Free Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi Page A

they’d all go outside.
    Now, five A.M ., she could lie, still, in silence, the waves nearby making what wasn’t quite noise. Perhaps admiring the genius of her runaway husband? At peace for a moment with the cards she’d been dealt? A woman, born in Gold Coast, in 1941, with the whole world at war with itself. But not here. Here at the edge of the world, the frayed edges. Here frozen in time pounding yam into paste. Fetching firewood and water. Watching boats push off, wistful. Above all things wanting to
go
.
    •   •   •
    Finally, Fola, from outside the hut.
    “Darling,” very gently. “Are you in there?”
    He wasn’t. He was nowhere, he was missing, he was outside of himself. “I’m here.”
    “Is the baby . . . ?”
    “The baby’s asleep.”
    But he knew what she meant: that it was wrong in some way to have new life so long in the presence of death. He lifted up the baby and handed him out to his mother, leaning in, her head tipped to the side.
    “Just another minute.” As if he were in a bathroom.
    He stayed until midnight, the tears too unripe.

11.
    His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom as he loves her most: dreaming, a bridge made of flesh. So he won’t get his slippers. He’ll go make the coffee. It can’t be past four A.M .—what woke him up?—now he doesn’t remember—what day is it? Sunday. Kofi’s day off. No more banging of nails. Just the silence and stillness. Aloneness and quiet. He thinks,
I rather like it,
this odd sense of pause. Of the morning suspended between darkness and daybreak, and him suspended with it, adrift in the gray. Too late to resume sleeping, too early to get going. On pause for the moment. The coffee, he thinks.
    And is turning to go in to decamp to the kitchen when he sees the thing, barely, from the corner of his eye. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to him otherwise, had he not seen, remembered, and thought of her face. Had he continued out of the sunroom through the door into the Dining Wing, through the dining room, to the kitchen, to make mocha and toast. Most likely he’d have noticed the constriction in the chest and the shortness of breath and known instantly:
go
. Would have tracked down the heparin in the medicine closet—unrushed, hyperfocused—then tracked down a phone. Would have called his friend Benson, another Ghanaian from Hopkins who now runs a high-end private hospital in Accra (and who just yesterday rang and left a very strange voicemail, something about having seen Fola here in Ghana; couldn’t be). Would have gotten hold of Benson, agreed to meet him at the hospital. Would have found his sneakers waiting by the door for his run. Would have tried to think back, as he laced up his laces, to the first of the chest pangs (
too beautiful sometimes
). Would have glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes. Easy peasy. Would have driven to the hospital, leaving Ama who can’t drive. And so forth.
    Would have noticed.
    And so known.
    And so gone.
    But he sees the thing, barely, bright turquoise and black.
    •   •   •
    Just coming to rest on a blossom, bright pink. When it comes to him suddenly: the name, by her face.
    “Bougainvillaea,” he hears her saying.
    “It sounds like a disease. The patient presented with bougainvillaea.”
    “You be quiet.” She sucked her teeth.
    But when he looked she was laughing. At the sink, hands in blooms, small, magnificent, magenta. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said.
    “Yes. Aren’t they?”
    “No. You are.”
    She laughed again, blushing. “You be quiet,” but quietly. A smile taking shape. The sun from the window behind her a backlight. He thought to go hold her. Beheld her instead.
    •   •   •
    Why did I ever leave you?
he thinks without warning, and the pang sends him reeling off the ledge to the grass. Once again his bare soles—which for years have known nothing but slipper leather, sock cotton, shower stall—object. The coldness, the