Tobenna Nwosu received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Eclectica Magazine, and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His stories are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review and South Dakota Review.
She dives in his pages, splaying herself at the bottom of each one, and the lines float her back to the light on the hill. In this town of tolling bells and doughy tourists, only his words can bridge the gap between what she sees and how to tell it.
The tide of thought on the last page ends in a cliff: It was hard to understand her, but what she said—
She reads it twice, peers over the edge, down miles of blank page streaked orange like a papyrus and framed by interwoven bones. The light droops her face as she waits for the English word that can describe their loss to press its weight down her tongue. If she can find it, she thinks, what happened to the twins will make sense to strangers. Wielding it in this town where everyone seems distracted or in a hurry, she will gain sympathetic ears.
They have woken before the twins. He plays the pianola downstairs. His hands flicker at the same tempo over the board, plod minor keys from both ends. The lower keys thunder. The top keys clink sotto voce. He ends the passage without warning but does not release the pedal. His fingers linger on the ivory. Vowel-less is her drift of the final note. It ticks on the fringe of her mind, spreads to a red blot. For the bare walls, she feels adrift in a dream played out, choked for scenes.
He pads up the steps and stares above her head, stands immovable at the door. She closes the book and crawls from the still waves of their blanket. The wood slats on her side creak with her arcane aches and itches, the unseen weight around her neck, the memories threading from her pores. Before he nears the painting in the twins’ room and enters its swirls, he wonders aloud whether to wear gloves. He already wears the pajamas webbed with his sleep, and wool slippers, The Merchant Messner stitched in their straps.
Soft green strokes, plum splats, and scarlet whorls gather at the heart of the four-by-four frame, mass along slender boughs. These yews shroud birds that coo and trill nonstop, he told her once, and she palmed the points of their leaves and stilled for the hum of a gust through cobwebs, rattling and scratching from mite-sized nests, beaks twisting and untwisting reeds, but the painting released nothing to her.
The day after it happened, they agreed only he could go in. Unlike her, he can describe what he sees there.
“It’s not your place to capture our boys,” she says now, from the threshold. “You should be happy just to see them, to know they’re alive and well.” Until she is fluent, he will see for them both. She will layer what she sees against all he sees. If he does not see a thing then she cannot have seen it, and if they see a thing differently, she will take his view. When she sees more than he does, she will rid her eyes of the excess.
In her mind, which is the one thing she can’t transfer to him, the twins huddle in the darker shades of the painting, misplaced but not lost, though he’d parted the colors over and over and found only the asymmetries of the artist’s mind, strokes stifling him with their volume. Once he said he saw them behind the yews, skin pulled taut over their ribs, the younger one gawping as though for water, flickering jaundiced eyes at the sky. “That can’t be true,” she told him then, with the conviction of a woman who could see for herself.
At noon the canvas gives him up empty-handed. This time he’s seen no one at all.
“Did you look in the branches?”
He lets the question wane unanswered.
She relieves him of the cane basket filled with blankets and bottled water and hoodies and antiseptic soap. Gray like leaves piled into mush, rust like rainless soil, has smeared his features blank, sparing just the swarm of his blue eyes. He sidesteps the beam from a window, and the hues slide to his neck. His hair stands on end, reeking of turpentine. He coughs and pats his chest. When next she speaks—“Not even footprints?”—he throws her a quizzical look. She slips into English: “It’s okay. You try again tomorrow.” A shock of energy, or perhaps another burst of grief, tightens her hand over his, and then she frees him to the icy calm in the room.
. . .
Phantom raindrops zigzag down his face from the patter on the windshield. She strains against her seatbelt and twists around in her seat, almost sees them wrestling in the back, almost says, “Hey, break it up.” He revs the engine, and the Jeep pulls away from the driveway, stirring the puddle in its curve.
He slows along Leeds, and the churn in her window cools into Victorian facades squashed between towers of plated steel and grim-blue glass, minarets sheathed in turquoise, and the drone of a shore littered with pebbles like half-chewed morsels. Castles slide across the sun, their turrets gaping moss. The majestic ruins remind her of Kaiserpfalz, once seat of power for the Holy Roman Empire, the backdrop of her childhood. The Romans, her maternal ancestors, had had to surmount the English language at the time they conquered British tribes. Physical surrender did not always mean victory; empires shrank or grew by how well the conqueror’s language spread. The Romans won the war but could not dethrone the language.
A tin shofar looped from the rearview mirror spins slowly in the dim light of a tunnel. To loosen the knots of anxiety along her spine, she skims the Sunday Times placed on the dashboard, beside an English dictionary no larger than a fist. Someone, presumably he, has circled columns for later. She imagines him tapping a pencil down the pages, bowled over and squinting, sitting back now and again to rub the intricacies of this language from his eyelids. She spots the only scribble among fields of newsprint: vos a demokrasi, the language of his ancestors, Yiddish for what a democracy (this much she knows). She smiles about his delicate hand as they clip across a perfumed garden, past birdsong and rows of tulips and persimmons. The maître d’ seats them in the main canopy, a ten-seater with walls blued by degrees to mimic the ocean floor.
