He was over six feet tall so fitting him into the freezer with the dignity he deserved would be a challenge. I tried to picture him in the cold box, bent at the hips and the knees, maybe with his chin tucked in, like one of the yoga poses he hated but tried anyway because I loved yoga and he loved me.
We had met at the gym. Eddie often entertained guests with the story of how he had fallen in love while watching me from a distance for many weeks. He had signed up for the yoga class I instructed so he could meet me, having already decided that he wanted to marry me. That was who he was, a planner and an executor, and it seemed odd that a man who predetermined his every step meticulously, who had cared for my every need since our encounter ten years before, had died and left me in Ghana with nothing but an absurd plan to guide my next steps.
Fifteen minutes earlier, I had raised myself onto one elbow to watch his slumber, mine disturbed, I realized belatedly, as his spirit had whispered its goodbye. I had kept this guard for ten nights, ever since the doctors had confirmed that pancreatic cancer had quietly, aggressively, and irreversibly ravaged Eddie’s body. I had watched him sleep—he had always been peaceful in sleep: mouth slightly open, arms long at his sides, forehead taut and absent of the lines that normally worried his brow. But that morning, the thin, straight strands of his graying mustache that usually rose and fell in tandem with the rhythm of his heart, were still.
Even as I shook him, gently at first then increasingly violently, I knew my efforts were futile. Eddie was gone. I, Ama Fitch, wife of Ambassador Eddie Fitch; daughter of Sajeed and Maya Alemu; sibling of none; mother of none; was alone, and I realized that I had never imagined I could lie next to his dead body and not die too.
But I did not die, and I could not just lie there, not for long. I had hoped for more time, another fortnight; even a week would have helped; time to execute our plan so I would not need to consider the freezer. A glance at the nightstand clock showed four a.m. The compound would begin to stir soon. The first movement would come with the change of the guards at five; the new shift storming on to the property and rousing the night sentries from sleep with shouts of “Shame.” There would be much call and response, making it impossible to return to sleep until the night guards left—possibly for another job, and the day guards settled into chairs scattered around the shadiest spots of the compound.
The wave of activity would then move indoors as Patience swept through the ground floor of the main residence, opening windows, inspecting balconies, and straightening furniture before taking control of the kitchen.
Patience. The thought filled me with equal measures of calm and panic.
My first caller after Eddie took up the position of United States ambassador to Ghana was the wife of the ambassador from Senegal. Mrs. Wade was a stately, older woman, seasoned in the role of diplomat’s wife. She greeted Patience warmly, but when the housekeeper left after carefully positioning an iced carrot cake and a pot of black coffee, decorative china plates, and silverware on the center table, Mrs. Wade leaned in close. Her musky perfume mingled with the scent of the coffee. My hand went to my neck, but I resisted the urge to raise a fold of my headscarf to cover my nose.
“You kept Sophia’s staff?” she said, referring to the previous ambassador’s wife. She did not wait for an answer before adding, “Interesting,” with a raised eyebrow and pout to her lips that left no doubt of her views on my decision.
I squirmed, feeling like a schoolgirl who had tried and failed to impress an upperclassman. I had been cautioned that loyal staff could mean the difference between a comfortable existence and a chaotic household, and perfect order was essential if Eddie was to secure an extension at the end of his three-year term. So that night after Mrs. Wade’s visit, as Eddie and I lay on our backs in bed, eyes closed, fingers linked in postcoital tenderness, I floated the idea of letting the staff go and beginning with a handpicked crew I could mold.
“Patience is older, taller, and probably smarter than I am. I feel like a visitor, tiptoeing around in my own house; like I’m in her space instead of she being in mine. I’m already uncomfortable managing people, dictating what they do. We need this to go smoothly. It might be better if I choose my own staff.”
Eddie flipped onto his side to look at me, his eyes dark and wide.
“Seriously, Ama? Where would they go? Their families rely on them. This isn’t the US where people have savings and safety nets. Here, a lost job can mean the difference between a family thriving and starving. Find another way to make it work.”
Ashamed, I said nothing more on the subject. I ignored Mrs. Wade’s disapproval when Patience entered the room on her next visit, but I still feared the possible repercussions of my decision. Everything about our tenure had to be perfect. And so, I fought to assert my authority. I injected myself into every aspect of the household affairs from directing how the meals should be prepared, to decreeing the frequency of the laundry and window cleaning. Patience lived up to her name, but I sensed her frustration. Our wills pushed and pulled against each other like equally-matched contenders in a game of tug-of-war.
