“Have you been to Haiti since…,” she asked.
He didn’t answer at first and seemed to be trying to stuff his words down his throat as he grabbed another crab cake, which he washed down with the whole glass of wine.
“Non” was finally all he said when his mouth, too, was empty.
* * *
—
The afternoon of the earthquake, she had been at Miami Dade College teaching. She’d grown close to some of her students that semester, and they’d invited her to a dinner the Haitian students’ association was hosting. They had also invited a popular local Haitian singer named Roro as the entertainment.
After she left the class, she was considering not attending the dinner. Then her phone started ringing. And with everyone she loved being far away, with her parents living in Brooklyn, and with other relatives in Paris, Santo Domingo, and Montreal worried but accounted for, and with Thomas on a prolonged New Year’s holiday with his wife and daughter in Haiti and not answering his phone, she decided to go to the student dinner after all. What better time to be with other people? she’d thought. There were still no detailed reports.
The college reception hall was packed. When she walked in, hundreds of students and faculty were sitting in a wide circle on what was supposed to be the dance floor. The singer Roro, the closest thing to a spiritual leader in sight, was standing in the middle of the circle. Towering over everyone, he seemed lost nonetheless, flabbergasted, his hands clasped together, his face crumpled. The student association president, an anxious young woman, walked over to Roro. Sobbing, she asked him to continue his ritual.
If only rituals could instantly heal us, Anika had thought. While waiting to see what Roro would come up with, she repeatedly checked Thomas’s and his wife’s social media pages and linked to the pages of their friends and their friends’ friends. There were no updates, just a stream of expressions of concern and worry.
When his Miami real estate office was reopened by his colleagues a week later, his assistant told her about his wife and daughter dying and his left leg being amputated at the knee joint. He was back in the States, but no one was supposed to know where. His cell phone was disconnected. He had returned to the office just a few days ago, when he finally took her call.
* * *
—
When the waiter came around again, Thomas ordered more food that he kept eating, small things he was picking up with his hands, empanadas, buffalo wings. She was too nervous to eat, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m craving akra,” he said, perhaps recalling the fried malaga fritters she used to cook for him.
“I could make that,” she expected herself to say, but she didn’t. Just as she didn’t want to give in to her hankering to invite him over to her place. And who said he’d want to go anyway? It had taken him months to answer her phone calls.
“I’ve been missing this kind of food,” he said.
“You were so careful about your diet before,” she said.
“I was careful with some things and careless with others,” he said. “Besides, you’re the one who wanted to come here. We occasionally ate things like this here. Not just the salads.”
“Not all at the same time,” she said.
“You’re not eating.” He finally noticed. “Drink more. You’ll be happier.”
“I’m not exactly thinking about being happy right now,” she said.
“You should be,” he said. “Isn’t that what these fireworks are about? The American right to happiness and all of that.”
* * *
—
She started sketching million-year-old birds because she couldn’t imagine how to sketch or paint what she really wanted to, earthquakes. Her sketches were meant to be studies for paintings, but she got no further than that. When you paint an earthquake, do you paint soil monsters devouring the earth? Shattered houses? Bloody, lifeless bodies? Random personal items—T-shirts, dresses, shoes, hair combs, and toothbrushes—scattered above the rubble? Do you paint cemeteries and grave markers and distraught mourners weeping over them? Do you paint crosses, wilted dust-covered flowers, or vibrant bright red ones, for hope? Do you write messages on your canvases, in case anyone misses the point? Or do you sketch your lover, his dead wife, and their dead baby daughter? A derivative, photo-realistic work based on an online image, something so faithful to the original that it could easily be mistaken for it, except in your sketches their high-end designer clothes become feathers, and apart from their legs and faces, they become birds.
Now she could also paint a man stuffing his face while regretting having come to a dinner he had long put off.
“Where were you all this time?” she finally asked him, in case he—or she—got up at any point in the evening and fled. “You said you’d tell me tonight.”
During their first phone call a few days before, he’d told her that she could ask him everything she wanted to at dinner. Pushing the food aside, he chuckled nervously, then said, “Physical rehab, where I still go. Also a nuthouse. I spent time in a nuthouse.”
“A psychiatric hospital?”
“We have a winner.” He raised his hands up in the air and cheered sarcastically.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know.”
She reached for his back. He pulled away.
“You weren’t meant to know,” he said. “No one was meant to know.”
