Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  Elsie could imagine Olivia, her hair just as wild as it had been that night with the three of them, and wild again as she pulled her feet toward her face and scribbled her name on the soles. Olivia had probably anticipated her kidnapping and had seen this as a way of still being identifiable, even if she were beheaded.

  “They didn’t, did they?” Elsie asked.

  “No,” Blaise said. “Her mother says her face, her entire body, were intact.”

  He put some emphasis on “her entire body,” Elsie realized, because he wanted to signal to her that Olivia had also not been raped. She wondered how he could know that, but did not dare ask. Instead she let out a sigh of relief so loud that Blaise followed with one of his own.

  “Her mother’s going to bury her in her own family’s mausoleum, in their village out north,” he added.

  “Are you going?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Would you—”

  She didn’t let him finish. Of course she wouldn’t go. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She had already booked a flight to go to Les Cayes in a few months to visit her family, and she’d need to not only bring her family money but also ship them all the extra things they’d asked for, including a small fridge for her parents and a laptop computer for her brother.

  Just then the sound briefly cut off.

  “It’s Haiti,” he said. “I have to go.”

  He hung up just as abruptly as he had reentered her life.

  “Elsie, are you all right?” Gaspard was standing in the doorway. He was breathing loudly as he spread out his arms to grab both sides of the doorframe. His daughter was standing behind him with a portable oxygen tank.

  Elsie wasn’t sure how long they’d both been standing there, but whatever sounds she’d been unconsciously making, whatever moans, growls, or whimpers had escaped from her, had brought them there. She moved toward them, tightening the belt of her terry-cloth robe around her waist. Grunting, Gaspard looked past her, his eyes wandering around the small room, taking in the plain platform bed and its companion dresser.

  “Elsie, my daughter heard you crying.” Gaspard’s blood-drained lips were trembling as though he were cold, yet he still seemed more concerned about her than himself when he asked, “Is your sister all right?”

  Gaspard’s body swayed toward his daughter. Mona reached for him, anchoring him with one hand while balancing the portable oxygen tank with the other. Elsie rushed forward, grabbed him, then said, “Please reconsider your decision to release me, Mesye Gaspard. I won’t be getting these phone calls anymore.”

  She was right. Blaise never called her again.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, after Gaspard had ceded to his daughter’s pleas and accepted a kidney from her, Elsie had a weekend off and, with nothing else to do, took the bus to Dédé’s on Saturday night, hoping Blaise might be there after returning from Olivia’s funeral in Haiti.

  It was still early in the evening, so the place was nearly empty, except for some area college kids whom Dédé allowed to buy drinks without IDs. Dédé was behind the bar. Elsie sat across from him as a waitress shouted orders at him.

  “How you holding up?” Dédé asked after the waitress took off with the drinks.

  “Working hard,” she said, “to get by.”

  “Still with the old people?” he asked.

  “They’re not always old,” she said. “Sometimes they’re young people who’ve been in car accidents or have cancer.”

  Eventually they got to Blaise.

  It was Blaise’s idea for them to get married. After the three-minute city hall ceremony, at which Dédé and Elsie’s friend, the head of the nurse’s aide agency, were witnesses, Dédé had hosted a lunch for them at the bar.

  “You should have married me.” Dédé now reached across the bar and playfully stroked Elsie’s shoulder. He had never married and, according to Blaise, he never intended to.

  “You didn’t ask then and you’re not asking now,” she said.

  “What if I’m asking for something else?” He moved his fingers across her clavicle, down to the top button of her blouse, and let his hand linger there for a few seconds. In his unyielding gaze seemed to be some possibility of relief or companionship masked as love.

  As pathetic as it seemed, she thought she loved Blaise most when he was onstage. She was seduced by something she didn’t even think he was good at. His devotion to his mediocre gifts had melted her heart. Watching other women pine over his lithe and flexible frame, not to mention his piercing glare at different faces in the crowd while he was singing, excited her, too. She was jealous of these other women’s abilities to fantasize about him, perhaps imagining that life with him would be one never-ending songfest. But every once in a while, it went beyond that, during ordinary moments like when she watched him cook a salty omelet filled with smoked herring, which they’d eat at the breakfast nook where they ate all their meals. This is when they would most often talk about having a baby. He had easily convinced her to get an apartment together and then to get married, why not a baby, too? She’d thought, though, that the best time to have a child would be after buying a house together, no matter how small.

  “Have you heard from him?” Dédé now asked her. She slowly removed his hand from her bra strap.

  “Not in a while,” she said.

  “I hear he’s in Haiti for good,” Dédé said, winking after her rejection had sunk in. He grabbed a few glasses from under the bar and started wiping the insides with a small white towel. And maybe this was his revenge, or perhaps he had been waiting to tell her, but between putting one glass down and picking up another, he said, “He’s living in Haiti with his old band’s money and a lot of cash from some fake kidnappings he and your friend Olivia came up with together. I promise you I have people on this. If they ever see them—”

  If this were happening to someone else, she would wonder why that person had not fallen over in shock. But she did not faint, either. Instead it was as if some shred of doubt that had been plaguing her, some sliver of suspicion, which had in part led her here, were finally being confirmed.

