THE UNEXPECTED [PART 2]

She had her mother's composure. Something around the eyes, maybe, something about the way she held still. But there was something else there — he couldn't have named it yet because he did not know what to look for in himself in another person's face. He would later. He would look at this face for months and years and each time find something new.

For now: she was small, and she was quiet, and she was looking at him with dark, serious eyes, and she had a small scar near her left eyebrow from some past encounter with the physical world that nobody had explained to him yet.

He said the first thing that occurred to him, which was: "Hello."

Aurica said, "You have paint on your hand."

He looked at his left hand. There was, indeed, a streak of cadmium yellow across his knuckles from the canvas he'd been working on last night. He had forgotten it was there.

"I paint," he said.

She looked at the paint for a moment.

"What do you paint?" she asked.

"Mostly things I can't explain."

She considered this. Nodded once, as though this was an acceptable answer. Then she returned to her corner of the sofa and resumed her inventory.

David looked at his mother.

His mother looked at him with the expression of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for God to answer a specific prayer and has just watched it walk through the front door in a yellow dress.

"Mummy," he said carefully.

"Don't Mummy me," she said, in a voice with no raised volume and maximum content. "She didn't come from Timbuktu. This is not a small thing."

"I know it's not a small thing."

"Do you? Because you are looking at me with the face of someone who is about to say something calm and small when what is called for is—"

"Grace." His father's voice. Quiet. The single word had the function of a large hand placed gently on a door that was beginning to swing too fast.

His mother stopped.

His father looked at David over his half-moon glasses. "The woman is saying you have a child. What do you want to say to that?"

"I want to say," David said, "that I believe her. I want to say that the fact that I don't have clear memories of that period is my limitation, not her dishonesty. And I want to say—" he paused, turned back to Tiwa — "that I would like to understand everything. All of it. If you're willing."

Tiwa held his gaze for a moment. Then something in her face — not much, a barely visible thing — eased.

"Yes," she said. "Of course."

His mother made akara.

This was how Grace Mercer responded to significant emotional events — with the production of food, specifically akara, because akara was what her own mother had made in moments that required the family to sit together and be reminded that the world was still physical and still good and still tasted of black-eyed peas fried in hot oil. It was, David had always felt, her version of a speech.

She made it in the kitchen and brought it out on the large plate, and she poured cold Milo for Aurica without asking, which was a decision so confident it suggested she had looked at the child and simply known.

Aurica received the Milo with both hands — a gesture of respect that made David's father look up from his newspaper with the first real expression of the morning, a faint calibration in his eyes.

"You held it with both hands," his father said to her.

"Mummy says you hold things given by elders with two hands," Aurica said.

"Your mother is a sensible woman." He returned to his paper. "Where were you born?"

"New Jersey," Aurica said.

"Hmm."

"But I've lived in London and Lagos and Abuja."

"Also hmm."

"I like Abuja best. It's clean and the roads are straight. Lagos roads are confused."

David's father turned a page. "Lagos roads are not confused. Lagos is simply a city that believes in personal freedom of direction."

Aurica looked at him for a moment.

"That's a nice way to say confused," she said.

Professor Mercer stopped turning the page.

There was a beat of absolute stillness.

Then he made a sound that was, from him, the functional equivalent of a standing ovation — a single short exhale through the nose that meant fair point, accepted.

David watched all of this from his chair.

He was eating an akara and experiencing a feeling he did not have adequate vocabulary for. It was not happiness exactly — it was stranger than happiness, more complicated, a feeling that had the shape of a door opening into a room he hadn't known the house contained.

He looked at Tiwa.

She was watching Aurica and his father with a quiet smile, the first real smile he'd seen from her.

"She does that," Tiwa said softly, to David. "Just — takes the measure of a room and settles into it."

"How long has she been like that?"

"Since she could talk." She paused. "She was an unusually quiet baby. She would just... watch. Everything. Always watching."

"She's watching now," David said.

They both looked at Aurica, who had turned from his father and was now looking carefully at the painting David had left propped against the wall near the television — unfinished, a large abstract piece in blues and greys and one aggressive streak of cadmium yellow, the kind of thing he painted at 2 a.m. when his brain wouldn't stop.

"What is that?" Aurica asked.

"A painting," David said.

"I can see it's a painting. What is it of?"

"I'm not sure yet."

She looked at it for a long, serious moment. "It looks like something is trying to come up from somewhere deep," she said. "But it isn't frightening. It looks like it just wants to be seen."

The room was quiet.

David looked at the painting.

He had made it at 2 a.m., half-asleep, and he could not have told you what it was of.

She had just told him exactly what it was of.

He looked at this child — his daughter, a sentence his mind was still slowly walking around — and she had already turned away and was drinking her Milo with both hands and asking his mother how the akara was made, and his mother was answering with the enthusiasm of a woman who has been waiting her whole life for someone to ask.

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