Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Ling appeared now in her coat, holding Olu’s.

Aaaaaaa-men. “Lacrimosa,” the choral climax.

Dr. Wei cleared his throat, but before he could speak Ling grabbed Olu and left. Out the door, just like that.

• • •

Then laughing together, a flute and a cello, the car windows open to birds and a breeze.

“You were there the whole time?”

“I was listening from the bathroom. Lee-Ann was on speaker. I love you so much.” She was crying. “Let’s get married. Tonight. Go to Vegas.”

“Right now?”

“It’s been fourteen years, fuck it, why not? Have we ever been to Nevada? Wait, where’s the Grand Canyon?”

“Arizona.”

“Go to Logan,” she said, and he did.

• • •

Then the Little White Wedding Chapel six hours later.

Ling-and-Olu in Vegas.

Of all places.

• • •

Now she wakes herself up with her tossing and turning. “Hey,” she says groggily, rubbing her eyes. She peers at him sitting in scrubs in the chair and assumes that he’s sliding his shoes off, or on. “Coming or going?”

Caught. “Going,” he lies. He puts down her T-shirt, embarrassed, and stands. He goes to the bedside and kisses her softly. Says, “Go back to sleep,” and she does.

• • •

He goes to the bathroom and closes the door. He sits on the toilet seat, taut from the lie. The mirror in front of him shows him a face, raw and ashen, eyes red from the thing, and the cold, and a phone peeking out from his little scrubs pocket. He pulls this out, sighing, and dials.

And what was it this time that bade her from bed to the closet, the coat and the short coat-length dress, to the street, to the gray of the soon-coming snow, to the cab, to the Village, and (back) to his bed?

What was it this time? Insomnia? A nightmare?

Was midnight already uptown when she left: just the man and his pug hurrying home saw her go, turned their heads as she passed in the thigh-length fur coat. (She does this, has always done this since Everything Changed, these little scenes from the movie she shoots in her head: frazzled lead enters frame, looking right, looking left, spots the taxi, leaps in, and zips off in the night.) She didn’t zip. She rode slowly through Saturday traffic, the streets of New York clogged with seekers of love, to the old stately home of her old stately lover where Taiwo got out, paused to look at the snow. Downward it danced through the black and the quiet, the yellow-gold lamplight, and onto the ground where some stuck and some melted, a funny thing, really, that something so soft could remain, could endure.

And pausing looked down the short block at the windows — some black and some gold, after midnight downtown — as she’d done as a child driving home in the Volvo, her hands pressed against the cold glass in the back. Those houses had seemed so impressive, imposing, set back from the road on low slopes or with gates, Brookline brick with black shutters or Tudors with turrets, ten bedrooms at least as compared to their five. But it wasn’t this grandeur that dazzled her mute. What bewitched her was all those warm windows. The glow. All those warm, wealthy people she peered at inside, with their dining rooms yellowed by chandelier light or their bedrooms turned amber against the night darkness, against the outsideness. The families implied. For though they, too, lived there— her family, in Brookline, not five or ten minutes from where she now passed — she had never once felt what she saw in those windows, that warm-yellow-glowing-inside-ness of home.

Even in the beginning, before things went pear-shaped (before Kehinde came in from the car without sound, up the stairs, down the hall, to her room where she’d been watching, where she was waiting in the windowsill, sat down, and wept), there was the sense in her house of an ongoing effort, of an upswing midmotion, a thing being built: A Successful Family , with the six of them involved in the effort, all, striving for the common goal, as yet unreached. They were unfinished, in rehearsal, a production in progress, each performing his role with an affected aplomb, and with the stress of performance ever-present for all as a soft sort of sound in the background. A hum.

There was “him,” straining daily to perform the Provider, and Fola’s star turn as Suburban Housewife, and Olu’s as fastidious-cum-favored First Son; the Artist, gifted, awkward; and the Baby. Then she. Determined to deliver a flawless performance, to fly from the stage chased by thunderous applause, Darling Daughter of champions, elementary school standout, the brightest of pupils in bright-eyed class pictures. No one asked her to do this. Not him, never Fola. No one mapped their joint progress toward the one goal — were they there yet? had they made it? had they become a Successful Family — but she knew to keep going, to keep striving, by the hum.

The families in the windows were Successful Families already, had finished the heavy lifting generations ago, were not building or straining or making an effort; the goal had been reached. They could rest now, calm down. At night, through their windows, she saw them there, finished, with silence between them in place of the hum, placid familyness captured in paint above mantels, with feet up on cushions, at rest and at home.

But how could she answer when Fola would ask her, about to start laughing, perpetually amused, “What are you always staring at back there, my darling?”

“The houses.”

“The houses? You have a house of your own.”

But not a home was the difference she saw even then, peering in from the car, from outside, as they passed — and saw now as she paused on the sidewalk outside. Lighting a cigarette. The cliché. But not a home.

“Is it you?”

He had cracked the door open at the top of the stoop to look down at the sidewalk. At first she didn’t turn. She stared down his block at his neighbors’ lit windows, thinking partially of how she looked to him. Short white fur coat. “For God’s sake, it’s freezing out. What are you looking at?” He followed her gaze down the block. Now she turned.

And there he was, lovely and solid and ruffled in sweatpants and sweater, an incongruous scarf.

“It is I,” she said, blowing out smoke with a flourish. “Did you miss me?”

With aching. “Come here.”

And she went.

• • •

What was it this time, at midnight, near sleeping, that bade her to rise, to get dressed, and to go? When she knows , she thinks now, that to go is to start the thing over right back where they ended it last?

She rides in the cab with her head on the window, her coat rather flattened for its hours on the floor, looking out at the Hudson, New Jersey in lights, feeling light-headed, empty, an odd sort of calm. And remembers now: midnight, alone in her room, having gone to sleep early, the rare weekend off, bolting up in the bed in the dark barely breathing, then crying for no reason at all.

She forgot.

It happened so quickly — this moment on waking, the tears which began without cause and then stopped — that she didn’t remember, not two minutes later, and not until now, what had woken her up. It wasn’t the insomnia, her lifelong companion, nor the “feelings of emptiness,” as Dr. Hass says (a misnomer, says Taiwo: there is just the one feeling, only one way to be empty, only one way to feel it). It was something entirely different, what she felt before going and remembers (too late) as she makes her way home, those forgotten few seconds of some bizarre sorrow, intense beyond reason, a force field of grief. Yes. This is what woke her. A force field of sorrow. But how can she answer Dr. Hass, who will sigh, “So we saw him…,” Monday morning on Central Park West, with the trees out the window all dressed up in snow, bare brown branches like legs in a short white fur coat, with the gesture, ceremonial, that goes with the sigh: the raising of the glasses (which may well be fake, Taiwo thinks, fashion glasses, a therapist prop) from the tip of her nose to the top of her head. “Did he call you?”