Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“Baby.” She covers her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” She enters the bathroom and kneels on the floor. She places her hands on his kneecaps and rubs them. She hugs his legs, resting her head in his lap. “I’m so sorry. What happened?” She looks at him. “Tell me.”

“A heart attack.”

“When?”

“Their time, morning. I guess.” He speaks in a monotone, entirely without feeling. He shakes his head, squinting, trying to break from the fog. Still, there is nothing but dull, heavy numbness. He stares down at Ling, trying to see her, to feel. “We’re going to Ghana. Tomorrow. My family.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

Too quickly, “You can’t.”

Both of them start, at the clip of this answer. Ling stands up, tensing. He straightens his back. As in fire at will . “Meaning what?” she shoots quickly. He shakes his head, presses his palms to his eyes. “I have the week off. I’ll come with you.”

“I know that. And thank you for thinking to offer to come.”

“ Offer to come? You’re my husband, remember? It’s kind of a thing a wife offers to do.”

“Don’t, Ling. Don’t do that.”

“Do what, please?” Reloading.

“We said nothing changes. No name change, no rings.” He rubs his head, frowning. Has not meant to say this, and tries to explain it, “We’re still who we were. You said ‘you’re my husband’—”

“You are.”

“No, I know that. But we said it wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t change things with us. Those words, husband, wife, they’re just words, they’re not mandates—” He stops, grabs his head. “I don’t know what I mean.”

“I think you do, Olu.” She shakes her head quickly. “I won’t come to Ghana.”

He looks at her, pained. “I should go with my family.”

“I thought I was your family.”

“No,” he says, desperate, “you’re better than that.” He squeezes his eyes shut to bid back the tearfall. He feels her small hands on the sides of his face. Her lips on his lips, then the taste of her toothpaste. The smell of her, Jergens, Chanel No. 5. “Ling,” he says, breaking. He still does not touch her. She holds his head gently and he doesn’t resist. “I don’t want to be a family,” he says to her, anguished, as a child says, exhausted, I don’t want to go to bed. “I don’t believe in family. I didn’t want a family. I wanted us to be something better than that.”

The phone in his scrubs pocket rings now, abruptly. For a moment he ignores it, not wanting to move. He wishes to stay here forever, in this posture, his head on her breastbone, her hands on his cheeks, in a space very small and contained, like a bathroom.

“Should you answer,” she says gently. Without the question mark.

He pulls out the phone without looking and answers. “Hello, this is Olu.”

“It’s Kehinde.”

“…” with shock.

“Kehinde. Your brother.”

“I know who you are.” He is smiling. He is lying. He doesn’t, never has. Has never known Kehinde, never really comprehended how he moves through things so loosely, never straining. That he’s somehow in this manner become a remarkably successful artist only confuses Olu further. Still, he’s smiling. “There you are.” The sound of his brother’s soft voice and soft laughter, the same as their mother’s, is soothing somehow. “Where are you?”

“In Brooklyn. With Sadie and Taiwo.”

“…” More shock.

“Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Olu says. He blinks, trying to process. “You said you’re all there, right?”

Here, Kehinde’s voice catches. After a moment, “We’re all here.”

“So, tomorrow,” says Olu. “We’ll meet you at the consulate. We’ll get our rush visas, eat lunch, and go straight.”

“Who’s we?”

“Ling and I. We’re both coming,” he says, as she kisses his forehead, her tears on his face.

“I’m glad.”

“I’ll call Mom, let her know we’re all coming.”

“Great. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

“’Til tomorrow.”

“Take care.”

Fola sits smoking at the edge of the lawn in a beach chair she’s lodged by a palm in the shade. She knows that she shouldn’t — she was married to a doctor and raised one; she knows that it’s foolish at best — but she puffs with great relish, as an act of defiance, or acceptance, complicit with the riddle of death. To do or not do this or that to live longer, as if longevity might be purchased with exemplary health, this is foolish, she thinks. Surely vegan nonsmokers get struck by stray bullets and cars all the time?

The house staff is working, pretending to ignore her, Mr. Ghartey at his post by the thick metal gate and the housegirl Amina washing clothes in a bucket, the houseboy little Mustafah, the car in the drive. When she arrived there was a driver, a Brother Joshua, very awkward, a Christian fanatic with a thing for the brake, who had ferried her about in sudden violent lurches forward, blasting Ghanaian gospel music without respite. He is gone. When she ran into Benson at MaxMart last Thursday she mentioned the need and he said he would help, but she rather enjoys getting lost, driving, aimless, windows down, zipping along the ocean. Alone. She’ll coast down La-Teshie Road past the black targets, the training site, gallows of Ghana’s last coup, with the maudlin Atlantic lapping languidly at the seaweed and plastic debris on the poorly kept beach. It could be quite scenic if anyone cleaned it, if anyone cared that an ocean was there. It could be as gorgeous as Togo, Cap Skiring. Instead, it is Ghana, indifferent and blessed.

But seen from her beach chair, the house has some promise: a bungalow built on a half-acre lot, quite a rare thing to find here, she’s told, a full parcel; now developers pack cookie-cutter homes on such plots. The problem is the light flow. There aren’t enough windows, and the windows aren’t big enough and face the wrong way. Instead of a view of the garden, for instance, the den boasts a view of the barbed border wall; the windows in the bedroom are long, skinny rectangles with views of the shrubs at the side of the house. The whole thing looks huddled up against its surroundings, making do, hunkered down, with its eyes tightly shut, as if dreaming of its natural habitat (Aspen), some mountainside wood and not luscious Accra.

Still, the bones are redeemable , she thinks, dragging slowly and squinting her eyes as she blows out the smoke. If she knocked down some walls and inserted some windows, big sliding-door windows, the place might just sing. Kweku would love it , she thinks, without warning, and sits up, alarmed by the visceral pain. He is gone now comes next, with another tsunami, subsuming, washing over and rising within. A bit like contractions. A thing that comes, passes. She bends at the waist, waiting, closing her eyes.

“Madame, are you fine?” Mr. Ghartey is calling.

Amina rushes over with suds on her hands. “Madame, can we help?”

Fola looks at the woman, much prettier than she’d realized when seen this close up. Amina peers down at her, genuinely worried. Fola feels the worry and smiles, nodding, “Yes. Would you mix me a drink in the kitchen, Amina? One quarter cup of vodka from the freezer, not the bar. Three quarter cups of tonic water, four solid ice cubes. A single slice of lemon, no seeds in. All right?”

Amina nods. “Yes, Madame.”

“ Thank you, Amina.”

Amina frowns. “Yes, Madame.” Hurries inside.

Fola leans back with her hand on her pelvis. A newly found “quadrant,” the lower-down fifth. A strange and deep longing here, throbbing, almost sexual — in fact, only sexual, she notes with some shock. And why on earth not ? she thinks, laughing, now crying, when he was her lover for all of those years, and damn good, if she’s honest, it was that which convinced her, the sheer desperation with which he made love, as if all that he wanted for all of those hours (and hours: he was careful, and thorough, and slow) was to get to the bottom of it, all of the longing and wanting and striving through which they had lived, was to plunge to the depths of it, all the way into it, naked and sweating, afloat in the void.