hip, as if seeking to rest the full weight of her past on this crumbling brick wall for these one or two breaths.

Fola steps forward, arms extended, ever gracious. “Shormeh,” she says.

“I am Naa.” The woman sighs.

“Naa, excuse me. Of course.” Fola laughs. “It’s been ages. God.”

Naa doesn’t laugh. “You are welcome in Ghana.” She straightens up slowly, taking her head off her fist and her elbow off the wall and her eyes off of Fola, a shift in position that draws her attention to Sadie at the edge of the circle.

iv

Sadie feels the gaze on her face, with the humidity, a pressure or a magnet: it tugs at her eyes, though her chin, out of habit, resists the ascension and sinks to her chest while her eyes travel up. She rarely looks people in the eye when she meets them, preferring their mouths or her hands as an audience — anything to throw off the would-be observer, to avoid being looked at too closely, too long. She’s doing it now, standing slightly behind Taiwo in the broken-doll position she perfected in high school, with shoulders hunched forward and flip-flops turned inward, an arrangement of limbs that conveys such unease that the onlooker invariably feels uneasy himself and after one or two seconds looks away. Undaunted, indifferent, or accustomed to uneasiness, Naa gazes on, drawing Sadie’s eyes upward — and holding them put: Sadie can’t look back down, for her shock at the striking resemblance.

She could be her mother, this heavyset Naa, with the same angled eyes (“half-Chinesey,” per Philae), same stature, short, sturdy, same negligible eyebrows, round face, rounded nose, like a button for coins. The joke of genetics. That of all of his children it should have been she who inherited this appearance, the one who would spend the least time with their father and come to so loathe his particular features. They worked out just fine on his face: he was handsome in the way that a man can be, without being pretty, with the skin like this Naa’s or like Olu’s, so flawless. A tidy face. Elegant.

Not so her own.

Philae likes to call her “a natural beauty,” while Fola uses phrases like “you’ll come into your own” (in a tone reminiscent of “we’ll find your hidden talent”), but Sadie knows better. She isn’t pretty. End of story. Her eyes are too small and her nose is too round and she hasn’t got cheekbones like Taiwo or Philae, nor long slender limbs nor a clean chiseled jaw nor a dipping-in waist nor a jutting-out clavicle. She’s five foot four, solid, not fat per se, stocky, pale milky-tea skin, number-four-colored hair, neither tall nor petite, with no edges, no angles; she looks like a doll, one she wouldn’t have wanted. It isn’t worth trying to explain this to Philae, nor to Fola for that matter. They wouldn’t understand it. They’re pretty, a state of being they both take for granted, through no fault of theirs (through the joke of genetics). Their empathy is bound within the limits of their reality, Sadie knows. They can’t imagine it, not being pretty. A bit like, say, a woman might imagine being a man — can merely close her eyes and picture it, whatever “being a man” may mean to her — but can’t in fact picture not being a woman, would have nothing to draw on, however she tried. So the pretty woman’s imagination is limited, absent reference for the experience of not being seen. Most of the time she herself can’t be bothered to sort through the reasons the world doesn’t see her. It all seems a bit too cliché, melodramatic, for a girl with her sarcasm and level of education. She accepts that the media are to blame for her bulimia, her quiet, abiding desire to be reborn a blond waif; vigorously castigates Photoshop as a public health threat; has examined and condemned her childhood taste for white Barbies; and so on. Isn’t stupid. Can see the thing clearly. But the fact remains: she is invisible. Unpretty.

The sense of being looked at is new and alarming. “H-h-hello,” Sadie stutters, flushing, offering a hand.

Naa takes the hand, frowning deeply, squeezing tightly. “Ekua,” she says.

“Um, I’m Sadie.” Sadie smiles. “My name is Sadie. Nice to meet you.”

But Naa is insistent. “Ekua,” she repeats. “Sister Ekua. It’s you.”

Sadie laughs nervously, not following. “I’m Sadie. That’s my middle name. Ekua.”

Naa nods. “Welcome back.”

Sadie thinks to clarify that she’s never been to Ghana, but Naa moves on to Olu, and on down the line. A second heavy woman in the simple black muslin with head tie appears with a large plastic tray piled with bottles of Coke, Fanta, Malta, Bitter Lemon.

Fola tries again. “Hello, Shormeh.”

Correct.

The soft drinks are distributed with hardened eyes, pleasantries, introductions made briefly, condolences exchanged. “We have prepared a small welcome,” says Shormeh. “Please be seated.” She gestures to the benches in a circle in the shade.

• • •

The sun has stopped playing demure and come forward, the air pressing down on their arms like a hand. They sit on the benches with their sodas, sweating lightly. A small crowd has gathered to observe the affair. They are children mostly, appearing from inside the modest houses dressed in faded American clothing, wearing cautious, watchful smiles. Girls, Sadie notices after trying to place the feeling that there’s something here she’s missing. All the children are girls.

“Where are the boys?” she asks Fola beside her.

Fola chuckles wryly. “They’re at school.”

Case in point, a small troupe of girls dressed in indigo batik lines up neatly in the space between the houses and the benches. Three teenage boys with large drums, dressed in tunics take up position to the side of these girls in the shade. Naa takes a plastic chair, sipping a Malta. Shormeh remains standing, a hand on Naa’s chair. The girls — there are six of them, ranging in age from the smallest, maybe eight, to the oldest, chubby, twelve — look dutifully at Shormeh, who nods to them curtly. With no introduction, the drumming begins.

Ling finds her phone in her purse, takes a picture. Sadie sits up straight, rather bracing herself. But the sound of the drums is unexpectedly calming, as relaxed and at ease in this space as she isn’t. She’s never been particularly drawn to this music, to African drumming, though she wonders why not: the reaction is visceral, she feels her heart slow, or succumb to this new form of beating, more ordered. Only now does it occur to her that her heart has been pounding, quite literally throbbing, since they left Fola’s house, such that now she is sore, bodily sore, physically exhausted, as if she’s been exercising, running for miles. This pounding becomes harder but also calmer with the drumming, her breath breaking off from the pace of her thoughts, following instead the mounting rhythm as it builds in its complexities. A surrogate heartbeat. Harder, calmer, and surer. Why don’t I listen to this music? she thinks. Or enjoy it? It is wonderful. It drowns out all thoughts. As lulling as that sitar and flute they’re always playing where she goes to do yoga with Philae. Transporting. She closes her eyes for a moment, feels dizzy. When she opens them the girls have come closer, gained speed.

They are moving in a circle, in perfect precision. Feet out, feet in. Hips out, hips in. The drummers change pace, and the girls change formation, from a line to a half-circle. The youngest comes forward. She dances a little solo, then returns to the circle. The next one comes forward. And on down the line. Others from the village have trickled into the compound to watch the performance; they clap for each girl. The last of the dancers, the eldest, short, chubby, shimmies forward, beaming brightly, to the delight of the crowd. She doesn’t have the look of a dancer, thinks Sadie. She rather has the appearance of Sadie herself, or of Naa: of a substance, a thick sort of substance, less long dancer limbs, liquid-fluid, than land mass: thick arms, thighs, high buttocks, broad shoulders, small bosom, the same solid body that she has. And hates. It startles her to think this so clearly of another, so cruelly, of this dancer, but the thought comes again. I hate this body, she thinks as she stares at the girl, I hate this body, it is ugly, I hate how it looks.

There.

Very simply.

This body is ugly.

Never mind the more gentle “unpretty,” the face; it’s the body she hates, if she thinks of it, really. The body is the difference between her and the rest. How much easier to see it of this young chubby dancer, or to say it, thinks Sadie, than to say of herself what she saw in that mirror, sees here with her siblings. The body is the reason she cannot be seen. She considers the dancer with something like sadness, for both of them, a sadness made soft by acceptance. Preparing to watch this girl’s solo, sympathetic, she crosses her arms with a pitying smile.

Funny how it happens.

How the girl begins moving. Almost awkward at first, sort of jerky. Stiff movements. The crowd begins clapping and Sadie laughs softly, suspicions confirmed. An ugly body can’t dance. The girl is still beaming, her narrow eyes twinkling, maybe laughing at the joke of genetics as well. She rolls her hips once to the right, then the left. Looks directly at Sadie, waves a hand, and begins.

Incomprehensible, indescribable how this girl moves her body. Virtuosic, without effort, without edges, without angles: an infinity of tiny movements made with thighs, feet, and torso, and in time to syncopation that only she hears, and the drummers: a current, round body electric, the crowd cheering wildly as the hips whirl around, until the one drum goes crack! and she stops before Sadie, her right hand extended, one foot off the ground.

Sadie, who is staring, mouth open, breath suspended, doesn’t at first process what the gesture implies. The drummers resume drumming, the girl resumes whirling, the crowd resumes clapping, then crack! She stops again. A hand out to Sadie.

Sadie turns to Fola. “I-i-is she asking for money?”

“She’s asking you to dance.”

“Bra, bra, bra,” says the girl, palms turned upward. “Please sees-tah, come. Come and dance, please, I beg.” She takes Sadie’s hand, takes a little step back, making Sadie lean forward, then rise off the bench. The assembled crowd claps with delight at this progress. Sadie flushes red, shakes her head, “No, I can’t.” She is seconds from weeping; she feels the thing building, the knot in her stomach, the accumulating bile. She takes a step back, but the girl pulls her forward, and she hasn’t the heart to use force to break free. Her siblings are watching with what looks like a mixture of worry and encouragement, their eyes and smiles wide, as if watching a baby trying to learn how to walk, ready to spring to their feet when she falls.

She doesn’t fall.

When they speak of it later they’ll say that a girl came to Sadie and pulled her up off of their bench, gave a little demonstration of the base two-step footwork, which Sadie repeated a few times herself, that the drummers, encouraged, started drumming a little faster, that Sadie kept pace, to the delight of the crowd, and that before they all knew it, she was dancing in the clearing as if she’d been born doing traditional Ga dance. No one will know what it is in this moment that overwhelms Sadie, not even Sadie herself, as the insistent lead dancer catches hold of her elbow and repeats, tugging gently, “Please sees-tah, please come.” She pulls Sadie forward, away from the benches. “Like so,” she says, demonstrating the footwork: one, two. There are tears in Sadie’s eyes that will fall if she doesn’t, so she stares at the ground, at the girl’s small bare feet. One two, one two, one two, one two. A surrogate heartbeat. Calmer and surer. She takes a few steps. Hears the onlookers cheering. Goes red with embarrassment. Too late to sit down. She stares at the ground, at her feet, willing movement. The feet obey, shockingly, and move, left to right. The girl cries, “Ehn-hehn!” with great pride in her pupil. Sadie glances up as she moves. “Yeah? Like this?” More movement. More cheering. Transporting, the drumbeat. Tension in the stomach. Which moves to the thighs. Then the knees, then the calves, then the shins, then the feet. Too embarrassed to stop, she keeps moving. Starts dancing. Slowly at first, with her eyes on the ground, on the feet of the girl, which she follows with ease — then a spark, something clicking, a logic inside her, a stranger inside her that knows what to do, knows this music, these movements, this footwork, this rhythm, the body relaxing, eyes trained on the feet, she is moving, not looking, afraid to stop moving, afraid to look up at the small cheering crowd, she is moving, she is sweating, she is crying (I am dancing, she thinks, disbelieving, unable to stop), stomach taut, thighs on fire, lids slack, hips in circles, shoulder up shoulder down, around, foot out foot in, she is outside her body or in it, inside it, unaware of the exterior, unaware of the skin, unaware of the eyes, unaware of the onlookers, aware of the pounding, aware of the drum.

