Radio silence.
“He’s gone” made her laugh, and he couldn’t hear why.
He was blinking with sadness when he stepped from the taxi and stood for a moment to steady himself with the sun slanting down at an angle toward him, his eyes blurring slightly against the rich light, and was bringing a hand to his eyes for some shadow when, shifting, he caught that quick glimpse of Ling’s face. They bear no resemblance. It was just a distortion — the angle, the sunlight, the sadness, the shadow — but there beside Olu she looked in that moment exactly like one Dr. Yuki.
vi
Fola pauses briefly in the hall between bedrooms to listen for voices behind the closed doors. Even in silence she senses the bodies, their presence as strange as their absence once was. She remembers the first time she felt it, one morning, unremarkable among mornings when she thinks of it now (though it goes that way always, it seems, with revelations, the banality of the context as striking as the content):
the odd Monday morning in Boston in April, that strangely named month, so misleading somehow, the very sound of it, April, all open, pastel, telling none of the truth of relentless gray rains. Her husband had called from a Baltimore pay phone to say he was gone and was not coming home (late October); she’d lain in their bedroom that evening and remembered him leaving the kitchen that day. She’d been standing at the counter fixing breakfast for the children and had glimpsed him only briefly as he floated from the room, but had heard him calling “’Bye!” from the foyer, then “I love you!” She’d answered in Yoruba, I know, “Mo n mo.” His phone call at midnight came so unexpectedly, so thoroughly out of nowhere, that she couldn’t quite think. Couldn’t listen, couldn’t reason, could only lie sobbing, remembering the morning, his voice from the door. By the time she woke up that next morning, eyes swollen, her tear ducts were dry and her grief had gone cold. Gone, he was gone, very well, getting on with it, one could mourn only so much in one life; they were broke, she discovered, so sold the house (winter), moved the children to a rental at the edge of a lot overlooking Route 9 but at least the same school district, two little bedrooms, her “bed” on the couch; settled debts, found a lawyer, got divorced (early spring); brought the twins to the airport and Olu to Yale (end of summer); blurry autumn, then Christmas, she and Sadie, then New Year, then snow warming slowly to rain…
until one day in April, an unremarkable morning, she was heading to the kitchen to make herself tea, having dropped off the baby at the bus stop in wellies, the radio playing softly, and softer the rain — when she paused in the hall in between the two bedrooms and noticed the silence. And that she was alone. Gone, they were gone, all the voices, the bodies, one lover, four children, their heartbeats, the hum, heat and motion and murmur, the rush and the babble, a river gone dry while she’d wept. She remained. She stood there, a remnant, as conspicuously alone as a thing left behind on a beach in the night, suddenly aware of the silence, its newness and strangeness, the sound of her solitude, clear, absolute.
As strange was that silence, their absence that morning, is what she feels now: that she isn’t alone. She stands in the hall in between the two bedrooms and feels them there, silent if not yet asleep. She chuckles at the feeling. She doesn’t quite trust it. She returns to the kitchen. Is there something she forgot? She turns off the radio so as not to wake Sadie; the walls are so thin in that bedroom. Something else? The phone call from Benson, who is coming for dinner. Amina to prepare the egusi at four.
Nothing needs doing.
She is stuck with the thinking.
She returns to the chair in the garden to smoke.
It is foolish, she knows, at her age to address it, to let the thing in as a fully formed thought, but it forms itself anyway; she thinks I’ve been lonely and laughs with surprise at the tears that spring up. It should not perhaps come as so shocking a revelation, seems obvious now that she’s met the truth’s eye, but it hurts all the same: a dull aching, like hunger, a hunger for a taste that she almost forgot.
Almost, but didn’t.
She closes her eyes, hugs her waist with one arm as she blows out the smoke, with the taste of companionship mingling with nicotine, hurting with happiness to have them all home.
4
Dinner. They are scooting their chairs to the table — a change in the air, each one sensing the weight, with the Reason They’re Here dawning jointly on all of them now that they’re formally gathered like this: a collective: beholden to collective desperation, to meanings that flourish in long-lasting silences, in down-turning glances, in moments of awkwardness masked as politeness — when someone turns up.
The bell, out of nowhere; a sound out of context; even Fola forgets she’s expecting a guest. They hover, midscoot, with their hands on the chair legs and wait for some seconds for someone to speak.
“Madame,” says Amina, from the dining-room entrance, three steps leading down to the den. “Please, a guest.”
“Who is it?” says Fola.
“A sir please.”
“Where is he?”
“Outside please.”
“For God’s sake, at least show him in.” But she hasn’t had company since arriving in Ghana and knows that the staff has no protocol yet. She’s still rather shocked by their efforts this morning, all springing to action with newborn aplomb from the moment they appeared in the driveway, five strangers and she (still the strangest one), no questions asked. Perhaps they prefer it, a house full of people instead of just Fola with clippers in shorts? “Come,” she adds gently, and accompanies Amina. She finds Benson waiting outside the front door.
With a bottle and flowers. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, stepping forward to embrace her.
For a moment she recoils. The velvet bass voice and the smell of black soap and cologne mixed together too strong, too familiar: a wave rises, passes. She clutches the doorframe, then waves her hand, laughing, “I’m fine, really, fine. Please. Thank you, and welcome.” She reaches for the flowers to waylay a second attempt at embrace. “We’re just getting started.”
“I’m not interrupting? In Ghana it’s rude to be early.”
“Thank God. Six is an uncivilized hour for dinner, I know, but with—”
“Jetlag—”
“Exactly.”
“Of course.” He swallows hard, nodding. “And the children?”
“Hardly children.” She laughs. “They’re all here, we’re all here, through the den.” He follows behind her to where they’re all standing, their hands on the table now, eyes on his face. “My darlings, this is Benson. A friend of your f… of the f-family’s,” she stumbles. “From Hopkins.”
“Hello.” He holds up the bottle and smiles at them sadly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry for your loss.”
They stare at him blankly, the expression before coldly, even Ling, as if he were the cause of this loss, being the first one to mention it here in this pause with the facing of facts on the tips of their tongues. Sensing this, Benson adds softly, to Fola, “You all must be shell-shocked. God knows that I am.”