Ghana Must Go Read Free

unnamed, fighting for life in its incubator. Losing.
    Baby Sai.
    •   •   •
    In the rancid delivery room.
    “What’s wrong with Idowu?
Where are they taking her?”
    She clutched his bare arm. He was still in his scrubs, nothing else, arms uncovered. He’d been stitching when she went into labor (too soon). A friend at the Brigham had had him paged over the intercom, and he’d run through the snow from Beth Israel here with the swirling flakes clouding his vision as he ran, and the words, two words, clouding his thinking.
Too soon
.
    “It was too soon.”
    “NO.”
    Not a human sound. Animal. A growl rumbling forth from the just-emptied belly. A battle cry. But who was the enemy? Him. The obstetrician. The timing. The belly itself. “Folasadé,” he murmured.
    “Kweku, no,” Fola growled, her teeth clenched, her nails piercing his goose-pimpled skin. Drawing blood. “Kweku, no.” Now she started to cry.
    “Please,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”
    She shook her head, crying, still piercing his arm (and other pierce-able parts of him neither perceived). “Kweku, no.” As if changing his name in her mind now from Kweku, just Kweku, to Kweku-No.
    He laid his lips gently on the crown of her head. Her crowning glory, Fola’s hair, reduced by half by fresh sweat. A cloud of tiny spirals, each one clinging to the next in solidarity and smelling of Indian Hemp. “We have three healthy children,” he said to her softly. “We are blessed.”
    “Kweku-No, Kweku-No, Kweku-
No
.”
    The last one was shrill, nearing rage, accusation. He had never seen Fola unraveled like this. Her two other pregnancies had gone perfectly, medically speaking, the deliveries like clockwork, instructional-video smooth: the first one in Baltimore when they were still children, the second here in Boston, a C-section, the twins. And now this, ten years later, a complete accident, the third (though they were all
complete accidents in a way). She was different with this one almost right from the start. She insisted upon knowing the gender at once. Then insisted he not tell anyone, not even the kids, not (a) that she was expecting and then (b) what it was. Both became obvious that evening in summer she returned with four gallons of pastel pink paint. She chose the name without him, for “the child who follows twins.” This didn’t so much surprise him. She’d become kind of precious about her Yoruba heritage after becoming
iya-ibeji
, a mother to twins. He didn’t like the name, the way
Idowu
sounded, and less what it meant, something about conflict and pain. But he was relieved that her choice wasn’t something more dramatic, like
Yemanja
, the way she’d been acting. Building shrines.
    And now this. Ten weeks early. There was nothing to be done.
    “You have to do
something
.”
    He looked at the nurse.
    A drinker, he’d guess, from the paunch and rosacea. Irish, from the trace of a South Boston
a
. But no trace of bigotry, which often went with this, and gentle eyes, grayish-blue, glistening. The woman managed to frown and to smile simultaneously. Sympathetically. While Fola drew blood from his arm. “Where did they take her?” he asked, though he knew.
    The nurse frowned-and-smiled. “To the N.I.C.U.”
    •   •   •
    He went to the waiting room.
    Olu looked up.
    He sat by his son, put a hand on his knee. Olu abandoned Achebe and looked at his knee as if only now aware it was bouncing.
    “Watch your brother and sister. I’ll be right back.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “To check on the baby.”
    “Can I come with you?”
    Kweku looked at the twins.
    A funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle. They slept like his mother. Olu looked at them, too. Then pleadingly at Kweku.
    “Come on then.”
    •   •   •
    They walked down the hospital hallway in silence. His cameraman walked backward in front of them. In this scene: a Well-Respected Doctor goes striding down the hallway to save his