They find Naana’s body floating in the pool in the early hours of the morning. Her body is swollen with chlorine and water. She is cold and pale, and her skin is ashen, sinking with the slightest pressure. What is most jarring is her eyes. The way they stare up dead, unfeeling, unknowing.

I know all this because my brother comes home with the stories of her body like she is no one. Emmanuel’s eyes are dull as he speaks, mouth stuffed with food, spitting up specks onto the space around his plate. I stand across the table to avoid his firing zone. He eats dinner from the plate Mom set aside for him and leaves his badge at the kitchen counter. At first, I exclaim with him, hmming and tsking, and he tells me how her tattoo is nothing but a blurry mess of ocean creatures, and my heart sinks mid-laugh. But I don’t quite understand why yet.

…

The first girl I ever slept with refused to touch me. She made me sneak in through the window of her first-floor bedroom, so her parents wouldn’t see me, and when I was in, the first thing she told me was that she wasn’t gay.

Neither was I, I said. But when she pushed me to the ground between her knees, I didn’t resist. It wasn’t great, honestly, but it was my first time, and I felt like I had to be grateful to her for that.

The next few weeks, in school, she’d pretend I didn’t exist, feigning disgust when we crossed paths and bumped shoulders in the halls, but she’d pull me into her when no one was watching. And in her home, in the quiet of her first-floor bedroom, she’d let me practice with my tongue, stifling her breaths with a fist. So, yeah, I was grateful.

…

Emmanuel obviously could not know who Naana was to me. And the chance I know the dead girl in his report. So when he asks if I am alright, I laugh and say yeah, and he is probably seeing things. His thirties must really be catching. He shoves me away.

But the next day, I still can’t shake the feeling that something is terribly off. The unease sticks slick along the inside of my throat with a sharp insistence that refuses to be swallowed. I call Naana’s number three times before giving up. There is no chance she’d answer past three calls. I’d just head over to her place. She is probably still asleep, the lazy girl.

…

Abigail talked about herself the entire first date. I didn’t stop her or try to interrupt. I had lost interest the moment we walked into the bar. Osu night life was live, but I had bottomed out of all my excitement. It was all shadows and colors in here, and I brought her to Plot 7 so we could dance. But she said no, and she went on about one thing or the other she bought when she visited the UK earlier that year.

I tried to be polite, but I was no longer listening.

There was a girl serving drinks at the bar. From there, even in the dim blue lights, I could see the contours of her arms, shaking a mixer, muscles flexing beneath, skintight black sleeves. Her smile was tight, and sweat dripped down the side of her face. I imagined the taste, salt with a tinge of alcohol that dripped on her from unsteady hands when she mixed her first few drinks of the night.  Later, I would learn the unsteadiness of her grasp would only calm in my hands.

‘Let me get you another drink.’

And I slid from the stool before she could respond.

…

Naana played basketball in her free time. She said that was why her hands were so big and she could cup my entire face in her palms. I never saw her play, but when she returned, shirt dripping with perspiration, I washed away the sweat with my own hands. Beneath the foam, there were scars she would not explain to me. I stopped asking, because I loved her enough to let her have her secrets.

In a way, that was what our relationship became, quiet in the space of secrecy, serenity in the unknown. I knew she appreciated it.

…

When I get there, Naana is not home, but her door is ajar, and her studio apartment is trashed. Her closet doors are wide open, and clothes, both hers and mine, are strewn across the floor. The full-body mirror by her bed lies shattered on the floor, and reflections of the ceiling I’d hand-painted glow-in-the-dark stars on are all over the floor.

The smell hits me first, urine and damp clothes, fruits spoiling in the damp heat. The acrid scent makes my eyes water, and curls itself in my throat with an urgency that drives me out.

Emmanuel will not answer my question because of confidentiality laws. He asks repeatedly why I am so distraught, but I'm too frantic to form a coherent answer. ‘Please just show me, I beg.’

Show me I ask, but please don’t let it be her, I think. Not her. 

…

I didn't get to tell Naana I was a writer myself. She guessed it one day while we lay in bed, within each other’s skin.

‘It’s just the way you talk, you know? Like you're making music of everything around you.’

‘It’s cute.’ She kisses my nose.

I didn’t tell her everything was already music. Everything was inherently beautiful, and I was just trying to show her.

Later that week, I had my first piece published in a journal. Naana held me through my excitement and kissed me so hard I went dizzy. Later, I would find her memorizing every word of the short poem in the dark of her bedroom, and I would not tell her.

…

Naana said if we ever had the chance to get married, she would strip herself of her last name so she could truly belong to me. I laughed because who lets go of a last name like Arlington? But she told me she was serious, and if we could not leave this godforsaken country, as she called it, and marry like any other pair in love, she would ink my name on her back, so she could carry me forever.

….

The only funeral I have ever attended was one of my father’s great aunts. I was nine years old with a cheeky smile and mischief laced in my every breath. And I asked in front of the entire congregation why Aunty Horla’s cheeks were swollen like that, and if she had taken the bread from the buffet table and stuffed it in her cheeks, and if that was why we had surrounded her like that. It was a joke, obviously. And a pretty funny one to my nine-year-old brain, but no one else was laughing.

