Chapter 6 (pt. 5)

She talked about riding on his back and dabbing peanut butter on his nose. She showed him the photograph and described how he had rescued her with just one hand. She told him about the box and the day her mother had shown it to her. She told him how sometimes her mother never mentioned him, how they would go months without acknowledging him, so long that Akua would start to wonder if she had imagined him altogether. How when that happened she would have to sneak to the box and rememorizes its contents. And how sometimes her mother would talk about him, how she would freeze and not know how to respond. She told him about the Search & Find tro-tro and the man who always sat in the back. How his smile was just like hers. She talked until the sky had gone completely black.

Jack listened and when she finished he asked, “How did he die?” but then he felt foolish for saying that because he wasn’t really dead…but maybe he was. Sometimes while Akua was talking, she used the past tense and other times she spoke about the future—how she would find him and what she would say to him, ask of him. Jack didn’t know the right thing to say or the right way to say it, so he just left his unfiltered question hanging between them.

She eventually responded with a small chuckle, and it confused Jack because though he couldn’t isolate any one feeling in the the hazy mix of emotions churning through his body, no part of her words felt remotely humorous. “I don’t know,” she said and laughed again, “who doesn’t know how their father died?”

“Or if their father died,”Akua let out another small chuckle. It had become a habit. She had spent her life trying not to speak of her father, but when she had to it was always prefaced with a laugh. The laugh was not for her. It was not the result of fond memories surfacing with the thought of him. She laughed for her audience, for who ever had asked the question or said the thing that required her to reply, “Ha. Ha. Oh, my dad...he died.” No one knew what to say to a child who mentioned a dead parent. Without needing to look, she knew the way their faces would drop, their mouths would open, but nothing would be said. Her little chuckle was to put them at ease, to save them the embarrassment. Dead dad. Ha. Ha. Don’t worry, it’s no big deal.

She couldn’t see Jack’s face in the darkness, but somehow she realized that she didn’t need to laugh for him. They sat on the hill above the fields, a island in an urban sea. In the distance, Accra was clamoring with activity. The street lights were glowing, but they were too far away to illuminate the space around Jack and Akua. Even the sounds—a muezzin’s call to prayer, the brassy honk of a FanMilk cart—felt soft and distant.

The darkness. The distance. The near-silence. Jack. Everything about the moment made her feel safe and she allowed herself, for the first time in her life, to cry over the loss of her father. Even as the tears rolled down her cheeks, she was piecing together her plan to find him.