Crack!

The drum stops. Sadie stops. Sweating, breathless. The small gathered crowd ceases clapping and stares. An instant of silence, then Olu: “Go, Sadie!” with all of the might of his baritone voice. The children resume clapping and cheering in Ga, the chubby dancer, “My sees-tah!” Pictures taken with phones. Fola leaps up from the bench to embrace her as if she has just run a footrace and won. “My God,” she is laughing, clutching Sadie by the forehead. “My daughter’s a dancer, ehn?” Kissing her braids. Sadie, overcome by belated self-consciousness now that she’s stopped and can feel the warm eyes, lets her mother embrace her, her heart pounding wildly for, among other things, joy.

v

But to see Sadie now in her moment of triumph, enfolded by Fola as she was at the airport (all smiles-through-the-tears, face to breast, and the rest of it), Taiwo feels something rather startlingly like rage. She’s been trying all morning to stick to the script, looking somber, sounding interested, dabbing sweat without complaining, an attempt at being civil that the rest take for sulking, accustomed as they are to her silence, her brooding. This is her preassigned part in the play, as it’s Olu’s to administrate or Kehinde’s to peacekeep or Sadie’s to cry at the drop of a hat or their mother’s to turn a blind eye: Taiwo sulks. They expect it, await it, would miss it if she stopped it. No one worries or asks her what’s wrong, did something happen? That’s just Taiwo, they’ll say with their eyes to each other when they think she can’t see, eyebrows raised, shoulders shrugged.

Such that she, too, believes that she’s always been like this, was a “difficult infant” and will always be difficult—and that, she thinks suddenly, watching Fola and Sadie, if only I were easier, then I’d be hugged, too. Her mother doesn’t hug her, it occurs to her, jarringly. Doesn’t rush to her side at the first sign of need, reserves this privilege for Sadie, who is sweeter and weepy and cute like a doll, like a thing that you hold. So it was yesterday at the dining room table when Fola just stared as she’d started to cry. Had it been Sadie, Taiwo knows, Fola would have embraced her, as now, instead of watching as her daughter walked away.

Rage, out of nowhere. She stares at her mother and feels this rage surging, both startling and embarrassing, that it should come now, with the rest of them laughing, putting grief aside momentarily to celebrate Sadie, small Sadie, sweet Sadie, clean Sadie, pure Sadie, as cute as a baby they can’t help but hug. Out of nowhere, overwhelming, a rage beyond reason. Her body begins trembling, then moving, without bidding: first quivering, then burning, then standing, then walking: without thinking, without speaking, she is walking away. The others don’t notice her go, taking pictures, the children still chattering, older women uninterested. Only Kehinde stands worriedly. “Where you going?” he murmurs. She answers, “To the bathroom,” and he doesn’t pursue.

She hasn’t the foggiest idea where she’s going. Just strides out the entrance to the compound, along the wall, sees the driver by the car, goes the other direction, away from the town, down the dark red dirt road. Rage bids her onward, a visceral seething that quickens her pace and inhibits her thinking so all she can see is her mother hugging Sadie and all she can think is the thought but not me. Rage and self-pity and shame at self-pity. A fire in the legs. Faster, onward, consumed — until, reaching the edge of the village, nearly jogging, she looks up and sees that she’s reached a small clearing. Absent clustered structures obstructing the ocean, the sand beckons, open, like an answer.

• • •

The beach is almost empty, the sun near its height, just the four little boys playing soccer without shoes who smile pleasantly at Taiwo as she appears between palm trees but don’t stop their passing or chitchat in Ga. She pulls off her flip-flops and walks down the sand, which is hard, whitish-gray, piping hot at this hour; feels the rage start to cool with the new, damper air, with the salt taste and sea breeze and sound of the waves; and keeps walking, away from the boys, from their laughter, not thinking, still heaving, now dripping with sweat.

A half mile ahead stands a colonial structure, what looks to have once been some grand beachfront house, complete with terraces and pillars, now abandoned to the sunshine. A few miles beyond another village begins. Somewhere in her mind is the idea of escaping, of making her way to the end of this beach, but the building distracts, looming darkly before her, the sand turning brown in its shadow ahead. It reminds her of that house that she hated, the sullenness, the ghosts of other families, strangers, long-dead Europeans, here plopped on a beach with the boats and the palm trees and few thatch-roofed huts someone’s built in the shade. She stops to consider it: out of place in this picture, as they always felt, an African family in Brookline; as she always felt late at night in her bedroom, the ghosts more at home there than she was. And laughs.

The visual is laughable: this house on a beach in a village in Ghana, some white family home, with its paint stripped away and its eye sockets empty, but here, still assertive, imposing itself. She laughs at the thought of her father, in childhood, a child on this beach looking up at this house, thinking one day he’d have one as big, as assertive, thinking one day he’d conquer some land of his own. Which he did, she thinks, laughing — those acres in Brookline on which stood that equally joyless old home, i.e., “home” as conceived by the same pink-faced British who would have erected this thing on this beach, hulking, rock, a declaration—but without the immovability, the faint air of dominance, the confidence or the permanence. He conquered new land and he founded a house, but his shame was too great and his conquest was sold. Or sold back, very likely, to a sweet pink-faced family, the descendants of Pilgrims, more familiar with dominance. Retrieved from the new boy, returned to the natives, to Cabots or Gardeners, reclaimed from the Sais. Poor little boy, who had walked on this beach, who had dreamed of grand homes and new homelands, she thinks, with his feet cracking open, his soles turning black, never guessing his error (she’d have told him if he’d asked): that he’d never find a home, or a home that would last. That one never feels home who feels shame, never will. She laughs at the thought of that boy on this beach, and laughs harder at the thought of the house that he bought, and laughs hardest at the thought of herself in that house, twelve years old, still a girl, still believing in home.

The usual thing happens:

she laughs until she’s crying with laughter, then crying without it, just crying. Then sitting. Where she is. Drops her bag, just stops walking, has nowhere to go, is a stranger here also. Had she any more energy she’d likely go anyway, start running, waiting (hoping) for some person (man) to follow her — but can’t, is too tired, in her legs, in her body; something seeping out the center, some last stronghold giving in, within. So sits. In the sun, on the sand, sweating, crying. As one sits on beaches. But without the lover’s cardigan.

She fumbles in the bag for her American Spirits, lights one, smokes it quickly; small, jittery motions. She clutches her knees to her chest, to feel closeness, overcome by a grief she can hardly make sense of. The last time she felt this was midnight in Boston, her father slumped over on the couch in his scrubs: that the world was too open, wide open, an ocean, their ship sinking slowly, weighed down by the shame. What she hadn’t known then was that it would be Fola to cut off the ropes, set the lifeboats adrift. Or that it could be Fola. Not a father but a mother. What she hadn’t known then is that mothers betray.

So then.

The thought that she hasn’t been thinking.

Stepping at last into light after years at the edge of awareness, a shadow of consciousness, peeking then hiding when her mind turned its way. Dr. Hass has it wrong, as she’s long since suspected: it isn’t the father. Or not him alone. It was Fola who sent them to Femi that summer like two fatted calves to the altar. Not he. How has she missed this? The source of her anger. The rage without name: that she sent them away, that she shipped them to Lagos when she should have known better, when she must have known somehow what would happen, who he was, her own brother, her own family. For the cost of tuition. The thought in the open. That mothers betray. And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don’t become huggable like Sadie, Taiwo thinks. They don’t become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls — really, they’re generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn’t work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows. They end lonely. Desired and admired and alone in their tents, where they weep through the night. In the morning they ride, and the boys see them coming. And think: my, what brilliant and beautiful girls. Hearts broken, blood spilled. Riding on, seeking vengeance. This a most curious twist in the plot: that the vengeance they seek is the love of another, a mother-like lover who will not betray. At the thought she laughs harder. To think of her lover, his scarf and his sweatpants, his motherly smile. And his wife and his children. Prepackaged betrayal. A foregone conclusion. “Marissa, thank you.” And… scene.

She stares at the water, eyes blurry for seeing things clearly, unsure what to do or think next. (If she hears it the first time, her name doesn’t register.) She lights another cigarette. She smokes this one slowly. The sun beating down on her shoulders and back is a comfort of sorts, a reminder of skin, a reminder of pain in a different dimension, outside of her body, outside of this grief. She lies on her back in the sand, which is damper than she realized sitting upright, a welcome surprise. She stretches her toes in the direction of the waves, but the tide doesn’t wash in this high at this hour. And is lying there, smoking, her locks full of sand, when she hears it again.

Someone calling her name.

• • •

“Taiwo,” and again from a distance, insistent. “Tai-wo!”

She props herself up.

Sees her mother.

Fola, as if conjured, calling, “Darling!” Coming toward her. The little boys pointing, informants, behind her. Fola, out of nowhere, storming frantically toward her, white linen pants billowing, gesturing. (All but the torches.) “Kehinde said you went to the bathroom, but I looked there. The driver said he saw you walking here toward the beach. What happened, my darling?” she’s saying, coming closer. “Did you get hurt? Can you stand?” She reaches Taiwo, and kneels.

Perhaps it is the proximity that overwhelms Taiwo, having Fola so close after all of these years? Something. She snaps, leaping up, startling Fola, who stands, reeling backward. “DID I GET HURT?!” Taiwo screams. Almost as if a thread that’s been dangling gets pulled on, or catches on something, the whole thing unraveling. She is laughing and crying and screaming, “What happened? Mom, what did you think was going to happen to us?” And then, because Fola looks utterly baffled, Taiwo sneers, “I’ll tell you what happened, sure, fine.” Though she promised she wouldn’t and hasn’t for years, though she never once imagined the moment like this (empty beach in the daytime, young boys standing, staring), she tells, without pausing, how it happened, how it started:

• • •

how they shared the second bedroom, the one given Kehinde, with the creaky twin beds because hers was too big and too cold with the air conditioner, which she couldn’t turn off (it was too high to reach), whereas his didn’t work. That first night she came to his door in her nightdress. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” Her brother said yes.

At first she took the one bed and Kehinde the other, but his room was too hot not to sleep by the window, so after a week they just shared, head to foot, like sardines in a can, sheets thrown off to the breeze. After two, she stopped sneaking to her room before sunrise, afraid that Uncle Femi would discover and scold them; they’d seen him only twice since they’d arrived in Nigeria, at the elaborate Sunday lunches he threw for his friends. The rest of the time he was virtually absent, locked away at the top of the four-floor apartment, accessible only by an elevator that required a code, which the twins didn’t have, so an invisible world. They could hear their uncle’s guests always coming and going, riding up, riding down, music playing, all hours, the raucous parties on Saturdays, women laughing, glasses smashing, muffled shouting, Niké complaining — but they never went up.

