* * *
—
At the end of the second month, when Mélisande needed a refill of the drugs, her doctor left Haiti and moved back to Montreal. Mélisande had no choice but to start seeing another doctor, a Cuban one this time, who ordered a new series of tests. When Mélisande came back with several bottles of pills, including herbal pills and vitamins, I could tell that whatever illusion she’d harbored about having gotten better was gone.
The new regimen did not agree with her. She had stomachaches, nausea, and diarrhea and spent her days in bed. It would take time for her body to get used to the drug and supplements, the Cuban doctor said, but she needed them both, not just the retroviral but also the natural stuff. Xavier made a few more calls, and we found Mélisande yet another doctor, a Haitian female one, to confirm that Mélisande was indeed getting the right treatment.
After the doctor examined her in the room she and her mother shared, Mélisande told the doctor that she wanted the one-pill treatment back. She handed the prescription bottles from the Canadian doctor to the Haitian female doctor, who sucked her teeth loudly and exclaimed “Jesus, Marie, Joseph!” when she saw the Canadian doctor’s name.
“What’s wrong?” I asked from where I was standing by the door.
It turned out, the Haitian woman doctor elaborated, that what Mélisande had gotten from the Canadian doctor was less potent than an aspirin. It was a placebo. It had not been doing anything for her at all. In fact, it might have even weakened her immune system. The Canadian doctor who had prescribed and sold the first pills to us had fled Haiti because he’d been discovered by some colleagues who’d reported him to the Ministry of Health for selling those useless pills to dozens of unsuspecting patients all over the city. There was even some doubt as to whether he was a doctor at all.
“You must be extra vigilant,” the doctor told Mélisande. She prescribed the gwo blan again, but told us to make sure we got the real thing. Mélisande’s body sank deeper under her bedsheets when she heard the news. She had lost precious time.
“He was playing with her life,” the doctor told me as I walked out of the room with her. Mélisande turned her face away from us, burying it in her pillow while I pulled the door shut behind us.
* * *
—
I shouldn’t have been so trustful of the first doctor. Maybe I was blinded by the white skin and all the diplomas on his wall. Would I have been so willing to trust him if Mélisande had been my daughter?
“We’ve gone way beyond the call of duty,” Xavier said while texting a driver about a visit to MUPANAH, the national museum, with a group of Haitian American art students in a few days.
“How?” I asked. “By getting her a quack?”
“We tried,” he said.
“We failed,” I shouted.
“We did everything we would have done for Wesley,” he said.
“Did we?”
I immediately made an appointment for our son to have a second test.
* * *
—
That afternoon before Wesley’s doctor’s appointment, Mélisande’s mother served Xavier and me lunch in the gazebo while our son napped in his stroller. She was sweating in her light blue uniform. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, and though this was what she wore most days, it suddenly looked like mourning garb.
“We’re sorry,” Xavier told her. “But she was probably sick before she came to us. It could have happened when she was even younger.”
She lay the food down quickly, turned her back to us without saying anything, and walked away. Perhaps she considered us just as deceitful as the quack, and now we were insulting her child, too.
I should apologize to her, I told Xavier after she left, reassure her that we were trying to help Mélisande. We had been duped, not just out of our money but out of hope.
I got up to go find Mélisande’s mother, but Xavier grabbed my hand and pulled me down.
“Leave it alone,” he said, now sounding truly angry, not only at the deceitful and perhaps fake doctor, and at the entire situation, but at Mélisande’s mother, too.
* * *
—
A few days later, I went to their room to see Mélisande to tell her that Wesley’s second test had also come back negative. She was lying in bed in a deep sleep and did not stir when I walked in the room. Her newly plaited waist-length box braids seemed too bulky for her face and were fanned out around her head like a nest of fleeing snakes. Her still-fragile-looking body, now stripped bare except for a black bra and polka-dotted panties, would eventually adjust completely, the doctor had told us.
Watching her sleep so quietly, and so exposed, especially with her mouth open, I thought what will she possessed. Her symptoms had completely disappeared for nearly two months while she was taking that ineffectual pill. It seemed to help once she’d believed it could. There was something different about her face now, though. She no longer looked young. Perhaps it was because of her erratic weight loss and gain, but she even had wrinkles, some between her eyebrows, some around her mouth.
* * *
—
A week later, Mélisande got out of bed again. I noticed her one morning sitting fully dressed in a lounge chair by the pool and staring into the water while Wesley and I were having breakfast on the patio. She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a small piece of jewelry that she traced against the lifelines in her palm. She then made a fist around it before placing it in her pocket again. She did this a couple of times, pulled the thing out of her pocket, then looked down at it, then put it back. At some point I noticed it was a ring, with a shiny gem that, though minute, was still drawing more light to it than the rest.
I walked Wesley down to the pool to see her. Her eyes were closed, and I had to call out her name to let her know we were there. She was surprised to see us.
“How are you?” I asked while we slid into the lounge chair next to hers.
