Everything Inside, Page 4

  “Those songs were stupid.” He chuckled, raising his hands over his mouth as if to suppress a deeper laugh. “The man was ruining a treasured kind of music, and he didn’t even realize it. Or he didn’t care.”

  “Why did you tolerate him?” she asked.

  “Why did you?” he countered.

  “He had his charms,” she said. And he did. One of them was how he became very conversational before sex. Foreplay for him was talking. He would ask her to recount her days to him. He would want to hear about her patients, her difficulties with them, her thoughts, her dreams, as if to help him expand or reinvent the person he was making love to.

  “I tolerated him because he was my friend,” he said. “He was like a brother to me.”

  “So you still like him a little?” she asked.

  “Only people you care about can hurt you like he did us,” he said while stroking his now-much-thicker beard. The gray tuft near his forehead had grown wider, too.

  “People you love,” she said.

  She didn’t realize that she had these many words left in her, and for Dédé of all people. He was the one dragging these words out of her. He made her want to speak.

  “Why did you help him so much?” she asked.

  “We are the same age,” he said. “Our fathers were mechanics together in Limbé. I knew he didn’t want that kind of life. And now it seems he doesn’t want a musician’s life anymore.”

  “He didn’t want my kind of life, either,” she said.

  “At first he did,” he said. “Then Olivia came.”

  But it couldn’t have been just Olivia. Maybe there was something about Elsie that wasn’t enough. Or something about Blaise that wasn’t enough. Maybe Blaise just wanted to go home. Some people just want to go home, no matter what the cost. Some people would do just about anything to go home.

  “Can I share some secrets?” he asked.

  “Can’t take any more secrets,” she said.

  “A small one,” he said.

  Big or small, she did not want to hear any more, but she didn’t stop him.

  “That night when he met you, I wanted to talk to you, too, but I felt shy,” he said, then let out a nervous laugh. “Women like musicians. They’re more fun.”

  “You mean more arrogant.”

  “Blaise got ahead of me and I let him,” he said. “I’ve always regretted that.”

  She tried to imagine how things might have been different, how she could have been spared the humiliation of losing both her husband and her money, how she might not have wasted all those years of her life with Blaise. But she couldn’t envision how she and Dédé would have worked, either. Still, she heard herself say, “Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.”

  He squinted as though trying to better understand. She wanted to clarify, but wasn’t sure how to do it. She was thinking of something she’d once heard Gaspard say to his daughter about his and her mother’s failed marriage.

  There are happy marriages, Gaspard had told his daughter, the kinds that are truly happy, where the people love each other very much and seem to be great friends, but he assured her that it was not the only type of marriage possible. There are also perfectly dispassionate marriages, and sometimes these marriages go on for years, for a whole lifetime, until one or the other spouse dies. But sometimes both happy and unhappy marriages end, and you get a chance to switch things around. And some marriages, in hindsight, just seem like detours, sometimes wonderful detours, you take to get where you need to go.

  Elsie realized now that Gaspard might have been telling his daughter that at some point her mother had fallen out of love with him and had come to think of their life together as a detour.

  “Hi there,” Dédé said, interrupting her thoughts. “Are you falling asleep?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said. “Can I tell you something else?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “It feels like confession time anyway.”

  “One afternoon after we played soccer in the park, I saw Blaise lying in the grass between you and Olivia, and I felt the most jealous I have ever felt in my life. It was clear as daylight. He had you both.”

  “He didn’t have us both,” she said, thinking she did not mean for him to have them both.

  “He had both your hearts,” he said.

  “This won’t happen to me again,” she said, wishing she’d never have to think of Blaise or Olivia ever again.

  “It may not be him,” he said, “but as long as you’re breathing you can be hurt.”

  “Go,” she said, “before you start singing, too.”

  “I need to close up the bar anyway,” he said. “But I have to tell you this one more thing and I hope you don’t take it badly.”

  “What?” she asked, feeling the heat from his breath on her eyelids.

  “I didn’t know you were such a weakling with the rum.”

  He laughed, this time loud and deep, and his laughter was not just keeping her from crashing but was filling the inside of her head. She tried to laugh, too, but wasn’t sure she was. Instead she started unbuttoning her blouse.

  “I’m not usually this weak,” she said.

  “Just tonight?” she asked him.

  “Just tonight,” he said.

  In the Old Days

  The call came on a Friday evening as I was lying in bed, grading student essays.

  “My husband is dying,” the sniffling woman on the other end of the line said. “And his final wish is to spend a few minutes with you.”

  Once these words were out of the way, the woman’s voice grew firmer and she immediately turned to the logistics. “Time is of the essence, of course. We can fly you over on the earliest New York–to–Miami flight possible. We can get you a hotel room near us in Little Haiti. The house is small, but big enough that you could also stay with us if you like.”

