When she came back, my father’s wife handed me a glass of supersweet lemonade. I gulped it to keep from having to engage in any more conversation. She followed suit, pouring herself a glass from a pitcher she set down on the side table next to me. I poured myself another glass, then heard some whispers in the distance.
“Is there anyone else here?” I asked, looking around.
I imagined my father walking out to greet me and scolding me for staying away too long.
“Yes,” she said. “The owners of the house.”
After a while, when our silence felt too heavy, I asked, “So where did you two meet?”
“Me and Maurice?”
“Yes, you and Maurice.” I said “Maurice” a bit louder, hoping it would force my father to come out, but my own voice was beginning to sound unfamiliar to me. She moved her head closer to mine, squinting as though she were worried about me.
“Maurice and I met through friends in Port-au-Prince.” Her voice dragged, and she seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“Are you one of those who returned?”
“I left at ten with my family and returned after practicing criminal law in Boston for twenty years,” she said, then stopped to catch her breath. “When the dictatorship ended, I went back to see what I could do. I was working with a group of Haitian American lawyers who were trying to help rebuild the justice system, but between the repressive laws inherited from the French Napoleonic code and those passed down from the dictatorship, our hands were tied. The head of the lawyers’ group introduced me to Maurice at my going-away party in Port-au-Prince. I was heading back to Boston, but he convinced me to stay and help him run his school.”
Maurice. I was slowly getting used to the name. Maurice who could convince people to change the course of their lives. Maurice with a different last name than mine.
“Do you have children?” I asked her.
“Me and Maurice?”
I nodded, though I meant with someone else.
“No children,” she said, “but I left my first husband behind in Boston when I moved to Haiti.”
“You have no children that you know of,” I said, then let out a cackle loud enough to drown out the sound of her ankle bells.
“You have your father’s sense of humor,” she said. “I’m afraid you won’t get to see that because many things about him have been stripped away.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. “Can he talk?”
“You can talk to him if you like,” she said. “I still speak to him. I will always speak to him.”
She closed her eyes for a moment as if to illustrate how they spoke. Telepathically? In her dreams?
“When did he—you two—get back to the States?” I asked.
“A few weeks ago,” she said. “Then his condition worsened. We’re lucky some friends let us use this house.”
“What exactly is wrong with him?” I asked.
“At this stage, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s irreversible.”
At our confession dinner the week before, I had asked my mother what she remembered most about my father.
“His seriousness,” she’d told me. “He always meant what he said.”
One Maurice serious. One Maurice a comedian. That makes him indeed my father.
“Do you think you made a difference there?” I asked my father’s wife. “In Haiti, I mean.”
“You mean was it worth leaving so much behind?” She paused for a second to consider this, took a deep breath, then said, “There’s still so much work to do.”
“Did you two not want to have children together?” I asked to fill the next long silence that followed. I wanted to remind her why I was here, but it seemed that she was only going to let me see my father when she was ready.
“ ‘Take care of one child or a few hundred, which would you choose?’ That’s what Maurice used to tell me whenever I mentioned us having a child. Or adopting one.”
When she noticed me reaching for the empty glass as if hoping it would magically fill up again, she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t agree with him on that. Or his approach to you. Your mother has done a great job raising you. The children he was helping had no one else but us.”
So he knew about me. The bastard knew. And still he’d chosen not to get in touch. He had chosen a country over us, as my mother had said. Because it was nobler to take care of hundreds of children? Who would be taking care of his little orphans now? Mother Earth would probably be going back for them.
“Your mother did her best to keep you a secret,” my father’s wife said, trying to lessen the blow. “She did not want to be forced to share custody. This was also a factor.”
“When did he find out about me?” I felt my teeth grinding as I was speaking. I wanted to leave, to go away without seeing him at all, but I also wanted to see him more than ever.
“When you were a teenager. He felt he had already lost so much time that you would never forgive him.”
I was thirsty again, like I had just swallowed a gallon of seawater. My mouth felt dry. Still I managed to say, “Did he really ask for me to come here?”
“He didn’t,” she said. “I did. He was too far along to know much when I got your information from your mother and Maurice’s friend.”
“I want to see him now,” I heard myself say.
“You will see him,” she said.
Her ankle bells sounded as she moved even closer to me. I leaned back, away from her. Then I remembered something from my C-student’s paper. He was angry at me for making him read, but he was angrier with Camus, with Meursault, the stranger, for saying that deep down it didn’t matter whether you died at thirty or seventy years old.
He’d closed his paper with “It do matter. Avery sekond kount.”
I promised myself I’d raise his grade when I got back.
“Before you see him, come meet some folks,” my father’s wife said.
I leaned on the ottoman next to the couch for support as I got up. My legs felt like straw. I wobbled behind her down the hallway, which was lined with the house owner’s family photographs. We stopped in the kitchen, where two men and three women were sitting around a square table.