The struggle continued until one day when Patience knocked on the door of the study where I was sorting bills. She filled the door frame, her brow furrowed, beads of sweat forming in the creases of her forehead.
“Everything okay, Patience?”
“Madam, Mercy told me you told her not to clean the living room today.”
“Yes, she dusted yesterday and no one has been in there. The furniture can’t possibly need cleaning every day. It’s a waste of her time, not to mention the polish.” I gestured to the paperwork in front of me, both to suggest the polish was another item of bother and to signal that I had more important things to attend to.
Instead of leaving, Patience clasped her hands and twisted them as if restraining them from acting without her consent. “Madam, the harmattan is coming. We have to dust every day or the dirt becomes too much.”
“Harmattan? It doesn’t seem to be impacting us yet. It’s just too much to have her around every day.”
Patience shifted again. “Madam.” She paused then lifted her shoulders. “I have worked with four ambassadors in this house. It is always the same. You do not know how to use servants. Not at first. But you will grow accustomed.”
I squirmed at her use of the word ‘servant.’ She was right, although it was unlikely that she understood the depths of my anxiety about having people around solely to do my bidding. I left the United States because people who looked and dressed like me were often disrespected. I could not then come to Ghana and execute authority over a group of people primarily because of their social status, and
I had no intention of ‘growing accustomed.’
Patience dropped her hands. “Madam needs to let me do my job.”
After that encounter, I relented somewhat, although the scales weighing the power between us continued to shift back and forth. Patience demonstrated, with a raised eyebrow or a pause before complying, what she thought of many of my secular and Western-styled habits. I could only imagine how she would respond to the news that, on finding my husband dead, I had promptly placed him in a freezer.
What are my choices? I thought. Once Eddie’s death was made public, I would be forced to leave Ghana for the United States.
I exhaled deeply, pushing away the thought. The air was still in the bedroom Eddie and I shared; the heavy curtains motionless despite the open windows. We had not used the air conditioning since Eddie started shivering through the hot West African nights.
The clock now read five minutes past four, and I wondered how long I had before the scent of death revealed itself to the household.
The freezer. The words pushed themselves to the front of my mind. I could not think with him in the room. I wrapped my night robe around my body, kissed Eddie’s forehead, then tramped downstairs to contemplate our plan.
***
The living room was dark except for the soft glow from the lamp on the ornate wooden table. It was a large room, long, narrow, and when I first arrived in Ghana, in my efforts to integrate into the new environment, I had it filled with locally-sourced furniture. I had even ventured to the lumber market, a compound with vendors scattered around a desert-like expanse. Men sat under large open-sided structures with galvanized roofs, wrangling to sell wood and construction materials. Even though I was a foreigner and not bound by the unspoken restrictions on local women, the men eyed me warily and strained to look behind me for the husband who must have accompanied me, the person with whom they were really meant to bargain, the person who would know what to purchase at a lumber market.
After repeatedly being quoted outrageously-inflated prices, being questioned about my order, and having met with outright refusals to complete a transaction without my husband’s stamp of approval, I had almost buckled under the urge to turn my back on the dust-filled arena and flee to the air-conditioned comfort of the waiting car. The men kept their distance but the way they regarded me from their folding chairs—half-closed eyes, legs spread open to underscore their manliness, leather-sandal clad feet planted on the dry ground—triggered echoes of my past. I could have sent Michael, my driver and by then my co-conspirator, to make the purchases, but I had been determined not to be a figure-head ambassador’s wife waiting straight-backed in a luxury car unwilling to sully my hands by negotiating with the locals. And so, I had stuck to my mission, bought my materials, and directed the assembly of my furniture. Each living room piece—two couches, two love seats, and two arm chairs, a host of tables, and an armoire—had an associated tale. Over time, I realized the journey I had made to acquire the wood had never been the dangerous adventure that lived in my head but, somewhat ironically, more like a tiresome nightmare from which I had the privilege to wake at will.
That early morning, I did not focus on the furniture, could not recall the stories that tied me to them, to the house, or to the country with which I had tried to bond. All I could see was the stark white box, the freezer, squatting in the room like a maggot pupating in a dark corner of a trash bin. *** The freezer had been my idea.