They lived on the second floor like two (wealthy) orphans in the care of Uncle Femi’s large all-male staff. The houseboys would wake them and set out their uniforms. The cooks served their meals. The drivers took them to school. They’d spend the whole day there, returning for dinner. They ate by themselves, did their work, went to bed. Sardines in a can, by the window for breeze, telling stories about Boston, most involving the snow, as if by remembering the cold they might actually feel it, and lessen the pressure of the humidity somehow. Auntie Niké would appear in the evenings after dinner to reiterate the rules about the use of the elevator, to see that they hadn’t dropped dead in the daytime, to complain about Femi, then ride back upstairs. They didn’t make friends at the American International School, where their peers thought them arrogant on account of their looks. So mostly stuck to each other, eating, sleeping, doing schoolwork, watching television, playing cassette tapes, swimming, riding in cars.

When they spoke to her, Fola, on the phone at the weekends (the one call allotted them, five minutes each), they said they were “happy” so she wouldn’t be worried. They weren’t sad in the beginning. They were simply alone. They knew there was something not right in the apartment — different people always coming in and out at all hours, speaking Yoruba and Arabic and English and pidgin; on weekends they could see them, from the bedroom, by the pool; they saw the girls prancing in leopard-print dresses and heavy fur jackets and stilettos and wigs, and the fat men beside them, and young men in batches, all slender and handsome with dark, hungry eyes — but they didn’t ask questions. It didn’t seem worth it. They did what they were told to and kept to themselves. Three months, then six, and then nine in this fashion. With the summer arriving suddenly with cool, drier air, then the end of the school year, a change in the program, an emptiness appearing in the middle of their days.

How things changed:

that one morning. Auntie Niké, without warning. Appearing in the kitchen as they sat down to eat. It was the first time they’d seen her in the morning, out of costume, without face paint or wig, a silk scarf on her head. Taiwo happened to glance up from her Weetabix and saw her, and choked on her milk with dismay at the sight.

The woman looked like a ghost. With her beige-grayish skin and her small vacant eyes, a white sheet in her hand. A ghost laughing. “Surprised to see me, ehn? You think we don’t live here? You think you can do as you please in this house?” She was laughing very softly as she liked to, when angry, and jabbing her finger like the tongue of a snake. They’d observed this performance on a number of occasions when Niké stood berating the houseboys outside: the measured opening (soft laughter or whispered derision), one finger thrust forward on salient points, the slow build to full volume, with rhetorical questions (“you think we don’t live here?”), the use of “my friend,” then the climax, the screaming, the invocation of the Bible, the melodramatic finale, Shakespearean in tone. Always ranting about honor and justice and such, before beating the houseboys, a violent to-do. To Taiwo’s mind, Nigerians seemed to like being angry, to derive pleasure from conflict, some physical thrill; she would watch them in the marketplace, at school, the way they carried on, their eyes alive with pleasure as they screamed and tore their hair. It was hard to take seriously. She was listening to Auntie Niké but absently, carefully mashing down her Weetabix in milk. It was only when the woman started shouting, “It’s disgusting!” that she looked up from the cereal.

“It’s disgusting what you’ve done!” In a single dramatic gesture Niké shook out the bedsheet, a white fitted sheet with a small reddish stain. Taiwo and Kehinde both stared in confusion. Niké continued, shouting, “I know what you’ve done! The houseboys have told me that you sleep in one bedroom, and now we can see what you do in there, ehn?” She pointed at Kehinde, eyes slit. “She’s your sister. Your very own twin. You are a sinner, my friend.”

Kehinde sat blinking with shock. “I–I-I’m sorry?”

A question, not an apology, but Niké raged on, “It’s a sin what you’ve done, ehn? ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t good enough! You tell me what happened. You tell me right now.”

“We don’t understand, Auntie,” said Taiwo very calmly, though it was beginning now to dawn on her, what had happened with this sheet: not a week ago she’d woken up bleeding, just a little bit; her first period, she knew, from sex ed class last year. She’d informed the youngest houseboy, Babatunde, the nicest, who’d returned hours later with tampons and pads, a huge bag, unceremoniously. Had thus “become a woman.” That was the phrase that their teacher had used. Becoming a woman. Taiwo didn’t feel womanly. She felt irritable and uncomfortable (perhaps how womanhood felt?). Now here was Niké with this sheet with this bloodstain, which Taiwo hadn’t noticed at the time, fair enough. Easy to explain that she’d gotten her period. Harder to explain why they slept in one bed. Heretofore it hadn’t seemed odd, much less “disgusting,” but now as she started to speak, she had doubts.

Two memories returned, the one faint in its details, a bit like a dream recollected at dusk: of some morning, one of many she had woken beside Kehinde, a month ago, longer, maybe months, she didn’t know. All she remembered was waking from dreaming, very early, before sunrise, eyes blurred, still half-sleeping, and feeling something firm against the back of one thigh as she rolled from her back to her side, away from Kehinde. Eyes closed, barely conscious, she thought it’s his foot and reached down, mumbling, “Move, man,” to push it away. The feel of the erection in her palm was so foreign — so hard and so warm, yet so fleshy, so soft — that she didn’t for a moment fully process what she was holding. Her brother stirred, snoring. Alarmed, she let go. She lay there beside him, eyes open, heart pounding, afraid for some reason, of what she didn’t know. Maybe she thought she was dreaming, had dreamed it? She fell back asleep. Only remembered it now.

And the other, not a memory. A habit. “Disgusting.” The thing she started doing when they got out of school, when they started spending days in the apartment, lazy hours, floating idly in the swimming pool or watching cartoons. The one day she’d come from the pool to the bedroom to shower and change, leaving Kehinde afloat. She’d pulled off her bathing suit and was looking for a towel when she found the one book she had brought here from home. A massive encyclopedia of gods and mythology, a gift from their father the Christmas before. She’d become obsessed with the Muses that winter in Classics; he’d inserted a leather bookmark at the chapter on Calliope. Some conspiratorial houseboy had placed the large volume in the last dresser drawer where they hid stolen snacks. There with the three-packs of biscuits and towels was the book she’d assumed to be stolen or lost. Delighted to find it, she’d flopped down at once on the bed that she shared with her brother to read. And was lying there naked with her stomach on a pillow when she flipped to an illustration of “The Rape of Persephone,” a pink-fleshy picture of plump-breasted girls in a meadow of flowers with the accompanying text:

Persephone was gathering flowers in a meadow with her companions Artemis and Athena. There she was attracted to an exceptionally beautiful narcissus with one hundred blossoms. When she reached out to pick it, the ground split open and from deep within the earth, Hades came forth in a golden chariot pulled by black horses. He raped Persephone and took her to the underworld. She screamed for help from her father Zeus but he gave her no help.

Demeter also heard Persephone’s cries and rushed to find her. Carrying burning torches, she searched for nine days and nine nights over land and sea for her abducted daughter. She never stopped to eat, sleep or bathe in her frantic search. On the tenth day Helios, God of the Sun, told Demeter that Hades had kidnapped Persephone. Furthermore, he said that the abduction and rape of Persephone had been sanctioned by Zeus.

Standard fare. What came as a surprise was what she felt as she read, staring repeatedly at the image of Hades’s hand on the breast: a tingling pressure between her legs where the sheet was bunched up, which grew stronger and sharper until she peed on herself. She leapt up, alarmed and embarrassed, shut the book. She stared at the sheets, first ashamed, then confused. There was no spreading wet spot from where she had urinated. She patted her thighs, also dry. She hadn’t peed. Squinting at the sheet, she saw the little damp spot and the liquid, almost slimy, like a drop of egg white. This is what had come from her body, not urine. She wiped it away with the towel, and showered.

But began to do this daily, after swimming, before showering: ritually peeling off her suit, then to bed with the book, always the one-page description of the Rape of Persephone, with the sheets in a ball between her legs as before, always squeezing her thighs, always listening for Kehinde, always losing her breath when the egg white slipped out. And now wondering — mashing Weetabix, Niké repeating, “It’s disgusting!”—why it pleasured her to do this, did she want him to walk in? She knew she wouldn’t hear him if he slipped up to their doorway in the pointy-toed ninja red leather babouches. He was Kehinde. He could do that. Appear without warning. And still she would lie there, nude, wet, while he swam.

She put down her spoon, feeling heat in her fingers. Kehinde turned to look at her, chewing his lip. Whatever she was sensing was apparent in his expression. Niké chortled, “Look at him!” Suspicions confirmed. “There are other stains, too,” she sneered, holding up the sheet again. “You think I don’t know what these white splotches are?”

Kehinde was staring at Taiwo. “What is it?” It was a question for his twin, who was looking away.

Assuming he was mocking her, Niké dropped the sheet and slapped Kehinde so hard that he fell from his chair. Before she could stop herself, Taiwo leapt up and pushed the woman, just once, screaming, “Leave him alone!” But Niké lost her balance, reeling backward in her slippers, fluffy, pom-pom — bearing slippers, landing splayed on her back. The dressing gown, parting, exposed her fat thighs to the houseboy who, entering, dropped his glass tray. Taiwo grabbed Kehinde and pulled him toward her, suddenly aware of their vulnerability, their defenselessness here. Something had broken. The casing around them. The distance between fourth floor and second had closed.

How Niké started screaming:

bloody murder. A madwoman. How she dragged them to the elevator and up to the lounge where they’d come on arrival, last seen in late August, that mishmash of marble and zebra and velour. Their uncle was reclining in his underwear and a bathrobe, Babatunde the little houseboy cutting a line on the table. Uncle Femi stroked the back of his neck as he worked, almost idly, as one strokes a pet at one’s side. Two older boys, teens, were standing guard at the doorway, in white sailor uniforms, like costumes from a play. But with guns. Slender rifles, which they clutched to their chests, neither moving nor speaking as Niké stormed in.

“Well, good morning,” Uncle Femi said softly, always softly.

His wife pushed the twins toward the chaise where he lay. Babatunde looked up, very briefly, then down, back to work, knowing better than to make his presence known. Taiwo and Kehinde looked blankly at their uncle, their aunt at their backs, seething, “Tell him yourselves.”

“Tell me what?” Uncle Femi asked, smiling, genuinely interested. He considered the twins as if he saw them every day, as if just yesterday they’d been chatting about the weather in Lagos, as if he hadn’t been missing for almost a year. Babatunde, finished, moved away from the table. Uncle Femi leaned forward and snorted the line. “E se,” he said to Babatunde, sniffing, smiling. The boy nodded, bowed, and rushed out of the room.

“Your uncle asked a question. They think that we’re stupid. And this one. She thinks she can strike me. Odé.” Niké pushed Taiwo, not gently, between the shoulders. Taiwo stumbled forward, caught her balance, straightened up.

“Don’t touch her,” Uncle Femi said. “The boy doesn’t like it.” Now he lit a cigarette. “Isn’t that what you said?” He gestured to Kehinde, brows raised, smiling brightly. “Isn’t that what you told me? ‘Don’t touch her’? Am I wrong?”

“No, sir,” said Kehinde.

“I’m sorry? I didn’t hear you.”

“No, Uncle,” repeated Kehinde, a tremor in his voice.

“Very well then. What happened?” Uncle Femi looked at Niké, then back at the twins in their nightclothes and socks.

Niké cleared her throat as if preparing to orate, but answered, very briefly, “They were caught having sex. The houseboys discovered her blood on the sheet, and the stains from his… climax. I can show you the sheet.”

