Why do we live here, he wondered, suddenly angry, in grayness, like shadows, like things made of ash, with their frail dreams of wealth overwhelmed by faint dread that the whole thing might one day just up and collapse? Was there something about them that kept them in limbo despite their intelligence and all their hard work? And if so, could they not just accept their position and settle in here among the dignified poor? He thought of his classmates, the rich ones in Brookline, the poor ones in Metco, and he in between, somehow stuck in the middle with none of the comforts of in-group belonging, ashamed and afraid. He knew, though they hid it, that his parents had suffered, perhaps were still suffering in some unseen way; that it lightened their burden to think that their children would not have to suffer — and yet here he was. Top of his class: at a high school he hated foremost for the school bus that ferried him in, like an immigrant, a foreigner, a native to brilliance but stranger to privilege, bused in, then sent home. Formidable athlete: who loathed competition, was nauseated with dread before taking the field, though he hid it, the panic, the sheer desperation that launched him to victory still breathless with fear. Having learned that his father was saving for prep school, he’d determined to perform at the height of his gifts (for if only he lived where he learned, as a boarder, as a permanent resident, surrounded by green, he could shake off the grayness that clung to his corner, his place in the shadowy gap between worlds).
He was thinking of shadows when he looked up and saw her at the window of the nursery, a shadow herself. It seemed she couldn’t see him. Or saw but saw through him, as if he were part of the grayness, a ghost. He wanted her to smile or to call from the window to admonish him for wearing such a featherweight jacket, but Fola just stared, rocking backward and forward. He went back inside, to the nursery (née closet).
“Mom?” he said softly.
She didn’t stop rocking. She drew on her cigarette. “Come in, love,” she blew. He went to the chair and stood awkwardly beside her, unsure he should touch her. They looked at the snow. “Do you like it? The color?” she asked after a moment.
“The gray?”
“Here. The pink.”
He considered the walls. “Seems good for a girl.”
“For a girl.” She was laughing. “Yes. I had a room with the same color walls.” Then abruptly, disjointed, “You can’t just keep losing and accepting the losses, or else what’s the point? I don’t know. That’s the question. If they just keep on dying — my baba, my baby — then why love at all?” She looked at him blankly. “Do you know what I mean?”
He didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant.
“Look at you. You’re trembling,” she said. “Is the heat on?”
The closet was sweltering, the heat on full blast. “I’ll check,” he lied, eager to make a swift exit. “Do you need anything?” he asked her.
“My daughter. Alive.”
His father returned, and his mother recovered, but something was different, still hard to say what. Fola was enraptured by “Sadé” the newborn, Kweku by buying a five-bedroom house, newly finished with training, now paid as a surgeon; the new house was massive, a cavity. Hollow. The center of gravity had shifted for the family, though no one seemed to notice the movement but him: instead of Kweku and Fola at the center, together, a twosome talking softly, laughing softly, present, home, there was now the small open space left by their absence, she lost to the baby, he lost to the work. Into this space slipped their Dreams for the Future, a vision of home a good decade ahead in which both of their projects had come to fruition (grown-up babies, private practice) and they could re-merge. This became the nucleus, of nuclear family fame — Future — with rings fanning out from the core, a new order, decentralized, disaggregated efforts to climb up the mountain each man for himself. Gone was his place between twosomes, the Eldest, a broker midway between parents and children; he no longer seemed special to Kweku or Fola, their firstborn, the prize horse, nor close to the twins.
With the center dissolved, they’d closed ranks, turning inward. An autonomous unit, they stopped seeming fragile. They whispered and chuckled, conspiring with glances. They didn’t need protecting. They didn’t need their brother.
And perhaps because this brother was fourteen years old and had just had a growth spurt and lost his old voice and was stranded in the anteroom of Awkward before Handsome, ejected from boyhood with one graceless thrust, he noticed very suddenly that he was not beautiful, at least not like they, not a beautiful boy. The privilege was Kehinde’s, both beauty and boyhood, two states he had never quite noticed before but missed desperately now that he knew what he wasn’t. Around this time someone said, meeting them both, “One got the beauty, the other the brains,” with a >, not a =, there implied in the equation, by the reaction (patted shoulders, forced laughter, changed subject) while Olu stood smiling, gone red with the ache, so it was true, he was lesser than… Jealous of Kehinde.
Some twenty years later the feeling returns: the same clamoring ache as they stood in the drive and he followed the feeling of being observed to his brother observing his girlfriend, lips pursed. Ling would choose Kehinde was what he thought next, promptly losing the scent of the past of the smell of the sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil, as he reddened himself. If ever it came to it, Ling would choose Kehinde; any woman in her right mind would make the same choice. He was glamorous and famous and wealthy, an artist, whereas Olu was a resident. Cause and effect. Though he couldn’t quite bear it, to lose her, he thinks, with his hands on the ache and his eyes on the fan and his brother beside him as silent as threat is. Or more to the point, to lose her, too.
v
Kehinde can sense that his brother’s not sleeping, perhaps that his eyes are still open (and filling) but lies there unspeaking, unnerved by the feeling he’s had since they got to the house and got out. “He died,” he said, hurting, she laughing, choir bellowing (“no shadow of turning”) — and then they were here: at the front of a house that brought to mind Colorado, a houseboy appearing with cash for the taxi. A very pretty housegirl was fussing with Fola, the others climbing out of the dusty Mercedes, the houseboy lifting cases from the trunk of the taxi, the rusty door grating as Taiwo alighted. He opened his door and stepped out, blinking slowly, assailed by the light and the sting of her laugh and the thought, she was right, though she’d said it to hurt him, though he used to be able:
he can’t read her thoughts.
For years he had. Read — or more accurately heard—them. As if they were words in her voice in his head, only snippets but clear ones, and clearer the feelings that went with the thoughts; he could feel what she felt.
He still doesn’t know when he lost good reception. It wasn’t in Nigeria, for all of the horror. After college or the last time he saw her or earlier? He doesn’t trust his memory when he tries to think back. The wrist-slitting scrambled his memories, rearranged them. The archives remain but are all out of order. He can’t tell what age he was when such-and-such happened; couldn’t say in which country he was in which year. He knows that at some point the line filled with static, then little by little went properly dead. He senses his sister — still experiences her presence like the space between magnets to a finger passing through — but can’t hear, so doesn’t know, her now.