Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  “How do you know this isn’t a plot to trick you out of your money?” Elsie asked.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “She’d never go this long without calling me.”

  * * *

  —

  Soon after Olivia met Blaise, Olivia would also reach up to kiss his cheeks the way she had Elsie’s. At first Elsie ignored this. But every once in a while, she’d bring it to their attention in a jokey way by saying, “Watch out, sè m, that’s my man.” From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she’d learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

  Whenever Blaise asked her to invite Olivia to his gigs, she obliged because she enjoyed Olivia’s company outside of work. And when he left the band and was no longer singing at Dédé’s, the three of them would go out together to shop for groceries or see a movie and even attend Sunday-morning Mass all together at Notre Dame Catholic Church in Little Haiti. They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus child.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long.” Blaise was now speaking as though they were simply engaged in the dawdling pillow talk Elsie had once so enjoyed during their five-year marriage. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

  We haven’t talked in over six months, to be exact, she was thinking, but instead said, “That’s how it goes with the quick divorce, non?”

  She was waiting for him to say something else about Olivia. He was slow at parceling out news. It had taken him months to inform her that he was leaving her for Olivia. It would have been easier to accept had he simply blurted it out one day. Then she wouldn’t have spent so much time reviewing every moment the three of them had spent together, wondering whether they’d winked behind her back during Mass or smirked as she lay between them in the grass after their Saturday-afternoon outings to watch him play soccer with Dédé and some of his other friends in Morningside Park.

  “Anything new?” she asked, wanting to shorten their talk.

  “They called me directly.” He swallowed hard. Her ears had grown accustomed to that kind of effortful gulp from working with Gaspard and others. “Vòlè yo.” The thieves.

  “What did they sound like?” She wanted to know everything he knew so she could form a lucid image in her own mind, a shadow play identical to his.

  “They sounded like boys, young men. I wasn’t recording,” he said, annoyed.

  “Did you ask to speak to her?”

  “They wouldn’t let me,” he said.

  “Did you insist?”

  “Don’t you think I would? They’re in control, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you do.”

  “I do,” she conceded. “But did you tell them you wouldn’t send money unless you speak to her? Maybe they don’t have her anymore. You said it yourself. She would fight. She could have escaped.”

  “Don’t you think I’d ask to speak to my own woman?” he shouted.

  The way he spat this out irritated her. Woman? His own woman? He had never been the kind of man who called any woman his. At least not out loud. Maybe his phantom music career made him believe that any woman could be his. He’d never yelled at her, either. They had rarely fought, both of them keeping their quiet resentments and irritations close to the chest. She hated him for shouting. She hated them both.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “They didn’t speak long. They told me to start planning her funeral if I don’t send at least ten thousand by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Just then she heard Gaspard’s daughter call out from the other room, “Elsie, can you come here, please?” Mona’s voice was laden with the permanent weariness of those who love the seriously ill.

  “Call me later,” she told Blaise and hung up.

  * * *

  —

  When Elsie got to Gaspard’s room, Mona was sitting on the edge of his bed with the same book she’d been reading for a while on her lap. She’d been reading it when Elsie had slipped away with the intention of stacking the dishwasher with the lunch plates, but ended up answering Blaise’s call instead.

  “Elsie,” Mona said as her father pressed his head farther back into the pillows. His fists were clenched in stoic agony, his eyes closed. His face was sweaty, and he seemed to have been coughing. Mona raised the oxygen mask over his nose and turned on the compressor, which had been delivered that morning, and whose whirring sound made it harder for Elsie to hear.

  “Elsie, I’m sorry,” Mona said to her in Creole. “I’m not here all the time. I don’t know how you function normally, but I’m really concerned about how much time you spend on the phone.”

  Elsie didn’t want to explain why she was talking on the phone so much, but quickly decided she had to. Not only because she thought Mona was right, that Gaspard deserved more of her attention, but also because she had no one else to turn to for advice. The one friend she’d always relied on, the one who’d been with her the night she met Blaise, had moved to Atlanta. So she told Gaspard and his daughter why she’d been taking these calls and why the calls were so frequent, except she modified a few crucial details. Because she was still embarrassed by the actual facts, she told them Olivia was her sister and Blaise her brother-in-law.

  “I’m sorry, Elsie.” Mona immediately softened. Gaspard opened his eyes and held out his hand toward Elsie. Elsie grabbed his fingers the way she did sometimes to help him rise to his feet.

  “Do you want to go home?” Gaspard asked in an increasingly raspy voice. “We can get the agency to send someone else.”

  “I’m not in her head, Papa,” Mona said, sounding much younger when she spoke Creole, “but I think working is best. Paying off these types of ransoms can ruin a person financially.”

  “It’s better not to wait,” Gaspard said, still trying to catch his breath. “The less time your sister spends with these malfetè, the better off she’ll be.”

  Gaspard turned his face toward his daughter for final approval, and Mona yielded and nodded her reluctant agreement.

