Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Samuel cut the engine. All was silent but for the gulls’ crying and Maud sniffling as she turned her face to the window. The lot was empty at this hour, and the absence of witnesses almost made Samuel want to turn back — to start the engine, leave the grounds, and make the long drive back to Aster, as if by painstakingly reversing his actions he could somehow undo the whole summer, undo its every disastrous turn. But that would be impossible, and wrong. The twins needed to be here. And though he’d never understand their abnormality — the fits of dark brilliance that were their best and worst trait — neither could he let it continue.

Samuel and Maud stepped from the car. The sun dropped a thin layer of warmth over the cold pavement. They led their children into the brick building.

It is a little-known truth that enemies make for discreet roommates. Avoidance in a household, even when vengeful, is far more pleasant than too deep an intimacy. So it was when the Porter family moved in, bringing with it smells, unnecessary yelling and a resentful and suspicious gratitude. They took a full Tuesday to move in, dallying more out of spite than because much had survived the fire. Samuel watched them carry their belongings across the dead field. The six children made a game of it, propping as much as they could manage on their heads and laughing when it all fell off. Porter yelled for them to stop acting like asses, and the whole crew settled around the pot of hot palm-nut soup and fufu Maud made for them. It was the only meal the two families ever shared, later dividing more for privacy’s sake than from disliking each other’s company. Maud and Akosua still continued to cook together, Akosua finally forcing Maud to speak Fante, despite Maud having made a vow almost two decades earlier to forget the tongue of her birth.

So again, as in history, the Tyne house became a boarding house. But things were not as bad as Samuel had imagined. Within a week he found himself living a kind of bachelor’s existence, working in his study uninterrupted, socializing if he liked. He told himself all had turned out well, considering. There had been no more fires after the twins’ departure. With the recovery of general safety, the people of Aster stopped abusing the Tynes, judging their new poverty as penance, and even began to ask after their health again. Strange as that was, Samuel accepted it, pleased to be a part of something again, to wander about without being watched, to have children overrun his house without having to discipline them when they broke something. And no one bothered him in his study, so when the chaos overwhelmed him, Maud knew where to look. He used Ray’s money to repay most of his debts, and worked hard to make up the difference. He was obliged to do work he’d formerly turned down; radios, kitchen appliances, any wired gadget with burnt nerves. The pay was paltry and the housecalls humiliating, but he otherwise enjoyed working from his study. Saul Porter kept up his ventures, peddling on the side to repay his debts. The arrangement, considering its nature, could not have run more smoothly.

Though Maud and Akosua often laughed together, behind closed doors Maud criticized the woman with such passion Samuel feared the Porters would hear her through the walls. Her anxiety exhausted him. She obsessed over the updates from the facility; Samuel would sometimes wake at some crazy hour of the night to find her running the paper against a light bulb, as though the watermark might tell her more. Samuel feared for her.

“Please be reasonable, Maud,” he pleaded.

“What, so I won’t ruin our good name in Aster? Don’t think I don’t see you eyeing me. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve got designs to put me away, too.”

For a while he bore her blame, but it soon overwhelmed him. He began to answer her by saying, “If your hand makes you go amiss, you cut it off.”

His own anxiety couldn’t be suppressed much longer. To calm himself, he took to cultivating a cocoa yam plant in the sunlit kitchen. Hayes’ Drugs began stocking his stomach medication again, but he often woke spitting blood.

When Maud demanded, “Who will care for us in our old age?” Samuel would reply: “Old age means death, and death will be a pleasure after all this. I hope they throw us in a ditch and refuse to let our children remember us.”

Samuel fluctuated between indifference and guilt. He’d begun to suspect he’d acted out of spite. He hated to admit he’d made disastrous choices, and had been making them since he’d been sentient enough to choose. And to use his faulty judgment to decide others’ lives … no, he had been right to do so. They needed help. But to accept their “psychosis”—he forced such thoughts from his mind. It was more comforting to think of where he’d gone wrong in other spheres of his life, such as coming to Aster. The whole thing had been a fool’s dream, this ridiculous belief in the living perfection of the past. There is no place in the world untouched by time.

The days passed, and Samuel considered visiting the twins. The need to see them worsened mid-September, when a yellow bus began to whisk the children of Aster to Edmonton schools. Samuel thought of Ama, whom he’d called to make sure her parents had returned safely. André and Elizabeth Ouillet were barely civil, and Samuel wondered what Ama had told them. To know she thought ill of him bothered him, but as with life’s other pains, he weathered it.

Every few weeks Maud would make a dramatic proposal to go and visit them.

“They’re not broken toasters, you know,” she’d say, the humour always off-kilter. “You can’t just shuffle them off for someone else to fix. You can’t dispose of them.”

Silent, Samuel would watch her lay out her Sunday clothes on the bed, her fingers trembling as she straightened their hems and wiped the lint from them. Her pain was most acute at these moments, and often he’d leave the room to avoid a confrontation. Sometimes he wouldn’t make it to the door before, greatly irritated, she’d say, “Oh, stop eyeing me like that! You have no right. You have no right to scrutinize me like that.”

He’d leave, only to find her in the same room hours later, the dresses put away, absorbed in darning his socks.

“Not this Saturday,” she’d say, though he wouldn’t have spoken. “We’ll visit them next week. I’ll send a letter for now, and a package with all their favourite food.”

It was obvious that Maud would never be able to bring herself to visit. Samuel understood. It would simply be too much for her. She couldn’t bring herself to see what she had done to them. And even if she were to undo it all, to bring the twins home and start all over, nothing that passed between them could ever absolve her.

For Samuel’s part, he didn’t mention visiting them, but resolved to go if she could ever bring herself to do so.

Despite the chaos in his life, or perhaps because of it, he found himself drawn to Akosua Porter. Less haughty out of her element, she maintained a dignity he thought bewitching at the most inappropriate of times. He thought of her as he worked, as he paused from work, and after months of abstaining he masturbated to distraction. She was full-breasted, a lovely beige colour, and her blemishes were like freckles on that ageless face. He thought he would die the day she stepped from the shower in a red terry robe, smelling of lavender. She paused, giving him an annoyed look, and with the boxes clogging the hallway, she had to gyrate past him to get by. In an impulse that frightened both of them, he put a hand on her hip and pressed against her. He hardly knew where the lust had come from, was as terrified by his actions as she was, but watching her rush away he only feared she’d tell his wife. After days of panic, trying to figure out if Maud knew, he decided she didn’t. And seeing how easy lust was to get away with, he started to put himself in situations where he could indulge it. The day Akosua responded, throwing open the door of her bedroom, Samuel collapsed on top of her, wriggling out of his pants. It was over as soon as it had begun; unsatisfied, they writhed away from each other as though they could hardly believe themselves. It was awful. The wrinkled thinness of their legs, the asthmatic panting, the briefness of it; all of this made them conscious of their age, and the indignity in this adolescent behaviour. Pulling up his slacks, Samuel wondered how to ask her not to say anything to his wife, but Akosua spoke first: “Tell someone,” she said, “and I will castrate you.”