Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  * * *

  —

  I cried only after I went to the bathroom closest to where my dead father lay and called my mother from there.

  “He’s gone, isn’t he?” she asked as soon as she picked up.

  I nodded as though she were standing across from me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “For everyone involved.”

  “He had a wife,” I said between sobs. “And nice friends who loved him.”

  “And we have each other,” she said, which made me realize that she was feeling neither guilt nor regret at having severed herself from her past, except for the food she served in her restaurant. And me.

  “Are you staying for the services?” my mother asked.

  I didn’t think I could. I had not seen him either live or die, so I was at best a well-wisher, and at worst an intruder. Besides, I had to get back to work, to my kids.

  “Come home soon,” my mother said.

  I told her I would.

  My father’s wife’s ankle bells began chiming again as I stepped out of the bathroom. They pealed softly at first, then they tolled as though she was no longer walking but dancing to the front door.

  “He died from a type of cancer where the brain cells start looking like stars,” I heard her tell the person, or people, who’d just arrived for the washing of the body, or whatever might come next.

  “The calcium in his bones became stardust,” she told someone else.

  Then from the front room came the scratchy sound of a needle hitting an old vinyl record. Nina Simone’s sultry yet sorrow-filled voice came blaring out, wailing for us to take her to the water to be baptized. The sorrow soon turned to joy, and the piano gave way to drums as Nina demanded, pleaded, to be baptized.

  I suddenly wanted to hold my father’s wife, and to let her hold me in a way that my mother could not. As I began walking toward my father’s wife, I felt, with Nina’s drums throbbing in my ears, as though I was marching at the head of a king’s funeral procession, with an entire village in my wake.

  The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special

  “They told me, madame, that I’m going to die.”

  Mélisande had gone to a downtown clinic and had gotten her blood drawn, only to receive a possible death sentence. She’d been coughing for some time, soft and discreet at first, then more and more thunderously, which had led to my removing my eleven-month-old son, Wesley, from her care. Only when she got a fever and became sluggish to the point that she was barely mobile did she finally decide to seek medical help.

  She was sobbing as she stood in my bedroom doorway, her body as flat as one of the doorframe beams. She hiked up a flowered silk skirt to wipe the tears from her face. I immediately recognized that skirt as one I’d formerly owned. I had paid sixty dollars for it at a shop in Miami back when I was in graduate school, where I met my husband, Xavier, a fellow Haitian, with whom I run a small hotel, which is also our home, in Port-au-Prince.

  “Have you talked to your mother?” I asked Mélisande.

  She was twenty-one or twenty-two at most. Her mother, Babette, worked as a cook at our hotel. Mélisande was our son’s nanny, and she and Babette shared a maid’s room behind the hotel’s kitchen.

  I didn’t trust many people with my son, but it was obvious that Wesley loved her. As soon as I placed Wesley in Mélisande’s arms, she probed out of him the loudest laugh he’d ever tried. Perhaps what drew him to her were the same things I found appealing about her: her elfin face, her reedy voice, her slightly hesitant gait, as though she wasn’t sure whether or not it was safe to touch the ground.

  Xavier thought Mélisande should be in a trade school, learning some other skill when she wasn’t taking care of Wesley, but we hadn’t forced it or insisted that she go. During her free time, we saw her helping her mother cook. I also watched her joke with our two hotel maids as she sometimes cleaned the conference room and all twelve guest rooms with them. The agreement she had with the maids was that whenever she helped them out, whatever was left behind in the rooms would be split with her.

  Sometimes, aside from the tips, they’d find pieces of gold or silver jewelry—mostly single earrings and thin bracelets—that my husband would make every effort to return, but if no one called back or claimed them for a few months, we would allow the maids to sell them to the jeweler down the street, who’d melt them into other pieces to sell to other guests. This was money Mélisande might not be making if she were in school and not working for us, but school might have helped with the future. And now she might have no future.

  “Come in and sit down,” I told her.

  I got up from my bed and walked over to the doorway. I was still in my nightgown. Wesley was in the main hotel building with my husband, who was in his office preparing to receive five college students arriving for spring break. My husband also ran a tourism business from the hotel. Our guided tours’ clientele consisted mostly of the foreign-born children of Haitians living abroad. During the day, Xavier took them to visit local landmarks and historical sites. At night, they were hosted by our writer, artist, and musician friends, and even shared a meal with some kids in a nearby orphanage. Another colleague took our guests out of the capital to Jacmel, a coastal town that was once thought of as the Riviera of Haiti, then Gonaïves, where Haiti’s independence from France was officially declared in 1804, and to the Citadelle Laferrière, a breathtaking fortress built after independence. Xavier’s tourism package was also a kind of recruiting tool. He wanted to encourage these young people to come back and contribute their skills to the country.

  Mélisande felt extremely light to my touch—like paper, cloth, or air—as I guided her toward a rocking chair by my bed. She slid down into the chair, where I piled a few cushions around her. Resting my arms on her shoulders, I felt some of the warmth of her lingering fever through her plain white T-shirt.