It wasn’t like I didn’t understand the permanence of death. I just couldn’t fathom why we were forced to act so morosely when all anybody at the party came to do was eat. Aunty Horla would remain dead regardless of the congregation’s tears, and all this was a sordid waste. Of course, I couldn’t say that. So I resorted to the joke that got me taken out of the funeral proceedings.

I think I understand now. I act in despair because you are not here. And you cannot see the beauty I have been trying to show you, and no longer can I.

…

The tattoo was an attempt to cover up the fact that she was drowning again. She didn’t show me the patch of inked skin till the cut had scabbed over, and she chalked it up to the tattoo artist’s error. I didn’t believe her, obviously. The scar was too clean cut, too new, too deep-set, and too familiar for her excuse to be believable.

So, there was a clean scar running between the fish swimming on her skin. And I wondered if the cut oozed blood or seawater. If it’d helped her pour out the growing dam in her lungs.

….

Naana didn’t have any family to fall back on. They were a bunch of hypocrites who saw her for the first time one night and threw her out the next. She would not tell me why they had done that. But I would guess. And I would know, it was for the same reason my family did not know about her.

It wasn’t like her to dwell on the past. But sometimes, I'd catch her unconsciously thumbing a passport picture she would quickly slip out of my view, a girl with her same, droopy eyes and brown skin.

She did not have any family, so the funeral was a responsibility of the state, at least sort of. They dumped her body into the crematorium and threw her ashes out back. So there was no keepsake for me to have. I doubt she would have liked it any other way. Naana did not want to be remembered. She told me so herself.

‘I just don’t understand the use. They’re dead already, what’s a tombstone going to do when in a year or two no one visits?’

‘I’ll visit.’

She looked up from the other side of the room, where she was lounging, almost melting into the cotton of her couch.

‘That’s the thing. I don’t want you to. When I die, don’t stop time for me. Just keep swimming.’

There was an awkward pause where I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Then:

‘Well, thank goodness you aren’t dying anytime soon.’

Naana held my gaze steady, though her grin faltered. I told myself it was because my gaze is undoing. Wasn’t that what love did to you? Break you down bare? She answered with an unsteady breath.

‘Yeah. Thank goodness.’

So I think she would’ve liked being thrown out like nothing. But she would not like me standing at the gates of the hospital, like the entire building of cement was to me a tombstone for her. She would not like that at all.

…

I don’t even know what she was doing in the university’s pool at night. Naana hated the water. She would not tarry in the sea nor would she dip her toes into a pool, no matter how much I begged. It was so uncharacteristic. Naana and the water.

I used to wonder if it was fear or learned distaste. She did not say she was scared. But it was the way she looked at the water. Like it would jump up and swallow her whole. So she stayed away. Sometimes I would mistake the look in her eyes for longing, like she wanted to be swallowed whole.

…

Emmanuel says there will be no investigation. They chalk up her death to an accidental drowning, but I know it is anything but. This was not an accident. They hadn’t even bothered to ask the most important question. What was Naana doing in the University of Ghana at night when she had dropped out three years prior? Much less at the pool, alone.

But Emmanuel shoves past me and my questioning and tells me it doesn’t matter. She didn’t matter.

They would dump her in the trash again, and she would be forgotten.

…

I head over to her place again to pick up some of her stuff before the neighbourhood boys have the chance to ransack it for money and things to sell.

Once again, the door is wide open, and I wonder if I am too late. But there is only one person inside. A girl, just a few inches taller than me. Her back is to the door, and she turns to the crunch of glass beneath my shoes.

Her eyes are jarringly familiar, and I almost crumple to the floor. It’s the same caramel brown skin and slightly upturned nose I know so well. But it's so wrong all the same.

‘Hi.’

I don’t spare her an answer. I may not know her name. But I know who she is. Somewhere within the mess, I find Naana’s favourite hoodie and an envelope of letters I had written her, and her empty ring box. All the while, I am followed by this girl who has the face of my love.

‘Look, you don’t even know who I am?’

I did not mean to answer, to engage, to acknowledge. God knows Naana wouldn’t have, but who does she think she is?

‘Yes, I do!’

I’ve stopped rummaging through the chaos. I'm five steps away from the door. But I cannot help it.

‘You're that no-good family that abandoned her.’

‘No! We didn’t,’ she pauses to take a shaky breath, like she cannot believe her own lies. ‘We didn’t want to.’

‘Bullshit!’

‘Do you know what you guys did to her? Do you know how long it took for her to get here? You just couldn’t stand to see her happy, could you? Which of your people forced her into the water?’

‘No one. No one.’

Tears stream down my face, and my heart is heavy, each breath slowing and dragging through my lungs till the air feels like sandpaper down my throat.

‘Which one of you killed her?’ My voice cuts off, and I can no longer hold it together. I no longer want to. My body slumps to the floor.

I try to feel Naana in the arms that wrap around me. But they are too small, too loose, and I leak out of her grip because she was not meant to hold me. No one else could possibly hold me like her.

Drowning is much like flying in some ways.

The farther you go, the safer you feel. The unknown becomes known, and you do not so much pray for escape. The frantic becomes calm and everything turns to still water.