She should have come sooner.
She laughs, looking out at the streets of Accra. Two years imagining the look on his face, she is here and her father is gone.
v
He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it was, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green. This is familiar.
What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts. A man without legs has a boy without shoes wheel him carefully through the traffic in the middle of the road to the cab, where he knocks on the passenger window and holds up a hand missing fingers for coins.
“Go, go, go,” shoos the driver, suddenly agitated. He rolls down his window to shout in coarse Twi.
Kehinde peers down, sees the man, is embarrassed. He rifles through his sweatshirt for five single bills. “Don’t shout at them, please, sir,” he says to the driver. The driver looks back at him, sweating and stunned. Kehinde rolls his window down and holds out the dollars. “Here,” he says. “Take it.” The driver sucks his teeth. The boy without shoes takes just one of the dollars. The man without legs smiles, a smile without teeth. “Take the rest,” Kehinde says, but the boy doesn’t hear, and the taxi starts moving as the stoplight turns green.
“They’re thieves,” says the driver. “They come from Mauritania. They steal from the tourists.”
“We’re not tourists,” Kehinde says.
The driver starts laughing, one golden tooth glinting, as if to say only tourists give beggars U.S. dollars, but quickly recovers and rolls up his window, asking casually, “So where are you from?”
Kehinde looks at Taiwo, who is paying no attention, then back at the driver, not much older than they. He can sense in the man a very particular form of aggression, mounting, familiar from Lagos and London and New York, to do with the fact that they’re both brown-skinned males unequally yoked by the side effects. He’d rather be ferrying some tense blond-haired couple in his taxi than them — brown, well dressed, the same age — whom he takes for American and assumes to be rich, at least richer than he by some cruel twist of fate. “Have you ever been to Africa?” he adds proprietarily.
“Nigeria and Mali.”
“But not Ghana,” he insists.
Kehinde shakes his head, and the driver looks satisfied. Kehinde feels the need to add, “Our father’s from here.” The instant he says it he wishes he hadn’t, for now comes the surge he’s been keeping at bay in the form of a headache, a sudden searing something in the space between his eyebrows so sharp he gasps, “Was.”
The driver doesn’t hear this. “Where’s ‘here’?” he asks, challenging.
“Ghana,” mumbles Kehinde. It sounds like a lie.
“Oh yeah? Where in Ghana?” The driver is smirking.
“I don’t know where,” says Kehinde, now closing his eyes.
“You don’t know where he’s from, your own father,” says the driver. He sucks his teeth, glancing at Taiwo, still mute. “Why don’t you ask him?”
As it finally hits him, “He died,” Kehinde answers and starts, at the laugh.
He can’t quite imagine what his sister finds funny, but she appears to be laughing, outright, her back turned. “Taiwo,” he whispers, thinking maybe she’s crying, but she turns to him dry-eyed.
“He’s gone.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t stop laughing.
The driver looks incredulous. “Father na’ dead and she laugh for,” he scoffs. But says nothing further, just turns on the radio (inconsolate gospel) and looks straight ahead.
3
Both the taxi and Mercedes pull into the drive where the house staff stands waiting at attention, in a line. Sadie has been sleeping for the twenty-minute ride and now opening her eyes says, “Where are we?” Olu and Ling side by side in the back, neither moving nor speaking, peer out at the house. Fola peers also with hands on the wheel as if considering whether this is the right place or not. One breath, then she stirs, pulling the key from the ignition and her sunglasses from her forehead. “We’re home, I suppose.”
The staff comes forward as the car doors open. Everyone alights and stands looking at the house (except Kehinde who — much to the annoyance of Taiwo and the disturbance of Olu — stands looking at Ling). There is the usual combination of disorder and determination that occasions the arrival of a group at a residence: half of the bodies moving busily, lugging suitcases, half of the bodies looking awkward, out of place, trying to help, to be of use but not to get in the way of the bodies who know where to go, what to do. With the lightly frantic energy of awkward introductions, with no one quite knowing what to say or to whom, smiling at no one, shifting positions, making lax observations. Where’s the bathroom? Longing suddenly to be on one’s own.
Fola holds shoulders, steers bodies down hallways. “This is the room where you two boys will sleep.” She pushes in Olu and Kehinde and continues, “The girls in here,” pushing in Taiwo and Ling. “The baby—” she stops herself. “Sadie’s with me. I’d suggest a good nap now. We’ll eat at half six.” Any questions? No questions. “Good. Welcome to Ghana.” She takes Sadie to her bedroom, and leaves them to sleep.
ii
Sadie stares up at the wood-paneled ceiling, alone in this room down the hall from the rest.
“The bloody A/C died this morning—” said Fola, then bent as if nauseous and didn’t go on.
“Mom, are you sick?” Sadie asked, stepping forward, but Fola stood straight, waved a hand, shook her head. “Comes and goes. Going” was her cryptic nonanswer. She turned on the fan, left the room, closed the door.
Sadie stares up at the blades in the shadow, like bats on the ceiling, too hot all the same. Through the thin bedroom walls she can hear other voices but can’t extract words from the soft throbbing din. Olu, maybe Kehinde. A phone in the hallway. The pretty girl, Amelia or something like that. “Please, Madame. Telephone.” The rustling of footsteps, then Fola’s voice, gravelly, the words indistinct. Someone’s laughter. Her mother’s, she realizes after a moment. But higher than normal, a burst of it, false.
She rolls to her side, where she glimpses a photo in light slipping in from the stiff wooden blinds. Just barely she makes out the faces, the location, and suddenly remembers: why Greenpoint seemed familiar: this strange-looking warehouse on Oak Street in Newton, the famed home of Paulette’s Ballet Studio. Winter. Her family stands bundled in coats close together on the sidewalk outside, the recital just over. The Man from the Story holds her up on his shoulders; she is still in her costume, red lips, pink tulle tutu, her four-year-old potbelly pushing unabashedly against the pink skin of the leotard, laughing. Taiwo and Kehinde wear matching red earmuffs, neither looking at the camera, Fola looking at her. Olu looks dwarfed by a massive brown coat. A stranger, another parent, must have taken the picture.