The house was on a tree-lined street, wide with white houses for friends of the British, the odd Lebanese. They took her to a bedroom painted pink, a funny shade of pink she’d find decades later while shopping for mulch. (Home Depot. She was passing through the paint aisle when she saw it, from a distance, just the color swatch, familiar at once. She read the name. Innocence. Laughed out loud, bought it. Four gallons for the nursery for the child who follows twins.) She stood in the doorway and looked at the bedroom. Reverend Wosornu, behind her, “And this is your room.” She walked in and sat on the narrow twin bed, the stiff mattress; she stared at the candy pink walls. She looked at the man in the doorway. Said, “Thank you,” then lay down and slept, without eating, three days. On the fourth day the wife Vera Wosornu came to see her. Mrs. Wosornu looked older, looked old (fifty-four). A fat woman, haggard, no light in her pupils. She wore a black wig that slipped back, showing grays. “It’s time to get up,” she said. “Come eat your breakfast.” When Fola rolled over the woman was gone.
Breakfast was cocoa bread, pawpaw, eggs, coffee. Mrs. Wosornu ate noisily. Thick, buttered lips. Reverend Wosornu sipped his coffee, listening attentively to the radio. Pogroms in Nigeria ongoing. He switched this off. “Sir Charles Arden Clarke is a friend of the parish. Do you know who that is?”
Fola shook her head no.
“Eat,” said Mrs. Wosornu.
“Former governor of Gold Coast. And the founder of the Gold Coast International School.”
“It’s Ghana International School now,” snapped Mrs. Wosornu. “Eat,” she snapped at Fola.
Fola picked up her fork. The woman’s commands were so tactlessly forceful; it was almost a relief to be told what to do. She put a piece of pawpaw in her mouth but couldn’t chew it. She moved it around until it dissolved on her tongue.
“They’ve agreed to accept you,” said Reverend Wosornu, excited. “In ten years they’ve built quite a fine little school.”
“You’ll take your GCEs, then go to college in America.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call me Mother.”
“Yes, Mother,” Fola said. The word sounded strange to her. Empty.
“That’s better.”
“Me, I’m just ‘Reverend.’ Not Father, not yet.”
“Speaking of fathers, yours was kind to our Sena.”
“Vera,” sighed the reverend, but his wife forged ahead.
“He can’t have any children, our Sena. Such a pity. Only son. And you know what the villagers say.” Fola didn’t know what the villagers said. The proverb was recited with mouth full of egg, “‘The woman who has one child only, has no child.’”
The reverend kept smiling. “Infant mortality,” he explained.
How: she finished high school, seldom speaking, barely eating. When the war came next summer, she didn’t much care. She skimmed the local papers, saw the pictures, heard the rumors (slaughtered civilians, starving children, German mercenaries, Welsh) but this “Nigeria” they spoke of was nowhere she knew of, not home, not a place she could see, so not real. She lost too much weight and excelled in her studies, having done it all in Lagos with her erstwhile private tutor. Her classmates took to calling her “Biafran,” but jealously. They envied her hair, glowing marks, tragic glamour. She allowed herself to be fondled by one out of boredom. He lived up the road in East Cantonments. Yaw. He was actually quite handsome, an athlete, later soldier, but modest in ambition (how: Kweku was her first). She sat her exams and came first in the year. She cut off her hair, tired of brushing. A scholarship was arranged by more friends of the parish at Lincoln University, where Nkrumah had gone. She’d wanted to go to Kings College as her father had, but didn’t object.
To the airport again.
How: she crossed the tarmac to the aircraft with the smell of dripping evening in her nostrils thick with soon-arriving rain. She didn’t turn to smile or wave or look back at the terminal at the reverend, whom she’d rather liked, or Vera, whom she’d hated. So almost didn’t see him coming running in his three-piece suit. The passenger behind her had to tap her on the shoulder. “Miss?”
And there was chubby Sena, jacket flapping out behind him like a broken magic mantle. “Fola, stop!” Fola stopped. He was wheezing when he reached her. “Thank goodness I caught you. How are you?”
She shrugged.
“I’ve been meaning to come. The firm is still operating, if you can believe it, in Lagos.”
She shrugged.
“But I should have come sooner, I know.” He hugged her now, pressing an object against her. An envelope. “He left this. Don’t open it yet. I was afraid that my mother would steal it so I waited.” He hugged until she had it, then he backed away. “Go.”
How: when she got there she opened the envelope. United States dollars in crisp bounded stacks. Enough to start over, to remain in America, enough not to have to watch fat women eat or take handouts or need them or ever go hungry or go back to that airport in Ghana again.
• • •
A passenger behind her is tapping her shoulder. “Miss?”
She turns, startled. The passenger points.
And there they are, all of them, watching her, waiting, here, back at this airport in Ghana again.
ii
“She doesn’t look happy to see us,” says Sadie.
“I’m sure she’s still shocked,” Kehinde tells her. “Don’t worry.” But pulls down his sweatshirt sleeves, covering his wrists with them, worried that Fola has noticed the scars.
“You remember my mother,” Olu murmurs to Ling, thinking how much this airport has changed since he came.
Ling whispers, awestruck, “She’s beautiful, Jesus.”
Taiwo feels inexplicably angry.
• • •
All of them slow to a stop and stand staring. Someone should do something, everyone thinks. Kehinde steps forward to hug her but Fola, thrown, cradles his face, rather thwarting the hug. “A beard,” she says, laughing.
“Don’t cry,” he says gently.
“Oh, am I?” Still laughing, she wipes off her cheeks.
The others come forward now, forming a huddle, and taking their turns with their hugs and hellos. “Ling,” breathes out Fola. “I’m so glad you made it,” while Sadie waits, watching them, trying not to scowl.
• • •
She knows this moment. This welcoming smile. This weightless expression of genuine warmth such as only exists for like-a-member of the family. Actual members get heavier welcomes. “And Sadie,” says Fola, her two hands extended, her mouth folded over, head tipped to the side. Sadie shuffles forward, suddenly nervous at the audience, intending a calm, very grown-up embrace, a stiff “Mom. Good to see you,” but the smell is overwhelming, and she feels herself crumbling, sobbing desperately instead.
The smell of her mother — so instantaneously familiar, the smell of baked goods and Dax Indian Hemp, Fola’s twenty-year-old hair product, green with brown speckles like something she uses for gardening, too — and the feel of her mother, so impossibly yielding, the skin on her arms and her hands like a child’s, are a welcome too warm, undiluted, wide open for Sadie to bear it, to feel she deserves it. She buries her face in her mother’s soft shoulder and grips her waist tightly. “I’m sorry,” she slurs.