Free Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi Page B

wetness, the sharpness of grass blades. He takes these in, trying to unthink it, to breathe. But the words don’t relent, nor the shortness of breath. Just the
why did I ever leave you
, a song on repeat (with the bridge yet inaudible in the distance,
too soon
) as he buckles now, gasping, brought low by the pain. “I don’t know,” he says aloud and to no one, but he’s lying. He closes his eyes; in the dark sees her face. Her brows knit together. Her mouth folded over. The voice of a woman.
I know, I know, I know
.
    So it’s come to this, has it? Here barefoot and breathless, alone in his garden, no strength left to shout? Not that it would matter. He is here in the garden; she is there in the bedroom unplugged from the world. The houseboy at home with his sister in Jamestown. The carpenter-
cum
-gardener-
cum
-mystic comes tomorrow. Who would hear him shouting? Stray dogs or the beggar. And what would he shout? That it’s finally cracked? No. Somehow he knows that there’s no turning back now.
    The last time he felt this was with Kehinde.

12.
    A hospital again, 1993.
    Late afternoon, early autumn.
    The lobby.
    Fola down the street in her bustling shop, having moved from the stall at the Brigham last year. A natural entrepreneur, a Nigerian’s Nigerian, she’d started her own business when he was in school, peddling flowers on a corner before obtaining a permit for a stand in the hospital (carnations, baby’s breath). When he’d graduated from medical school and moved them to Boston, she’d started all over from the sidewalk again: by the lunch cart (falafel) in the punishing cold, then the lobby of the Brigham, now the stand-alone shop.
    Sadie, almost four, in white tights and pink slippers, doing demi-pliés in her class at Paulette’s.
    Olu, high school senior and shoo-in at Yale, attempting doggedly to break his own cross-country record.
    Taiwo, thirteen, at the Steinway in the den attempting doggedly to play Rachmaninoff’s
Prelude in C Sharp
while Shoshanna her instructor, a former Israeli soldier, barked instruction over the metronome. “Faster!
Da!
Fast!”
    And Kehinde at the art class Fola insisted he take despite the exorbitant expense at the Museum of Fine Art three short train stops away on the Green Line, up Huntington, where Kweku was to meet him after work.
    •   •   •
    Except Kweku never went to work.
    He left, calling “Bye!” as he did every morning: in his scrubs and white coat, at a quarter past seven, with Olu waiting for carpool, and the twins eating oatmeal at the breakfast nook table, and Fola braiding Sadie’s hair, and Sadie eating Lucky Charms, and National Public Radio playing loudly as he left. “Bye!” they called back. Three contraltos, one bass, Sadie’s soprano “I love yooou!” just a second delayed, breezing only just barely out the closing front door like a latecomer jumping on an almost-missed train.
    He started the Volvo and backed down the driveway. He pushed in the cassette that was waiting in the player.
Kind of Blue.
He rode slowly down his street listening to Miles. The yellow-orange foliage a feast for the eyes. Pots of gold. In the rearview, a russet brick palace. The grandest thing he’d ever owned, soon to be sold.
    •   •   •
    He drove around Jamaica Pond.
    He drove under the overpass.
    He drove toward their old house on Huntington Ave. He slowed to look out at it. The old house looked back at him. A window cracked, bricks missing, stoop lightly littered. It looked like a face missing teeth and one eye. Mr. Charlie, former owner, would have turned in his grave. Such an attendant to detail. Kweku had liked him so much. American, from the South, with a limp and a drawl. Had lost his wife Pearl over a year before they moved there but still kept her coat on a hook in the hall. He’d given them a 25 percent discount on rent because Fola tended Pearl’s orphaned garden in spring, and because he, Kweku, doled out free medical advice