My father’s wife turned to everyone at the table and said, “This is Maurice’s daughter, Nadia. She’s visiting from New York.”
If they were shocked that Maurice had a daughter, they didn’t show it.
“Nadia, these are friends of mine and Maurice’s,” she said.
One of the friends was a doctor. After waving hello, the doctor went back to tapping on her phone. We were the youngest people there. She was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress, no doctor’s coat or scrubs, but had a stethoscope around her neck.
My father’s wife then pointed to the collared minister among the remaining four and said, “Pastor Sorel and his wife are longtime friends.”
I gave an extra nod to Pastor Sorel, who got up from his chair so I could sit in it. As he pulled out the chair for me, he said, “This must be a great shock.”
“Maurice and Nadia have not spent much time together,” my father’s wife said.
“Or at all,” I said.
I couldn’t believe I had been in the house so long and had not seen the man himself.
“Can I see him?” I asked again.
“Have some bread soup,” my father’s wife said.
She poured me a bowl of plain white soup filled with soaked bread, potato chunks, and a few white noodles.
“There’s plenty more if you need it,” said one of the other women around the table. Something led me to believe that she was Pastor Sorel’s wife.
As I slurped my way through the soup, Pastor Sorel put his hands on my shoulders. All the others, except the doctor, linked hands and bowed their heads.
“Let�
�s pray for Nadia,” Pastor Sorel said.
I wondered why they were praying for me and not for my father, but like the soup, the prayer calmed my stomach.
While they were praying, I turned my face toward a low window, where the fluttering shadow of a traveler’s palm merged with our reflections in the glass, which was being pierced by the orange rays of a late-afternoon sunset. On the kitchen’s walls were more framed pictures of Pastor Sorel and his family. In the pictures, Pastor Sorel was always photographed on the left side of his daughter, the doctor, while the woman who’d possibly made the soup was always on the right. Based on the pictures in the hallway, this seemed to have been their picture-taking pose since the doctor was a toddler to when she began wearing caps and gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, a wedding gown, then eventually her doctor’s coat.
* * *
—
“We can go in now,” my father’s wife told me when I was done with the soup.
As I followed her down the hall, the minister and his wife began singing a mournful hymn, a lullaby for the dying.
Shall we gather at the river?
The beautiful, beautiful river.
The room was dimly lit, save for a desk lamp on a nightstand filled with gauze and ointments and other medical supplies. There was a hospital bed smack in the middle, and on the side, against the wall, was a cot covered with an eyelet embroidered white sheet. The bed was directly beneath a ceiling fan, which was circulating the cool air from a stand-alone unit on a side window. I followed my father’s wife to the bed.
My mother had no pictures of my father, and he and Mother Earth were not online either posting about themselves or raising money like everybody else, so I had no image to compare with that skeletal man lying in the hospital bed, except my own. From the outline of his stiff pajama-clad body under the thin blanket, I could see that he was shorter than me, though the illness might have shrunk him. If there was any territory for me to claim, it had to be on his face. I had to find myself in his drawn-out coppery skin, in the uneven rise of his forehead, in the tightly sealed eyes, the eyebrows that had nearly disappeared, the deep pockets beneath the hollow cheeks, the clenched jaw and gray fuzz on his chin.
I let my hands travel up the frigid railing of the hospital bed toward my father’s face, which when my fingertips grazed it felt just as prickly and haggard as it looked and just as dead. I pressed my palm down on his forehead and it was slippery, like a well-polished mask. I turned to my father’s wife for an explanation. She began quietly sobbing. Her sobs reminded me of my mother’s tears, even though they were crying over two different men, neither of whom I knew.
“He is gone now,” she said. “He is free. We rejoice for his freedom.” As she said this, her face became distorted as much with agony as horror. “He died right before your plane landed,” she finally admitted.
In her flushed and distressed face, I saw the void my father had left as clearly as if it were a gash, a wound, a scar. I was desperate to feel what she was feeling. I envied it, coveted it.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.
“There’s no rush, no emergency,” she said. She was composed once again, as though she had not been crying at all. “The doctor will pronounce him dead when you tell her to. Whenever you are ready. He’s been out of it for the past day or so, but we were told he could still hear us until the moment he stopped breathing.”
So officially, at least on paper, since the doctor had not yet called it, my father was still not dead.
“If you ever have a child of your own,” my father’s wife said, “at least you can tell your child that you saw your father, even like this.”
How would I describe this to my own child if I ever had one? How would I tell it to my mother, who thought that nothing having to do with my father was in the present, that everything involving him was in the past, in the old days?
