“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.”
I began a denial but there was no point. Fern was always very hard to lie to.
“It must be a truly strong feeling you have for him, to risk so much. So much. Last time you were here, you know, I suspected it, and the time before — but somehow it is still a shock, to have it confirmed.”
“But I don’t have any feelings for him!”
All the fight went out of his face.
“You imagine this makes me feel better?”
Finally, shame. A suspicious emotion, so ancient. We were always advising the girls in the academy not to feel it, because it was antiquated and unhelpful and led to practices of which we didn’t approve. But I felt it at last.
“Please don’t say anything. Please. I’m leaving tomorrow and that’s it. It just started and it’s already over. Please, Fern — you have to help me.”
“I tried,” he said, and walked off, in the direction of the school.
The rest of the day was torture, and the next, and the flight was torture, the walk through the airport, with my phone a grenade in my back pocket. It didn’t go off. When I walked into the London house everything was as before, only happier. The children were well settled — at least, we didn’t hear from them — the last album was well received. Photographs of Lamin and Aimee together, both looking beautiful — back at Jay’s birthday, from the concert — were in all the gossip rags and were more successful, in their way, than the album itself. And the baby had its debut. The world was not especially curious about logistics, as it turned out, and the papers considered her delightful. It seemed logical to everyone that Aimee should be able to procure a baby as easily as she might order a limited-edition handbag from Japan. Sitting in Aimee’s trailer one day during a video shoot, eating lunch with Mary-Beth, personal assistant number two, I tentatively introduced the topic, hoping to wheedle some information out of her, but I needn’t have been so careful, Mary-Beth was more than happy to tell me, I got the whole story, a contract had been drawn up by one of the entertainment lawyers, a few days after Aimee met the baby, and Mary-Beth had been there to see it signed. She was delighted at this evidence of her own importance and what it suggested about my position in the hierarchy. She took out her phone and flipped through the pictures of Sankofa, her parents and Aimee smiling together, and in among them, I noticed, was a screenshot of the contract itself. When she went to the bathroom and left her phone in front of me I e-mailed the screenshot to myself. A two-page document. A monumental amount of money, in local terms. We spent about the same on household flowers in a year. When I brought this fact to Granger, my last ally, he surprised me by considering it a noble case of “putting your money where your mouth is,” and spoke so tenderly about the baby that everything I had to say sounded monstrous and unfeeling in comparison. I saw that rational conversation wasn’t possible. The baby cast a spell. Granger was just as much in love with Kofi, as we called her, as everybody else who came near her, and God knows she was easy to love, nobody was immune, certainly not me. Aimee was besotted: she could spend an hour or two just sitting with the child on her knee, staring down at her, without doing anything else, and knowing Aimee’s relationship with time, its value and scarcity to her, we all understood what a mighty measure of love this represented. The baby redeemed all kinds of deadening situations — long meetings with the accountants, tedious dress fittings, PR-strategy brainstorm sessions — she changed the color of a day simply by means of her presence in the corner of whichever room, on the knee of Estelle or rocking in a Moses basket on a stand, chuckling, gurgling, crying, untarnished, fresh and new. The first chance we got we’d all crowd around her. Men and women, of all ages and races, but all of us with a certain amount of time racked up in Aimee’s team, from worn old battle-horses like Judy, to middle-rankers like me, to young kids straight out of college. We all worshipped at the altar of the baby. The baby was starting from the beginning, the baby was uncompromised, the baby wasn’t hustling, the baby needn’t fake Aimee’s signature on four thousand headshots heading for South Korea, the baby didn’t have to generate meaning out of the broken shards of this and that, the baby was not nostalgic, the baby had no memories and no regrets, it did not need a chemical skin peel, it did not have a phone, it had no one to e-mail, truly time was on its side. Whatever happened afterward, it wasn’t out of any lack of love for the baby. The baby was surrounded by love. It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.