“That’s not the point,” Sadie said at last, at which Fola looked up, at which Sadie looked down. With the counter between them (and harder things also). “I want to spend Christmas with a family.”
Fola smiled. “You have a family of your own.”
“We’re not a family,” mumbled Sadie. Very quickly, very softly.
That face, as if punched.
“Whatever do you mean?” Fola carried on smiling. But tightly. “I can assure you, you all came from me.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean, baby?”
To which Sadie, “I AM NOT A FUCKING BABY ANYMORE!”
Fola dropped her spoon with shock. Sadie burst into tears with shock. She’d never in her life sworn or shouted at Fola and couldn’t seem to stop herself now. “My baby! Baby Sadie! Baby, baby — at nineteen fucking years old? I’m not a baby! I’m not a child! And I’m not your replacement husband! It’s been, what, Mom, fifteen years, since you left Dad, or Dad left us? I mean, don’t you think you should start to date, to have a life of your own? I’m nineteen — practically twenty — years old. I’m sick of having to be here with you. On the weekends. At Christmas. On the phone. It’s too much. I want to live my life!”
Fola tipped her head to the side, her brows knit together, her lips folded down. But said nothing. She laughed, a sound like sobbing, turned, and left the kitchen.
Sadie waited a moment too long, then followed the sound of the footsteps on wood down the hall, past the room for the children (one bedroom) to the back, the master bedroom, but got there too late. The bathroom door was swinging shut. The clicking of a little lock. “Mom,” she said. She knocked on the door.
“Go,” said Fola. “Go live your life.”
She knocked again. “Please, Mom, I’m sorry.”
But Fola said nothing and didn’t come out. Sadie sat by the door of her mother’s locked bathroom, that chamber of secrets, and waited, an hour, maybe more, while the sun set outside, dripping orange, and the bedroom turned dark and then moonlit, pale gray. Finally she stood, knocked again, said, “I’m leaving,” and waited for Fola to open the door. She didn’t. “I love you.” No reply. Knot in stomach. She went to the bedroom, expunged a late lunch. Then back to the kitchen, the scene of the crime, where she cleaned up the mess, called a Red Cab, and packed; took a cab to the station, the train back to school, still unsure what she’d meant by the things that she’d said.
Fola didn’t call that night. Fola hasn’t called her since. A few days later Olu called to say their mom was moving. “What do you mean, moving?”
“She’s moving to Ghana.”
“When?”
“She’s leaving Friday.”
“What?”
“That’s all she said. And that you still haven’t talked. You should call her.”
“I know.”
But she hasn’t.
She wants to tell Fola that she loves her, that she’s sorry, that she didn’t for a moment mean to say those horrid things, and that however it appears from that apartment in Coolidge Corner, whatever Fola may think, that she isn’t alone — but can’t: for two of the four things aren’t true, and she doesn’t have Fola’s new number.
• • •
Your mother is gone, she thinks, curled on the bed in her clothes on the blanket that smells of the past, of a time, very brief, when they lived in a house with the Man from the Story and they were still whole, and she cries very softly for all that is true, for the loss of that man and for missing her mother, how light things became and how lost she’s become, how alone they all are, how apart, how diffuse. What she couldn’t tell Fola is why she hates Christmas, why she longs to disappear for that week in St. Barth’s: so as not to feel the distance, the heartbreaking difference, between what they’ve become and what a Family should be. At least in St. Barth’s with the bronzed Negropontes she’s spared the iconography: the commercials on TV and the vitrines at the mall and the carols and pronouncements that this is the most wonderful time of the year. At least in St. Barth’s she can observe from the outside the fighting and laughter, the family at play, and a real one, a real family not pretending to be happy because it’s Christmas but happy because it’s St. Barth’s. The beach and the sun and the boats smack of falseness, the truth in the open, that the whole thing’s a sham, roasting chestnuts and sleigh bells, her greatest fear realized: she doesn’t belong. But isn’t meant to. Not here.
What she couldn’t tell Fola is how much less hurtful it is not to belong to a family not her own than to sit there in Boston, just the two of them smiling, rehearsing all the reasons that no one comes home. Even if they do — Ling and Olu and Taiwo, and Kehinde from London — it won’t be the same. Fola thinks she can change things, but Sadie knows better, knows all they will do, all they can do, is lie. And doesn’t wish to brazen it out at the table in the apartment Fola moved to over a weekend on a whim, with her brother and the twins and their mother all lying with their laughter about feeling, each, utterly alone, either eating something Nigerian and delicious made by Fola but out of context somehow, given the tree and the snow, or some traditional Christmas fare even further out of context and not delicious for being bought at Boston Market. She weeps at the thought of it. The lot of them together, scattered fivesome (down one) eating Boston baked beans. And cries herself to sleep in this manner, with her clothing on, with no one coming to look for her, for hours, undisturbed.
Someone is tapping on the bedroom door. “Sadie?”
She is sleeping on the kente throw, still in her clothes. She opens her eyes to the shining gray dorm room and squints out the window: a blanket of snow. Sunrise, pale pinkness, the storm’s grand finale of absolute silence, the whole world washed white. She peers at her iPhone clock. Seven in the morning. She rubs her eyes, swollen from crying and raw. And is thinking that she dreamed it — the phone call, the kiss — when the someone taps lightly, cracks open the door.
There she is. Gorgeous, inappropriately dressed Taiwo, her face flushed a ruddy shade of brown from the cold, peeking her head in the door with the snow on her dreadlocks and furry white coat smelling thickly of cologne. “You’re here,” she says, breathless. “Thank God you haven’t left yet.” And other things also, about having been wrong, having rushed to Grand Central when they finished their call for a train to New Haven, having seen her mistake: it wasn’t true that there was nothing, no one, nowhere to go, there was Sadie turning twenty, Baby Sadie, at school… none of which Sadie follows for her deafening astonishment, the same two words blinking, on, off, in her head. Such that all the years after, when she thinks of this moment — of her sister on the threshold of her dorm room at Yale, covered in snow, in high heels, closing the door, falling silent, coming to lie at her side on the extra-long twin, wrapping her arms around Sadie like wings of white fur that smell strangely of father, someone Sadie doesn’t know — she’ll hear only her voice in her head in the quiet she came she came she came she came she came.