Transcendent Kingdom(50)

I sat there listening to Pastor John’s words, listening to the amens and hallelujahs that rose up in chorus around those words, thinking, Nana would have hated all of this. And that knowledge, and that roomful of people who knew my brother but didn’t know him, who skirted around the circumstances of his death, talking about him as though only the portion of his life that had taken place before his addiction was worthy of examination and compassion, wrecked me and felled the long-growing tree of my belief. I sat there in that lodge, reduced to a stump, wondering what would become of me.





39





The Chin Chin Man had sent us pictures of Nana’s Ghanaian funeral. There were hundreds of people gathered in a tent in Kumasi, wearing clothes similar to the ones my mother and I had worn. My father was in only one of the photos. He looked stately in his black-and-red wrapper. His face was an old, faded memory. I had never looked like him, but, staring at the photo, I could see myself in his bent head, his sad eyes.

“They had a good turnout,” my mother said as she flipped through the photos. “Your father did well.”

I didn’t know any of the other people pictured. Most of them hadn’t known Nana, but a few said that they could remember the baby he once was.

When the Chin Chin Man called to ask if we had received the photos, I talked to him for a few minutes.

“What did you tell everyone?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“About how Nana died. What did you tell them? What did you tell your wife?”

He paused and I looked at the photo of him, waiting for an answer. “I said he was sick. I said he was sick. Is that not true?”

    I didn’t even hand the phone to my mother. I just hung up. I knew she would call him back and that the two of them would whisper about me before they went over every detail about the funeral. What was eaten, what songs were played, what dances danced.

“I don’t like how you disrespected your father,” my mother said later that day. She hadn’t gone to work in two weeks, and it was strange for me to see her in the house at every hour, doing everyday things, coming to my room to dispense a parenting reproach an American child might get on television. In those first few weeks after Nana died, before my mother’s crash, I’d felt as though I was living the same life, but upside down, backward. Things looked normal to the untrained eye, but when had my mother ever been home, awake, talking to me at three in the afternoon?

“Sorry,” I said.

“They had a good turnout at the funeral,” she said.

“You already said that.”

She glared at me in warning and I remembered myself. Things hadn’t gotten so backward that I could become a regular American preteen girl, mouthing off to her mother.

“Do you wish you could have been there?” I asked, changing course.

“In Ghana? No. Nana would not have wanted that.”

She stood there leaning against my doorframe for a little while longer. In those days, and still, I was always wondering how to be with her. Should I have gotten up and forced her into a hug? She told me she was going to take an Ambien. She left the room, and I could hear her rustling around the bathroom searching for the sleeping pills she’d come to rely on to survive her many years of working the night shift. I could hear her get into bed. Little did I know.



* * *



—

The Ambien made my mother loopy and mean. She would take one, but she wouldn’t fall asleep right away. Instead she would wander around the house, looking for trouble. Once, she found me in the kitchen making myself a peanut butter sandwich and she said, “You know I didn’t want another child after Nana.” On Ambien, her words were always slow, slurred, like each one was dipped in the shocked sleep of that drug before it escaped her lips.

    “I only wanted Nana,” she said, “and now I only have you.”

I know how this makes her sound. She said those words and then she ambled back upstairs to her bedroom. Within minutes, I could hear her snoring. I was hurt by what she said, but I understood what she meant. I understood and I forgave. I only wanted Nana, too, but I only had my mother.

Whenever she woke up from the drug-induced sleep, she looked frantic, like a woman who had been dropped down onto some deserted island and told that she had only an hour to find water. Her eyes were wild. The pupils darted around, searching, searching. Watching her, I would feel like a lion tamer or a snake charmer. Whoa there, I’d think as she slipped slowly back into reality.

“Where am I?” she asked one day.

“You’re at home. At your house in Huntsville,” I said.

She shook her head, and her eyes stopped searching. Instead they found me out, found me wanting. “No,” she said, and then louder still, “No.” She went back upstairs, got back in bed. That was the beginning.





40





My mother in bed at fifty-two. My mother in bed at sixty-eight. When I lay the two images of her side by side, looking for the differences, at first there seem to be few. She was older, thinner, more wrinkled. Her hair, late to gray, was now sprouting a few silver strands here and there. These differences were subtle but present. Harder to spot: me at eleven—out of my depth; me at twenty-eight—still so.