  “What did the doctor say, exactly?” I asked.

  “He said,” she replied, with her face buried in her hands, “that I have SIDA. AIDS.”

  I had initially expected pneumonia, a bronchial infection, but not that. When she came home from the doctor, I was prepared to lecture her about not waiting so long the next time to get herself checked out. I thought at most she would need antibiotics.

  “Even with the SIDA,” I told her, “they have all these drugs. People live for years on them.”

  This provoked a new flurry of sobs. Her shoulders were bobbing up and down, and I began to panic myself. Wesley. She had touched every part of his body, had washed, had wiped, had kissed and cuddled him. Had they ever accidentally exchanged blood? I wanted to leave her there and run past the pool, through the hibiscus garden, the flamboyant tree clusters, to the other gingerbread house, on the other side of the property, to find my son. As usual, Wesley had woken up earlier than all of us, and my husband had taken him to his office. He was probably playing or crawling under his father’s desk as Xavier made his calls.

  Mélisande was still sobbing. We’d have to have Wesley tested. And how would I live with myself if he had been infected?

  I decided to simply let Mélisande cry. Let her get it out of her system before we tried to come up with some type of solution. A few clinics offered good retroviral treatments. Some were free; others expected you to be part of studies and experiments. The clinic where Mélisande had been tested offered counseling but no long-term treatment.

  I should have urged her to go to the doctor when she first began to lose weight. I should have stopped her not-so-secret flirtations with some of the hotel’s male guests. The night concierge had told Xavier and me that Mélisande liked to seek out some particular guests for conversations—the fat, white nongovernmental-organization-affiliated ones—who she thought, because they appeared to have never missed a meal in their lives, were rich. It didn’t matter to her that most of the time she had no idea what they were saying.
Trying to make sense of their native languages was a delightful game to her. By repeating some of the things they said, she thought she was learning English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, or whatever language they spoke. Still, in trying to keep the guests happy, the night concierge did not discourage her. The time she spent with these men never seemed to him to last long enough for her to have had sex with them anyway. Besides, she was living with her mother, who was always watching her.

  Mélisande stopped crying because she seemed to have run out of tears. And now she had the hiccups, which forced her head to jerk back and forth toward and away from me.

  “We have to find you a place where you can get a second opinion,” I told her.

  She raised her head and glared at me, then she opened her eyes wide, as though a beehive or a bird’s nest had suddenly appeared on top of my head. Her eyes were bright red, the bulging capillaries having taken over her eyeballs.

  “They told me there was no cure,” she said.

  “Let me talk to Mesye Xavier,” I said. “We’ll find you some care.”

  I had no idea where to find the best treatment in Port-au-Prince, but I knew Xavier would. He knew something about nearly everything, especially things that involved worst-case-scenario types of problems. This is in part a guide and hotelier’s job. If guests show up hungry, you feed them. If they want drink, you ply them. If they want to be left alone, you make yourself scarce. If they want company, you entertain. If they are lovelorn, you find them love. And if they show up sick, you find them treatment quickly before they expire on your watch.

  * * *

  —

  Wesley tested negative for HIV. The same Canadian doctor who performed his tests and Mélisande’s second test in Pétionville was the one who’d help us get the retroviral drugs that Mélisande needed. The best thing, he told us, was a one-pill treatment many of his patients were calling the gwo blan, or the big white. It made compliance easier. Mélisande, he could already tell, was not going to be compliant. First of all, she was claiming she’d never had sex with anyone, and since she had not injected herself with hypodermic needles and had not had blood transfusions, all he could conclude was that she was in terrible denial.

  “If you won’t even own up to the possible ways the disease might have entered your body, how can you hope to treat this disease aggressively?” he’d told Mélisande in French-accented Creole as she sat across a desk from him, her eyelids fluttering between open and closed, staring, when they were open, at a wall full of diplomas.

  But once the doctor provided us with two months’ worth of pills from his own private stash—at two American dollars a pill—Mélisande was more compliant than any of us expected. To get her started, I told her to come and find me every morning so I could watch her take the pill as we ate breakfast together, usually something solid like plantains and eggs or spaghetti with herring for her, and something light, coffee and toast, for me. Most of the time we ate on the patio of my room, which overlooked the hotel pool, where a few of our guests would already be having their morning swim. Other times we ate in the hotel dining room with Wesley in a high chair at my side.

  Mélisande began to gain weight, my old clothes fitting her better now. She cried less, too, in part, I think, because she knew the whole staff, including the groundsman and security guard, were watching us. But what she never did again was touch my son, who reached his tubby little arms out to her, contorting his face into a grimace that would turn into wails, then tears, when she simply ignored him or turned away.

  I stopped bringing Wesley to breakfast with her after a while. It was too much for both of them. Though I surely needed one, I didn’t hire another nanny because I didn’t want Mélisande feeling worse than she already did. Instead I asked Xavier to pitch in a little more when he didn’t have any tours and took Wesley with me everywhere, pushing him around in a stroller when he became too heavy to carry.