My son lunged for the shiny trinket, which was in Mélisande’s left hand, but she pulled both hands away and shoved it back into her pocket.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Mélisande must have been wondering how long I had been looking at her, watching her pull this thing in and out of her pocket. Slowly she reached in deeper and out came the ring once more. The gold was as thin as spaghetti but it had, just as I’d suspected, a small glass stone that was capturing the light. Drawn by the glint of the stone, Wesley reached for the ring once more, but Mélisande yanked it away again as if to protect it from his grasp.
“Did one of the guests leave that behind?” I asked her.
She shook her head no.
“Did someone give it to you?”
She nodded.
“A man?”
Another nod.
“Did he give it to you before you were sick?”
“Maybe,” she answered softly while keeping her eyes on the fist now closed tightly around the ring.
“He said he was going to marry you?”
She said nothing.
He did say he would marry her, I suspected, then he left and returned home to his life, or his wife, or whoever it was he was truly beholden to, and he never came back.
The ring was worthless, of course, one of the fake-gold krizokal ones made by the corner jeweler down the street. I had seen a bunch of them on the fingers of young girls who came to the hotel for drinks and sexual exploits with both foreign and local guests, guests who told them they loved them and gave them a ring like this as a symbol of their loyalty, then left them clinging to some hollow promise and never looked back. Around the hotel, those types of rings even had a name. We called them the Port-au-Prince marriage special, renmen m, kite m—or love-me-and-leave-me—rings.
“Mélisande,” I began, trying to think of the best way to tell her, or to remind her, that
this ring was like the pills she’d been taking at first. There was no truth, magic, or healing in it. Her sunken face and reddened eyes indicated that she already knew.
“M konnen,” she said, “I know,” signaling with a wave of her bony hands that she no longer wanted to talk about it.
The Gift
Anika promised Thomas a gift so he would have dinner with her on the Fourth of July. They hadn’t seen each other in over seven months, not since before the earthquake. The glass-walled restaurant overlooking Biscayne Bay was her idea. They had eaten there many times before and, in much-happier days, had both found the dim lighting and black leather couches not just intriguing but also romantic. The crate-style coffee tables on which the meals were served had always been a challenge, but the breathtaking view of the downtown Miami skyline kept them coming back. It was a good place to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, and in spite of how crowded the restaurant would eventually get, the corner where they always sat would be quiet enough for them to talk.
Anika had bought a special dress for the occasion, a black halter mini that grazed her thighs. When Thomas arrived, he looked nothing like the dapper man she once loved, the one she’d been attracted to from the moment they’d met, when she appeared at his real estate office, a penthouse suite overlooking downtown Miami, and asked if she could decorate the walls of his offices with her clients’ paintings, on the condition that he help her sell the paintings to his renters or buyers or their interior decorators.
“Don’t know about all that,” he’d said, smirking, even as his blonde female assistant was sitting next to her, across the desk from him, taking notes. “Besides, it would be a lot of work. You’d have to be here all the time, looking after those paintings. And after me.”
He was still new to Miami then, a double dyaspora from both Park Slope, USA, and Pacot, Haiti. Back then, he was spending a lot of time at the gym. As he approached the table, he looked less burly and much thinner, and an inch or so shorter.
He slid down onto the couch and wrapped his arms around her neck. He smelled like one of the many aftershaves he took turns using, in spite of her recommendation that he stick to just one so that whenever she smelled it, wherever she happened to be, she would think of him.
“People don’t remember smells,” she’d told him, “unless the smells are tied to something or someone—”
She’d meant to say: something or someone they love. But she knew this wasn’t always true. People also associate some smells with things they hate or are trying to forget.
After saying hello, he kept his arms around her neck for so long that she had no choice but to stroke his back. She patted it midspine just as she would if he were crying. In times past, he would have been wearing some designer jeans and a dark T-shirt, but now it was a long-sleeved white shirt and plain dark slacks. On his right ear was a tiny diamond earring, which looked as though it might belong to a baby girl.
“That’s new,” she said, pointing at the earring.
“As is so much else.” He pulled away from her and pressed his back into the sofa. He sat up straight, almost too straight, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
* * *
—
She was the one who’d pursued him. He agreed over time to buy her clients’ paintings as housewarming gifts for his. Each time he bought a painting from her, she treated him to a celebratory dinner in this same restaurant. His confidence, his cockiness, were what had won her over. She’d found his flirting with her in another woman’s presence, even the ones who worked for him in his office, sexy. He was captivating, extremely photogenic, with his bald head and mahogany-colored skin. His voice was radio deep, as though every time he opened his mouth he was making on-air announcements.
“I’m surprised you called me back this time,” she said.
“It’s a holiday and I had nothing to do,” he said.
“There’ve been other holidays.”
“Ones that mattered?”
“This one matters to you?”
“We’re here, aren’t we?”
“You came because I promised you something.”
“We’ve always promised each other things,” he said. “Well, not always things.”
He looked around the room, which was becoming more and more crowded. Voices grew from whispers to normal talk, then the occasional shout of someone trying to be heard. Many of the other patrons were already angling for empty spots next to the glass walls, which were high above the bottlenecked Brickell Avenue Bridge. It had taken some convincing, and reminding the manager how much money they’d spent there, to get their usual table.
