Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Olu frowned, tensing. “The baby, I meant. What is it? The gender?”

“Oh. Right.” Kweku smiled. “It was a girl,” then, “It’s a girl,” but too late. Olu heard the past tense and glared at him, wary.

“What’s wrong with the baby?” he asked, his voice tight.

“The curse of her gender. Impatience.” Kweku winked. “She couldn’t wait.”

“Can they save it?”

“Not likely.”

“Can you?”

Kweku laughed aloud, a sudden sound in the quiet. He patted Olu’s head, this time finding his hair. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor never ceased to amaze or delight him. Or appease him. His other son couldn’t have cared less what he did, irrespective of the fact that they lived off his doing it. He didn’t take this personally. At least he didn’t think he did. At least he didn’t show it when his cameraman was around. He was an Intelligent Parent, too rational to pick favorites. A Man’s Man, above petty insecurities. And a Well-Respected Doctor, one of the best in his field, goddammit! , whether Kehinde cared or didn’t. Besides. The boy was un-impressable. Perpetually indifferent. His teachers all said the same year after year. Preternatural ability, exemplary behavior, but doesn’t seem to care about school. What to do?

Kehinde doesn’t care about anything, Kweku told them. Except Taiwo . (Always except Taiwo.)

“No,” he answered Olu, his laugh lingering as a smile. Olu’s eyes lingering on the side of his face. Then falling away. They walked farther down the hallway in silence. Suddenly, Olu looked up.

“Yes, you can.”

• • •

All these years later when Kweku thinks of that moment, he can picture the look on his fourteen-year-old’s face, when Olu seemed to become — in the course of one instant — an infant again, raw with trusting. The boy was transfigured, his whole face wide open, his eyes so undoubting that Kweku looked down. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor broke his heart (for a second time. He hadn’t felt the first). He shook his head weakly and looked at his hands. His fingers still frozen from running through the snow. He was teetering on an edge, though he didn’t know which, some strange gathering force building within and against him. “She doesn’t have the heart for it—” he started, then stopped. They’d reached the glass door to the nursery.

• • •

Kweku peered in.

There it was.

On the left.

Three and a half pounds, barely breathing, barely life.

With all kinds of patches and tubes sticking out of it, it looked like E.T. going home.

Olu pressed his hands to the Plexiglas window. “Which one is it?” he asked, cupping his hands around his eyes. Kweku laughed softly. Olu didn’t say she . Only it, one, the baby. Little surgeon in the making. He pointed to the incubator, the handwritten tag. “That one,” he said. “Baby Sai.”

• • •

It was the simplest thing, really, just the littlest slip ( Sai ), speaking aloud as he tapped on the glass, but he’d been teetering already on an edge when it happened, when pointing to the incubator he spoke his own name. And the two put together, like combustible compounds — the sound of his name breathed aloud in the space and the sight of the neonate fighting for breath — suddenly somehow made “Baby Sai” his. It was his.

She was his.

And she was perfect.

And she was tiny .

And she was dying. And he felt it, felt this dying, in the center of his chest, the force gathered, raw panic, overwhelming his lungs, filling his chest with a tingling, thick, biting, and sharp. He heard himself whisper, “There she is,” or something like it, but with the constriction of his larynx didn’t recognize his voice.

Neither did Olu, who looked up, alarmed.

“Dad,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

But Kweku couldn’t help it. He was barely even aware of it. The tears came so quickly, fell so quietly. She was his. That precious thing there with her toenails like dewdrops, her ten tiny fingers all curled up in hope, little fists of determination, and her petal-thin skin, like a flower that Fola could name by its face. Fola’s favorite already. And she. Waiting, hopeful, still propped up in bed, sweating, bloodied. His, too.

You have to do something .

He had to do something. He wiped his face quickly with the back of his arm. The salt stung the wound there. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder. Reassuring himself.

“Come on then.”

• • •

The next ninety-six hours he stayed: in the staff lounge, befriending bleary interns who slept there as well, consulting colleagues, researching treatments, obsessively reading, barely sleeping, until his opponent was defeated. Until the newborn was named. And not Idowu , that goat-meat-tough name Fola loved for the long-suffering child born directly after twins. He picked Sadé when they brought the child home from the hospital on the grounds that two Folas would become too confusing. His first choice was Ekua , like his sister, “born on Wednesday,” but Fola had established sovereignty over naming years back (first name: Nigerian, middle name: Ghanaian, third name: Savage, last name: Sai). Sadé picked Sadie when she started junior high on the grounds that her classmates pronounced Sadé like that anyway. But a nurse picked Folasadé in the first place, inadvertently, that last night at the Brigham.

Another accident.

He was alone in the nursery with the infant after midnight, in the scrubs from the appendectomy at Beth Israel days before, fully aware that some parent passing the Plexiglas window might mistake him for a homeless man and very well should. The bloodshot eyes, the matted hair, that half-crazed look of consuming obsession: he looked like a madman, a madman in scrubs, gone broke trying to win against the odds. (He had no way of knowing he would one day become this.) The nursery was dark, save the lamps in the incubators. He rocked in a chair with the girl in his lap. The girl had been asleep for over an hour at this point but he carried on rocking, too exhausted to stand. The chair was too small, one of those tiny plastic rocking chairs that hospitals put in nurseries, apparently for neonates themselves.

The Irish-looking nurse with the paunch and the rosacea appeared in the doorway with her clipboard and paused. “You again.” She leaned against the door, frowning-smiling.

“Me again, yes.”

“No, no. Please don’t get up.”

She entered without switching on the overhead fluorescents, kindly sparing them both the sudden violence of light. She made her rounds quietly, scribbling notes on her clipboard. When she reached the little rocking chair she looked down and laughed.

The infant’s hand, with its five infinitesimal brown fingers, was attached to Kweku’s thumb as if holding on for life.

“You must really love her,” she said. Boston accent. Luff-ha . “You’re here more than I am, I swear it.”

Kweku laughed softly so as not to wake the baby. “I do,” he said simply. “I do.”

The two words returned him to Baltimore, to his wedding day, to Fola, young, resplendent in maternity dress in that low-ceilinged chapel, red carpeting, wood paneling, their first night of marriage, ginger ale, plastic flutes. Whereon two other words came sort of floating like little bubbles to the surface of his thoughts. And popped. Too soon . Had they married too soon? Become parents too soon? If so, what might that mean? That it wasn’t “really love”?

The nurse, still in Boston, turned off the lamp in the incubator. Kweku, still in Baltimore, closed his eyes, rocked back and forth. “But I do really love her.” The nurse didn’t hear this. She checked the label on the incubator. Baby Sai. No given name.