“You’re lying!” cried Taiwo, on instinct. “We didn’t!” This time the blow made her fall to the ground. Niké, from behind her, halfway shoving, halfway slapping her.

“Are you calling me a liar?!” Niké shouted. “I have proof!”

Taiwo remained kneeling on the floor where she’d fallen, her ear burning sharply, too stunned to stand up. More shocking than painful, the way Niké struck her suggested more violence might follow, and soon. Their parents never hit them, never shouted, never threatened; all their punishment was issued with calm, as in court. She found it insulting to be hit by a grown-up, and trembled with anger, hands balled into fists. Intuiting her intention, Kehinde knelt down beside her.

“Don’t touch her,” Uncle Femi mocked, leaning down toward them. The voice remained soft but had darkened, or hardened, the sound of his laughter too steely, too sharp. A weapon.

Eyes welling with fear and with anger, Taiwo turned to look up at their uncle’s blunt nose. She grabbed Kehinde’s T-shirt. “Come on,” she whispered nervously, pulling him up by the shirt as she rose to her feet. They stood pressed together, now facing their uncle, much closer to his body than they’d been until now. The smell of him — sweat and cologne and tobacco — was overpowering now, as was the heat from his gaze. Kehinde reached over and took Taiwo’s hand, without thinking, and squeezed, fingers shaking.

“You see! You see how they stand so. You see how he holds her.” Niké sucked her teeth, a low, long-lasting tssssssssst.

“Enough,” Uncle Femi said. “Thank you for informing me. You’re welcome to leave. I can take it from here.”

Surprised and affronted, Niké turned and left them standing there, the guards nodding stiffly as she stormed out the door. Taiwo felt her heart sink as the double doors swung softly shut. Baffling as it was, she wished that Niké wouldn’t go. The woman was volatile and violent and dramatic, quite likely insane, but familiar by then. Their uncle was foreign and frightening, a stranger. Too calm, too controlled, and too cold.

How it happened:

“Omokehindegbegbon!” said Uncle Femi to Kehinde. “So only you can touch her, ehn? Another little princess.” He gestured with his cigarette to the portrait of their grandmother. “A precious little princess, ehn?” He stood up from the chaise. He came to where the twins were and stood just behind them. He cupped Taiwo’s chin in his hands, turned her head. He held her like this, so she was looking at the portrait. “Look at her. Precious Somayina,” he breathed. He stroked Taiwo’s hair. She could feel Kehinde stiffen, his hand in her hand still, could feel his breath stop. She stood without moving, without looking, her eyes closed, could smell Uncle Femi’s odd sweetness, his soap. “Open your eyes,” he said, touching her chin again, bending beside her, his lips near her ear. “Look at her. Look at her. Looks just like you, no? Like you. Precious princess, that no one can touch.” He took a step over so he was standing behind Kehinde. He touched Kehinde’s cheek as he’d stroked Taiwo’s hair. “Except you, little boy. Only you. You can touch her.” He squeezed both their shoulders. “Show your uncle what you do.”

One of the teens at the door cleared his throat. Uncle Femi looked up. “Lock the door, please,” he said. The boys began leaving. “From the inside, you idiots. You two stay here.” They obeyed. “There we are.” Uncle Femi turned to Taiwo now. “My little Somayina.” He patted the chaise, smiling warmly. “Come here.”

Taiwo took a step toward Kehinde. “Uncle, please. We didn’t do what she said we did.”

“You’re lying.” Not loudly. He smiled again, patting the chaise. “Come lie here.” She squeezed Kehinde’s hand, shook her head, a small movement. He laughed, closed his eyes, and then bellowed, “LIE HERE!” The sound of a voice at this volume was so unexpected, so jarring, she dropped Kehinde’s hand. A bit like a robot, she went to the chaise and sat down. “There. That’s better. Now lie on your back.” He placed a cold hand on her neck, pushing backward. Surprised at the force, at the touch, she lay back.

Kehinde stepped forward. “Please, Uncle. Don’t touch her,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Don’t you worry. I won’t.” Uncle Femi stepped back, considering Taiwo on the chaise, with her arms at her side, body stiffened with fear. Still trembling from shock at his touch, and his shouting, she stared at him back, at the black, red-rimmed eyes. He looked like the drawing of Hades, the “rapist,” a word that she’d heard but never seen written down. Rape. Flesh and flowers, golden chariot, black horses, a girl carried off. “I’m not a pedophile,” he sneered.

Pedophile, pedophile, pedophile, thought Taiwo, now starting to cry. For she’d gotten it wrong. A man who loved children? Who loved his own children? Wrong. Who had left them, had left her, like Zeus. And where was Demeter? On the hunt for her daughter? Torches blazing, frantic searching? With Sadie at home.

The feel of defeat was a wave washing over. She felt herself slacken, her legs going loose. The tears ran out mutely from the side of her eyes to the floral upholstery beneath her neat braids. She felt her chest cave, giving in, under the nightdress, the Minnie Mouse nightdress she’d had since the man brought them proudly to Disney World, more excited than they were by this, the most American Family Tradition on earth. She felt her fists melt, fingers weaken, unclenching. She felt herself die to the hope of escape. If she tried to run now, the school-play soldiers would stop her. Her uncle would overpower her if she tried to resist. Whatever was happening would happen, she knew; there was no one to stop it. There was no one but them. She and her brother alone in his room with this uncle.

A pedophile.

“You touch her,” he said. He gestured from Kehinde, who was standing there dumbstruck, to Taiwo laid out on the chaise like a cake. “She’s too pretty for me.” He took a drag. “Ehn, now, touch her.” He clapped his hands, impatient. “Jo, jo, jo.” Hurry up.

Pedophile, pedophile, pedophile, thought Taiwo.

“I don’t… understand,” Kehinde said.

“Touch the girl.”

“I don’t understand,” Kehinde repeated, eyes filling.

Uncle Femi sucked his teeth. “Then I’ll show you. You, come.” He gestured to the guards by the door, who hurried forward. “Just one of you.” The older one approached with his gun. “Put down the rifle,” he said. “It’ll scare her.” The young man set his weapon on the table. “Touch the girl.” Cigarette dangling, Uncle Femi moved the boy like a puppet into position at the end of the chaise, then made himself comfortable in the armchair across, as to watch a live show, his legs crossed, his eyes bright.

“Sa?” asked the guard.

“Touch the girl. Lift her nightdress. The boy here won’t do it. Unbuckle your belt.”

The guard looked at Taiwo, then at Kehinde behind him. Taiwo squeezed her eyes shut, still crying without sound. With a glance at his employer, the guard unzipped his trousers.

“Stop,” Kehinde said. Barely audible. “Please stop.”

“If you won’t do it, he will,” Uncle Femi said calmly. To the guard, “Use your fingers.”

“I will,” Kehinde said.

Uncle Femi started clapping. “I thought so,” he chuckled. He gestured to the guard, who returned to the door. With the rifle on the table. Like a coffee cup. Just sitting there. A token of the absurdity of the world in which they were. Kehinde stepped forward, looked down at his sister, his knees near her feet at the end of the chaise. Tears in her eyes, and his eyes, the same eyes. With the third pair, the portrait-eyes, watching from the wall. She looked at her brother and thought he was bluffing, perhaps that he’d hatched some sly plan for escape? She stared at him, desperately trying to read his expression. Saw nothing. His eyes had gone vacant and dark. He looked angry. She had never seen her brother looking angry. He wiped his eyes quickly with the back of one hand.

“Touch her like you do in the bedroom downstairs.” Uncle Femi looked joyful. “Pretend I’m not here.” At Kehinde’s hesitation, he added, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your mother what your auntie told me.”

How it happened:

how her uncle gave her brother instructions from his armchair, a director, the guards looking on. How her brother, not speaking, with his eyes saying nothing, removed her weekday panties, set them neatly on the floor. Put his finger inside her. The baffling sensation, less painful than uncomfortable. An opening, a tear. “Harder! Harder! Harder!” said Uncle Femi. “Faster! Faster!” With glee in his voice. Kehinde’s finger, with force.

This was the first time that she learned to leave her body, just to leave the body lying there, mind wandering off. Not with effort. It simply happened: she was lying there in Lagos on a chaise lounge in her nightdress when she felt herself go. Weary party guest departing. She was floating above them, then, watching the proceedings just as calm as could be, watching Kehinde in his T-shirt and his matching cotton Mickey shorts, his finger in his sister, Uncle Femi in his chair, the two boys at the door, their eyes wide with shame, pleasure, the portrait above the mantel, “Tuesday” panties on the floor — then floating elsewhere: to their parlor in Brookline, to the piano, to Shoshanna shouting, “Faster! Faster! Fast!” while she tried to play Rachmaninoff — and elsewhere: to the classroom, to the teacher’s nervous laughter while she shaded in o’s — to her bedroom: to the window watching Kehinde in the driveway, with their father looking guilty, little light on in the car. It seemed almost impossible that she, in this body, had covered such distance, from Brookline to Lagos, from piano and classroom and bedroom and safety to here, to this nightmare unfolding: too far. She floated above them and wondered who was this, then, here in that body? Wasn’t her. Couldn’t be. Was simply a body. A body she’d left there as one drops a towel.

To which she returned.

Kehinde had finished. Slid his finger from her body. She opened her eyes. Saw the stain on his shorts. Uncle Femi was clapping. “E kuuse!” Well done.

Sweat, or something like it, ventured shyly down her thigh.

“You can go,” said Uncle Femi. Kehinde hurried from the room, his shoulders shaking, leaving Taiwo there alone. She sat up. She looked at her uncle. She collected her panties (but didn’t put them on, not yet, the gesture too abasing). She walked out the door with a hole in her body, a space where her girlhood had been, no longer crying. Babatunde was there waiting with an expression on his face that suggested he knew what had happened and how. She didn’t find Kehinde in the kitchen or their bedroom. She went to her room down the hall, still too cold. She lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling for the rest of the day. No one called her for dinner. The next morning Babatunde came to fetch her. Up the elevator. For a week their uncle watched as Kehinde touched her like that. He said what the molesters say in made-for-TV movies: that he’d report them to their mother if they ever told a soul.

Then there was a party, and they were made to wear makeup and to walk around smiling at guests, boys and men, Nigerian and South African and white, of all ages. A gay man from Ghana: “I know who you are.” They left without luggage in a taxi with the Ghanaian. He put them on a plane to JFK and they came home. And… scene.

• • •

Taiwo pauses, her breathing grown labored. She means to say, “Happy? Now you know,” or the like, but she can’t catch her breath; is weak, sweating, dehydrated; intends to storm off and instead starts to sway. Fola lurches forward, catching Taiwo as she buckles, managing to grab her by the shoulders as she slumps to the sand. The movement is instinctive — less embrace than intervention — but it puts their skin in contact for the first time in years. Taiwo jerks backward, the dizziness mounting. She tries to say, “Don’t,” and erupts into tears.

vi

Fola pulls the girl to her chest, clutching tightly to prevent her from attempting to flee or pull away — but Taiwo clings back, body wracked by the sobbing, too weakened to stand without something to hold. So holding Fola. Barely choking out words, as a child does attempting to give voice to its grief between sobs, “How could you send us there? How could you send us? You knew what would happen. You knew, Mom. You knew.”