On one of the early days after we had been installed as ambassador and wife, Eddie and I had sat in our bedroom, paperwork strewn poster to poster over the king-sized bed. Eddie examined and dissected every detail of the documents outlining the conditions under which Ghana had accepted the embassy’s presence. He was meticulous in his review, but it was I who had come across the stipulation that: in the event of the ambassador’s death, his assets would be frozen and his dependents would have fifteen days to leave the country. I was sure it happened often enough, an illness or accident taking the head of the household. Under normal circumstances, I imagined that the spouse and family would happily return to the United States. The State Department would rush to their assistance, arranging their way home. But my circumstances were not normal. I intended to remain outside of the United States indefinitely.
“I’ll have to pack you in a freezer before they find out you’re dead and kick me out,” I had quipped. We shared a laugh and when the sound had wisped away into the cool breeze of the air conditioner, Eddie put his arms around me.
“I’ll take care of you forever.” His eyes darkened, clouded by the event that had shrouded our life in the United States and led Eddie to shift his career trajectory at the State Department and aggressively pursue an overseas posting. His gaze was unfocused and I knew he was replaying the incident: seeing himself striding around the corner of the gas station, annoyed that I had insisted on getting the ice instead of waiting for him to do it, only to be faced by the sight of a man embracing me while holding a gun to my head.
I envied him. He did not have a first-hand vision of the events that had led to that moment. ***
“Can I get past you? I need some ice?” I had said to the teen leaning against the edge of the blue-and-white cabinet. He put his cigarette to his lips and inhaled, his cheeks sinking into craters on his slim face. He said nothing.
“Excuse me, please,” I said a little louder. I curved my lips into a smile, a half-hearted effort to distract him from my brown skin and headscarf. Internally, I cursed Eddie for being right…a little…this time. He insisted that given the political environment, wearing a headscarf for cultural reasons as I did, was an unnecessary risk. I countered that if someone hated me for what I wore, that was their issue to deal with, not mine.
“I’m not deaf. You people always in a hurry,” the young man responded.
I heard my father’s voice in my head cautioning me to disengage and live to relate the story at the party to which Eddie and I were going. But the roar of my irritation at the world for restricting my every action, was louder.
“You people? You mean humans?”
The man dropped the cigarette into a shallow puddle on the ground, then crushed it with the heel of his sneaker. He stood straighter and pushed his hands into the front pockets of his hoodie. He was taller than I had first thought, but slight in build.
I can take him.
“No. I meant Muslim. Cockroach. Terrorists.”
He seemed so young, a child repeating words he’d heard his Daddy say. I almost laughed then choked back the sound when I noticed the shape of the gun pressing against the front pocket of his hoodie. He turned it so the barrel was unmistakable under the black fabric. It was aimed at my belly.
There was a distance of about six feet between us. Would the shot kill? Would the fabric of his hoodie and the pocket slow the bullet’s progress towards me and lessen the impact? The inane calculations distracted me and the next thing I knew his cigarette-laden breath was hot against the side of my face. Afterwards I recalled feeling nauseous, but in the moment, I was only aware of one gloved hand over my mouth and the other using the nuzzle of a gun to push my headscarf back from my forehead.
“I can make you feel like the cockroach you are,” he growled.
I often replayed this scene with alternate endings in which I stomped on his foot, punched his face, or kneed his groin…one or all of these, but in reality, terror immobilized me and all I could do was to tremble. It seemed like minutes passed in which my shaking was the only movement in the world. When Eddie rounded the corner, the man swung around and the gun exploded. Pain forced me to my knees as the bullet entered my shoulder; a clean entrance and exit that the doctor would later declare as
‘Lucky.’
“Yes, lucky,” I had echoed, the first words I spoke after being shot.
“I will take care of you forever.”
Those words reverberated in my mind after it became obvious that Eddie was very ill. His illness revealed itself with a seizure, or at least that was what the doctor labeled Eddie’s stiffening at the dinner table, his eyes unfocused behind his glasses. The diagnosis came after a month of being shepherded from one doctor to another, doctors who were well-qualified but lacked the diagnostic tools to give definitive answers. Eddie and I entered each new corridor of our quest like children walking hand-in-hand, lost in a labyrinth, until we received the final verdict: pancreatic cancer that had metastasized through his body and up to his brain. Our journey had been futile. There was no way out of the maze alive, at least not for Eddie.
