Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

So then.

The thought that she hasn’t been thinking.

Stepping at last into light after years at the edge of awareness, a shadow of consciousness, peeking then hiding when her mind turned its way. Dr. Hass has it wrong, as she’s long since suspected: it isn’t the father. Or not him alone. It was Fola who sent them to Femi that summer like two fatted calves to the altar. Not he. How has she missed this? The source of her anger. The rage without name: that she sent them away, that she shipped them to Lagos when she should have known better, when she must have known somehow what would happen, who he was, her own brother, her own family. For the cost of tuition. The thought in the open. That mothers betray. And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don’t become huggable like Sadie , Taiwo thinks. They don’t become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls — really, they’re generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn’t work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows. They end lonely. Desired and admired and alone in their tents, where they weep through the night. In the morning they ride, and the boys see them coming. And think: my, what brilliant and beautiful girls. Hearts broken, blood spilled. Riding on, seeking vengeance. This a most curious twist in the plot: that the vengeance they seek is the love of another, a mother-like lover who will not betray. At the thought she laughs harder. To think of her lover, his scarf and his sweatpants, his motherly smile. And his wife and his children. Prepackaged betrayal. A foregone conclusion. “Marissa, thank you.” And… scene .

She stares at the water, eyes blurry for seeing things clearly, unsure what to do or think next. (If she hears it the first time, her name doesn’t register.) She lights another cigarette. She smokes this one slowly. The sun beating down on her shoulders and back is a comfort of sorts, a reminder of skin, a reminder of pain in a different dimension, outside of her body, outside of this grief. She lies on her back in the sand, which is damper than she realized sitting upright, a welcome surprise. She stretches her toes in the direction of the waves, but the tide doesn’t wash in this high at this hour. And is lying there, smoking, her locks full of sand, when she hears it again.

Someone calling her name.

• • •

“Taiwo,” and again from a distance, insistent. “ Tai -wo!”

She props herself up.

Sees her mother.

Fola, as if conjured, calling, “Darling!” Coming toward her. The little boys pointing, informants, behind her. Fola, out of nowhere, storming frantically toward her, white linen pants billowing, gesturing. (All but the torches.) “Kehinde said you went to the bathroom, but I looked there. The driver said he saw you walking here toward the beach. What happened, my darling?” she’s saying, coming closer. “Did you get hurt? Can you stand?” She reaches Taiwo, and kneels.

Perhaps it is the proximity that overwhelms Taiwo, having Fola so close after all of these years? Something. She snaps, leaping up, startling Fola, who stands, reeling backward. “DID I GET HURT ?!” Taiwo screams. Almost as if a thread that’s been dangling gets pulled on, or catches on something, the whole thing unraveling. She is laughing and crying and screaming, “What happened ? Mom, what did you think was going to happen to us?” And then, because Fola looks utterly baffled, Taiwo sneers, “I’ll tell you what happened, sure, fine.” Though she promised she wouldn’t and hasn’t for years, though she never once imagined the moment like this (empty beach in the daytime, young boys standing, staring), she tells, without pausing, how it happened, how it started:

• • •

how they shared the second bedroom, the one given Kehinde, with the creaky twin beds because hers was too big and too cold with the air conditioner, which she couldn’t turn off (it was too high to reach), whereas his didn’t work. That first night she came to his door in her nightdress. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” Her brother said yes.

At first she took the one bed and Kehinde the other, but his room was too hot not to sleep by the window, so after a week they just shared, head to foot, like sardines in a can, sheets thrown off to the breeze. After two, she stopped sneaking to her room before sunrise, afraid that Uncle Femi would discover and scold them; they’d seen him only twice since they’d arrived in Nigeria, at the elaborate Sunday lunches he threw for his friends. The rest of the time he was virtually absent, locked away at the top of the four-floor apartment, accessible only by an elevator that required a code, which the twins didn’t have, so an invisible world. They could hear their uncle’s guests always coming and going, riding up, riding down, music playing, all hours, the raucous parties on Saturdays, women laughing, glasses smashing, muffled shouting, Niké complaining — but they never went up.

They lived on the second floor like two (wealthy) orphans in the care of Uncle Femi’s large all-male staff. The houseboys would wake them and set out their uniforms. The cooks served their meals. The drivers took them to school. They’d spend the whole day there, returning for dinner. They ate by themselves, did their work, went to bed. Sardines in a can, by the window for breeze, telling stories about Boston, most involving the snow, as if by remembering the cold they might actually feel it, and lessen the pressure of the humidity somehow. Auntie Niké would appear in the evenings after dinner to reiterate the rules about the use of the elevator, to see that they hadn’t dropped dead in the daytime, to complain about Femi, then ride back upstairs. They didn’t make friends at the American International School, where their peers thought them arrogant on account of their looks. So mostly stuck to each other, eating, sleeping, doing schoolwork, watching television, playing cassette tapes, swimming, riding in cars.

When they spoke to her, Fola, on the phone at the weekends (the one call allotted them, five minutes each), they said they were “happy” so she wouldn’t be worried. They weren’t sad in the beginning. They were simply alone. They knew there was something not right in the apartment — different people always coming in and out at all hours, speaking Yoruba and Arabic and English and pidgin; on weekends they could see them, from the bedroom, by the pool; they saw the girls prancing in leopard-print dresses and heavy fur jackets and stilettos and wigs, and the fat men beside them, and young men in batches, all slender and handsome with dark, hungry eyes — but they didn’t ask questions. It didn’t seem worth it. They did what they were told to and kept to themselves. Three months, then six, and then nine in this fashion. With the summer arriving suddenly with cool, drier air, then the end of the school year, a change in the program, an emptiness appearing in the middle of their days.

How things changed:

that one morning. Auntie Niké, without warning. Appearing in the kitchen as they sat down to eat. It was the first time they’d seen her in the morning, out of costume, without face paint or wig, a silk scarf on her head. Taiwo happened to glance up from her Weetabix and saw her, and choked on her milk with dismay at the sight.