  “So she’s alive?” she asked.

  “Oh, he told you she was dead?” Dédé said, putting down the glass he was holding.

  “She’s not dead?” she asked again, just to be sure.

  She wanted to laugh but instead she grasped for a few more words. How could she have let herself be fooled, robbed, so easily? How could she have been so naïve, so stupid? Maybe it had something to do with Gaspard being so sick that week and his daughter being there watching. She had been distracted enough to trust someone she once believed she loved. Blaise and Olivia must have trained, or practiced, for weeks to take more and more away from her, to strip her of both her money and her dignity. They must have been convincing to the point that no one could doubt them. They had fooled Dédé, too.

  “I guess we’re both Boukis,” she finally said. “Imbeciles.”

  “Suckers, idiots,” he added, wiping the insides of the glasses harder. “I’d understand if they were starving and couldn’t make money any other way, but they decided to become criminals so they could go back to Haiti and live the good life.”

  “It’s not right,” she said, though nothing felt right anymore.

  They were interrupted by some drink orders from one of the servers. Dédé worked silently filling the orders, then, when he was done, he said, “I promise you. They’re not going to enjoy the money they stole from me.”

  “What are you going to do?” She caught the pleading tone in her voice, and she felt ashamed, as though she were begging for their execution.

  “You should do something,” he said. “At least he didn’t marry me.”

  “She might have married you,” Elsie said.

  �
�Clearly I wasn’t her type. Wasn’t enough for her. Your husband was.”

  She was asking herself now why Blaise had married her. There were other women who had a lot more money. She wondered whether he was hoping she would commit a crime, steal one of her richer patients’ life savings for him. She was glad Gaspard’s daughter was around that week, otherwise Blaise might have possibly talked her into stealing from him.

  “What would you do if you went to Haiti and found them?” she asked while considering the possibility herself.

  “I’d give them a chance to pay me back first.” He grabbed a bottle of white rum from the mirrored table behind him and pushed one of the glasses he’d been cleaning toward her. She demurred at first, waving it away, but then she realized that she wanted to keep talking to him. She also wanted to keep talking about Olivia and Blaise, and he was the only person she could talk to about them right then.

  “What would you do to her first?” he asked.

  “I’d shave her head,” she said. “I’d shave off that head of hair she gelled so much.”

  “That’s all?” he asked, laughing.

  After taking a gulp of the rum, she said, “I am trained to help people, but for these two, I’d pound both their heads with a big rock until their brains were liquid, like this drink now in my hand.”

  “Wouy! That’s too much,” he said, pouring himself a glass. “Don’t ever be mad at me. Okay?”

  “What would you do?” she asked him.

  “The stuff they do to the terrorists. The stuff with water I saw in a movie the other night. I’d wrap their heads with a sugar sack and pour water in their noses and make them think they’re drowning. And I wouldn’t do that to just them. I’d get all the other thieves who steal from people like us—”

  “The naïve people, the Boukis.”

  “Again, I’d understand if he was broke or she was starving,” he said.

  “The more money they have, the greedier they are,” she said, feeling herself drifting away from Blaise and Olivia and slipping into some larger discussion about justice and impunity.

  “Your revenge would be better than mine,” she said, circling back to Olivia and Blaise. “Those two would suffer a lot more with you.”

  It was not the first time he had been burned. Once a seemingly pregnant woman had walked into the bar in the middle of the afternoon. She pretended to go into labor, and while he was looking for his cell phone to call an ambulance, she pulled out a gun and forced him to empty the cash register. He was bringing up the robbery now, saying he preferred being confronted face-to-face to being robbed behind his back.

  “This situation is not ending the same way,” he said, his voice growing louder and the pace at which he was speaking becoming faster. “I’m not turning this one over to the police to just drop. And what police? The Haitian police?”

  She was thinking of going to a police station nearby and filing a report, in case Blaise and Olivia ever decided to move back to Miami, but she didn’t think it would do much good. Blaise had not held her up at gunpoint. She had willingly given him her money. Still, he hadn’t even had the balls to take the money from her hand. He had insisted that she wire it.

  “I’m having them caught,” Dédé was saying, “for you, for me, and for everyone else they did this to. Even if it’s the last thing I do before I die. I’m never letting go of this, and you shouldn’t, either.”

  That would mean hating them for a lifetime and dreaming about some type of revenge every day. She did not want that. She would rather think ahead, though she wasn’t sure what lay ahead. She was glad that Gaspard was still alive, that he was not one more person whose final days she had witnessed. She wanted to keep moving, keep working. Alive or dead, neither Blaise nor Olivia would be in her life anymore.

  The details. They’d been so good at the details. Whose idea had it been, for example, to tell her that Olivia had written her name on the bottoms of her feet? They might have also told her that Olivia had drawn a cross there, as a symbol that she wanted a Christian burial. That last call, she realized, was to make sure she wasn’t coming to the supposed funeral.