I had been willing to return to the United States. Access to medical care, a cure, a prolonging of life was worth everything, but Eddie would have none of it. His death sentence in hand, he focused, not on his prognosis—death was, after all, inevitable—but on my life. When Eddie added the chest freezer to our living room décor, he begged me to promise to fulfill his wishes and drilled his scheme into my head with gravitas that increased as his strength diminished.
“We have money. You can live anywhere you want. The trouble is to retrieve it and we don’t have time. Once they know I have died, the only way you can access our money will be by returning to the US and you must not go back to the US,” he insisted.
We never talked about why he did not want me to return. The attack had been one incident but it hung between us like a frozen carcass swinging silently on a meat hook.
After I was shot, I put every effort into putting the incident behind me. I told everyone I was fine, that these things happened, that I was ‘lucky’, I had survived. Only Eddie knew of the nightmares of my drug-induced sleep; he stifled my screams against his chest; he cataloged each time I stiffened in the presence of a strange man. I often caught him staring at the scar on my shoulder, his face a mask of anger, although I suspected that his gentle demeanor had become the mask and his anger, our new reality in which his role had shifted from husband to bodyguard, and mine from wife to victim.
I pushed back against his plan for the freezer. “Have you suddenly found religion?” I asked, smiling. “Do you now expect me to believe you will be looking down on me after you die? Maybe God will issue you a video screen? An iPad? Won’t there be anything more interesting for you to watch, though?”
“I may not know what you do,” he replied, ignoring my flippancy. “But at least give me the satisfaction of dying believing you will follow my wishes.” He paused. “Your father would turn in his grave to know you can’t feel safe returning to the country he adopted, the country he claimed as the greatest democracy in the world.” Eddie hesitated for a moment longer than usual then, “If I die…when I die you must not go back. Promise me you won’t go back.”
I considered his pleas. With money, life was good in Ghana. Patience, I knew, would disagree. She had often confided to me about the difficulties of being a woman in Ghana: economic instability, strict gender defined roles, lines which could not be crossed. “I see it in the movies,” she had said. “Women in the US have it easy. Here you must earn money, run the household, and raise the children all the time with a smile on your face and legs ready to open.”
I had been shocked at Patience’s familiarity and had felt an urge to tell her how that “easy” life in the US had erased me, how I regurgitated my trauma when I heard a door slam or found myself alone with a strange man. But it was different in Ghana. When I encountered the searching gazes of the men in the lumber yard, my stomach clenched, but I did not feel the deep roots of fear. In Ghana I was obroni, a foreigner, my otherness was met with dismissiveness or curiosity but never hate. I had privilege in Ghana that was denied me in the US.
The shooting had been one incident but I still could not endure the scent of a cigarette without reliving the churning and cramping in my lower abdomen that followed my fall. It had been one incident but that man had balled up all the slights I had experienced during my life: slights about my brown skin, my clothing, and my unimpressive intellect, stuffed them into his gun, and blown it at me in a rush of hot, stinking air and a bath of blood that covered my shoulder, seeped from my head when I fell, and later that evening, flowed from between my legs when I miscarried.
It had been one incident but it played over and over in my mind, always the same details, the heat of his breath, the sharp sting of pain, the empty hole of irreplaceable loss.
The afternoon when we first discussed actually using the freezer, I had curled against Eddie, pressing into his waning body, my face buried in his thinning hair wet with my tears and I promised. “I will do as you say. I will not go back.”
“I should be the one to save you,” Eddie had said.
I should have saved myself, I thought.
***
Now I was faced with fulfilling that promise. I had not yet accumulated enough money to make a home in Ghana. There had been no time. Only the freezer would buy me time. In the darkness of our living room I sat, my elbows resting on parted knees and my palms cupping my chin. It was four-thirty and very slight traces of gray lit the sky, reminding me it was time to make my move.
I would have to move Eddie. The thought of that task weighed as heavily on me as his body would on my arms when I attempted to bring him downstairs and lift him into the freezer. I was strong—regular yoga ensured that—and he had lost some weight because of his illness. In my mind’s eye, I watched myself walk back up the stairs and into the bedroom where he lay. I imagined scooping him in my arms and, staggering just a little under the weight, carrying him out of the room to the landing at the top of the staircase. If I had some sort of pulley system, I could use ropes to lower him to the first floor. Or slide him down a laundry chute like the one at my childhood home where there had been no servants whose job it was to make dirty laundry disappear and reappear clean and folded in dresser drawers.
