What We Lose(20)

“I don’t think I can do this,” he says. “It’s just not the right time. For me or for us.”

A light has been growing inside me since the park, a light that felt sure this would work out.

“Yeah, of course,” I say. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be here with you. I have to get back to work.” He writes me a check for $700.

I take him to the airport that evening. I get out of the driver’s seat and we hug and kiss in the loading lane. Then we say goodbye.



We returned to Johannesburg one year after my mother died. Of the two weeks we spent there, I spent one afternoon with my grandfather. He sat in his recliner, in front of the TV, switched to the cricket game, and I halfheartedly arranged papers, went to the store to buy milk, and brought him cups of tea.

“You don’t seem well,” he said.

I laughed and said that I was fine.

“My feet ache,” he said, pointing down at his blue velvet slippers. His diabetes caused his feet to swell, and they caused him great pain. I removed the slippers and found his skin dry and red. His toenails were black.

“Papa . . .”

“I’m in pain every day,” he said. “It’s not just my feet, it’s all over.”

I saw his eyes fill with tears and then looked away quickly. My father had spent most of his time in Johannesburg with my grandfather, running him all over town, sitting with him, talking. They had always gotten along, but now they behaved as old friends, reunited after a long time apart. They shared a bond over my mother’s death that the rest of us couldn’t know. My grandfather’s pain was as unknowable to me as my father’s but multiplied several times over. I was afraid that if I looked into his eyes, I might see what it was like to lose a child. Instead, I excused myself to the bathroom.

“I’ll get you some muscle rub, Da.”

In the small room lined by eggshell tiles, unchanged since my mother bathed in there as a baby, I gazed at his neat arrangement of ointments and creams, the same bottles that he’d used since I was a child. I cried until I felt so empty that I knew no more would come, and then I went back outside.

—

We assembled at my family’s gravesite, at the large coloured cemetery a few minutes from my grandparents’ house. As we walked from our cars to the small plot marked by a few lines of white folding chairs, I remembered my grandmother’s funeral, held here ten years ago. My grief had been simple and remote. I had had no clue of the depth of feeling beneath my own mother’s tears; this time I finally did.

My mother’s brother Bertie led the ceremony. He had made a small fortune and a name for himself by opening a string of gas stations in coloured townships that employed neighborhood people and quietly exploited them. He walked to the front of the group with a serious look that bordered on a smirk. He could barely contain his glee at being in front of a captive audience. He rubbed his belly with a gold ring–laden hand; his children sniffed loudly from the front row.

Bertie took the urn holding my mother’s ashes from the pedestal nearby. He handed it to my grandfather, who laid it in a small hole next to my grandmother’s headstone.

My cousin Lyndall squeezed my hand.

“I hope his fat ass falls in that hole,” she whispered under her breath to me. We both laughed, and Bertie’s children—clad in designer clothes and shades, comforted by their respective spouses—shot us disapproving stares. Though we were close as children, our relationship became distant when my cousins became certifiably rich, in a way none of us could really understand; it ended completely when they married. Their wealth made them paranoid. They closed ranks against people or conflicts that challenged any one of them. The rest of us saw this happen, felt a different kind of grief for the people they had once been.

I started to sob in huge bursts again, felt my face getting hot.

“Are you okay?” Lyndall whispered to me.

I felt Stephanie, my older cousin, poke me in the back. She opened her palm and revealed a small blue pill.

“For your nerves,” Lyndall said.

I held it in my hand.

“Don’t think about it,” Lyndall said, and raised my hand to my mouth.

The pill kicked in just as Bertie waddled back to his seat, and everything turned gray. I stopped crying. We waited in line to throw dirt on my mother’s ashes. I held my father’s hand. We said our final prayer and went back the way we had come.



—

My cousin Lyndall is beautiful and wild. She has wavy sandy-brown hair flowing down to her back that she flicks off of her neck mischievously whenever she is lying. She’s the pariah of our family because in high school, her parents caught her doing tik. They screamed and beat her and she didn’t apologize, so they sent her to rehab in Botswana for a month. She came back wilder than ever, but better at hiding it.

Lyndall is that fatal mix of beautiful and visible brokenness that made all the guys swarm us whenever we would go out. When I first arrived, she took me out into the small rectangle of my grandfather’s backyard and handed me a joint. As we hunched under the clothesline, Lyndall held the garments away from our smoke. “Aish, if my mother smells this I’m in for it.” I chided Lyndall, still a captive to her parents’ old ways. For the millionth time, I told her she should move to America. No one as free as her should live in this country. She waved off the weed smoke.