And so it was.
Kehinde wasn’t lesser, less outgoing, less social, “in the shadow” of Taiwo, a shadow himself. He was something else. From somewhere else. Otherworldly like Ekua. An empath like Fola. And for whatever it was worth, Kweku saw now with awe, like his father (and his father before him).
• • •
Kehinde signed neatly in the lower right corner. Kweku touched his shoulder. “Why, thank you, Mr. Sai.”
“You’re welcome, Dr. Sai.” Kehinde’s smile quickly faded. The word doctor hung between them like an odor in the car. Dogs began a canon of cacophonous barking. Kehinde looked out at the house a little longer. The light went off in Taiwo’s room. Then on, then off. Like a signal. Then on. Kehinde turned back to Kweku, turning back into a black hole. “Your pen.”
“Yours.”
“But it’s—”
“Keep it.”
“Are you sure?” Turning it over.
“I’d be honored for you to have it.”
“Thank you, Dad.” Another odor.
Kweku reached over and touched Kehinde’s face, rubbing gently with one finger the space between his brows as he often did with Fola, trying to rub away her frown, though it never really worked and didn’t now. “It must be time for dinner.” Though it wasn’t. Thirty minutes yet. “Your mother will want to hear all about class. You go ahead.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Just a second.”
Kehinde nodded, not smiling. “Your painting,” he said.
He rolled it up neatly and handed it to Kweku. The cameraman filmed: The Intelligent Parent Falls Dumb. Kweku gripped the painting as one does when one means I’ll treasure this always but can’t find the words. The words that he found were, “If you could maybe not mention—”
“Don’t worry. I promise. I won’t.”
And then silence.
“Okay,” said Kweku.
“Okay,” said Kehinde. He waited for a moment then got out of the car.
“I love you,” said Kweku, but the door closed on “I.”
Kehinde didn’t hear and went inside.
• • •
He waited one moment, then backed down the driveway. He didn’t stop driving until Baltimore, seven hours, straight, I-95 stretching out like dark ocean. Flat. Driving without seeing, under moon, into black. He checked into a hotel near Hopkins Hospital, one he remembered. When he called home at last she was sobbing, but clear. “Kehinde won’t tell me what happened, says he promised. You’re scaring me. What happened? Where are you? What’s wrong?”
He said very simply that he was sorry and he was leaving. That if she sold the house at value, she’d have enough to start again. That it was quite possible that he had never actually deserved her, not really. That he’d wiped them out trying to beat the odds.
“Beat the odds. What does that mean? Are you in danger? Have you been gambling? Are you in physical danger? Where are you?”
(He was nowhere.) He said it was for the best and that again he was sorry. That she’d be better off without him. “I’m letting you go.”
“What does that mean?”
All his love to the children.
“When are you coming home?” she wept.
He wasn’t.
13
Sixteen years on he stands bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, his bare feet in the grass, partly wheezing, partly laughing at what’s happened and how: the heartbreak he fled from has found him.
At last.
Of course when he left he assumed he’d return, to his life as he knew it, his family, his home — perhaps sooner than he did, in some days, not some weeks — but never once did he guess they’d be gone. Up in smoke. And could Fola be faulted? Was it she who overreacted, packing up as she did, shutting down in despair? Left to weep in that house, with its secret interconnections, its drafts and its shadows, original doors that wouldn’t close, and four kids, a serious boy and two liminal beings and the baby — without him? Deserted. Alone. Not “helpless.” Never helpless. She had never been helpless, not as a child even, pampered in V.I. before the war. She was a natural-born warrior, a take-no-shit Egba (or half of one, the Igbo mother dead giving birth), had faced feats far more fearsome than a mountain of debt not her making, than loneliness, than aloneness, despair. But not desertion, she would argue. Not deceit, disappointment. Not placing her trust in, then being let down.
Was it she, as he’d argued, perhaps knowing he was wrong, or rather knowing he had lost, that it could never be made right, and so right as one is when he’s being done wrong by a person he’s wronged: unable to believe in his righteousness? Was it she who betrayed him, having herself been betrayed? Who, having left a life twice, simply did it again? Or was it he, packing nothing, driving away in desperation, too exhausted to explain it, too exhausted to think: of other hospitals, of starting over, of finding work in another state, of being reasonable, of being responsible, of being a father, of being forgiven?
So going. With the whole of it down to an instant. Waiting, watching, for that moment (one) then backing down the drive. When if Fola had come to some window, seen the Volvo. When if Kehinde had made some small noise coming in. When if he had reconsidered, somehow come to his senses. Or considered in the first place. Gotten out, gone inside. In his scrubs, bowed and broken, but in, into the foyer, down the hall, into the kitchen smelling of ginger and oil. Instead of a question becoming a body there at sunrise, every morning, there to greet him with its weight and warmth, what if, when he opens his eyes. He thinks of it now and can scarcely comprehend it. That he lost her. That he left her. That she left him.
And how.
Days: in a stupor, barely sleeping, barely thinking, too afraid to call home, eating rice, drinking shame, back to the Goodwill on Broadway to buy a suit for a meeting at Hopkins (no positions), Johnnie Walker, Kind of Blue. Weeks: bled together. Six, eight weeks, then ten. Until one night, past midnight, simply driving back home. Snow beginning as snow begins in Boston, harmless, lazy, light, a blizzard by nightfall but flurries to start, pale fluttering flakes in the pink winter dawn. Fear in his fingertips, quivering belly, but certain he’d be able to argue his case, to confess and explain, beg his children’s forgiveness, to earn back their trust, win her over again. Instead of: arriving at seven A.M. to a FOR SALE sign in front and the statue in back, which he took almost unthinkingly before speeding to the flower shop (shuttered), then the public school (children withdrawn). Racing, now sweating, to Milton in panic, looking desperately for the headmaster to ask for his son and somehow chancing upon Olu himself in that coat, the beige coat, with an L.L. Bean bag on his back. Before either could speak, a shrill bell ringing, steel, slicing clean through the distance from father to son, standing awkward and conspicuous in the sudden swirl of students issuing forth from brick buildings to cheer for the snow. Olu speaking clinically, describing a patient. “She cries every morning. She thinks I don’t hear. She says you up and left us without a dime in the bank. The twins are in Lagos. The baby’s still here.”