I would have to twist my body sideways and carry him down the stairs, careful not to let his head bang on the walls. Right foot, left foot joining it on the same step, right foot, left foot together again, until I reached halfway down the stairs. His arm might catch on the huge metallic sculpture I had commissioned from a talented local artist and mounted in the curve of the wall. Eddie might slide out of my arms, completing his journey down the stairs without my assistance. I imagined my face filled with horror as I raced his body to the bottom and lifted him from the ungraceful heap but even then, the ordeal would not be over. I would still be faced with the problem of getting him from the bottom of the stairs to the freezer and then over the four-foot-high top-loading appliance. No matter how many times I played the scene in my head the result was the same. Even with my strength and his slight frame there was no way I could move him from our bed and into the freezer with any of the dignity he deserved at this end of his life.
“Are you watching, Eddie?” I said, directing my words to the ceiling. “Do you have any idea what you have asked me to do?”
Four-forty-five.
I had fifteen minutes to act. Fifteen minutes to get his body into the freezer then return to bed and pretend to wake with the house staff as if it was not at all unusual that ‘Sir’ had left during the night leaving behind all his clothes. A death in his family, they would understand, although his visibly declining health and the suddenness of his departure would worry at them, and some would suspect foul play, imaginations leaning towards the occult rather than natural death.
Holding suspicion at bay until I was prepared to make my own exit, would be my last major act as the ambassador’s wife and my most important performance. I had played so many parts during this ambassadorial post: doting wife, supportive wife, and playful wife were some of my best roles.
And yet I was unable to act. Unable to walk up the stairs. Unable to return to his body. Unable to lock him away in the freezer. Unable to move.
I could go back home. Home. I had not thought of the United States as home in at least three years. Going home was returning from the busy streets of central Accra to the quiet tree-lined neighborhood where we lived. Home was the thick black gate of the walled compound that opened to welcome me after each excursion. Home was where I felt safe. They had never caught the youth who shot me. He had run, gun in hand, through the grove of trees behind the gas station and disappeared. He had left no fingerprints, no evidence but an untraceable bullet and the soggy cigarette butt. My description had been too vague, there were so many skinny, white teens in black hoodies with short haircuts. The police had given up and moved on.
In my nightmares, he was waiting for me to return, waiting to approach me in the airport, to step close to me so I smelt his aftershave and cigarette breath, waiting to say “I can make you feel like the cockroach you are.” I knew my fear was baseless. I meant nothing to that man. If he thought of me at all it would be as an anecdote he brought up to prove to his buddies what a badass he was. I knew this was true, yet the fear bobbed up again and again.
It was true that my situation had changed. Five years ago, I was nobody, and worse, a Muslim nobody. Now I was a United States’ ambassador’s widow. I could engage professionals to reopen the files; to re-examine the ballistic evidence, security film, eye witnesses; to find this man. And then what? The fear would end with his incarceration? Would that be enough? With his death? Would that be enough? Would anything be enough?
A pigeon cooed loudly as it flew past the living room window. The back door moved, lifted slightly and swung open by someone accustomed to avoiding its noisy idiosyncrasies. The familiar slapping of rubber slippers on the wooden floors filled the room. It was Patience, emerging from her quarters, almost invisible in the dark except for the white of her t-shirt and the shine of her dark forehead and white teeth.
I was out of time.
“Madam, I saw the light. I thought I left it on. Are you ok?”
Am I ok? I thought. I had two pathways—announce Eddie’s death to the world and find my own way through the consequences or take Patience into my confidence. I could lean on Patience. The woman had handled her share of grief in this country where death seemed always a hair’s breadth from the door. I would have to explain to Patience why leaving was unthinkable; to convince her that her impression of a woman’s life in the United States was a mirage that would dissipate with the slightest probe. I could tell my story, put words to my trauma in a way I had not since the police interrogations. The thought filled me with dread that froze my tongue, my mind, my entire body. Even if I could speak it, Patience would respond with clarity only possible from a distance. She would put it to me that freedom from the incident did not lie in a physical place: the US or Ghana and it certainly did not lie in the freezer; a perspective I would have to acknowledge as truth.
“Madam, are you okay?” Patience repeated, her voice deep with concern. “I heard voices. Is the ambassador with you?”
“No, Patience,” I replied. “Wake the household. The ambassador is dead.”
——
Image: Copilot AI remixed