Chapter 15
The Choice
Her message came on the eleventh of February, and it was four words long.
The stairs. Friday. Six.
I read it in Timo's garage with a spanner in my hand, and he looked up from under a bonnet and said, "That's a face," and I said, "It's the stairs," and he said, "What stairs?" and I said, "Never mind," and put the spanner very carefully down on the fender, because my fingers had stopped working.
I had not heard from her since the thirty-first. She had replied to my message with a small round emoji of a face with its eyes closed, smiling, and nothing else, and I had looked at it for a week, unable to decide whether it was a door or a wall. I had not written again. I had learned to leave a thing alone.
On Friday I left the office at five. The evening was hot and hazy, with the low copper light that comes before the rains. I took a boda to the Lugogo Bypass, and the rider, a very young man with a phone strapped to his handlebar playing a football commentary, took the corners as though he were being chased. I did not mind. I held on and watched the city go by, and thought about nothing at all, in the exact way a man thinks about nothing who is thinking about a single thing with his whole body.
The building had not changed. The petrol station, the satellite dish, the sign in its ransom-note letters. PRESS. I paid the rider and stood on the pavement for a moment, looking up.
Then I went in, past the security guard, who knew me and waved, and up the concrete stairwell that smelled of damp and instant noodles. The yellow stripes were on every tread.
They were fresh. That was the first thing I saw. Someone had repainted them, recently, a thick bright coat over the old faded one, each edge crisp. It was a small thing. It stopped me on the third step with my hand on the rail.
"Mr. Okumu does it every October," said a voice above me. "He says it's a safety matter. He won't let anyone else. He does it himself, in his cardigan, on his knees. It takes him a whole morning."
She was sitting on the sixth step, halfway up the flight, with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up.
I had rehearsed what I would feel, and I had been wrong.
I had expected a blow. I had expected the old lurch and grab, the great hot wave of want, the reaching-out. I had thought that my whole body would try to cross the distance before I could stop it. Instead, I stood on the third step and looked at her, and felt only a sort of wide, still, clear attention, as one feels looking at a landscape from a height.
She had changed. That was obvious at once. She was thinner, and browner, and her hair had grown out from the crop into small tight twists that lay close to her head. She wore a plain white shirt and a grey skirt and flat sandals, and there was a wristwatch on her arm that I had not seen. Something in the set of her shoulders had shifted, a slight, easy squareness, like a person who has been carrying a load on one side and has learned to balance it. She looked older. She looked, very quietly, more herself.
The scar in her eyebrow was exactly as I remembered.
"Hello, godfather," said Maya.
"Hello."
"You came."
"I said I would." It was what I had said in the newsroom door, a year and a half before, and I heard her hear it. The corner of her mouth moved.
"People say things."
"I know. I'm trying to be the exception."
"I've noticed." She looked at me for a long moment, her head tilted. "You've done something."
"What?"
"I don't know. You're not doing the face."
"Which one?"
"Any of them." She smiled. It was a small, tired, guarded smile, and I saw what it cost her. "Sit. It's a long staircase, and I'd like you not to stand there like a man on a bus."
I climbed up and sat, three steps below her. Not close. Not far. The concrete was cool through my trousers. Somewhere above us a typewriter of some kind was clacking, a machine no newsroom had had for twenty years, and I realised it was Mr. Okumu's old Olivetti, which he kept for reasons of dignity. A radio played somewhere, low. A man laughed.
"How was Nairobi?" I said.
"Hot. Loud. Extraordinary." She spoke slowly. "I've never worked so hard in my life. I did the land story, the whole thing, Wakiso and two other districts, and it's going regional. It runs in March across six papers. There's a man in the Ministry of Lands who's going to lose his job, and two more who ought to." A flicker of fierce satisfaction crossed her face and went. "I did it by myself. Nobody rang me to check if I was eating. It was the best thing that's ever happened to me."
"I'm so glad."
"I know you are." She looked down at her hands. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. You were glad. In your flat. The day I told you. I've thought about that face for seven months."
I said nothing.
"I want to tell you something, and I want you to let me finish."
"Of course."
"I was very angry. I want you to know that it lasted a long time. It wasn't tidy, or quick. I lay in a flat in Westlands in the first month and I hated you. It was a clean hot hatred. It was almost restful." She drew a breath. "And then, in about September, it stopped. Not because I'd forgiven you. It just went out, like a lamp running out of oil. And what was under it was worse."
"What was under it?"
"That I missed you." She said it flatly. She was looking straight ahead, at the wall. "Every day. Not the romance. The ordinary things. The way you say terrible about a staircase. I'd see a building in Nairobi with a badly proportioned stair and I'd turn to say it, and there'd be nobody. It was the most ridiculous grief. I'd be standing in the middle of Kenyatta Avenue, holding a phone, thinking, I'll tell him, and then, oh."
The typewriter clacked and stopped.
"But I want to be clear," said Maya. "That doesn't mean I've decided."
"I know."
"I need you to know it, and not do a face."