  “If you want to save your sister,” Gaspard said with an even-more-winded voice now, “you may have to give in.”

  * * *

  —

  “I have five thousand in the bank,” Elsie told Blaise when he called again that afternoon. She actually had sixty-nine hundred, but she couldn’t part with all her savings at once, in case another emergency came up either in Haiti or in Miami. He already knew about the five thousand. It was roughly the same amount she had saved when they’d been together. She’d hoped to double her savings but had been unable to after moving from her and Blaise’s apartment to a one-room efficiency in North Miami, plus she was sending a monthly allowance to her parents and paying school fees for her younger brother in Les Cayes. But what Blaise had been trying to tell her, and what she had not been understanding until now, was that he needed her money to save Olivia’s life.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Elsie was sure she could make out the approximate time Olivia and Blaise began seeing each other without her. Olivia started pairing up with other nurse’s assistants for the group-home jobs and turned Elsie down when she asked her to join the usual outings with Elsie and Blaise.

  The night Blaise left their apartment for good, Olivia was outside Elsie’s first-floor window sitting in the front passenger seat of Blaise’s red four-door pickup, which he often used to carry speakers and instruments to his gigs. The pickup was parked under a streetlamp, and for most of the time that Elsie was staring through a crack in her drawn bedroom shades, Olivia’s disk-shaped face was flooded in a harsh bright light. At some point Olivia got out of the car, then disappeared behind it, and Elsie suspected that she’d crouched in the shadows to pee before getting b
ack into the seat Elsie had always called the wife seat during a few of their previous outings when she sat in the front and Olivia in the back. Only when the pickup, packed with Blaise’s belongings, was pulling away did Olivia look over at the apartment window, where Elsie quickly sank into the darkness.

  Sitting on the floor of her nearly empty apartment and seeing the dust that had been hidden by some of Blaise’s things, Elsie spotted, by the door, a Valentine’s Day card she’d given Blaise the year before. He must have dropped it while leaving. The card was white and square and was covered with red hearts. “Best husband ever” was written in both cursive and capital letters all over the front of it. Inside Elsie had simply written “Je t’aime.” She had left the card on Blaise’s pillow the morning of Valentine’s Day while he was still asleep. She had a double shift that day, and he had a solo gig at a private party. They would not see each other until the next morning, when he didn’t mention the card at all. The night Blaise left, Elsie rose from beneath the window, picked up the card, and held it tightly against her chest. She realized then that she needed to move out of their apartment. She could not stay there any longer.

  * * *

  —

  As she stood in line at the bank in North Miami, Elsie reached into her purse and nervously stroked this card, which she’d kept there since Blaise left. The teller, a young woman with a Bajan accent, asked if she was dissatisfied with their services and whether or not she wanted to speak to a manager. She said she needed the money urgently.

  “Won’t you let us write you a check?” the young woman asked.

  “I need it in cash,” she said.

  She was sweating as she handed the fat envelope to the elderly Haitian man behind the glass window at the money transfer place.

  “This money is going to end up in Haiti, isn’t it?” the old man said. “Are you building something there?”

  The money would end up, she hoped, saving Olivia’s life. Blaise had told her to wire it rather than bring it to him because he was too busy running around trying to collect funds all over Miami.

  She had asked for the morning off to withdraw and wire the money, and when she got back, she found Gaspard on the floor, next to his bed. He had fallen while reaching over to his bedside table for a glass of water. Mona was already at his side, her bottom spiked up in the air, her face pressed against his. Elsie rushed over, and together they pulled Gaspard up by his shoulders and raised him onto the edge of the bed.

  They were all panting, Elsie and Mona from the effort of pulling Gaspard up and Gaspard from having been pulled. Gaspard’s panting soon turned into loud chuckles.

  “There are many falls before the big one,” he said.

  “Thank God you got the good rug,” Mona said, smiling.

  Then, her face growing somber again, she said, “How can I leave you like this, Papa?”

  “You can and you will,” he said. “You have your life, and I have what’s left of mine. I don’t want you to have any regrets.”

  “You need my kidney,” she said. “Why don’t you accept it?”

  Mona reached over and grabbed a glass of water from the side table. She held the back of the glass as he took a few sips, then watched him slowly lower his head onto the pillow. Mona nearly pierced her lips with her teeth while trying to stop them from trembling.

  “I know you’re having your family problem,” she said, straining not to raise her voice as she turned her attention to Elsie. “And I know we told you to go handle your situation, but the point is you weren’t here when my father fell out of this bed. I think Papa’s right. I’m going to call the agency to ask for someone else.”

  Gaspard closed his eyes and pushed his head deeper into the pillow. He did not object. Elsie wanted to plead to stay. She liked Gaspard and didn’t want him to have to break in someone new. Besides, she now needed to work more than ever. But if they wanted her to leave, she would. She only hoped her dismissal wouldn’t cost her other jobs.