Of the many things Fola thinks, holding her daughter, is the thought that it’s useless to love with such force, for the force doesn’t travel, doesn’t keep them, protect them, doesn’t go where they go, doesn’t act as a shield — and yet how to love otherwise? What else might she feel but this raw, desperate love as she clutches the girl, wishing only to protect her, to act as a shield, and this raw, desperate grief, having long ago failed? “I’m sorry,” she whispers, stroking Taiwo’s long dreadlocks, knowing sorry won’t do, not knowing where else to start.

She’s never before felt what she feels in this moment. Three feelings at war for her breath, for her strength: first the anger at Femi, the pure, crystal hatred, a rage undiluted by pity or doubt; then the grief that is Taiwo’s, her shame and her sorrow, a well of it rushing beneath the right breast; then her own shame and sorrow, to know what has happened, to know what she’s sensed all along in her twins, who got hurt, she thinks, badly, because they didn’t have their mother. Because their mother thought they didn’t need a mother like her. “I thought,” she tells Taiwo, as she thinks of it, anguished, “I thought I was helping. That you’d be better off. I thought that your uncle—” heaves once and continues—“I thought he could provide things I couldn’t afford. I wanted you to have, I don’t know, to have more…”

“More than what?”

“Than a single mother. Than a mother like me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I never had a mother. I was making it up as I went. I was scared. I was lonely. I was a coward. I was afraid of disappointing you, of holding you back from the things you deserved. You were gifted, so brilliant, even smarter than Olu. Your teachers all said it. ‘She’s special,’ they said. ‘Make sure that you challenge her, stimulate, encourage her.’ I feared I’d be the reason that you didn’t excel. I was afraid that I’d fail you. So I sent you to… him… and he hurt you. And Kehinde. I failed anyhow.” Fola stops talking abruptly, embarrassed. This isn’t at all what she wants to be saying. Taiwo is silent, her arms around Fola, her chest quivering palpably against Fola’s breasts. Fola pulls back, just enough to see Taiwo, to hold the girl’s face with her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Her daughter looks back at her, blinking, eyes bloodshot, dry-raw from the salt of her tears and her sweat. She looks like an infant, thinks Fola. My infant. My baby, my daughter. And not Somayina. The eyes don’t remind her at all of her mother’s, perhaps for the first time since Taiwo was born. The clear amber eyes look to Fola like Taiwo’s: the eyes of a child, not a ghost’s but a girl’s. Taiwo says nothing, just stares at her mother, who stares at her child, overwhelmed by her want. She wants to give healing and comfort and answers. She wants to undo what was done to her twins. She wants to find Kehinde and hold him here also. She wants to find Femi, to kill him. By hand. Very slowly. To torture him. She wants to stop crying. She wants to make Taiwo stop crying. But can’t. All she can do is stand weeping with Taiwo alone on this beach in the bearing down heat, knowing someone has damaged her children irreparably, unable to fix it. Able only to hold.

She kisses Taiwo’s forehead, still holding her cheeks in her palms, and is moving to hug her again when she, Taiwo, says, “Don’t,” thinking Fola has kissed her by way of hard stop and will now pull away.

“Don’t go,” whispers Taiwo, and startles her mother by grabbing her fiercely and gripping her waist. “Don’t let me go yet, please don’t let me go.”

“I won’t,” whispers Fola, and doesn’t.

vii

Olu is getting annoyed now. Where are they? His mother and sister just up and disappeared, leaving the rest of the family to receive the food offering, a beans-and-rice dish served on plates made of tin. They ate this politely, chewing, nodding, and smiling, then gulped down warm Fanta, surrendered their plates. Sadie hurried off with her newfound instructor to learn further dance moves behind some mud hut while Benson received a call on his cell and began pacing the clearing in search of reception. “Hello? Hello?” Kehinde dematerialized in typical fashion, leaving Olu and Ling with this Shormeh and Naa, the two sisters in black whom his father never mentioned, both older by the look of it, sixty or more. Naa, the somewhat friendlier, dead ringer for Sadie, asks would they like to come see the old house? “That’s okay,” says Olu as Ling gushes, “Yes!” and they’re ushered along to the hut at the back.

He noticed the roof when they entered the compound — a triangular dome stitched of some sort of reed, five feet taller at least than the tin roofs surrounding it — but only now thinks of his father’s remark. Kweku, in a ramble about renting versus owning, said something about a father having “designed his own property.” Olu asks Naa, “Who designed this? Who built it?”

“His father,” she answers. “Your grandfather. Come.”

They duck in the door and stand still for an instant, adjusting to the relative darkness and silence. The space is much cooler than seems possible given the burdensome heat in the courtyard outside. Olu peers around at the rounded clay walls, at the sixteen-foot roof, one small window, faint light. Intelligent construction, he thinks. Ling takes pictures, the flash from the phone bouncing off this and that.

“There were six of us, then, with your father,” says Naa. “And our mother. Ehn, seven. We all slept in here.”

“Eight, with your father,” says Olu. “My grandfather.”

“No,” Naa says brusquely. “That man disappeared. He wasn’t our father. Just Kweku and Ekua’s.”

“He died?” Olu asks.

“No. He left.”

“To go where?”

“Jesus knows,” Naa says, shrugging. “By now he is dead. Both his children are, too. And his wife. Prideful man. That one, our mother, she loved him too much, oh. Too much. And for what, ehn? You came when she died. The woman was gone but he brought you to see her. He never came back here apart from that time.” She laughs without joy. “Now the space is sufficient. Your father would always fuss, fuss, for the space. ‘It’s too small,’ ‘it’s too hot,’ always hot, like a white man.” She sucks her teeth. “Obroni. Too hot in the shade.” She is quiet for a moment, her hands at her elbows. Then, her voice breaking, “A shame, oh. So young. My own junior brother. That foolish boy Kweku.” She wipes off her eyes with the back of one arm. “They say he bought a big, big house. Someplace very, very cold.”

Olu nods. “Yes.”

“Then he did it.” Tiny smile. “You wait. I am coming.” She dabs at her eyes again, shuffles to the doorway, ducks out. “I go and come.”

Ling comes to Olu by the one wooden bed. “What are you looking at?”

But Olu doesn’t know. He thought he saw something, a bird or an insect, flittering briskly around the window near the top of the dome, but when he points to it now he sees nothing but light spilling in full of dust to the mats on the floor.

viii

Kehinde comes tentatively to the entrance to the compound and stops by the wall, looking left, looking right. The outhouse was empty and so is the road, Benson’s car left alone on its tilt in the groove. He approaches the window to peer in to see if the driver is sleeping, but no one is there. He looks up the road at the line of small kiosks and sees, just past these, one large stand-alone shack. It looks like those cabins, the square wooden cabins they slept in, in Boy Scouts, the one year he tried, age eleven, before abandoning the pretense of boyness in favor of painting and working with beads. He can make out some movement inside it, a shadow, and thinks to go ask if the person here saw either Taiwo or Fola or Benson’s lost driver these last twenty minutes they’ve all disappeared? He walks the short way to the large wooden structure and stops at the doorway before ducking in, a low door, squinting twice in the dim of the space that is the coffin maker’s workshop and a clinic in the clutch.

He doesn’t see the man. He sees the one metal table bearing basic tools for woodwork and medical exams, wooden benches by the walls, single window by the doorway, rusted ceiling fan squeaking with every slow turn. Incongruously, at odds with the torture cell effect, a string of white Christmas lights blinks on one wall. The window is closed, as are three massive shutters that make up the top of the wall at the back. The only illumination is bright whitish sunlight thrown in from the door to the rough slatted floor. Even so, eyes adjusting, Kehinde makes out the coffins that hang more like boats from the beams overhead: one a car, one a fish, one a rose by the look of it, absurd in one sense, wild, fantastic in another. The idea of it. Coffins in shapes, like kids’ birthday cakes, celebratory, colorful, laughing at death. Sangna would love these, he thinks, with a start, caught off guard by the thought, by this flash of her face:

Sangna’s narrow brown face with its ill-fitting features reviled by their owner for being “too big.” An image out of context. On the backs of his eyelids. Her face on that screen in that space in his mind where such images materialize when his thoughts begin to wander, when forms replace words, like a photo exposed. (This is how paintings begin, and revelations, a form floating up out of dark on that screen, at first blurry, then detailed, then clear as a memory, as if to “create” were in fact to recall.) Here on that screen appears Sangna, lovely Sangna, whose narrow brown face passes by all the time, a flash here, a flash there, while he’s working in Brooklyn or writing her texts or while they talk on the phone — but whose face he has never really properly considered, like this, out of context, on its own. In other light. As he thinks of it now, he can see that she’s right, that her features don’t fit in their slender-cheeked frame, that there’s something too big about the teeth and the brows, a man’s eyes, a man’s nose, a man’s mouth, a child’s chin. An exquisite imbalance, he thinks, even thrilling, with the tension it creates when he sees her again after months and feels nervous those first thirty seconds, as if watching a juggler, afraid and amazed: they’re still there, all in order, those huge gorgeous features at war with their borders but not yet seceding.

That face.

And her laughter.

“So you want to make coffins,” he hears Sangna laugh. “You just started the Muses! You’re mad. But I like it, man. ‘Kehinde Sai, Coffins.’ Materials list Monday. And please no more dirt.” A home, he would tell her, he thinks, for the homeless, a home in the space after bodies, before. The thing he’s been after perhaps prematurely, a home, not a coffin. His next major show. Fantasy coffins. A museum installation. When he finishes the paintings in Brooklyn of her, of his sister as each of the Muses, huge portraits—

the thought of which sends up a warm wave of grief. The image shifts abruptly from Sangna to Taiwo: the girl on her back on that rococo chaise in the Minnie Mouse nightdress, her voice in his head a faint whisper please help me, and after, her face. After, when he’d done all their uncle instructed so the jaundice-eyed guard wouldn’t touch her instead — after, when he looked at his shorts, as did Taiwo, and saw there the wet spot — the look on her face. He hadn’t been able to brook the expression, had run from the room like a coward, a fool, but can see the face now, that one glimpse of it, frozen, held steady before him as if he were there: the pure shock in her eyes at this proof of his pleasure, the strange spreading wet spot, the strange spurting shame.

This was the first time that he learned he had a body, that he was bound inside this body, trapped, an airborne being caged. In his mind he’d been elsewhere, far, farther than snow, had been floating with Taiwo in space beyond space: they were drifting in nightclothes like Wendy and Peter, her hand in his hand, not his fingers in her. He heard Uncle Femi and did as instructed, could feel the walls’ smoothness and warmth and the wet, but his mind wasn’t joined to his finger; was with Taiwo, perhaps where they started? Then his body began. The beginning of having a body: that moment. The feel of the liquid a snake on one thigh. The clapping, Uncle Femi, “E kuuse, o, Kehinde!” His mind coming back.

To that look on her face.

How could he tell her that he didn’t enjoy it, when here was the proof that he had, on his shorts? When the body had betrayed him, and her, inexplicably? How could he persuade her? What could he say? He couldn’t say anything. Or didn’t. And hasn’t. Not for the week that the thing carried on. Not when they flew to New York to meet Fola, when they got back to Boston, for the next fifteen years. He has never said anything (nor she) of the moment, has never once revisited her expression until now: at the door to this storehouse of coffins and stethoscopes, from the dim of which someone says, “You, are you sick?”

