Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“But he rang the wrong bell,” Bintou said. “It didn’t ring here.”

Then Jeanette turned to her husband. None of this made sense. “So how did you know it was my brother?” There were no pictures of Albie in their apartment, and certainly Fodé had never met him. Jeanette tried to think of the last time she’d seen her brother. He was getting on a bus in Los Angeles. He was eighteen. Years and years and years.

Fodé laughed, even Bintou covered her mouth with her hand. “Look at yourself,” he said.

She looked at her brother instead. He was an exaggeration of her: taller, thinner, darker. She wouldn’t have said they were too much alike except when compared to the West Africans in the living room. Funny to think of someone in the apartment looking like her when Dayo looked like no one but his father and babysitter. When Bintou met her at the door at night, Dayo bound to her chest ingeniously with yards of bright-yellow cloth, Jeanette couldn’t help but think, Really? This is my son?

“Do we look that much alike?” she asked her brother, but Albie didn’t answer. He was trying to unlace the tiny fingers from his hair.

“I wanted to wait and see you so happy,” Bintou said, squeezing Jeanette’s arm. “Now I’ll go. Family time.” She leaned over the baby and kissed the top of his head repeatedly. “Tomorrow, little man.” Then she added something else in Susu, a few swooping words of birdsong meant to connect him to Conakry and the motherland.

“I’ll walk her,” Fodé said. “Then you’ll have time.” He had to leave them. He could not possibly contain his good cheer another minute, his elation in the face of visiting family. He put on Jeanette’s coat and hat and scarf because they were there, because Fodé had very little sense of what was his and what was hers. “Goodbye, goodbye!” he said, waving and then waving again, as if he would be walking Bintou back to Guinea. There was pageantry in the smallest of Fodé’s departures.

“Explain this,” Albie said once the door was closed, the two sets of footsteps receding down the stairs, the animated elegance of French drifting behind them. Fodé and Bintou spoke French when they were alone. “They’re a couple?”

Jeanette hated to admit it but it was better once they’d gone, just having the extra space in the cramped room, the extra air. “Fodé’s my husband.”

“And he has two wives?”

“Bintou’s our babysitter. They’re both from Guinea, they both live in Brooklyn. It doesn’t make them a couple.”

“You believe that?”

Jeanette did believe that. “You don’t need to look for ways to make me crazy. Just seeing you is enough. Does Mom know where you are?”

He ignored her. “So this one’s really yours.” He held out his arms as far as his braid would allow and waggled Dayo back and forth while the baby laughed and pumped his legs up and down. “Can’t you just imagine what those old Cousinses would have to say about this? They’d make you give him to Ernestine.”

“Ernestine’s dead,” Jeanette said. It was the diabetes — first her foot, then she was blind. Her grandmother had tallied Ernestine’s losses in her annual Christmas letter until finally the news came of the housekeeper’s death. Jeanette hadn’t thought about Ernestine much since then, and in the clear picture of Ernestine’s face so suddenly returned she could see her own disloyalty. Ernestine had been the only person in her grandparents’ house Jeanette had ever liked.

Albie sat with this information for a minute. “Anybody else?”

Other people had died, of course they had, but she couldn’t think of any people who were Albie’s people. She shook her head. The baby began to stuff her brother’s braid in his mouth and so she took him, not sure that Albie would want the baby’s saliva in his hair, not sure she wanted that hair in the baby’s mouth. She offered Dayo her wrist and immediately he began to work it over with his sore gums, his few teeth cutting against her skin. He turned his eyes up to stare into her eyes as he sucked and chewed. There was something about the gnawing that settled her, brought her back to herself, to this room, this moment.

“If you were going to have an African baby, couldn’t you at least have named him something a little less African?”

Jeanette brushed her fingers along the plush density of her son’s hair. “To tell you the truth I named him Calvin, but it turns out I could never bring myself to call him that. For a long time we just called him ‘the baby.’ Fodé was the one who started calling him Dayo.”

Albie’s spine straightened involuntarily, then he leaned down to look into the baby’s eyes. “Cal?”

“Where have you been?” Jeanette said.

“California. It was time to go.”

“California all this time?”

Albie gave a small smile at such an impossible thought, and in that smile she saw something of the brother she had known. “Not even close,” he said. The sleeves of his black sweater were pushed up towards his elbows, showing off patterned bands of black tattoos that circled his wrists in wide bracelets. Everything was black: the tattoos, the sweater, the jeans, his work boots. Jeanette wondered if he had kohl around his eyes or if his lashes were just very dark.

“So do you live here now?” That wasn’t the question, but then there was no single question.

“I don’t know.” He reached out and touched his finger to Dayo’s chin, making the baby laugh again. “We’ll see how it goes.”

Then she saw the duffel bag in front of the couch, inches away from the toe of her winter boots. She had somehow overlooked it by looking so intently at him.

Albie shrugged as if none of it had been his idea. “Your husband said I could sleep on the couch until I find a place.”

It would have to be the couch, unless it was the coffee table or the single armchair where Fodé studied or their tiny kitchen table. The baby slept with them in the bedroom in a bassinet wedged in between the bed and the wall. If she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night she worked herself out of the blankets and crawled off the foot of the bed. Jeanette sat down on the couch, and the baby, who was just starting to crawl, stretched his arms away from her in an effort to get to the floor. She put him down.

“It’s not like I’ll ever be here,” Albie said.

It was the closest he could come to an apology and it startled her, because even though they didn’t have the room or the time or the money to keep him, even though she did not forgive him for disappearing for the last eight years with only the occasional postcard to let them know he wasn’t dead, the thought of his going made her want to get up and lock the door. How many nights must he have needed a place to go but never called her or Holly or their mother? If he was with her now it meant that something had changed. The baby had hold of the zipper on the duffel and was trying to figure it out. “You’ll be here,” she said.

* * *

Albie and Jeanette were not from Virginia. They had both been born in California and in that sense the two of them had been a team, albeit a team neither one of them wanted to be on. Jeanette had applied for her first passport when she was twenty-six, after she had gotten pregnant, after she and Fodé were married. He wanted to take her to Guinea to meet his family. The question that made her stop as she filled out the forms in the post office was Place of Birth. What she wanted to write was not Virginia. Not Virginia was where she was from. Cal had tortured Albie and Jeanette with the lesser state of their birth. “Take a good look around,” Cal had said once when they were driving to Arlington from Dulles, the passing landscape a multidimensional shade of green never witnessed in Southern California. “They only let you in now because you’re little. Dad got permission. Once you’re older they’ll stop you in the airport and put you back on the plane.”