My father’s wife had her own version of the old days. In the old days, she was telling me, conch shells blared for each person who died. In the old days, when a baby was born, the midwife would put the baby on the ground, and it was up to the father to pick up the child and claim it as his own. In the old days, the dead were initially kept at home. Farewell prayers were chanted and mourning dances were performed at their joy-filled wakes. When it was time to take the dead out of the house, they would be carried out, feet first, through the back door, and not the front, so they would know not to return. Their babies and young children would be passed over their coffins so they could shake off their spirits and wouldn’t be haunted for the rest of their lives. Then a village elder would pour rum on the grave as a final farewell. In the old days, she said, I would have pronounced my father dead with my bereavement wails to our fellow villagers, both the ones crowding the house and others far beyond.
Looking down at my father’s dead face, in which I saw no trace of my own, I wanted to grab him and shake him, force him to wake up and explain to me his version of the old days.
“He was a good man, a very good man,” my father’s wife continued. “I know he would have wanted you to be part of his final rites.”
How could he have wanted me to be part of his final rites when he’d been absent from my first?
“Please forgive him,” she said. “Please forgive us. There is no rush now. You can take your time here, then our young doctor friend will pronounce him…”
My father’s wife’s voice trailed off, then she walked out of the room, which became brighter when she opened the door allowing some of the hallway light in. I sat down on what must have been her cot, where she must have spent days, and nights, on both a vigil and a death watch. The cold air from the air-conditioning unit hit me, and I shivered. I leaned back and pressed my spine against the eyelet sheet. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t take them off the fan twirling over my head. It reminded me of wanting to put my hands into another type of fan in my mother’s restaurant when I was little and seeing if it would really cut my fingers off as my mother had warned me it would. It also reminded me of being hushed by my mother whenever I asked her about my father, until one day, when I was twelve, she blurted that he had left her before I was born and wanted nothing to do with us. This is what kept me from looking for him. This is what made me wish he would die.
Out in the hall, I heard my father’s wife and her friends talking. Perhaps they thought they were whispering, but they were not.
Pastor Sorel said, “Surely a simple service would do, then the cremation, just as he’d asked.”
“He wants his ashes spread on the school grounds in Port-au-Prince,” my father’s wife said.
She was speaking about him in the present, as though he were still alive.
Led by Pastor Sorel, they all began singing again, about gathering at a river where angels tread on crystal tides. They sang of laying their burdens down at this river and receiving a hard-earned robe and a crown from God.
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river.
Then, during a still moment when neither prayer nor song could be heard, the doctor asked, “How much longer do you think the daughter will be in there?”
The daughter? She said “the daughter.” And the daughter was me. The daughter will be in there for a year and a day when, as in the old days—according to my father’s wife—my father’s soul will rise from another type of river to be reborn as a shadow, a dream, or a whisper in the wind. The daughter will be in there for a lifetime, for the same amount of time she’d missed with her father. How about the daughter just stay here until the end of time?
But even if the daughter weren’t a total stranger, even if my father and I had spent my entire life together, I wouldn’t be able to stay in that room much longer. So I got up, leaned over the hospital bed railing, and pressed my lips against my father’s cold forehead. I did this
because I thought it would have been expected of me. If he had been alive and awake when I’d arrived, this is what I would have done.
My father no longer looked like he was sleeping. A sliver of white was visible through his half-open left eyelid. A veiled world remained hidden behind that small gap, a world I had never been privy to, a world I’d never know. In the old days, coins might have been placed over his eyes to keep me from seeing even this much of the windows to his soul.
It would have been simpler perhaps, and easier, to cry, to want to cry, to mourn things I had no idea I’d lost, to wonder how I would ever be able to live without him.
“Au revoir, Papa,” I said, trying out the word “Papa” just this once. I had always wondered what it would be like to call someone Papa. I had even imagined my mother marrying one of the men she had casually dated, just so I could call someone Papa. This would be the first and last time I would ever say the word “Papa” to the man who had actually been my father.
I turned my back on all of this, on him, and started walking toward the door. I kept expecting something to stop me, a hand on my shoulder, a whisper that would reverse, if not my entire life, this one incomplete moment. But my father did not wake up, nor did he come back from the dead to claim me.
Aujourd’hui, papa est mort.
My father died today.
But I had already killed him over and over in my mind. In a robbery, a duel, a terrorist attack, with bullets, grenades, land mines, snakebites, drowning, a drug overdose, in a car crash, train crash, plane crash, volcano eruption, tsunami, lightning strike, earthquake, of natural causes, in his sleep, with a terminal illness. This time I had apparently succeeded. He was dead, truly dead.
The kitchen, where my father’s wife and her friends were waiting, was darker than before. The window shades were drawn and the picture frames were covered with black bedsheets.
“His spirit might stop and look in the glass,” my father’s wife called out to me from the front room. “That would keep him from traveling on.”
Everything Inside Page 5