Kehinde turns, startled, to the bench by the doorway and finds here a man with a paper, reclined. The man is quite old, dressed in trousers and T-shirt and worn leather sandals and dirty white coat, short and stout, with a belly and Coke-bottle glasses, with none of the famous Ghanaian good cheer. He has lowered his paper to glower at Kehinde but doesn’t get up, just repeats, “Are you sick?”

Kehinde shakes his head, caught off guard, stepping backward. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”

“Of course, there’s no light. Too hot with the light. Me, I don’t like the heat, oh. I see in the darkness. You look like you’re sick.” He sets down his paper and stands with some effort. “You came from Big Milly’s? A rastaman, ehn?”

“N-no,” Kehinde stutters. “We came for my father. He lived here. Grew up here, I mean. Now he’s dead.”

“Your father?” The man shuffles closer to Kehinde. “That one, the Sai boy? I heard that he died.” Kehinde nods, silent. “It’s a coffin you want then. What’s your name?”

“Kehinde.” He holds out his hand.

The man takes the hand, starts to shake it in greeting, then turns it face up to examine the palm. He leans in to squint down at Kehinde’s raised calluses. “Rough. You are a laborer.” Kehinde shakes his head. “Then why are your hands so, so rough like my own? The Sais I knew, self, they were thinkers.” Sarcastic. “At least that, the first one, could put up a house. But the boy? Good for nothing but thinking, thinking, thinking. He thought he was smart, ehn, too smart to break wood. Tss. Your hands are good, rough, like my own. Like a man.”

“I’m an artist,” says Kehinde.

The man starts to laugh. “An artist.” Pronounced ah-teest. “You are a Sai then.” He drops Kehinde’s hand and goes waddling to the shutters. He unlatches and pushes them out to rich light. Kehinde shields his eyes with one hand and squints, blinking, at the workspace now visible at the back of the hut. Half-finished coffins lie in piles by a worktable. Four men are painting what looks like a loaf. “We can’t make a new one in time for the funeral—”

“What does that mean, sir? ‘I am a Sai then’?”

The man turns to look at him, surprised by the inflection. Kehinde, surprised also, looks down at his hands. He presses them together, holding left hand with right, thumb to palm, trying to rub out the burning beneath. There is something in the smug, dismissive manner of this stranger that calls up aggression, a strange thing itself, to feel anger, simple anger, this burning sensation, this urge to do violence to some yielding thing. He is so rarely angry he finds himself nervous, alarmed by the feeling, the heat in the hands. He is certain that the stranger can sense his aggression, but the man just keeps talking, still laughing, “Chalé. Go and see that one, the house in the compound. The first one, he drew it. An ah-teest like you. Then came the boy, that your father, an ah-teest. His mother would send him to watch me, you see. They said he was coming to learn how to doctor, but no: he was just like his father. Just drew. Drawing and drawing, tss, all the day drawing. Never learned about bodies, never learned about wood. They were ah-teests. Like you.” He looks closely at Kehinde. “You see. Now you’re crying. You Sais, all the same.”

Their classmates used to ask him if twins were telepathic, if the one could feel in real time what the other sibling felt. This was in high school, when they first grew their dreadlocks, when Taiwo stopped combing, he cutting his hair, when they’d walk around campus in oversized sweaters and Doc Marten boots, clothed in black, and blank stares, when they still didn’t know what to say to each other but knew even less what to say to the world, and so stuck to each other in gathering quiet like guilt-ridden robbers who’d pulled off the heist, always watching the other for signs of defection, sitting side by side, knitting a silence with breath. Of the two of them he was the slightly more approachable, would try to engage on behalf of them both, could see that their classmates and teachers were curious, very genuinely, to know whence these Sai twins had come — but they lacked the vocabulary, simply hadn’t the language, in the suburbs, in the nineties, to know what he meant. “A year in Nigeria,” in their language, was “experience,” a sophomore year abroad, a vacation run long; “my father left the family” was a custody agreement, a Back Bay apartment, a stepmom named Chris. He and his sister still spoke the same language, like newborn twins babbling in conjured-up words, an odd language known only to them (and their uncle perhaps) that they spoke by not speaking at all. In this new way they were aware of their twinness, performed it in a way that they hadn’t before, with their clothes and their hair and their genderless affect and constant togetherness. He knew why they asked.

But the question upset him. The tone of the questioners. As if they could sense what was wrong with these Sais, never mind whence they came. “No, we’re not telepathic.” He’d smile. “We’re just close.” Never told them the truth. That often he’d excuse himself to go find a bathroom to sit there and weep for no reason at all, only to speak with her later and learn she’d been crying at precisely the same moment for good reason elsewhere.

So it is now as he bursts into tears without warning: hard, chest-rattling, deep-water sobs. Without speaking (unable), he goes to the bench by the door and drops down as a spinning coin falls. End of journey. Bent over, his face in his palms, with his legs squeezed together, his feet curling in. He has no way of knowing about Taiwo and Fola entwined in a knot by that house on the beach but feels sorrow far greater than one heart could muster and knows not to try to abate the loosed tide. All of it comes and sits calmly beside him: the face of the woman he thinks he may love, and the face of the sister he touched though it broke him, the blanket of quiet, the body, the loss, the loose word that slipped out in New York that one evening, the word meant for Bimbo, a statement of fact, and the face of his father that night in the Volvo, “an artist like him,” not a stranger at all. The whole thing is over in three or four minutes — the heart bursting inward, split, splintering apart — but it feels like an hour has passed when the last sob has risen and Kehinde looks up. The man is gone.

ix

Benson phones his driver to ask where he’s gone to. The driver explains, nervously, he’s here at the beach, by the path that the fishermen beat to the ocean, where he brought the pretty woman who was looking for the girl. This solves the mystery of Fola and Taiwo. Benson asks the driver to return to the car. Sadie, Ling, Olu stand waiting, bewildered. Kehinde appears, walking up the middle of the road. The driver comes jogging from the other direction. The beep-beep of car doors unlocked, blinking lights. Benson, Kehinde, Sadie, Ling, Olu alight, with the latter three climbing to the third row this time, as if sensing that Kehinde should be by himself for the moment; the driver starts humming again. They drive the short way to the path to the ocean where Fola and Taiwo stand waiting on the road. Fola has an arm around Taiwo’s bare shoulders. Both Olu and Sadie emit sounds of surprise. Fola takes the seat between Taiwo and Kehinde and holds both their hands with the rest of her strength.

“Shall we go choose the coffin?” asks Benson.

“Can we cremate? Do they cremate in Ghana?” asks Fola.

“Of course.” Benson looks stunned. “There’s a place near my clinic.”

“Today?”

“I’ll call now.” Benson takes out his cell.

The driver looks at Benson, then to Fola for instruction. “Madame?”

Fola nods. “Let’s go home.”

6

Later, much later, the moon having risen, the day having died its spectacular death of blood reds and blood oranges, blues and magentas, a heart-stopping sunset that none of them sees — they come to the table again to eat dinner (rice, garden egg soup, minus Taiwo, who’s resting), then drift to their rooms with their hurts and faint hopes drifting softly behind them, beneath closing doors.

ii

Ling is on her side when he returns from the bathroom. He stops in the doorway and stares at her hair. Usually it comforts him to look at her sleeping, to sense that there’s some hope of rest in the world, to observe his heart slow from the pace of his fears to the beat of her breaths — but it troubles him now. The black of the hair on the white of the pillow reminds him of Sunday in Boston, the snow, of the dark and the drumbeat, the slick black on cotton the only familiar among so much strange. Three days have passed since he sat in that Eames chair and watched his wife sleeping, a mute to this mouth, but he thinks of it now and the moment seems further, much further away both in hours and miles. Or she does: this figure, her hip, waist, and shoulder, the familiar undulation too distant to touch. Or else he does. Feels distant. Feels far from this figure not ten feet before him, feels far from himself.

He wants to go back, he thinks, home, to that bedroom, to the apartment he found when they first moved for school, not a ten-minute walk from the house he’d once lived in, but in the other direction, across from MassArt. He loved it the moment the broker unlocked it: the stainless-steel kitchen and brilliant white walls and the blond wooden floorboards and oversize windows, the sun playing Narcissus, blond blinding light. But he couldn’t afford it. He was just starting med school then, fresh out of college (returned from Accra, with the smell of that woman still thick in his nostrils, the taste of betrayal unnamed on his tongue). A miracle, really, how it happened, years later: he was walking out of the library at the School of Public Health when he chanced upon an advert on a corkboard, same apartment. Ling’s mother had died, then, and left a small sum. He procured all the furniture at IKEA, on eBay, arranged all their photos in matching white frames, black-and-whites, he and Ling on their various adventures; he pored over copies of Dwell magazine; rented vans to go pick up antiques in Connecticut, did the painting himself, installed bookshelves, built desks — until the apartment was perfect, the home he’d imagined, inoculated against disorder, indestructibly clean.

He wants to go back to that order and cleanliness. He wants to go back to their tidy redoubt, to their jogs before sunrise and to-do lists on the refrigerator, their white squares of furniture welcoming them back, to their muted-toned clothing all folded and hung, to their meals of lean meat and dark greens and whole grains, to their kisses good-bye in the morning postjogging, their kisses hello in the evening, in scrubs, to the clean way they chitchat, never arguing, never lying, never asking for truths. To that place and not this. Not this tension, not Ling with her back turned toward him, not sleeping but not turning as he appears at the door to the thin-windowed room with its gray marble floor and its chipped yellow walls and its brown velour drapes (that mismatched decor he’s always found, in his travels, in bedrooms in countries where sleep is a gift, where the bed needn’t look like a present at Christmas with pillow shams and dust ruffles to drive the point home) — and not silence, demanding, in place of their chitchat, a large, messy silence, subsuming, like damp.

It hangs there like moisture, so thick he can feel it. There is no place to put it, and no place to go. He stands in the doorway and hears in this silence his heart beating, hard, to the sound of her breaths. He closes his eyes and he sees in that darkness, that deep, sparkling darkness that lives behind lids, like a slideshow: their flight, Monday evening, to Ghana, with Ling there beside him, her head on his chest, then their flight to Las Vegas, the chapel, October, their first night of marriage, the tacky motel. He remembers making love to her; a difference, already; to think the word wife of the woman below him, to place his wide palm on the side of her face and to hear her “We’re married,” to whisper, “I know.” It wasn’t the idea of being married that changed things — he’d never much cared for the language, the show — but the idea of a beginning, in which began every ending, the thing he’d been running from, for fourteen odd years.

Fola used to tease him for calling Ling “partner,” for refusing to say “girlfriend” (“your lab partner,” she’d joke). They had no anniversary. They had no beginning. “You’re not Asian,” she said, and he loved her. Fait accompli. He’d wax philosophical about the puerility of the language, “boyfriend/girlfriend,” about the emptiness of “falling in love,” about the physiological underpinnings of desire and attraction, the senselessness of exalting the instinct to mate, and the rest of it. Really, he was terrified of endings. He couldn’t understand how people loved, then didn’t love. Loved, then stopped loving. As a heart just stops beating. (Of course he knew how, but he couldn’t see why.) Dr. Soto once told them that the reason for dating — the only real reason for dating as opposed to mating for life — was to acquaint oneself, viscerally and immediately and nonlyrically, with the fact of one’s “personal mortality,” nothing else. One of the junior attendings had just called off his wedding and was moping around the OR with a look on his face that suggested he might do himself harm with his scalpel. Dr. Soto convened them all after surgery to say:

“the only point of a relationship is to play out, in miniature, the whole blasted drama of life and of death. Love is born as a child is born. Love grows up as a child grows up. A man knows well that he must die, but having only known life does not believe in his death. Then, one day, his love goes cold. Its heart stops beating. The love drops dead. In this way, the man learns that death is reality: that death can exist in his being, his own. The loss of a pet or a rose or a parent may cause the man pain but will not make the point. Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.”

