Chapter 50 Because Of Everything

Chapter 50 Because Of Everything
The letter came back three weeks later.I was not expecting it that fast. International post was unpredictable and I had told myself to be patient and had been managing the patience imperfectly, checking the letterbox every day with a casualness I was not fooling anyone with, including myself.It arrived on a Thursday morning, a thick envelope with Nigerian stamps and handwriting I now recognised. I stood in the hallway of our building and held it for a moment before I took it upstairs.She had written eight pages.She wrote about my father as a boy the way I had asked — the specific memories, the ones that only a mother kept. The way he ate his food, the arguments he picked, the morning he came home from school at eleven years old and announced he had decided to learn French for reasons he never fully explained. The friendships. The failures. The time he failed an exam he should have passed and cried in his room and then got up the next morning and asked her to quiz him until he had it right.She wrote about reading my letter. She said she had read it to her housekeeper and they had both cried and her housekeeper had said this girl writes like someone who has been through things and come out knowing what they mean.She wrote: I want to hear your voice one day. Not now if you are not ready. But one day. A phone call. Just to hear what Adaeze sounds like.She wrote: Your young man sounds like someone your father would have liked. Your father had a gift for recognising people who meant what they said. He always said you could tell in the first five minutes. I imagine he would have known about this one in two.I had to put the letter down at that point and look at the ceiling for a while.When I picked it back up she had written about the Igbo phrases she had used in her first letter. She translated each one. She wrote that she hoped I would learn some Igbo one day, not because it was required but because language was a door and doors were worth opening.She ended with: You said you are learning to walk into rooms like you have already decided you belong there. Good. Keep learning. It took me until forty to fully understand that no one was going to hand me permission so I might as well stop waiting. You are ahead of me already. Your father would be so proud of you, Zara Adaeze. I am already proud of you and I have only just met you. Come and see me when you can. Nigeria will be here. I will be here. — With all my love, your grandmother Ngozi.I folded the letter and put it in the shoebox beside her first one.Then I went and told my mom.She sat at the dining table and read both letters and did not say anything for a long time and then she said: I should have given you that box years ago. I was protecting myself. I'm sorry.I said: You gave it to me when you could. That's enough.She looked at me.I looked back.She reached across the table and squeezed my hand once.That was the whole of it.— — —Micah's sports day was on a Saturday in January.The school held it at a local sports ground, the kind with a running track around the outside and a grass field in the middle and fold-out chairs set up along the edge for parents and families. It was cold but bright, the particular January brightness that came when the sky had decided to be clear and meant it.We arrived at ten — Chase and me, Karen and Gerald who had been coming to things with her since December with the easy naturalness of someone who had decided to show up and was not making a performance of it. Chase's dad was there too, standing near the entrance when we arrived, slightly uncertain in the way he always was now at family things, waiting to see if he was welcome.Karen saw him first.She looked at him for a moment. Then she walked over and said something quietly and he nodded and she nodded and she walked back and that was that. Not resolved. Not repaired. But present. Moving forward in the slow complicated way that some things moved.Micah found us from fifty metres away.He came running across the grass in his school sports kit — the red one, the one he had told me about three times in the preceding week with increasing excitement — and he launched himself at Chase first and then immediately at me and said into my shoulder at full volume: "I'm going to WIN.""Which event?" I said."All of them," he said, and ran back to his class.Chase looked at me. "He came last in the egg and spoon last year.""That's growth," I said."That's delusion," Chase said. "Loving delusion, but."We found chairs together along the edge of the track. Karen on one side with Gerald. Chase's dad a few seats down. Chase and me in the middle with the winter sun on our faces and the noise of children and parents and the particular warmth that came from being outside in the cold with people you loved.Micah ran four events.He came third in the sprint, which he celebrated as though he had broken a world record. He came last in the long jump, which he also celebrated because he had jumped further than he had in practice and that was the important thing, he explained to us afterward at some length. He came second in the relay and was furious about it for approximately four minutes before he forgave his teammate and they hugged it out. He came first in the obstacle course and the noise he made when he crossed the finish line was genuinely one of the most joyful sounds I had ever heard from a human being.He came running to us at the end of his last event, sweaty and bright-eyed and completely spent, and crashed into Chase and then into me and said: "Did you see me? Did you see me?""We saw you," Chase said. "Every second.""Every second," I confirmed.Micah beamed with everything he had.Then he looked at his dad, who was standing a few seats away watching.A moment passed between them — small and large at the same time, the way moments were when they carried a year of weight inside them. Then Micah walked over and stood in front of his father and his father crouched down and Micah said something I couldn't hear and his father nodded and Micah nodded back and that seemed to be the agreement made.Karen was watching. I watched her watch them.Gerald put his hand over hers briefly.She didn't pull it away.Chase was beside me. His hand found mine in the crowd the way it always did — without announcement, without making a moment of it, just there and then held. I looked down at our hands and then up at the field where Micah was now running back toward his class for the closing ceremony with his arms out like an airplane."I used to think being loved meant being chosen despite everything you are," I said.Chase looked at me."I used to think the fact that I existed the way I did — the way I looked, the space I took up, all of it — was something that needed to be forgiven by anyone who chose to be near me." I watched Micah reach his class and turn around and wave at us from across the field with his whole body. "Like love was something people extended toward you in spite of what you were. Not because of it."Chase was quiet beside me."Standing here," I said. The cold on my face. His hand warm in mine. Karen and Gerald. Micah waving. A letter from Lagos in a shoebox in my room. Priya and Riley somewhere in the city figuring out what they were becoming. My mom in the navy dress laughing at something Gerald said across a dinner table. Chase beside me on an empty road holding cold coffee and finally being able to breathe."Standing here I think I finally understand. It was never despite. It was always because. All of it. Every single part of me. Because."Chase looked at me for a long moment.Then he said, very quietly: "Yeah. That's exactly right."Micah waved again, bigger this time, making sure we had seen him.We waved back.The winter sun kept its light on everything.The field kept its noise.And I stood there in my full space, in the cold January morning, holding the hand of someone who had chosen me completely, and I let it be exactly what it was.Real.Mine.Enough.