  The woman’s husband was my father, but I had never met him. I know only one side of the story: my mother’s.

  My father left Brooklyn to return to Haiti during what he’d considered a promising time for the country. A thirty-year father-son dictatorship had ended, and he wanted to use his American education degree to open a school for poor kids in Port-au-Prince. My mother had no desire to return to Haiti after coming to the United States alone when she was twenty-two. My father left, and my mother stayed behind in Brooklyn. When she discovered she was pregnant with me, my mother shipped my father divorce papers. They never saw each other again.

  My mother, who first told me that my father abandoned us, recently confessed that she’d failed to inform him of my existence—that is, until she heard that he was sick and dying.

  “Was he airlifted?” I asked my father’s wife.

  “He came on a regular flight from Port-au-Prince,” she said. “He was doing much better when we first got here. Will you please come? It would mean the world to us both.”

  “I’m not sure I can drop everything and come to Miami now,” I told my father’s wife, even while realizing that I was sounding like a moody teenager. “I have school.”

  “On the weekend?” she asked.

  “On the usual,” I answered.

  “So you’re a student?”

  “A teacher like him.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “High school.”

  “What subject?”

  “Books,” I said. “I mean English. To newcomers.”

  “English as a second language?”

  “Yes.”

  At that point, it was obvious that we both wanted this conversation to end.

  “Please come see him,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But I already knew I would.

  * * *

  �
�

  I didn’t jump on the next flight like someone with nothing better to do, like someone who’s kind of been waiting for a phone call like this her entire life. Instead I continued grading my students’ papers, which ended up not really being essays but fragmented reactions to a piece of literature we had chosen to read. I had given them a choice between the school’s limited options—William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Albert Camus’s The Stranger—and being strangers themselves, both to English and to Brooklyn, and also because it was a shorter book, most of them voted for the English translation of L’Étranger.

  “WHAT?” began one boy’s reaction paper. “I don’t thank I be so kalm if my moms dyed.”

  Before the phone rang, I had scribbled “AMEN BROTHER!” in red pencil, in the margin of his single-spaced, handwritten, stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. But after hanging up with my father’s wife, I wrote him a long note scolding him for oversimplifying and being careless with his spelling. Then I gave him a C.

  * * *

  —

  “So she got in touch with you,” my mother said when I met her at Nadia’s, a Haitian restaurant she’d opened a year after I was born and had also named after me. We were sitting at our corner table, which allowed her a view of the entire place, from the customers’ entrance, through the bar, to the kitchen. Above our heads were several images painted directly on the walls. The one above our table, the one that marked our spot, was the restaurant’s signature painting. It was of a plump brown baby girl swimming in a large bowl of squash soup that seemed to be spilling out of the round bowl, which doubled as a trompe l’oeil frame.

  The place was packed because a popular rasin band had a nine o’clock show scheduled at the reception hall next door, and some of the folks going to the show stopped in for dinner first. Usually my mother would be running around between the storeroom and her office, grabbing meat out of the freezer and bottles out of the wine cellar. She’d be acting as maître d’, hostess, waitress, or bartender, as needed. But when I told her about the call, she walked me over to our table and told me to sit down.

  This corner table had been in my life for as long as I could remember. It was where I’d napped in my stroller, where I learned to color between the lines, where I did my homework and read dozens of books as my mother worked. It was the only spot where she could see me wherever she was in the restaurant, and over the years I grew to love it.

  I liked that there was no background music at Nadia’s because while sitting at that table I overheard conversations that surpassed the drama in many of the books I was reading. I witnessed and was sometimes invited to join baptism parties, First Communion and wedding lunches, graduation dinners, wakes, and funeral repasts. I heard men and women—and later women and women and men and men—declare their love for each other, even as others confessed nearby that they had fallen out of love. I heard parents explain the birds and the bees to their kids as a girl at another table revealed to her mother and father that she was pregnant or a boy announced to his parents that he had knocked up someone’s daughter. These patrons, and the restaurant staff, were my mother’s and my only family.

  Still, why did people think that they should share the most life-changing news during a meal? Had they been biding their time, waiting for a moment when the other person was sitting in a public place with a mouth full of food and couldn’t scream? Every now and then I overheard a woman telling her man that the kid they were raising together was not his biological child. I heard elderly parents inform grown sons and daughters that they were not in their will or that they were disowning them. But I had never heard anyone announce to their twenty-five-year-old daughter, as my mother had the week before, that the father they’d never met, a certain Monsieur Maurice Dejean, was gravely ill and dying.