"I'm not doing one."
"You're doing a very small one."
I laughed. It came out unsteady. "I'm trying."
"I know you are." She looked at me then, directly, for the first time. Her eyes were dark and clear and very tired. "So. I'm going to tell you where things stand, and then I'm going to ask you a question. And you're going to answer it honestly, and it's going to be uncomfortable."
"All right."
"The Fund's offered me a job," she said. "In Nairobi. Two years, senior investigator, regional desk. It's a very good offer. It's the kind of offer that I would have cut off my hand for at nineteen. I've got until Friday to say yes."
"Friday next?"
"Yes."
"That's a week."
"It's a week." She spoke calmly. "The Sentinel's also offered me something. Deputy news editor. It's a good job. It's here. It's my mother, and Joel, and Doreen, and the newsroom, and everything I know. Mr. Okumu has been muttering at me for days about institutional loyalty." A faint smile. "He says it's an honour to be asked. He says it in the voice of a man who's been asked to hold a snake."
"And you don't know."
"I know exactly what I want." She said it quite quietly. "That's the problem. I want to go. I've wanted it since about November. I went out there to see whether I could, and I could, and now I'd like to keep doing it. But there's this." She made a small, exasperated gesture at the space between us. "And I hated that. I hated that it was there at all. I thought, I'm not going to make a decision about my career around a man."
"You shouldn't."
"I know I shouldn't. So here's my question." She turned. She looked me in the face. "If I go. If I say yes on Friday, and I'm in Nairobi for two years, and I don't know what happens, and I don't come back. What do you do?"
The staircase was very quiet.
It was the question. I had known it for days. It was the whole of the book, put in six words on a concrete stair. I looked at her, at the fresh yellow edge between us, and I felt the old animal begin to stir in me, the large, patient, frightened one. It was quite calm. It said: say it. Say the thing that will keep her. It had the low warm voice of a good friend. Tell her you'll follow. Tell her you'll wait. Tell her you'd rather die. It's true. Every word of it's true.
And I thought of a car park at Entebbe, and a girl in a green jacket looking back at the glass.
"I'll be sad," I said.
Her eyebrows lifted.
"I'll be very sad. I won't pretend otherwise. I'll be a mess for a while. I'll probably ring Timo at three in the morning and make him listen to me breathe." My voice was not quite steady, but it went on. "I'll want to write to you every day, and I won't, and I'll hate it. And then in a while, I'll be all right. Not because I'll have stopped loving you. Because I'll have learned, once and for all, that I can survive it."
"That's what you told me at the gate."
"It's still true. It's more true."
"Ethan." Her voice was low. "It's easy to say on a stair."
"It isn't easy. I've been sick about it since December." I turned to face her. I set my hands on my knees, open, palms up, an inch from the rail. "I want to say something and I don't want it to sound like a line. I've thought about it a lot. About why I did it. In Entebbe. I've gone over it every way I know. And I'd like to tell you what I found."
She said nothing. She waited.
"I didn't do it because I was afraid of you. That's what I thought at first. I thought, it was the old me, he took over. But that's another way of making it not mine. Nobody took over. There was a corridor and a door and a woman who was warm, and I wanted her, and I opened it. That was me. Just me." I swallowed. "And then I stopped, and that was also me. Both of them. And then I hid it for a week, and that was the worst. It wasn't the kiss. It was that I let you go on believing in a version of me that I'd made up, because I liked being him."
"I know."
"I'm not saying it so you'll forgive me."
"I know that too."
"I'm saying it because I've stopped needing you to." I heard my own words as they left me, quiet and level and true. "That's what I understood. I used to think that if you loved me, it meant you had to forgive me. That it was a kind of contract. And it isn't. You can love someone, completely, and still say no. That's what makes it love and not a hold. If you go to Nairobi, I won't be a man whose life has been ruined. I'll be a man who loved you well enough, at the end, to let you go."
She was quite still. In the last of the light through the stairwell window her face had gone gold and very young.
"That's a beautiful speech," she said, at last, very softly.
"I know. I don't trust it either."
She laughed. It was a shaky, startled sound. She put the back of her hand over her mouth, and her eyes were bright, and she looked away up the stair, at the wall, at a yellow edge, at nothing.
"Do you want to know what I was afraid of?" she said. "The whole way back? On the plane?"
"Yes."
"That I'd come up these stairs, and you'd hold on." She said it so low I could hardly hear. "That you'd say stay, in that voice. And I'd have to choose whether I could bear to say no. And that a part of me would want you to say it, so I wouldn't have to decide." She shook her head. "And you didn't. You just told me you'd be sad. It's the most maddening thing anyone's ever said to me."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It's exactly right." She wiped her cheek with her wrist. "It's what I needed. And it's exactly why I don't know."
The light was almost gone. Someone had switched on the strip lamp on the landing, and it hummed, and put a yellowish glow on the concrete. Below us, a door opened and shut, and there was a burst of noise and then quiet, the newsroom emptying for the weekend.
