Commonwealth(44)

“Surprise,” Albie said, the word a flat statement of fact: I am surprised to be in your living room. You are surprised that I’m here. Then he added the thing that had been the most surprising to him, “You have a baby.” Dayo, the baby, was holding on to the rope of Albie’s hair. He gave his mother an enormous smile, both to say he was glad she had come back to him and also he was very pleased with their exotic guest.

“Scarf,” Bintou said, and unwound the damp wool from Jeanette’s neck. She plucked the hat from her head and shook off the melted snow. It was February.

Jeanette turned to her husband. “This is my brother,” she said, as if he were the one who had just walked through the door. It felt almost accidental seeing Albie in her living room, the way some other long-lost siblings might run into one another in an airport, at a funeral.

“I saw him on the street!” Fodé said. “He was walking a bicycle away from our building just as I was coming home from work.”

Albie nodded to confirm the implausible story. “He came running after me. I thought he was some crazy guy.”

“New York,” Bintou said.

The good news washed over Fodé, poured from him, the thrill of it still so fresh. “Except I was calling your name, Albie! Albie! The crazy guys don’t know your name.”

Jeanette wanted nothing but to step into the hallway for five minutes and pull her thoughts together. The room was too cramped: Albie and Dayo sat on the couch like guests while she and Fodé and Bintou remained standing. Had they just now come in the door or had they been waiting for her for a while? How much of their discussion had she missed?

“You were just walking down the street?” she said to Albie, My street, of all the streets in all the world?

“I was coming to see you,” he said. “I rang the bell.” He shrugged as if to say that was it, he’d tried.

“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.