“I do like the Fourth of July,” he said. “I barely remember what we did last year, though.”
“I got the midday picnic in my apartment. She got the fireworks at Bayfront Park.”
“Which was a mistake,” he said. “The fireworks terrified my daughter.”
He never said their names to her, neither the wife’s nor the daughter’s. It was as though he wanted them to remain fuzzy, abstract, vague.
* * *
—
She learned a few weeks after they met that he had a wife and baby. After he sold a multimillion-dollar mansion to a new star player for the Miami Heat, he was profiled in the business section of the Miami Times. He had moved to New York with his family at age nine. His wife was born into a well-to-do Haitian clan and had relocated to Miami as an adult. Her family was in the construction trade in Haiti, and he wanted to enter the market there. It was a perfect fit.
The picture of the three of them on the newspaper’s website—him, his wife, his infant daughter—sitting in their luxurious Miami penthouse’s living room, hit her like an assault. There they were. Holy trinity. Perfect family. The wife’s mix of Lebanese and Haitian ancestry showed in her russet-colored skin and cascade of thick Cleopatra-style hair. Their daughter, nearly a year old, was doughy, edible looking, her pudgy arms wrapped around the wife’s jeweled neck.
Thomas now slid his body close to hers until there was nowhere else for him to go. When he rested his head on her shoulder, she reached into her bag for her cell phone. She was going to call a girlfriend to come rescue her so she wouldn’t be tempted to backtrack or change her mind or slip into old ways after dinner. Watching her drop her cell phone back in her purse, he said, “I was at the Caribbean Market in Port-au-Prince once, and all of the maids were on their cell phones with their mistresses. I should put that differently, with their bosses. And then the maids got on the phone with their maids to tell them what to cook their kids for lunch.”
When she narrowed her eyes and looked perplexed, he added, “After the earthquake, didn’t you hear about all the people who were stuck under houses and schools, and the Caribbean Market, texting for help on their cell phones, for hours?”
“Did you have your phone with you when the house fell?” she asked.
He raised his head from her shoulder, and Anika felt the much-lighter weight of him slip away.
“For once, no,” he said. “I was trying to focus on family. But I wish I did have my phone with me down there.”
“You look good,” she said when he failed to elaborate. She was lying. His gaunt face was full of nicks and scars that, if he were clever with makeup, he might be able to cover.
The busboy came by with water, then the waiter with silverware and a menu, but these people might as well have been shadows, ghosts. There was a speech about specials and the menu that she was too distracted to hear well. She had memorized the menu anyway.
“We need a minute,” he said when asked what he was drinking.
“We might as well eat on the floor,” he said the same way he had in the past, while tapping the crate coffee table with his palms.
When the waiter came back, Thomas ordered the same Chilean Pinot Noir they’d always had, the one with the pep
pery taste and earthy aroma. It was their favorite. He also ordered some prawns and crab cakes.
“Have you been working?” he asked, once the waiter was gone. “Are you still selling a lot of pieces?”
“I lost my best client, remember?” she said.
“That’s right. Me,” he said, while patting himself on the shoulders.
“I’m working with a few interior decorators,” she said. “Kind of a step down, but I’m also doing some sketching now myself, some simple line drawings.”
She knew he was doing his best to catch up. She wanted to tell him that she was still living in the nearby condo where he used to visit her, that the bedroom was still small, and that the terrace, packed with her collection of colorful patio chairs, still overlooked both the MacArthur Causeway and Biscayne Bay. She wanted to tell him that she was still teaching that Intro to Art History class at Miami Dade College twice a week, and that what she was sketching now, from photographs, in notebook-sized drawing pads, was a series of birds. Her favorites were the Antillean mango birds, the only birds known to fly backward. She was also sketching a lot of striped-bellied piculets, the kind whose feathers had been found buried in twenty-five-million-year-old amber in the Dominican Republic.
The waiter came back with the wine, and Thomas made a show of sniffing and tasting it. Clicking his full glass against hers, he said, “Santé.”
“To better days.” She took a gulp, then put her glass down.
The appetizers came and kept coming and they both looked down at them, uninterested. She wondered what it might be like to be in bed now with this new version of him, the one who was missing a left leg from the knee down, though she could hardly tell which one of his legs was the prosthesis. She wanted to believe that it would be easy to take things up right where they had left off, that the yearning she’d once had for his strong if pampered body, the hunger, would still be there. But she wasn’t sure. She could tell that some of his confidence was gone. Yet perhaps the loss of confidence had less to do with the leg and more with everything and everyone he’d lost. She wanted to see, to experience, the absent part of his body, this leg, just as she had when it was still walking toward and away from her bed, or when it was still wrapped tightly around her body. She thought that he might bend down at any time, pull up his pant leg, and show her his prosthesis. Instead he grabbed a crab cake from a small plate and began shoving it in his mouth. He took his time chewing while she watched his face, his now messier and older-looking face.
Everything Inside Page 7