Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

But doesn’t sleep deeply.

The telephone rings.

At first she thinks: no, I’m still dreaming . Ignores it. But then wonders how, if she’s dreaming, she’s thinking. So opens one eye. Hears the ringing. Picks up. “Hello?” she murmurs.

“Fola,” he answers.

A man. But who has this number? Not him. Not Olu. Not Kehinde. The voice is too deep. “Who is this?”

“It’s Benson,” he says.

“Benson, hi. What time is it?” she asks, looking around for a clock.

“I’m sorry to call you so early…”

No clock. “What time is it?” she repeats.

“Just, you gave me this number last Thursday…”

A man who is stalling.

She perceives this in an instant and sits up now, worried. “What is it?” A very brief silence ensues. “I’m sorry,” he begins — so she runs through the quadrants: alive if not well, fish in water, they’re fine. She knows that he’s crying though doesn’t know how. She hears nothing. She comforts, on instinct, “Don’t cry. The children are fine.”

Which he thinks is a question. “Yes,” he says quickly. “I’m sure they’re all fine.” A cough, one soft sniffle, and then there is nothing.

“Benson?”

“I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry.”

Now she knows what and knows who and is silent.

“Fola?”

She wonders how she missed it. Not the child. “Where are you?” she asks.

“At the house,” Benson answers. “His wife—” then stops short. “I’m so sorry.”

Not the father. The roaring returns without warning and, rising, the tide from the middle. “Not him,” Fola breathes.

“She called me at home and I came straightaway, but the heart had — he — it was too late.”

Benson continues in his sonorous voice, a dead ringer for Luther Vandross. Among the various disjointed things she now thinks, Fola remembers meeting Benson at Hopkins that day. Twenty-three years old in the hospital lobby with Olu tucked into her wrappa , asleep. Benson in scrubs with his skin of burnt umber, the taller of the handsome Ghanaians.

The other one.

“Kookoo!” the bulbul cries.

“ Please …” Fola whispers. “Not yet please no Kweku- no .”

Olu walks in no particular hurry out of the hospital, puts down his coffee, puts down his phone and starts to cry. Five quick sobs, drumbeats— your-fa-ther-is-dead —then he wipes his face, closes his eyes. Snowflakes fall, land on his nose and his lips. It is one A.M., zero degrees Celsius.

“So sorry.”

He opens his eyes to find an elderly woman, not five feet tall, fur coat, below him. She has just made her way through the handicapped exit and stopped by his side on the sidewalk outside. In the peculiar silence that invariably accompanies the opening act of a storm in the nighttime, they stand there together and watch the snow swirl through the black then the bright of the hospital sign.

She gestures to the lobby through the glass doors behind them, then touches him, winking. She says in a rush, “I know I should have stayed with the kids. Well. The kids . Jesus. Forty years old is our youngest, my youngest. Two boys. Brett and Junior. Bruce Junior, like my husband. He’s always had impeccable timing, my Bruce. Twelve twenty-one A.M., December twenty-first, time of death. How’s that for good timing? Yes, sir. I love it at night when it just starts to snow. It just goes by so quickly, though. Who did you lose?”

“—a doctor,” he says, his voice cracking on I’m . “I’m a doctor.”

“I could tell by your outfit,” she says. “But I assumed you weren’t standing here mourning a patient.” After a moment she laughs and he joins, clouds of breath. She pulls out a Cohiba Esplendido in a handkerchief. A small silver lighter. Sparks, loses the flame. Olu cups his hand around the lighter, fingers trembling. “Your fingers are shaking,” she says.

“Sure is cold.” He says foolish things like this whenever he’s nervous, short sentences that start with sure is and how ’bout .

“Dressed in those,” touching him, “cotton pajamas? You know we’re in a blizzard here, darling. Yes, sir. Doesn’t look like much now, never does to begin with, but wait until sunrise. Not here. Don’t wait here. You’ll catch a death of a cold — oh dear me. Did I say that? Not what one says at such times. Here, take this.”

“No. I’m a—”

“Doctor. You said.”

“I don’t—”

“Take it. I promised my Bruce that I’d smoke it for him. If he died, when he died. Like he did when our children were born, our two boys. Pack of three. But I’m old.” She laughs again, takes one good drag with her eyes closed, then puts the cigar—“ That’s a dear”—in his mouth. A nurse inserting a thermometer. He bends to receive it. With his face there before her, she touches his cheek. “You’re crying.” A statement. She holds his chin, gently, and wipes off his cheek with her handkerchief. “There.” She pats his cheek, smiling, and adds before leaving, “The cold always makes me cry, too.”

• • •

Olu walks, smoking, up Huntington Ave. Streetlamps drip gold into puddles of light. The snow gathers strength as he makes his way home, leaning forward, lips chapping, arms naked. No coat. Saturday-night revelers stumble and shout. A few cars pass slowly, no traction, in fear. No one seems to notice someone walking in the street itself. Nude arms, blue scrubs, and the drumbeat.

• • •

Ling is asleep with her back to the door. He stands in the doorway and watches her sleep. The light cuts her body in two on an angle, her hair on the pillow an oil spill. Slick black. The bedroom is white, all white, everything white. She thinks it excessive, a sham wouldn’t hurt. She’s left her red shirt on the floor, a suggestion. He picks this up, making no noise. Looks around. He goes to the Eames chair (white), clutching the shirt as a child would a blanket or bear, for the smell of it. Chanel No. 5, Jergens lotion, cherry-almond. He tries to say her name, wants to hear it. Says, “L—.” But hears instead Fola, her voice flat and distant, the shoddy connection, “Your father is dead,” and the few things she told him, the pause that came after, that hush between heard and received, before hurt.

He asked every question and heard every detail—“on his face,” “in the grass,” “Benson found him like that,” “seems he walked outside, fell down, and couldn’t get up,” “six A.M.”—but she didn’t have answers. She wept. He set down his stirrer, dripping soymilk on the tabletop. He looked around the house staff lounge, packed at this hour. Emergency department interns, coked, Red Bulled, and coffeed, their eyes dim and bloodshot with fear and fatigue. Days before Christmas, wee hours, Sunday morning, the sorrows of the Saturday left at their door: desperate barroom brawls, suicide attempts, crashes presnowstorm, hypothermia among the homeless. He didn’t want to go home. This is what he misses in his second year of ortho now, buzzing through shifts high on sports drink and drive. Orthopedic surgery is intensity by appointment: fallen grandpas, fallen quarterbacks, procedural, well paid. He chose it for these reasons, the procedures above others, the physicality, the precision, nostalgia for track. But he misses the rush of ED, the desperation, the prospect and hovering presence of death.

Fola. “Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Please call your siblings? To tell them that…?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind? You’re okay?”