by Taiye Selasi
“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.
