“Just another minute.” As if he were in a bathroom.
He stayed until midnight, the tears too unripe.
11
His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom as he loves her most: dreaming, a bridge made of flesh. So he won’t get his slippers. He’ll go make the coffee. It can’t be past four A.M. — what woke him up? — now he doesn’t remember — what day is it? Sunday. Kofi’s day off. No more banging of nails. Just the silence and stillness. Aloneness and quiet. He thinks, I rather like it, this odd sense of pause. Of the morning suspended between darkness and daybreak, and him suspended with it, adrift in the gray. Too late to resume sleeping, too early to get going. On pause for the moment. The coffee, he thinks.
And is turning to go in to decamp to the kitchen when he sees the thing, barely, from the corner of his eye. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to him otherwise, had he not seen, remembered, and thought of her face. Had he continued out of the sunroom through the door into the Dining Wing, through the dining room, to the kitchen, to make mocha and toast. Most likely he’d have noticed the constriction in the chest and the shortness of breath and known instantly: go. Would have tracked down the heparin in the medicine closet — unrushed, hyperfocused — then tracked down a phone. Would have called his friend Benson, another Ghanaian from Hopkins who now runs a high-end private hospital in Accra (and who just yesterday rang and left a very strange voicemail, something about having seen Fola here in Ghana; couldn’t be). Would have gotten hold of Benson, agreed to meet him at the hospital. Would have found his sneakers waiting by the door for his run. Would have tried to think back, as he laced up his laces, to the first of the chest pangs (too beautiful sometimes). Would have glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes. Easy peasy. Would have driven to the hospital, leaving Ama who can’t drive. And so forth.
Would have noticed.
And so known.
And so gone.
But he sees the thing, barely, bright turquoise and black.
• • •
Just coming to rest on a blossom, bright pink. When it comes to him suddenly: the name, by her face.
“Bougainvillaea,” he hears her saying.
“It sounds like a disease. The patient presented with bougainvillaea.”
“You be quiet.” She sucked her teeth.
But when he looked she was laughing. At the sink, hands in blooms, small, magnificent, magenta. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said.
“Yes. Aren’t they?”
“No. You are.”
She laughed again, blushing. “You be quiet,” but quietly. A smile taking shape. The sun from the window behind her a backlight. He thought to go hold her. Beheld her instead.
• • •
Why did I ever leave you? he thinks without warning, and the pang sends him reeling off the ledge to the grass. Once again his bare soles — which for years have known nothing but slipper leather, sock cotton, shower stall — object. The coldness, the wetness, the sharpness of grass blades. He takes these in, trying to unthink it, to breathe. But the words don’t relent, nor the shortness of breath. Just the why did I ever leave you, a song on repeat (with the bridge yet inaudible in the distance, too soon) as he buckles now, gasping, brought low by the pain. “I don’t know,” he says aloud and to no one, but he’s lying. He closes his eyes; in the dark sees her face. Her brows knit together. Her mouth folded over. The voice of a woman. I know, I know, I know.
So it’s come to this, has it? Here barefoot and breathless, alone in his garden, no strength left to shout? Not that it would matter. He is here in the garden; she is there in the bedroom unplugged from the world. The houseboy at home with his sister in Jamestown. The carpenter-cum-gardener-cum-mystic comes tomorrow. Who would hear him shouting? Stray dogs or the beggar. And what would he shout? That it’s finally cracked? No. Somehow he knows that there’s no turning back now.
The last time he felt this was with Kehinde.
12
A hospital again, 1993.
Late afternoon, early autumn.
The lobby.
Fola down the street in her bustling shop, having moved from the stall at the Brigham last year. A natural entrepreneur, a Nigerian’s Nigerian, she’d started her own business when he was in school, peddling flowers on a corner before obtaining a permit for a stand in the hospital (carnations, baby’s breath). When he’d graduated from medical school and moved them to Boston, she’d started all over from the sidewalk again: by the lunch cart (falafel) in the punishing cold, then the lobby of the Brigham, now the stand-alone shop.
Sadie, almost four, in white tights and pink slippers, doing demi-pliés in her class at Paulette’s.
Olu, high school senior and shoo-in at Yale, attempting doggedly to break his own cross-country record.
Taiwo, thirteen, at the Steinway in the den attempting doggedly to play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp while Shoshanna her instructor, a former Israeli soldier, barked instruction over the metronome. “Faster! Da! Fast!”
And Kehinde at the art class Fola insisted he take despite the exorbitant expense at the Museum of Fine Art three short train stops away on the Green Line, up Huntington, where Kweku was to meet him after work.
• • •
Except Kweku never went to work.
He left, calling “Bye!” as he did every morning: in his scrubs and white coat, at a quarter past seven, with Olu waiting for carpool, and the twins eating oatmeal at the breakfast nook table, and Fola braiding Sadie’s hair, and Sadie eating Lucky Charms, and National Public Radio playing loudly as he left. “Bye!” they called back. Three contraltos, one bass, Sadie’s soprano “I love yooou!” just a second delayed, breezing only just barely out the closing front door like a latecomer jumping on an almost-missed train.
He started the Volvo and backed down the driveway. He pushed in the cassette that was waiting in the player. Kind of Blue. He rode slowly down his street listening to Miles. The yellow-orange foliage a feast for the eyes. Pots of gold. In the rearview, a russet brick palace. The grandest thing he’d ever owned, soon to be sold.
• • •
He drove around Jamaica Pond.
He drove under the overpass.
He drove toward their old house on Huntington Ave. He slowed to look out at it. The old house looked back at him. A window cracked, bricks missing, stoop lightly littered. It looked like a face missing teeth and one eye. Mr. Charlie, former owner, would have turned in his grave. Such an attendant to detail. Kweku had liked him so much. American, from the South, with a limp and a drawl. Had lost his wife Pearl over a year before they moved there but still kept her coat on a hook in the hall. He’d given them a 25 percent discount on rent because Fola tended Pearl’s orphaned garden in spring, and because he, Kweku, doled out free medical advice (and free insulin), and because they were “good honest kids.”
Kweku had always greeted him with the Ghanaian Ey Chalé! to which Mr. Charlie always responded, “Tell that story once more ’gain.” (The story: in the forties the officers strewn around Ghana were known as Charlie, all, a suitably generic Caucasian male name. Ghanaian boys would mimic Hey Charlie! in greeting, which in time became Ey Chalé, or so Kweku had heard.) But no matter the man’s insistence, they couldn’t call him by his first name, so well steeped were he and Fola in African gerontocratic mores. Mr. Charlie would hear nothing of sir or Mr. Dyson. (“Mr. Dyson was my daddy, may the bastard rest in peace.”) So “Mr. Charlie.”