  * * *

  —

  My mother had always been a fast talker. She often spoke as though she were on her way somewhere. Even her customers at the restaurant, while offering lavish praise and seeking details about the food, could not get her to linger in conversation. The only unhurried thing about her was how carefully she chose her clothes. She liked clingy sheaths and plunging necklines, black silk and lace slips, which were so refined looking that I sometimes borrowed them and wore them as outdoor clothing. I was wearing one of those slip dresses when the call came and decided to wear it to the restaurant, even though it was still early spring and most people were wearing long sleeves. I always felt pretty when my mother’s patrons complimented her on her beauty, because in the next breath they would say I looked like her.

  My mother had concluded our conversation the week before by saying, “An old friend told me he’s very sick. I asked my friend to pass on your number to his wife.” And how exactly did this happen? I wondered. What words did she use? Did she simply tell the friend, “Oh, by the way, he has a daughter and here’s his daughter’s number”?

  It was second nature for my mother to survey the dining room, her eyes never resting on one thing for too long, but this time she was literally itching to get away from me, clawing her elbows with well-manicured fingernails.

  “Please go see him,” she said as she waved hello to someone walking through the front door.

  I tried to imagine the child me, observing this tableau vivant: two nearly identical-looking women sitting with their backs stiffened and attached to fancy cushioned chairs that perhaps they were both hoping had an electric switch that someone might turn on at any time to put them out of their misery. Or was it wrong of me to think of death in a jokey way when the person who might want to turn on that switch—at least my mother’s switch—was actually in the process of dying?

  One of the waiters brought over two Prestige beers with napkins wrapped around the cold, sweating bottles. Once he put the beers down, my mother motioned with her head for him to step away from the table and leave us alone.

  “As I told you last week,” my mother said, grabbing her beer, “in the old days, when the dictatorship ended in Haiti, many marriages fell apart here. There was a hard line between those who wanted to stay in America for good and others who wanted to go back and, swa dizan, rebuild the country. Your father was in the group that wanted to go back and I was in the one that wanted to stay.”

  She put the beer down and covered her face with her hands. When she pulled her hands away, I realized she was crying.

  “He still chose a country over me, over us,” my mother said, plowing her fingers into her shoulder-length weave to reach her scalp.

  “He might have made a different choice if he’d known about me.” I was on the verge of yelling, even if it lost my mother business. This is why we were talking out in the dining room and not in her office. She knew that being in public would keep me from screaming or being loud.

  “Don’t you want to see him?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t see him live the most important years of his life,” she said while rising from our table. “I don’t want to go see him die.”

  After my mother disappeared into the kitchen, I booked a flight on my phone for the next afternoon, then called my father’s wife to tell her I was coming.

  “This is such wonderful news,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at the airport in Miami.”

  * * *

  —

  My father’s wife was not at the airport to pick me up the next afternoon.

  “Please take a cab,” she said abruptly on the phone, after texting me the address.

  I had been to Miami once before, with a bunch of girlfriends for spring break, when I was a junior in college. And it was just as hot and muggy then. We stayed in a hotel in Miami Beach and spent most of our time in the ocean. Miami to me was the beach. Now it would be the place where I would meet my dying father.

  * * *

  —

  The house was in the middle of Little Haiti, on a corner between rusting, deactiv
ated train tracks and a long line of ancient oak trees. A white wall surrounded the property, which had a small metal gate on the side. I rang the bell at the side gate a few times before a buzzer signaled that I could push it open.

  Both the yard and the house were smaller than the wall might suggest. A short trail led through a cluster of traveler’s palms toward the front door, where my father’s wife was waiting. She was wearing a purple caftan that filled up the doorframe when she raised her arms to greet me. On each of her bare feet was a string of cowrie shells and small bells that chimed as she moved toward me. She raised her glasses and rested them on her short Afro, then, looking over my pink yoga pants and matching T-shirt and bursting-at-the-seams handbag, asked, “Is this all you brought?”

  The bells kept chiming as I followed her through a dark foyer into the living room. The decor was sparse, with a velvet brown sofa and a matching ottoman and a TV console with no TV, but covered with packages of adult diapers.

  My father’s wife motioned for me to sit on the sofa while she slid down onto its opposite end.

  Looking down at her feet, my father’s wife said, “The chimes? You’re curious about the chimes. They’re so he can hear me, sort of, wherever I am in the house.”

  Caftan, bells, Afro. So this was the Earth Mother who’d replaced mine.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” she said.

  “Can I see him?” I asked.

  “You can,” she said, “but you want to talk to me first, to prepare yourself.”

  She got up, and the bells came to life again. “We both need a drink,” she said. “Wait here.”

  She disappeared down a narrow hallway leading to the rest of the house. I felt lightheaded. My stomach, empty since the night before—except for the glass of wine I’d had on the plane—was now churning with both hunger and anxiety. The chimes grew faint until I stopped hearing them all together, then they started up again, then stopped, then started again. This was not the type of sound I’d want to hear all day long if I were dying, but that’s just me.