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 generaclass="underline" 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