  Dédé poured her another glass of rum. Then another. And even as the news of Olivia being alive began to sink in, she was surprised that a kind of grief she hadn’t lingered on was now actually lifting; that a distant ache in her heart was turning to relief. She wanted to fight that relief. She did not want to welcome, embrace, the reprieve she felt she’d been given in learning that someone she believed to be dead was now alive, as though Olivia had been resurrected after days under the ground.

  Tears flowed down her face, tears she couldn’t stop. She didn’t want them to be tears of joy, but a few of them were. Her homeland seemed safer now. Her parents and brother, whom she’d gone back to speaking to more regularly, appeared to be in less danger from being kidnapped. Yet the tears kept flowing. Tears of anger, too. Of being robbed of money that took years to save, and seeing her dream of owning a house disappear along with the children that she and Blaise would never have. She felt more alone now than before she’d met either Blaise or Olivia, lonelier than when she’d just arrived in this country having only one friend.

  Dédé kept his eyes on her. They were filled with more concern than lust. Her tears became moans, then groans, then a new revenge fantasy emerged. She was now wishing that she could annihilate Dédé’s place, that she could burn everything down. She reached inside her purse, pulled out the Valentine’s Day card she was still carrying, and tore it to pieces. The pieces went up as light as feathers when she threw them in the air, but when they fell, they felt like stones and glass shards pummeling her body.

  “I’ll take you home,” Dédé said, and the next thing she knew she was curled up in a ball in the back seat of his car, the same old black Toyota he had been driving for years. He had somehow managed to obtain her address from her.

  “You’re living on your own,” she heard him say.

  “When I’m not with live-ins,” she said.

  The rest of the time, she was talking to him in her head, but no words came out of her mouth, which was half-full of vomit. Yes, she was living on her own, in a one-room efficiency in North Miami, behind the main house of an elderly Jamaican couple. They often left her notes inviting her to dinner, but she was always working and was barely around. She sensed that the couple was being friendly because they felt sorry for her, since she seemed to have no one. She was resisting becoming friends with them. She no longer wanted to make friends.

  When they reached the house, she handed Dédé her keys, and while holding her upright with one hand, he tried to open the efficiency’s narrow metallic door. Glued to her door was a plate-sized stop-sign-shaped sticker with the dark silhouette of a man with a bull’s-eye in the middle of his chest. Above the outlined head and torso were the words NOTHING INSIDE IS WORTH DYING FOR. On the other side of the door was the same kind of sticker, with the NOTHING scratched out by hand and replaced with EVERYTHING, so that the altered sticker read EVERYTHING INSIDE IS WORTH DYING FOR. Next to that was another black-and-white sticker that read YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT.

  She’d found the stickers there when she moved in. Before her, the efficiency had been briefly rented to a young man who became more and more troubled over time, until the couple had to ask him to leave. Or so they told her. They’d wanted to remove the stickers and have the place repainted, but Elsie needed to move in right away and told them not to bother. The words on the door might offer an extra layer of protection from intruders, she’d thought.

  Now the stickers seemed to also be proclaiming some deeper truths. This one room was suddenly her everything. It was her entire world.

  “I’m not going to die in there, am I?” Dédé asked. “No one’s waiting in there with a fizi, right?”

  She tried to lift her hands to wave off his concern, but could not synchronize them in
time. He opened the door and walked in anyway. He was still cradling her as she stumbled to the bathroom and emptied out her mouth and stomach in the toilet. When he carried her to the twin bed across from the door, she felt as though she were flying, not the good kind of flight, but the kind where you’re tumbling through the air and are terrified of crashing.

  Lying on her side, in her own bed, she slipped in and out of a fog in which Olivia and Blaise were waiting, like they’d been waiting the night they had all slept together. That night, she had performed acts and said things she could no longer remember in detail. Had she given them permission to be together? Maybe that’s why they had abandoned her.

  She dug her fingers into her bedsheets and tried to open her eyes to fight this foggy picture of the three of them, but particularly of her telling them to go off and be together, because it was obviously what they wanted. She had become the surplus one.

  She felt a damp washcloth land gently on her forehead. Dédé had made her a compress and was whispering comforting words in the air above her head. She couldn’t make out most of the words, but after a long pause he said, “You’re home.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “Yes, I’m home,” she mumbled.

  “Should I stay?” he asked.

  Having him stay would calm her down, even if he just sat on the floor across the room and watched her sleep. But then she would still wake up in the morning burdened with her losses.

  “You can go,” she said, feeling more confident now in her ability to speak.

  “You sure?” he asked while stroking her cheeks. His wet finger carved a warm stream into her skin, a stream that was soaking up her whole body.

  “I wish I’d met you first,” he said, widening the circle he was now drawing with his finger on her face. “I wish I’d seen you first. I wish I’d known you first. I wish I’d loved you first.”

  “You sound like one of his stupid songs.” She stuttered through the words, not sure whether he would find them funny or insulting.