She cups her face and throws furtive glances at the men here, lingers on a young Kurd busing tables. Despite his lean pretty face, his lowered gaze, and his delicate fingers, he has stamina, can draw light to a woman’s pores. The waiter marching past them would bring flowers to his trysts, needs simpered pleas to be engorged, sees his darling mother in his women. Cocaine and love bites will get the monk at the next table going. He likes to be choked. She has a sixth sense, in this way, about men.
A sweet fog wets her mouth from the pastrami buttered and scraped around in a pan, pressed thin as pages on cheese bread, and sprinkled with mango chutney. What a show, she thinks, for the tourist diners who are costumed as if for Halloween, shawled and talcumed clownishly. At his request, sherry is spritzed in thumb-sized glasses for them. The first toss parches her throat. “It’s like drinking the devil’s pee,” he tells her too late. “Happy birthday to our boys! How old are they?”
A scene from the past flutters to her, blows against her senses, of the twins holding hands on a pier, facing a starless night. “What’s the English word for when you’re no longer sure you’re a parent? Say your child is in a coma and the beeping from his monitor slows, but then speeds up, or your child has been missing for years, and knocks on the door one night, or your baby stops kicking for hours, but squirms in the morning. While you wait, can you still call yourself a parent?”
His face reddens. The waiter leans over his sigh.
“Hi, George,” she says, eyeing the nametag. “How are you today?”
“I’ll have a pickled salad and a dill lime crème fraîche,” he says, “a beef stroganoff, and a crème brûlée.”
The menu shudders in her grip. She puffs her chest and glances down the fonts, descriptions of flavors raked from glare-white borders into neat blocks. Appetizers. Main. Sides. The air clutches at her throat; she scrapes her chair back. Sriracha. Tzatziki. Gnocchi. Her stare blurs. She half-stands. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. His fingers tap-tap-tap on the table. Over his smile, his eyes chide her.
“I’m sorry, you clearly need more time,” the waiter says. “Call if you need me.”
She paces her breathing, draws her chair back in and sits.
“You’re too old to be so stupid,” he says.
She rights her cutlery, dusts imaginary crumbs from her lap. “I know an English word when I see one.” She nods. “At least half my menu was not in English.”
“Again, with the excuses,” he says. “I would have fit in here way sooner if I had an articulate wife.”
“But would you want to fuck an articulate wife?” she says. “You get erect only when you’re correcting my grammar, like now.” She raises the menu again.
Ruffles around them betray tourists who, having heard this much, would like to know more. Eyes widen at their tones of recrimination; ears stretch for his response.
“I’ll be in the car,” he says. He blunders from the table into sunlight, scowling.
Tzatziki. Her teeth buzz with the attempt: “Tzatziki.” Abandoned, she still feels him listening, holding in laughter. The word spikes her throat and reddens her eyes with shame. “Tzatziki.” She will not find it among the slick entries in his dictionary, words changed by conflict, split from their roots and shorn of their glottal branches, their historical clicks and grunts, remolded like braces to fit the victor’s mouth.
“Are you ready to order, ma’am?” The waiter huffs with the weight of her husband’s platter.
She grabs a fork. “Bring that over here. He’s too sad to eat.”
. . .
How does a woman like her look believable?
She has unbraided her cornrows (oily hair streams down her back). She has removed her bangles, wiped off the matte lipstick and pulled the tiered earrings. She has covered the tattoos. In the shower, she squishes her hair clean, combs it in damp curtains, eyes shut with the thought of what she has to do. She hops in a primrose column crisscrossed with forsythias and zips the side closed, tiptoes into square heels, and applies lip gloss. “I have to tell you something,” she whispers, and her reflection leans forward.
She slides her hand along the wall of the stairway, alert for even a hairline crack in the plaster. Go on. She conjures up the coldest gaze from a man who has just whipped off his shades. Sunlight glints in his tousled blonde hair. He is so tall that he misses her when he looks around—he has to look down. Are you sure of what you’re saying? She wrings her hands. “I didn’t actually see them fall in the painting. My husband saw it. He was so stunned, he didn’t move until they’d fallen in.”
She pauses on the landing, her eyes still closed.
The front door creaks ajar as if by an invisible hand.
He calls from the depth of the house: “I’m in no mood to go out.” His voice starts a cold sweat on her upper lip. She swings around and takes a step back up, wilts, and returns. Her squint lightens the pall around him. He is shaving dried stems into spindles for a bird cage; maple wisps and spirals pile at his feet. Sawdust floats tremulously from a stick passing through the low whir of the blade; he clacks the finished stick on a heap.
“I’m going out by myself.”
“But you can’t drive.”
“I’ll walk.”
“Since when?” His chest rises and does not fall. He quiets the hum of the blade and peels his gloves, blinking fast. “Close the door, honey. Come here.”
She hugs her purse and scuttles back. “I’ve searched too long for the right word. I’m ready to talk about what happened. I’m going to tell a stranger. Someone needs to hear how I feel.”
“They’ll hear you but not how you feel,” he says, “until you find the right word.”