Olu listened, laughing. But what of the opposite? What if love never dies, what if love wasn’t born? What if it had always existed since they touched pouring punch at the Asian-American Cultural Center Open House at Yale? What if there was no relationship to end? No boyfriend/girlfriend? No “now we are” and therefore no “now we’re not” down the line? This is what he had with Ling Wei, he was thinking. The dramaless life of a love unbegun.

Then they got married on a whim in Las Vegas. After, they made love with her face in his palm. That night he lay still with her cheek on his breastbone and thought of an “ending” and wanted to cry. Many years earlier he’d vowed not to do so, teeth grit in the mirror, alone in his dorm, so just stared until dawn at the pink neon heart blinking on and off, huge, on the ceiling. In the morning he asked could they keep it a secret, not tell what they’d done, let it be “just for them.” What he wanted to say was, “Don’t die, don’t go cold, don’t stop beating,” but knew it was useless. Now he stands at the door in this break in the action and thinks what he thought in the bedroom before: that he can’t bear to lose her, to let her drift further, or drift off himself in the way that he’s done, but that “forward” or “closer” are his only two options, not “back,” as he’s hoped, that they can’t unbegin.

And so he begins, “I have something to tell you.”

She looks, sees his eyes closed, and starts to stand up. He hears that she’s stirring and shakes his head. “Please. Please just listen.” (She does, sitting back, on her feet.) “You live your whole life in this world, in these worlds, and you know what they think of you, you know what they see. You say that you’re African and you want to excuse it, explain but I’m smart. There’s no value implied. You feel it. You say ‘Asia, ancient China, ancient India,’ and everyone thinks ooh, ancient wisdom of the East. You say ‘ancient Africa,’ and everyone thinks irrelevant. Dusty and irrelevant. Lost. No one gives a shit. You want them to see you as something of value, not dusty, not irrelevent, not backward, you know? You wish you didn’t give a shit, but somehow you do, because you know, Ling. You fear what they think but don’t say. And then, one day you hear it out loud. Like, your father—”

“My father’s an asshole—”

“Your father was right. I didn’t go to Haiti for that project at graduation. I came here to Ghana to see him. I lied. He kept sending these letters to ask me to visit, to come for my birthday, to just hear him out. He’d gotten this place, this… this ugly apartment. He said it was until he could afford to buy land. I don’t know. I didn’t stay. There was a woman, some other woman, he was living with some woman, I don’t know who she was. I know what he was. He was that man. He was that stereotype. The African dad who walks out on his kids. The way that I’d always hoped no one would see us.” He squeezes his eyes, shakes his head. “And I know. I stand in that house, in that hut he grew up in. The man came from nothing; he struggled, I know. I want to be proud of him. Of all he accomplished. I know he accomplished so much. But I can’t. I hate him for living in that dirty apartment. I hate him for being that African man. I hate him for hurting my mother, for leaving, for dying, I hate him for dying alone.”

Tears. But not as for Taiwo and Kehinde, the dam giving way and the tide rushing out. They begin without noise and he stands without moving, as strange as they feel, left to flow, on his face. He leans on the doorframe, too tired to keep speaking, and hears in the silence the bullfrogs outside. He doesn’t hear the creak of the bed as she leaves it. He feels her small hands on the sides of his face. “Maybe it was the best he could do,” she says softly. “Maybe what he did was the best he could do.” He nods, though it hurts to. He opens his eyes now. She smiles at him, wiping her tears off, then his. He touches the hand that she’s placed on his cheekbone. She thinks that he wants her to stop and pulls back. But he presses his palm to her hand, to his jawbone. “I want to do better.” He kisses her lips.

He can sense her surprise as she turns her mouth upward, the way that she used to when they were at school, when he’d walk her to her door on Old Campus and pause in the lamplight to consider the shape of her mouth. Feeling his gaze, the pink lips would drift up, as if moving of their volition, not their owner’s, not his. He’d kissed girls in high school but never like this, with their lips playing puppet, his eyes playing string. And had never had sex (is the truth he’s never told her, half embarrassed, half touched by his own lack of breadth. He always assumed that he’d want other women, come to desire other bodies as the months turned to years, but he didn’t, and hasn’t, as the years blur to decades. His first is his only). He touches her neck. He feels the pulse quicken beneath his four fingers. He feels his heart speed to the pace of her breath. “I want to do better,” he whispers, through kisses — her chin, then her neck, down the length to her chest. Placing his palm along the curve of her lumbar and applying enough pressure to make her arch back, he kisses her sternum, the cotton-clad nipples, the one then the other, then lifts up her shirt. He presses his palm to her breastbone, five fingers, and kisses the dip of the clavicle, once. The sounds that she makes are small lights on the runway; he flats the palm down to her waist, cups her groin.

“Make love to me,” she whispers. “Make love to me, make love to me.” She grabs his smooth head with such force that he gasps, looking up at her face, a pale mask of pure agony, such want and such need that she looks like someone else. He lifts her up easily with one of his arms, sets her down on the bed, and removes her few clothes. She unbuttons his trousers with rushed, famished movements and pushes them down to his knees with her feet. He presses her wrists down with one of his hands, both her arms stretched above her. “Make love to me. Please.”

In a moment he will: piercing body with body, pushing firmly through labia, palm to her mouth (though the moaning is his as he thrusts to her center), the slippery-pink tissue peeling willingly apart. His body will feel foreign at first, somehow larger, too large and too strong, like a thing that can hurt; for the first time he imagines himself, in his lover, as those words that he spoke, as an “African man.” He will start to pull out of her, afraid he is hurting her, afraid of the noises that slip past his palm, but Ling won’t allow it — and, clutching his buttocks, she’ll pull him yet deeper, in, farther, down, down. For now he just kneels there and pauses to see it: Ling’s body in this bedroom that isn’t their own, both their faces distorted by sorrow and longing and overhead lighting and truths newly told, but the forms still familiar to his fingertips, the landscape: bones, breasts, hips, rib, pubis, navel, birthmark, flesh, hair, skin: the woman’s body, a body, nothing sharp-edged or sterile, everything rounded and destructible and soft, and so home.

iii

Taiwo is on her side when he returns from the garden. He thinks she is sleeping and leaves the light off. He sets down his cell phone beside the pink flowers, on the small wooden nightstand, and kicks off his shoes.

“Who was on the phone?” she asks, not turning over. “I could hear you through the window.”

“My assistant,” he says. “We’re doing a show with those paintings you saw, of the Muses, in Greenpoint. A gallery show. They’re not done yet, I know, but I think I might like them. I think you might like them.” He is nervous. He stops.

“They’re incredible, K.”

She rolls over to face him, her cheek on the pillow, her hands just beneath — but he hears something else. Three other words, in her voice, in his head, just a snippet. Her thought among his. He feels his heart swell to have heard what she’s thinking, this briefest transmission, but something. Reception. Three words in silence, in the space between beds, her low voice in his head as he once used to hear. He looks at his sister, or tries, in the darkness. She looks at him back, a sad smile on her lips. They don’t state the obvious: that both have been crying. They look at each other with raw, swollen eyes.

“She’s pretty,” says Taiwo. “Your assistant.”

“I think so.” He hears her breath catch, the small knot in her throat. He remembers this sensation from their early adolescence, so particular a sensation that it has its own smell: teenage lotion, kiwi-strawberry. Jealousy. Or possessiveness. Possessiveness and embarrassment, which she needn’t have felt (for he’d felt the same way, that he was Taiwo’s possession. A thing that belonged to and with her. Box set).

“Do you like her?” asks Taiwo.

“I think so,” says Kehinde.

She rubs her eyes, sleepily. “I always kind of thought.”

The knot comes untangled. She shifts her position and lies on her back with her hands on her ribs. He stays where he is at the edge of the bed, seated upright across from her, too exhausted to move. He closes his eyes for an instant and hears them again, those three words, her low voice, close to his. Almost too close, he thinks. Is he hearing his sister, her thoughts in his head, or just hearing himself? His heart starts to sink, a small dip of a kite. He has waited so long to hear Taiwo again. To hear anything, any thought, much less this thought that he’s longed all these years to believe, dare believe. Was it his raspy voice that he heard and not Taiwo’s? The three words in silence his pardon, not hers? He opens his eyes, starts to ask her the question, but finds that her eyes have slipped shut.

She’s asleep.

He leans in to stare at her, elbows on kneecaps. Her face in the moon is impossibly still. When a thin film of sweat forms above her top lip, in an hour, he rises and wipes it away. He is tired. He sits on the bed by his sister. He smoothes down her dreadlocks, a tangle of snakes. He kisses her hands and he whispers, “Forgive me.” His body too weak from the day, he lies down.

iv

Later, a bit later, an hour before sunrise Taiwo wakes up as one does from a dream, as one does when she’s gone to sleep crying with clothes on; finds Kehinde beside her, his head by her feet. She sits up and looks at him, still in his clothing, his hand by his mouth, by the beard that he’s grown. She stands up very quietly and is heading to the bathroom when, thinking he has spoken, she turns back around. He is snoring. Lips moving. Three words, she thinks, maybe. She comes to the foot of the bed and looks down. His eyes are still bulbous as a child’s after tearshed. She looks at the hand, palm turned up, by his mouth. She touches the scar there, the T, only barely, but his hand shuts, a reflex, and squeezes her thumb. She stands there, not moving, not wanting to wake him. The birds in the garden begin their lament. She thinks it, though it hurts to, though she cannot yet speak it. His fingers relax and she slips out her thumb. She stands there and stares at his face until she sees it, fifteen seconds and not longer. A smile in his sleep.

v

In this way comes morning (death to wan gray, etc.); feeling something is missing, Sadie opens her eyes. Fola is missing, though her scent lies there lightly. The butterflies, too, have abandoned her chest. She feels with some wonder and a touch of suspicion the void in her middle, her shirt damp with sweat. She peers at the alarm by the little framed photo and laughs at the date on the analog clock. Christmas. No chestnuts, no baked beans, no sleigh bells. Pink blossoms, palms, bulbul, an Aspen chalet. She stands up the frame, tries to straighten the photo by tapping. Nothing doing. A terrible shot. But likely the last of the old family photos with all six together, she now understands. With everybody looking in a different direction, her father at the camera, she down at his head, her mother at her tutu, her brother at her mother, the twins at who knows what, all blurry, all there.