  That particular week, my problem guests included the young local newly married couple who’d spent four nights locked up in our honeymoon suite when they had only reserved it for two. And the senator who’d abandoned his house for security reasons and was now living in one of the rooms next to the gazebo.

  I came across the senator as I sprinted around with Wesley, hastily inspecting the grounds before having breakfast with Mélisande. The senator was sitting by the pool reading his newspaper while wearing only his swimming trunks. He smiled and winked like he always did whenever I reminded him of his unpaid bill. There was also the hunchbacked elderly French philosopher. He claimed to be writing a book about Haiti, but I had never seen him do anything but smoke and drink heavily at all hours of the day. Along with the stringer who had to be reminded that the money her newspaper had supposedly wired had never arrived, each of these guests required some nudging. Much more nudging than Mélisande, who I felt confident would now be fine taking her medication on her own.

  I soon stopped the breakfasts altogether and passed on the job of monitoring Mélisande’s compliance to her mother, who from the day she learned Mélisande was sick started calling her a bouzen, a whore, even as she stopped whatever she was doing every morning to make sure that her daughter swallowed the pill with breakfast.

  Some mornings I’d watch them from the patio. Babette was no taller than Mélisande, but was strapping and thick. The veins in her short neck throbbed as she continuously berated Mélisande, who’d try to put an end to their interaction by swallowing the pill, then dashing off.

  “What will you do when mesye and madame stop paying for your hundred-gourde pills?” Babette would shout like a drill sergeant hazing a recruit. Her fear was palpable. Her daughter’s survival now depended on my husband and me. If we decided to sell the hotel and move elsewhere, her child could get sicker. What if the drug companies stopped making the drug or no longer sent it to Haiti? If any part of the chain that ran from the creation of the drug to our ability to afford it broke down, she might lose her child.

  One morning, I heard Babette asking Mélisande as she was taking the pill, “What if the foreigners, the blan, start keeping the medikaman for themselves? What if mesye and madame leave Haiti?”

  “You will never have a healthy child,” she told her another day. “You will never have a husband.”

  “You should talk to her,” Xavier said to me after overhearing this.

  He was preparing a dinner for a group of local businessmen who sometimes used the hotel conference room for their meetings. He was making notes on his phone about ordering wines, alerting the chef, and coming up with a menu as he spoke.

  “It can’t be helpful for the poor girl to be treated that way,” he said.

  “Where do you want to be buried?” Babette said soon after. “You better start saving if you want a fancy coffin.”

  Unlike the rest of us, Babette couldn’t afford the conditional optimism this pill allowed. If Mélisande were my daughter and I could barely afford these pills, I might have had the same fears.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I asked to have a word with Babette, who, as soon as I closed my husband’s office door behind us, grabbed my hand and said, “Mèsi, mèsi. Thank you, madame, for not throwing her out. Thank you for not letting her die.”

  “There are people all over the world taking this medication,” I said, gently tugging my hand out of her grasp. “Besides, you’re wasting precious time with your daughter, time you could be spending with her just as you had before. You can help her the most by not cursing but loving her.”

  “Love her?” She frowned, moving a few steps away from me.

  “Yes, love her,” I said. It must have sounded like an order. “You must love her,” I stressed.

  I knew what she was thinking. These half-assed outsiders, these no-longer-fully-Haitian, almost-blan, foreigner-type people, these dyaspora with their mushy thinking, why
does it all come back to one kind of love with them, the kind of love you keep talking about rather than the kind of love that shatters you to pieces? Don’t these die-ass-poor-aahs, these dyaspowa and dyasporèn, these outside-minded kings and queens, know that there are many other ways to show love than to be constantly talking about it?

  “Of course I love her,” she said, spreading both her arms wide open as if to illustrate how much. “That’s why I am so rough with her.”

  She lowered her gaze and bowed her head and appeared ashamed that I, on top of everything, had reason to scold her, ashamed that she had no choice but to stand there and take it.

  “Eskize m. I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re both mothers. I understand.”

  She looked around the room, at the framed photographs on the wall, at the pictures of Xavier’s and my family members, both in Haiti and far away. She looked at the close-to-a-dozen pictures of Wesley’s less than a year on this earth. She looked at the wall as though she was hoping to see herself or Mélisande there, but was still not surprised that she didn’t.

  “You’re a mother who can provide not only for your own child, but mine, too,” she said, turning her eyes toward the white ceiling. “We’re not the same.”

  I wanted Mélisande to be healthy, I told her, and so did she. In that way, we were the same. I knew she was not convinced. I also knew that even after our talk there would be no apologies or reconciliatory mother-and-daughter embrace between her and Mélisande.

  The next morning, I watched from the patio where Wesley was bobbing up and down in a playpen next to me and saw her silently hand Mélisande a glass of water.

  “Whatever did you tell her?” Xavier asked as he looked in on Wesley.

  “You know…,” I said, which he realized meant that I didn’t want to talk about it.