She twists free of his voice and flees the house. Pocks in the hill scuff her shoes and twist her ankles. He thuds down the porch and crunches in the driveway for her. His shadow lengthens over gravel and pigeons taking wings. She scrapes one foot from a damp pit and leaves its shoe buried. She scrambles onward, whimpering. The one time she looks back, he is hunched below the sun, gripping his knees. A groan pours from the cave of his mouth. No matter how far she runs, she sees now, any step not hers may well be his. Even when she leans on the graffitied plexiglass of the bus station a whole mile from the hill, she is tempted to listen for his approach, to see him in the gaits of strangers.
All through the bus ride to town she sits transfixed by a tear-stained Polaroid of the twins cupping surf to their cheeks, beaming at the lens. She folds their father’s grin from view. At the slightest hint of his presence—the tips of his fingernails on their shoulders—her stomach folds like a touch-me-not. Nerves crackle in her eyes, scrambling his figure.
He’d never wanted children, and if he had one by accident, he said on their first date, he would treat that child no better than his own father treated him. His father despised him, there wasn’t another way to state the distance between them. She’d held his arm, a thing in her already accepting of him: his dimpled chin and lean torso, his smell of figs and the way he wore his pride, burnished and pinned high like an epaulet, even on that empty shore, the tide gray and many-tongued at their heels. He spoke slipshod German, despite having lived in Hamburg for two years. Of his English, she understood “mother,” “father,” “beautiful,” and “kiss you?” Changes in the tone of his voice filled the gaps. His eyes said everything.
She did not tell him the news, terrified as she was that they would be bringing not one but two souls into this world. Because he would have begged her not to keep them. She waited for him to notice the changes in her body. He said nothing when she confirmed his suspicions, just hopped on a flight to Prague for a months-long retreat and refused to take her calls. She won’t soon forget his teary fidgeting as he stood over their cradle, how an inner storm grayed his skin, how he pointed at her and cursed her for cluttering their lives. He must be relieved the painting took them, she thinks now. He has no reason to bring them back.
She tries not to think so unfairly of him. A year ago, almost to the minute, her mistake rushed to her, pushed her on the mattress as she changed out of her nightgown to file a missing person’s report. She sat unblinking, hose stuck on one knee, fending off a feeling like panic, that feeling like a plunger in her belly sucking her into herself. In the sun-flecked rooms, their smells lingered, almost in the shapes of their bodies, and so, she clung to his words from the night before: They were nearby and he would find them. When he came in snuffling, lifting his sleeves to his eyes, she clamped a hand over her mouth and folded. He flew up the stairs to her sprawl and raised her, grabbed fistfuls of his hair and winced, tried to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “We should check their room again,” he said and steered her there, past strewn Lego blocks and melting saucer sweets, plastic arrows nibbled lengthwise, the younger one’s trophies. Held her to the painting. “Look.”
She huffed at the profusion of colors in the frame. At first nothing moved among the dashes and arcs and fitful strokes. Then he shifted. “Right there.”
Her nose nearly touched the canvas, the scabbed yellow swirl that was the sun, which had no dimension, she was almost sure.
“They skipped along the frame just now.”
His steady tone, his furrowed brow, the set of his jaw, got to her slowly, pulled her hand-over-hand from a wave of doubt.
She hugged him. “Oh, thank God!”
. . .
The town engulfs her in its smells of ruin and rebirth. She plods the sidewalk blinking tears, pressing the image of the twins to her breast, against tides of jacketed passersby. The sun rains directly on the horde, so that her nose shines in her dark puckered face. “Excuse me,” she stutters, and the words hang above her like an unanswered prayer. “Hey.” This plea scrapes along her throat and skitters on the pavement; it is promptly trampled by the rush around her for environmental seminars and yoga classes, board meetings and doctors’ appointments. Her primal scowl leaps at her from the glass front of a deli. She tries futilely to stand tall. The swirl of bodies speeds up, tugging her from every direction, pulling her feet from the pavement.
Crumbs of a tune lead her downtown, to a fair in full swing. Turbaned men whistle as Bharatanatyam dancers squat in sequence, spreading the pleats of their skirts into iridescent mosaics. A punk (neon mohawk, brass grin, eyes sewed shut) tosses a flaming guitar to the pigeons chirping on a phone line, staggers back, and catches the whooshing board in his mouth. On slack stilts, sleeves snapping like pennants, Jarvis the ginger-bearded musketeer (the town’s mascot) sways down the flood of sightseers.
She stares ahead, face slack, arms pinned to her sides, the Polaroid almost fluttering away. A couple tilts rum by turns over their mouths, instead of drinking from the bottle. At the woman’s turn, a breeze slices the trickle and flicks droplets in her hair. She howls and then laughs with a bronchial wheeze. His free arm loops her neck, hers is bunched in his back pocket. In their embrace, she thinks, they are like trees grown into each other, planted separately but sharing life. She twists through the swarm on a pedestrian crossing. She hasn’t walked two-dozen steps to them, yet she feels far enough from the noise to be on a balloon drifting over snowy peaks. The woman notices her first, looks away.
She holds up the Polaroid. “My boys,” she says. “I failed them. I was close to the pier, but I heard nothing. They never found the bodies.”
