Homegoing(107)

Them. Them. Always them. No one called them by name. No one in the group spoke. They all stood still, waiting. For what, Marcus didn’t know. Suddenly, he felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

He didn’t think. He just started to push at the door. He could hear the guide asking him to stop, yelling at Marjorie in Fante. He could hear Marjorie too. He could feel her arm on his hand, then he could feel his hand push through, then, finally, there was light.

Marcus started running onto the beach. Outside, there were hundreds of fishermen tending their bright turquoise nets. There were long handcrafted rowboats as far as the eye could see. Each boat had a flag of no nationality, of every nationality. There was a purple polka-dotted one beside a British one, a blood-orange one beside a French one, a Ghanaian one next to an American one.

Marcus ran until he found two men with dark, gleaming, shoe-polish skin who were building a dazzling fire with flames that licked out and up, crawling toward the water. They were cooking fish on the fire, and when they saw him, they stopped, stared.

He could hear her feet behind him before he could see her. The sound of feet hitting sand, a light, muffled sound. She stopped many paces away from him, and when she spoke, her voice was a distant thing carried by sea-salted wind.

“What’s wrong?” Marjorie shouted. And he just kept staring out into the water. It went every direction that his eye could see. It splashed up toward his feet, threatening to put out the fire.

“Come here,” he said, finally turning to look at her. She glanced at the fire, and it was only then he remembered her fear. “Come,” he said again. “Come see.” She stepped a little bit closer, but stopped again when the fire roared into the sky.



“It’s okay,” he said, and he believed it. He held out his hand. “It’s okay.”

She walked to where he stood, where the fire met the water. He took her hand and they both looked out into the abyss of it. The fear that Marcus had felt inside the Castle was still there, but he knew it was like the fire, a wild thing that could still be controlled, contained.

Then Marjorie released his hand. He watched her run, headlong, into the crashing waves of the water, watched her dip under until he lost her and all he could do was wait for her to resurface. When she did, she looked at him, her arms moving circles around her, and though she didn’t speak, he knew what she was saying. It was his turn to come to her.

He closed his eyes and walked in until the water met his calves, and then he held his breath, started to run. Run underwater. Soon, waves crashed over his head and all around him. Water moved into his nose and stung his eyes. When he finally lifted his head up from the sea to cough, then breathe, he looked out at all the water before him, at the vast expanse of time and space. He could hear Marjorie laughing, and soon, he laughed too. When he finally reached her, she was moving just enough to keep her head above water. The black stone necklace rested just below her collarbone and Marcus watched the glints of gold come off it, shining in the sun.

“Here,” Marjorie said. “Have it.” She lifted the stone from her neck, and placed it around Marcus’s. “Welcome home.”

He felt the stone hit his chest, hard and hot, before finding its way up to the surface again. He touched it, surprised by its weight.

Marjorie splashed him suddenly, laughing loudly before swimming away, toward the shore.