7

Mr. Lamptey sits, silent, at the edge of the garden, his legs wet with dewdrops, his joint dwindling down, with the saffron replaced by a heavy black linen, obscured by the shadow, the more for the black. He has done this since Monday, his three days of mourning: has sat by the wall at the edge of the grass, taking leave before sunrise, unseen by the woman who comes to the kitchen at a quarter past six. She doesn’t come out to the garden, or look; she just stands at the counter and fixes her drink with the frozen expression of grief before sorrow, the soft, pretty features gone hard with her shock. The dog came on Tuesday but found it too doleful and remained on the beach when he set off at dawn. The birds that he found in the fountain on Monday have yet to return, so he mourns on his own.

In a way he has come here to see the soft woman, to bid her “wake up” with his blue-bellied gaze, with the sense that his presence might send her a message, that all is not lost, that she isn’t alone. (In fact it is he who is lonely, uncharacteristically. He misses the man in the sunroom he built. He misses the wave of the napkin, the glasses, the spilling of coffee on trousers, their dance.) He sits with his joint at the back of the garden and puffs with great rue, idly stroking the grass. He wonders if the man ever noticed the plant here, the lush marijuana set back from the pinks? Likely not. He laughs sadly. He closes his eyes and exhales. It is sunrise. It is time to go home.

He is thinking he’ll wait just a few minutes longer to see her once more before leaving for good, when he hears someone parking a car in the driveway, the crunching of tires on the pebbles, beep-beep. He opens his eyes, laughs again. What is this now? He waits there, unmoving, amused by surprise. Someone rings the bell at the gate, a nasal buzzer. He looks at the house as if watching a film. The door doesn’t open. The buzzer, for longer. The person raps once on the person-height gate. Mr. Lamptey puffs, torn. Should he wait for the woman? Should he let in the person? The man never had guests. At least not for the years that he slept in the tent or on Mondays. Only Kofi, and later the nurse.

Here she is. Nightdress and pink furry slippers. She opens the doors to the house and steps out. (The man demanded double doors — simple bamboo with a K on one handle, an F on the other — for the entrance to the gray-not-green courtyard, the main entrance, with the heatable walkway around the small square. Mr. Lamptey would have thought a K and S more appropriate but carved out the letters with no questions asked.) The woman steps out of these doors in her nightdress and walks down the path of flat stones to the gate, a straight line of gray slate through the sea of white pebbles, as sketched on a napkin in faded blue ink.

“Hello?” she says warily.

“Hello.” A woman’s voice.

But a different sort of woman’s voice, a different sort of woman.

He has never heard her speak before, the woman-in-pink, but her voice is exactly as he’d thought it would be: very sweet, very innocent, awaiting instruction, the voice of someone used to being told what to do. The woman-at-the-gate’s hummed “Hello” is a river, the bottom of a river, an echo, a tide. The voice does not wait for instruction but gives it, and gently. The woman-in-pink acquiesces. She pulls out the bar at the top of the gate, rather trustingly, and pushes it open.

The river-woman enters, her arms full of flowers. Mr. Lamptey laughs softly again, with surprise: they are the very same flowers he chose for this garden, a raucous arrangement, bright pinks and deep reds. Her appearance is arresting, the effect beyond “striking.” It doesn’t stir up, neither jealousy or awe. It quiets. The woman-in-pink stares in silence. He pauses his puffing to squint from his perch. Even from here by the wall, at this distance, his eyes going bad, he can see the effect. The woman laughs, embarrassed. “I’m sorry to bother. It’s terribly early, I know, for a guest, but Benson, er, Dr. Adoo, he gave me this address, and I thought that I’d come by to pay my respects.”

The woman-in-pink stares in silence.

“I’m Fola.” She pauses. “I’m Kweku’s — I was Kweku Sai’s wife.” She holds out the flowers. “I’m so very sorry. These are for you. I–I don’t know your name.”

“Ama,” says the woman-in-pink, like a question. “I am Ama?” She sounds baffled, unsure what this means. She repeats Fola’s words as in pursuit of a right answer, as a schoolgirl does dictation, “I was Kweku Sai’s wife.” She pauses to consider the words she’s just spoken, the frozen-stiff features beginning to melt. “Dr. Sai isn’t here,” she adds sweetly, voice quivering, repeating a line clearly used on the phone. The shoulders begin trembling. “May I please take a message?”

“Oh, darling,” says Fola, setting down the bouquet. She wraps both her arms around Ama’s plump shoulders. She is taller, much taller. Mr. Lamptey thinks, a tree. (“What kind of trees are these?” he’d asked, of the napkin. The man was looking murderously at the mango. “Never mind that.”)

The two women stand at the gate for some moments. When Ama can, she pulls away to wipe her button nose. “I am sorry,” she sniffles.

“Never mind that,” says Fola. A deep and short laugh, a small wave of the hand. “We’ve planned a small ceremony, very small, in Kokrobité. You’ll come with us, no? Nothing fancy. Just us.”

They carry on talking, Ama receiving instruction. Mr. Lamptey watches, smiling: so she isn’t alone. Fola says she’s happy just to wait in the driveway if Ama would like to get dressed and come with? Ama insists that Fola come wait in the house, and retrieving the flowers, she leads the way in.

• • •

Fola pauses briefly at the entrance, sees the handles. She touches the K and the neat hand-carved F. Only now does she glance to her right, see the fountain, and laugh at the statue adorned with the weeds. She doesn’t see the man at the edge of the garden. She enters the house and the double doors close. When they come back outside, she and Ama together, the garden is empty. Mr. Lamptey is gone.

ii

They return to the beach, Ama riding with Fola, the others with Benson, a small caravan. No one quite knows what to say to this Ama; they all smile politely and leave it at that. The sisters stand huddled together, suspicious. They exchange a few greetings with Ama in Ga. Benson produces the urn from an official-looking container and hands this to Fola with an official-looking nod. She had it in mind to toss his ash to the sea breeze, to let the man free, end at the beginning and that. But now as she twists off the top, she can’t do it. The idea of him scattered seems wrong in some way. We’ve been scattered enough, she thinks. Broken pot, fragments. Keep him inside, she thinks, let him stay whole. She twists the metal top on and kneels by the water. She doesn’t face her children, afraid that she’ll cry. “Odabo.” Good-bye. Puts the urn in the water. A wave washes in but doesn’t take the urn out. It rolls to the side, sort of drifts a few inches. Another wave comes, but it still doesn’t go. She stands up and watches, an arm at her middle. The urn turns in foam, drifts a bit farther out. As if waiting for something. She thinks but can’t say it. I love you. A wave with some promise appears. Ama makes a squeaking sound, a bit like a bulbul. Fola watches Kweku bobbing, bobbing out of view.

iii

Now she is back in her chair by the fan palm. Amina is busy with the dinner inside. Olu and Ling are very dutifully helping her; Benson took the baby and the twins to find a tree. There are conifers in Ghana, she knows, but not fir trees. She started to warn them, then just let them go. They want to keep busy, she knows, not to say it. Not to let there be stillness or silence or pause. Not to say that they’ve done it. Sixteen years in the making, they’ve lost him. Whatever else, Kweku is gone.

The sun is going down; there will soon be mosquitoes. She takes a long drag, leaning back in the chair. She thinks of plump Ama’s round face, and she chuckles. Just barely a “woman,” how possibly “wife”? Then laughs at her chuckling. Is she jealous? Yes, maybe. Or more so embarrassed, for not moving on? She remembers meeting Benson in the lobby at Hopkins. The skin of burnt umber, black soap, velvet voice. Does Benson rather like her? she wonders. Yes, maybe. She laughs at this, too. Takes another long drag.

Mustafah is hanging up the lights with a ladder. She remembered that she had them and asked him to try. Mr. Ghartey is chewing sugarcane, watching with amusement. All of them start at the bell, at the gate. Fola looks over. “Must be Benson,” she tells them, though wonders why he didn’t honk his car horn instead. Mr. Ghartey opens both of the gates to let the car in. Ama stands there nervously, a taxi behind.

“Madame,” she says shyly, seeing Fola in the beach chair.

Fola scrambles up. “W-w-what a pleasant surprise.” She thinks to hide the cigarette but just can’t be bothered. She goes to greet Ama. “Is everything okay?” They’d dropped her back home when they returned from Kokrobité; Fola invited her to dinner, but Ama refused. She thinks that perhaps she’s changed her mind, and is happy. There is something about the woman that cries out for care. She wouldn’t mind having a new thing to care for, the other things appearing to have all fluttered off.

But Ama shakes her head. “I won’t stay, please,” she says, voice staccato and steady. “I brought these for you.” She holds out a bag, a plastic Ghana Must Go bag, her smile and raised eyebrows belying her pride. Her movements as before seem to replicate Fola’s: she presents the plaid bag as Fola presented the flowers. The mimicry is touching, almost paining. Fola smiles.

“Thank you,” she says. “Are you sure you won’t stay?”

Ama glances back at the taxi. “I won’t, please.” Mirroring Fola’s pained expression, she smiles, then she leaves. Fola, surprised by the sudden departure, holds up one hand as the taxi drives off. She cradles the plastic bag, pulling on her cigarette. Mr. Ghartey steps forward and closes the gate.

She returns to the chair. She peers in the bag. She laughs with such force that Mr. Ghartey looks scared. Cigarette in one hand, she retrieves with the other the slippers: battered slip-ons, thin, worn to the soles. She stubs out her cigarette to free both her hands up and only now sees the face drawn in the dirt. Kweku, however gestural (it must have been Kehinde). She looks at the mouth, at the angled-up eyes. “There you are.”

Here I am.

“Your wife’s a bloody genius. Slippers.” Starts to laugh, picks them up from her lap. “I mean, really.”

Genius. He is laughing. She is laughing. Why did I ever leave you?

“I also left you.” She breathes in the smell of forgotten familiar. She presses the soles to her dampening cheeks. “We did what we knew. It was what we knew. Leaving.”

Was it?

“We were immigrants. Immigrants leave.”

Not good enough.

“Cowards.”

We were lovers.

“We were lovers, too.”

Couldn’t we have learned? Not to leave?

“I don’t know.” She is quiet for a moment. She knows that they’re watching, the staff, from the gate, with confusion, alarm. But still can’t be bothered. She thinks but doesn’t say it: one can learn only so much in one life. “Still there?”

Yes. Forever.

She laughs. Yes, most likely. “We learned how to love. Let them learn how to stay.”

How are they? The children?

“They’re here,” she says, pointing. “I got what I wanted. You sent them all home. They’re all here for Christmas. We’re roasting a game fowl. Your Olu insists upon carving, of course.”

My Olu.

“Well, yes. He was always your favorite.”

Your Sadie.

“Then whose—?”

They’re each other’s. The twins.

“The twins…” She trails off. Hears a car engine idling. The honk of the horn. “They’ve come back. I should go.” But doesn’t. She sits, slips her fingers in the slippers as if they were mittens and covers her face. “You should go,” she says softly. She squeezes her eyes shut. The gate rattles. Tires turn. “I know, I know, I know.” Then there is quiet. Car doors open, shut. She slips out her fingers and opens her eyes.

• • •

A dawn-colored sunset.

“We found one!” calls Sadie.

She watches them hauling out the tree from the trunk. Benson smiles, waving. Waving back to him: “Coming.” She places one toe on the mouth on the ground. The sketch is remarkable, unmistakably Kweku. She stares at it, waiting to hear something else. Then laughs at her waiting. There is nothing to wait for. She picks up his slippers and brings them inside.