  “All right,” she said quietly. “I understand. I’ll wrap things up until you get someone else.”

  * * *

  —

  One night after Elsie and Olivia had heard Blaise play as a last-minute replacement at an outdoor festival at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami, they were walking to the parking lot when Olivia announced that she wanted to find a man who was willing to move back to Haiti with her.

  “Do you have to love him or can it be anyone?” Elsie had asked.

  Olivia’s voice slurred after a whole afternoon of beer sipping. “Anyone with money,” she said.

  “My dear, can one live without love?” Blaise had answered, waxing lyrical in a way Elsie had never heard before, except when he was onstage and chatting up the women in the audience with his public come-ons (“You’re looking like a piña colada, baby. Can I have a sip?”). Corny, harmless stuff, often half-comic, at least, that Elsie was accustomed to and that sometimes made her laugh.

  “Oh, I can live without love,” Olivia had said, “but I can’t live without money. I can’t live without my country. I’m tired of being in this country. This country makes you do bad things.”

  Elsie guessed that Olivia was still thinking about one of their revolving shifts, an in-home patient, an eighty-year-old man, whose son, a middle-aged white man, a loan officer at a bank, had in their presence, as they were changing shifts, turned his senile father on his side and slapped the old man’s wrinkly bottom with his palm several times.

  “See how you like it,” he said.

  Calling her supervisor from her cell phone, Olivia had barely been able to find the words to explain what she’d just seen. After the concert, to distract Olivia from her thoughts of abused patients, and perhaps to distract one another from contemplating losing Olivia, the three of them had returned to Blaise and Elsie’s apartment and had wiped off a bottle of five-star Rhum Barbancourt. Sometime in the early morning hours, without anyone’s request or guidance, they had fallen into bed together, exchanging jumbled words, lingering kisses, and caresses, whose sources they weren’t interested in keeping track of. They were no longer sure what to call themselves. What were they, exactly? A triad? A ménage à trois? No. Dosas. They were dosas. All three of them untwinned, lonely, alone together.

  When they woke up near noon the next day, Olivia was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Blaise called again early the following morning. Elsie was still in bed but was preparing to leave Gaspard for good. Gaspard and his daughter were asleep, and aside from the hum of Gaspard’s oxygen compressor, the house was quiet.

  “I shouldn’t have let her go,” Blaise whispered before Elsie could say hello.

  When Blaise was with the band, he would sometimes go days without sleep in order to rehearse. By the time his gig would come around, he’d be so wired that his voice would sound robotic and mechanical, as though all emotion had been purged from it. He sounded that way now as Elsie tried to keep up with what he was saying.

  “We weren’t getting along anymore,” he murmured, rapid fire. “We were going to break up. That’s why she just picked up and left. And that’s why I’m—”

  The hallway light came on. Elsie heard the shuffling of feet. A shadow approached on the oak floor. Mona slid Elsie’s door open and peeked in, rubbing a clenched fist against her eyes to fully rouse herself.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked Elsie.

  Elsie nodded.

  “I wish I’d begged her not to go,” Blaise was saying.

  Mona pulled Elsie’s door shut behind her and continued toward her father’s room down the hall.

  “What happened?” Elsie asked. “You sent the money, didn’t you? They released her?”

  The phone line crackled and Elsie heard several bumps. Was Blaise stomping his feet? Banging his head against a wall? Pounding the phone into his
forehead?

  “Where is she?” Elsie tried to moderate her voice.

  “We had a fight,” he said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone.”

  Mona opened Elsie’s door and once again pushed her head in.

  “Elsie, my father wants to see you when you’re done,” she said, before leaving again.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” Elsie said. “My patient needs me. But first tell me she’s okay.”

  She didn’t want to hear whatever else was coming, but she couldn’t hang up.

  “We paid the ransom,” he said, rushing to get his words out quickly. “But they didn’t release her. She’s dead.”

  Elsie walked to the bed and sat down. Taking a deep breath, she moved the phone away from her face and let it rest on her lap.

  “Are you there?” Blaise was shouting now. “Can you hear me?”

  “Where was she found?” Elsie raised the phone back to her ear.

  “She was dumped in front of her mother’s house,” Blaise said calmly. “In the middle of the night.”

  Elsie ran her fingers across her cheeks where, the night they’d fallen in bed together, Blaise had kissed her for the last time. That night, it was hard for Elsie to differentiate Olivia’s hands from Blaise’s on her naked body. But in her drunken haze, it felt perfectly normal, like they’d needed one another too much to restrain themselves. Now the tears were catching her off guard. She lowered her head and buried her eyes in the crook of her elbow.

  “But there’s something else. You won’t believe it,” Blaise said now in a frantic gargle of words.

  “What?” Elsie said, wishing, not for the first time since he and Olivia had stopped talking to her, that the three of them were once again drunk and in bed together.

  “Her mother told me that before she left the house that morning, Olivia wrote her name on the bottoms of her feet.”