One night he told a story to the ceiling as we lay side by side on the futon I’d dragged from home to replace the narrow dorm-room bed. “My father was mentally ill,” he said. “But in Zimbabwe, we don’t think illness comes from nowhere. We believe there’s been a possession.”
I conjugated the word and realized a beat too late that he meant a spirit had possessed his father. I thought of Poltergeist and snow on a TV screen, had no frame of reference for what he meant. He was describing a culture so unlike my own, a place where even mental illness had a different name, a different definition. A world I was sure I would never understand without my own handles to hold it by. A world without the guideposts I’d grown up requiring.
There’s been a possession.
* * *
IT’S JANUARY OF 1980 and I’m five and a half years old and my father is just dead. The house on State Street is full of love and fear and confusion and lasagna. I stand in the dining room loud with people, looking for my mom. My hand rests on the warm haunches of our loyal black Lab, Shandy. She hasn’t gone on a run in a while. Her haunches are getting thick.
The light in the room comes from a large paper globe that hangs over the dining room table, which itself is round and has lion claws for feet that scare my toes when I eat. We haven’t sat at that table since Dad left for the loony bin. I consider crawling under it now to hide from all these people—maybe Mom would look for me then?—but the lion claw feet.
I need Mom because I have a question in my heart that I don’t know how to ask and I think maybe with all these people around I’ll be brave enough to speak. Why hasn’t Dad’s picture been in the corner of the screen when Channel 3 Eyewitness News is on in the mornings yet, the way other dead people’s pictures are in the corner of the screen? When are they going to come on the TV and explain why he’s dead? Because I would really like to know.
I’ve been watching the news every morning since he died, crawling up onto the stool at the long kitchen counter across from Mom and her thick black coffee, no toast. “Tea and toast?” she asks me, and I nod. But my throat hurts when people talk to me these days, so I just turn and watch the TV that sits on the counter and wait for Dad’s picture to appear.
But right now there are all these people who knew him and Mom is nowhere and I’m not sure where to look for her and I’m afraid that if I take my hand off Shandy’s back I’ll lose my balance and fall through the holes I have just learned are all over this house. There are so many dark corners.
Behind me is the living room with the red couch Dad napped on, and my older sister and brother are sitting there with plates of food on their laps and grown-up hands on their shoulders. At least that’s what I think they’re doing, but I haven’t been able to look at them the last few days because I don’t recognize their eyes anymore and I can’t tell if they know how to talk. I don’t want to talk.
In front of me is the kitchen with cooking aunts, and the knees of one of the aunts look just like Mom’s knees, and I’m scared if I see them I won’t be able to stop myself from hugging that knee, and what if it’s the wrong knee? So I just stay in the dining room. I just stay between.
Then someone says my name, and I look up and swallow, and the giant paper globe light is blocked out by a man’s bald head. It comes down to my level before he speaks.
“When will I see your first novel, Jules?” the man asks. “You’re always watching everything. You’re sure to become a writer, just like your dad.”
3
THE SUNDAY MORNING before my college graduation, the phone on the floor by my futon startled me awake.
“Julia?” said my grandmother Rose, my father’s mother. She said my name as though she might’ve called someone else by accident. As though if she had, it would have been their fault.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said, trying to sound awake, alert. Alone. She called me most Sundays. I was mostly at the library. Mostly let the answering machine pick up.
“What’s new?” she asked. The question was code for Do you have a boyfriend yet? I sat up in bed, placed my feet on the cold linoleum floor. Felt a door open somewhere dark.
“Actually, Grandma,” I said, “I have news.” I turned to Ngoni and smiled, hoping to communicate to him to keep quiet, stay still.
“Oh?” The hope was in her voice now.
“I’ve met someone.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well,” I said, wondering if she was wearing her hearing aid, hoping not to have to shout, “let me spell it for you.”
“What?”
“Let me spell it, you won’t recognize it if I just say it.” I took a breath. “He’s from Zimbabwe.”
There was a silence then. In it, I knew the folly in that hope I’d held like a shard of glass.
“Colored?” Defeat thick in her voice.
“Yes, Grandma,” I said, shifting on the bed so even my profile was hidden from Ngoni. “He’s black.” I wished I’d said something radical, I wished I’d communicated to my grandmother that my loyalty was to this man next to me in bed. I wished I’d challenged her language, ideas, assumptions. But I didn’t know how to. I only knew how to change the subject, so we started making plans for the upcoming weekend—one I was now dreading.
And when she arrived for it, with my aunt and uncle and their children, they all seemed foreign and I couldn’t place why any of them had come to my graduation when I hadn’t seen most of them in years. I couldn’t place how I was meant to treat them. My mother and sister, Ngoni and I, stood in a clutch by their car as they gathered their things and got out. Cold embraces, quiet hugs.
“This is Ngoni,” I said to everyone, reaching out my arm to draw him near.
He was elegant and reserved, extending his hand to Rose first, as the eldest. “It is so nice to meet you, Mrs. Wolk,” he said.
She turned her face away. Offered him her left hand, in which she clutched a Kleenex. He shook it as though this were the common way, but when he turned and looked back at me, I saw a shadow cross his forehead. I took his hand in both of mine, as though I could rinse it clean of her touch.
“I’m not surprised,” my mother said after dinner, as we watched them drive away. “The black woman who cleaned her house was forty years old if she was a day,” my mother said, “but Rose called her the girl.”
I held Ngoni’s hand but couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t know how this information would settle on his shoulders, if he would be able to join a family with people like that in it. By now I very much wanted him to join my family.
As we lay on my futon late that night, I held his face and apologized. For Rose. For my inability to confront her. For my inability to know what he felt and to help him through it.
“Your grandmother is from a different time,” he said to me. “She’ll come around.”
I nodded at Ngoni, smiled a little. But I wasn’t so sure she would.
* * *
THAT SUMMER I rented a small apartment deep in the woods, bought a frame for the futon and a used dining room table, pots and pans, a few mismatched plates and glasses, and borrowed the old red couch from my mom. It felt like playing house, but I was determined to make it a home. Determined to make it Ngoni’s home for his final semester in the U.S. before he returned to Zimbabwe forever. I’d found a job in the college admissions office so I could stay close.
One evening I sat on the couch staring at my hands. Wishing time would stop, wishing this warm night would last forever. Wishing Ngoni would never leave. I’d waited all my life to find my person. I didn’t want him ever to leave.
Ngoni