"I'm going to tell you what I've decided," said Maya. "And I'd like you to listen to all of it."
I nodded.
"I'm going to take the Nairobi job."
The stair did not move. I looked at her face and did not look away. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and the stillness that came over me was not a wall. I want to say that plainly. It was not the old thing, the shutter, the face going out like a light. It was something open. I felt it hurt, quite cleanly, in a place under the ribs, like a wound with no infection in it. I let it.
"That's wonderful," I said. My voice cracked in the middle, and I did not stop it. "I'm so proud of you."
"You mean it."
"I mean it."
"I can see you do." She was crying now, quietly, openly, without wiping it away. "And it's killing you."
"A little."
"Good. It should." She laughed and sobbed at once. "I'd be disgusted if it didn't."
I laughed too. We sat there on the concrete steps, in a hot yellow light, two people with wet faces, laughing at nothing, at the absurdity of it. It was the closest I had felt to her since the veranda.
"I want to say the other thing," said Maya. "Before I lose my nerve."
"Go on."
"I love you."
The words went into the stairwell and stayed there, hanging in the air like something dropped from a height. I did not breathe. It was the thing I had said in my flat, on a summer evening, into a dim room, with no hope of effect, and she had walked out without a word.
"I didn't say it on the landing," she said. "In your flat. I couldn't. I was too angry, and I thought, if I say it, it'll be a promise. And I didn't want to promise anything. But I've had seven months to think about it, and it's true. It's been true since about a week after the veranda. It's not a decision. It's just how it is." She wiped her face on her shoulder. "It doesn't change the sum."
"I know."
"I'm not saying it so you'll wait."
"I know."
"I'm saying it so it exists." She looked at me, and the ghost of a smile touched her mouth. "That's what you'd say."
"It's what I said to Naomi."
"I know. Achan told me you wrote it." She shook her head. "I've been quoting you to myself for months. It's very annoying."
Neither of us spoke. The strip lamp hummed. A moth had found it and was bumping against the glass, patiently, with a small dry sound.
"Ask me again in a year," said Maya.
I looked up.
"Not to come back. I don't know that I will. And I don't want you to hold your life open for me like a door, because that's exactly the kind of thing I'd hate." She was speaking carefully, slowly, one word at a time. "I mean, ask me anything. Ask how it's going. Ask if I'm happy. Ask whether I've met someone. Ask if I forgive you. Just, in a year. Once. And I'll tell you the truth."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, you write to me. Properly. Not every day. Not so that it feels like a hand on my neck. Just when you have something to say." She swallowed. "I'd like to know about the staircases."
"Letters?"
"Real ones. On paper. I like getting post."
"I'll write."
"And I'll write back, sometimes. Not always. I'm going to be busy."
"I know."
"And you can see other people. I'd like to say I don't mind. I'd be lying. But it isn't my right to ask, and I don't want to be the reason you're waiting."
"I won't be waiting," I said. "I'll be living. That's different."
"Is it?"
"I think it's the whole difference."
She looked at me for a long, long moment. Then, without saying anything, she reached down the three steps between us, and took my hand.
It was warm. Her palm was rough at the base, with a callus from pencils. Her fingers laced through mine and held on, quite hard, and I felt it go through my arm, and into my chest, and settle there with a kind of enormous quiet.
We sat like that. Neither of us said a word. The moth beat against the lamp, and the typewriter started again, upstairs, clack, clack, clack, and the light outside the window went from gold to violet to a soft, deep blue.
After a long time, she said, "Walk me up."
"Where?"
"To the top. It's fourteen steps. I'd like to do it with somebody." She stood, still holding my hand, and pulled me up. "I've never done it with somebody. I've done it two thousand times alone."
We climbed. I counted them. Fourteen, each with its bright new stripe, each one exactly where the foot expected it to be. At the top, on the landing under the strip lamp, she turned, and put her forehead against my chest, quite briefly, heavily, as one leans against a wall at the end of a long day.
I put my arms round her. I did not hold. I want you to understand the difference. I put my arms round her the way you put them round something you are not going to keep, and I felt her breathe in, and out, and I did not tighten, and I did not try.
"That's it," she said into my shirt. "That's what I needed. That, exactly."
"What?"
"That you didn't hold on."
She lifted her head. She reached up and touched my face, once, with her thumb, along the jaw, as she had done on a painted step a year and a half before. Then she let go. She went through the door into the newsroom, and did not look back, and the door swung shut behind her with a small soft click.
I stood alone on the landing, under the humming lamp.
It hurt. It hurt exactly as much as I had said it would. I stood there with my hands open at my sides, and my heart going, and waited to see whether I would fall. I did not. I found that I was standing quite steadily, on a concrete floor, on a Friday evening in February, in a warm blue dusk that smelt of paint and dust and rain.
I went down. I took the stairs slowly, one at a time. On the ninth step I stopped, and looked at the yellow edge under my foot, and laughed, quietly, alone.
Then I went out into the evening and did not run.