Commonwealth(45)

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.”

“Cal,” their stepmother said. Just his name. She was driving and she didn’t want to get into it but she flashed her big Jackie Onassis sunglasses in the rearview mirror to show him she meant business.

“They’ll send you back too,” he said to her, his face turned to the window. “Sooner or later.”

After Cal died, there was never any mention of Jeanette and Holly and Albie going back to Virginia. Every now and then their father would fly out to Los Angeles and take them to SeaWorld and Knott’s Berry Farm, take them to that restaurant in West Hollywood where girls swam in the giant fish tank along the wall while you ate your dinner, but the endless unsupervised summers of the commonwealth were over. Albie, of course, moved back later for a single, disastrous school year after the fire, and Holly went back for two nights as an adult in an attempt to measure just how much peace and forgiveness she had mastered through the dharma, but Jeanette wrote off both the state and its residents, including, but not limited to, her father, both sets of grandparents, her uncles and aunts, a handful of first cousins, her stepmother, and her two stepsisters. Goodbye to all that. She hunkered down with what she considered to be her real family: Teresa, Holly, and Albie—the three people who were with her in the house in Torrance when she brushed her teeth at night. It was a funny thing but until that point she hadn’t fully understood the extent to which her father was gone, that he had left them years ago and would never come back unless it was to spend the day at an amusement park. Her mother slept alone in her room like Albie slept alone in his. Jeanette, thank God, had Holly. She would lie in her bed at night watching Holly breathe and make a promise to herself to hate Albie less. Even if he was simultaneously irritating and unknowable, he was also her brother, and she was down to just the one.