A plane overhead.
2
Fola stops at MaxMart to pick up the candles. The cashier smiles blandly. “Yes, ma. Right this way.” She looks at the candles and laughs. “No, not this kind. The small ones, for a birthday cake.”
“This is all we have.”
She drives to the airport, unnerved by the silence. She turns on the radio. It appears not to work. Then blasting through static comes Joshua’s gospel, off-key and forlorn, like a shrill cry for help. She switches the station. Evangelical Mormons. She switches again. BBC, all bad news. She turns off the radio and peers at the traffic. The usual crush on the new Spintex Road. She rolls down the window and peers at the junction where a policeman appears to be making things worse, shouting, “Bra, bra, bra, stop,” with conflicting gesticulations, the newly installed stoplight not working (no power). She rolls up the window and hums, without thinking of it, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” two bars of it, stops. Where did that come from? she thinks, frowning, honking. That hymn, which he always used to sing before work, perfect pitch, though if ever she mentioned it, his singing voice, he’d shake his head, laughing, “Just sound waves,” and stop.
• • •
Arrivals is teeming with Christmas returnees deplaning in coats with freight tons of checked luggage. She pushes her way to the front of those waiting, not roughly, but firmly, in the Nigerian tradition. And stands. She is early, she knows, thirty minutes, but couldn’t brook waiting alone in the house with the cake on the countertop sitting there, done, with the look of one waiting for something as well. Better here: closeness, the throng, humans being, aunties wailing as prodigals appear half-asleep, pushing forth from the crowd to grab, hug, sob, and welcome, the tearful theatrics of old women’s happiness. Better here, sweating, surrounded by talking, the low steady throbbing of heartbeats in wait, hundreds, all of them waiting in collective anticipation of some beloved somebody’s coming back home. Bodies. Familiar. She never told him how familiar, she is thinking, thoughts drifting as thoughts will in heat as one waits standing still with still time all around one, a space into which enters Past, seeing room. Some motion, slight movement, away from the moment, and off one goes, drifting, from this day to that:
to the airport, same airport:
“Be careful, this is Ghana!”
“My friend, I’m from Lagos.”
And I’ve been here before.
Why didn’t she tell him? It wasn’t a secret. He knew that she’d fled at the start of the war, that she’d somehow left Lagos to finish her studies and showed up at Lincoln in bell-bottom denim, but he never asked how, how she got to Pennsylvania, as if her life had begun where their shared life began, and she never proffered answers at night in the dark after he had gone diving and held to her, wet. Then, it seemed normal to lie there beside him alive in the present and dead to the past with the man in her bed, in her heart, in her body but not in her memory and she not in his. It was almost as if they had taken some oath — not just they, their whole circle at Lincoln those years, clever grandsons of servants, bright fugitive immigrants — an oath to uphold their shared right to stay silent (so not to stay the prior selves, the broken, battered, embarrassed selves who lived in stories and died in silence). An oath between sufferers. But also between lovers?
She doesn’t know. Maybe. So much she never asked him. So much she never told him. The aching for example. “Enough,” she would say, which he took to mean “stop,” and he would: floating gently to the surface, coming up, thinking she was exhausted when in fact it was the opposite: she feared his exhaustion. She was aching for more. More, always more of it, more of him, alclass="underline" having opened, having been opened, wanting only to be filled: but never saying it, just holding him, lying, in silence, he sleeping beside her, he fulfilled, she unfilled. Why didn’t she tell him? And other things also. Why she never said yes when he asked her to come to those parties in Cambridge with colleagues in khakis and cheese cubes on toothpicks and immigrant maids and the requisite child trotted out after drinks to rend “Für Elise” proficiently before trotting to bed. Yes, they were boring. But the more it was heartbreaking, to watch him seek approval from far lesser men in his own fresh-pressed khakis, small eyes wide with hope that he, too, might soon be so at home in the world. Why didn’t she tell him? “You don’t have to impress them,” she might have said, “your excellence speaks for itself.” Instead of “the dishes” or “Sadie has a recital” or “Olu needs help with his science fair booth.” Instead of the silence, protective, destructive, like mites on a daylily nibbling away undetected for decades. And the biggest thing. The precedent. How she got to Pennsylvania.
How she packed up and left.
• • •
How: she had lain in that bedroom, in Lagos, unable to move or to think or to breathe with her head under covers, her hands on her ribcage, her chest emptied out, until nightfall. The housegirl returned as she did every Sunday and let herself in through the door at the back. She’d prepared the whole dinner and laid out the table before she thought strange that the house was so quiet. “Master!” she called, up the stairs, down the corridor. “Master, are you home? Miss Folasadé? Ah-ah.” Only then had Fola left his bed covered in sweat to ride, trembling, to the second-floor kitchen. “I’m here.”
The housegirl Mariama grabbed her forehead when she saw her. “A fever, you have a fever, where’s your father?” she cried.
Fola shrugged, groggy. “He went to Kaduna.”
“No!” cried Mariama, slumping promptly to the floor.
How: they’d just sat there, neither speaking nor eating, at a dining table set for two, built for fourteen. The Nwaneris from their portrait watched them sitting, black John seated, too, white Maud beside him standing, hand on husband’s epaulette. The food was set out, Fola’s favorite, egusi, but neither of them touched it; after an hour it was cold. After two her father’s partner at the law firm, Sena Wosornu, leaned frantically on the doorbell. Fola looked at Mariama. The housegirl was trembling, rocking, clutching her elbows and shaking her head, noiselessly mouthing some prayer. Fola took the shaking of the head to mean “don’t get the door” and stayed seated. Mariama lost her nerve. She stumbled to the entry, from which Fola heard whispers, then loud sudden sobbing, then Sena’s high voice. “The baby will hear you,” he scolded. The baby. What her father always called her, even then, and his friends.
Later that evening Sena came to her bedroom. He knocked on the door, came to sit on her bed. She was lying on her back with her feet on the wall on a poster of Lennon, her head hanging off.
“Fola,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”
She didn’t lift her head up. “I know, I know, I know.” Sena was upside down, bending to face her.
“Your father—”
“Don’t say it,” she said, and sat up.
He said she should pack. They would leave in the morning. His parents lived in Ghana. She’d be safer with them. If anything ever happens, take the baby to Ghana. Don’t leave her in Nigeria, her father had said. She packed a gold aso-oke, a birthday gift, records, his thick kente blanket and bell-bottom jeans. She didn’t pack photos or dresses or teddy bears. The details came later. They left before dawn.
How: at this airport, much smaller, as crowded, they landed, midsummer, July 1966, all the colors so different from Lagos, more yellows, the smell like the smell of a broken clay pot. A man with an Afro gone gray came to greet them, all bushy white beard, laughing eyes, wings of wrinkles. “You must be Fola!” He shook her hand. She shook her head. She didn’t know who she must be anymore. “People call me ‘Reverend.’ Reverend Mawuli Wosornu. Sena’s father,” he said, though he looked far too young.