Some days before Christmas, I was sitting in the London house, at the desk in Aimee’s study, finalizing the list for the New Year Party, when I heard Estelle, somewhere upstairs, she was saying: “Dere, dere.” It was a Sunday, the second-floor office was closed. The children had not yet returned from their new boarding school and Judy and Aimee were in Iceland, for two nights, doing promotion. I had not seen or heard of Estelle since the children left and had presumed—if I even thought of her at all—that her services were no longer required. Now I heard that familiar lilt: “Dere, dere.” I ran up a floor and found her in Kara’s old room, in what we used to call the nursery. She stood by the sash windows, looking out on to the park, in her comfy crocs and a black sweater embroidered with gold thread, like tinsel, and a pair of sensible pleated navy trousers. Her back was to me, but when she heard my tread, she turned round, a swaddled baby in her arms. It was so tightly wrapped it looked unreal, like a prop. I approached quickly, reaching out—“You cyan just come up and touch the baby! Your hands got to be clean!”—and it took a great deal of self-control to take a step away from them both and put my hands behind my back.
“Estelle, whose baby is that?”
The baby yawned. Estelle looked down at it adoringly.
“Adopted tree weeks ago, I believe. You didn’t know? Seem to me everybody know! But she just arrive here last night. Her name is Sankofa—don’t arks me what kind of name is that because I could not tell you. Why anybody wan give a lovely little baby like this a name like that I must say I don’t know. I’m going to call her Sandra until somebody make me stop.”
The same purple, dark, unfocused gaze, sliding off me, fascinated by itself. I could hear in Estelle’s voice the delight she already took in the child—far more, it seemed to me, than she had ever taken in Jay and Kara, whom she had practically raised—and I tried to focus on the tale of this “lucky, lucky little girl” in her arms, rescued from the “back of beyond,” placed “in the lap of luxury.” Better not to wonder how it had possibly been managed: an international adoption in less than a month. I reached out again. My hands were shaking.
“If you wan hol’ her so bad, I’m about to wash her right now: come upstairs with me, you can clean your hands.”
We went to Aimee’s gigantic en suite, which had at some point been quietly made ready for a baby: a set of towels with rabbit ears, baby powders and oils, baby sponges and baby soaps, and half a dozen multicolored plastic ducks lined up along the edge of the bath.
“All this nonsense!” Estelle crouched to examine a kooky little device made of terrycloth with a metal frame that hooked to the side of the bath and looked like a sun-chair for a tiny old man. “All this equipment. Only way to wash a baby this small is in the sink.”
I knelt next to Estelle and helped unwrap the tiny package. Froggy limbs splayed, astonished.
“The shock,” explained Estelle, as the baby wailed. “She was warm and tight and now she’s cold and loose.”
I stood by as she lowered Sankofa, outraged and screaming, into a seven-thousand-pound hunk of Victorian porcelain I remembered ordering.
“Dere, dere,” said Estelle, wiping a cloth in the child’s many wrinkled crevices. After a minute or so she cupped Sankofa’s tiny backside in her hand, kissed her on her still-screaming face and told me to lay the swaddling blanket out in a triangle on the heated floor. I sat back on my heels and watched Estelle rub coconut butter all over the baby. To me, who had never so much as held a baby for more than a passing moment, the whole procedure looked masterful.
“Do you have children, Estelle?”
Eighteen, sixteen and fifteen—but her hands were greasy so she directed me to her back pocket and I drew out her phone. I swiped right. Saw, for a moment, the uncluttered image of a tall young man in a high-school graduate’s robe, flanked on both sides by his smiling younger sisters. She told me their names and special talents, their heights and temperaments, and how often or not each one Skyped or replied to her on Facebook. Not often enough. In the ten or so years we had both worked for Aimee, this was the longest and most intimate conversation we’d ever had.
“My mudder take care of dem for me. They go to the very best school in Kingston. Next thing he’ll be heading to the University of the West Indies for engineering. He’s a wonderful young man. The girls they take him like a model. He’s the star. They look up to him so much.”
“I’m Jamaican,” I said, and Estelle nodded and smiled blandly at the baby. I had seen her do this many times, when gently humoring the children, or Aimee herself. Blushing, I corrected myself.
“I mean, my mother’s people are from St. Catherine.”
“Oh, yes. I see. You ever been dere?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, you’re still young.” She wrapped the child back up in its cocoon and held it to her breast. “Time’s on your side.”
? ? ?
Christmas came. The baby was presented to me, to all of us, as a fait accompli, a legal adoption, suggested and agreed upon by the parents, and nobody questioned this, or not out loud. No one asked what “agreement” could even mean in a situation of such deep imbalance. Aimee was in the throes of baby love, everyone else seemed happy for her—it was her Christmas miracle. All I had were suspicions and the fact that the whole process had been hidden from me until it was already over.
A few months later I went back to the village for the final time, making inquiries as best I could. Nobody would speak to me about it, or offer anything but happy platitudes. The birth parents were no longer living locally, no one seemed to know exactly where they had moved. If Fernando knew something about it, he wasn’t going to tell me, and Hawa had moved to Serrekunda with her Bakary. Lamin moped around the village, he was in mourning for her—maybe I was, too. Evenings in the compound, without Hawa, were long, dark, lonely and conducted entirely in languages I didn’t know. But though I told myself, as I headed out to Lamin’s place—five or six times in all, and always late in the night—that we two were acting on an uncontrollable physical desire, I think we both knew perfectly well that whatever passion existed between us was directed through the other person toward something else, toward Hawa, or toward the idea of being loved, or simply to prove to ourselves our own mutual independence from Aimee. She was really the person we were aiming at with all our loveless fucking, as much a part of the process as if she were in the room.
Creeping back from Lamin’s to Hawa’s compound, very early one morning, just before five, as the sun came up, I heard the call to prayer and knew I was already too late to pass unwitnessed—a woman pulling a recalcitrant donkey, a group of children waving from a doorway—and so changed direction, to make it look as if I were out for a walk for no particular reason, as everyone knew the Americans sometimes did. Circling back round the mosque, I saw Fernando right in front of me, leaning against the next tree, smoking. I’d never seen him smoke before. I tried smiling casually in greeting but he fell in step with me and grabbed me painfully by the arm. He had beer on his breath. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all.
“What are you doing? Why do you do these things?”
“Fern, are you following me?”
He didn’t answer until we were the other side of the mosque, by the huge termite hill, where we stopped, obscured from view on three sides. He let go of me and started speaking as if we had been in the middle of a long discussion.
“And I have some good news for you: thanks to me, he will be with you very soon on a permanent basis, yes, thanks to me. I am going to the embassy today in fact. I am working very hard behind the scenes to unite the young and not-so-young lovers. All three of them.”