When his assistant told her he was doing therapy somewhere and didn’t want to talk to anyone, she thought only about the amputated leg, the prosthesis. She hadn’t considered his mind, that he’d be so broken that he would also need this other kind of help.
“Some guys I’d come to know in Port-au-Prince,” he said as he reached for more food. “Their bodies were found crushed together with their mistresses in hotel rooms. How would it have looked if my wife and child were pulled out in pieces from under her parents’ house, I’m taken out from under the house alive, and I continue this thing with you?”
That’s the bargain he’d made over the hours of waiting, with whichever gods had heard their breaths grow more and more shallow alongside him, he said. And when nighttime came and when the aftershocks continued and when both his wife and daughter fell silent in the dark, he swore that, if they were spared and he didn’t die, he would never speak to Anika again.
She picked up her wineglass and tried to picture some ghostly and shadowy version of this, of his leg crushed beneath one of the house beams, of his wife and daughter at first screaming for help, then losing blood, strength, hope, then breath. Then she saw the people who had been digging for the three of them finding only him alive. Barely alive, as his assistant had said.
“So how would it look if after all that I kept sleeping with you?” he repeated.
“How would it look?” she said, before stopping herself from saying more. Did he think that theirs was ever a moral love? Otherwise, how could she explain the initial twinge of delight she’d felt when she’d learned that his wife and daughter had died? Was it actually glee she’d felt? Or was it yet another version of the fantasy she’d nurtured for nearly a year, of his wife and child disappearing, allowing her to take their place?
“I wasn’t ever going to leave them for you,” he said, as if responding to her thoughts. He turned his face toward the causeway and the glass towers and skyscrapers, whose reflections created, as the night sky darkened, a parallel city on the water. “And you were not the only one,” he added, his voice growing colder as he went along. “I think you should know that there were other women.”
She tried to speak, but her own voice cracked, and the sound fell back into her throat. Aside from the need to let him go, what she was feeling most was shame. He was direct, even brutal sometimes, yet he could be gentle, too, she reminded herself. She remembered him rushing around her apartment and hurriedly jumping into his c
lothes when he really wanted to stay.
“Five more minutes,” he’d say while slipping under the covers in her bed, five minutes that would sometimes turn into five more hours, which as time went by would require bigger and bigger lies to explain his absence to his wife. During these moments, she’d felt that nothing real could grow out of their betrayal, which had been complicated by her wanting to have a baby. He must have wanted that, too, she told herself, because in spite of making a halfhearted effort at precautions, she got pregnant anyway.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know?” he asked.
Was there anything else he wanted to know? she wondered.
He was fidgeting, rubbing his hands together. He seemed nervous, angry even. His sudden mood change scared her. Maybe his head wasn’t fully right yet. Or he wasn’t ready to tell her all those things. Perhaps that’s why he had stayed away.
“Please don’t ask me if I loved her,” he said. “Because you won’t like my answer.”
“Of course you loved her,” she said.
“Then what was I doing with you?”
“I guess you loved me, too. How could anyone not love me?” she said, trying to tease him even now, while laughing a bit at herself.
But plenty of other men had not loved her, and she had not loved them, either. It was too much time, too much work. Their desire for permanence drove her away. Once they wanted to live with her, to move in, to marry, she would lose interest. Except this time, this man, him. She remained interested.
* * *
—
The night of the earthquake, at the college hall, the singer Roro asked if anyone happened to have a rope. No one did, so some men offered their neckties and a few women their scarves. Roro asked for help in tying the ties and few scarves together until they formed a table-sized cloth circle in the middle of the room.
“This is now the epicenter of the earthquake,” Roro said. “And we are going to fill it with our love.”
This was not exactly what she’d wanted, needed. And nearly everyone seemed as disappointed as she was that Roro had not provided them with a more meaningful ritual, with unique and specific prayers, hymns or psalms to recite, or soothing refrains to chant. This was supposed to be their spontaneous porta fidei, their transient door of faith, their sudden sanctuary. This thing with the epicenter ties and scarves felt trite to her, empty, untrue. But it was their incantation of the moment, until some more ancient ceremonies could be recalled in detail or newer ones devised. Another type of priest, cantor, vicar, or layperson might have performed a different ritual, but the basic idea would have been the same: to try, with will and desire alone, to influence something you could not.
One of the students went out and came back with a bottle of Haitian rum, and while pouring it in the middle of the circle, Roro made everyone recite over and over “Pou sa n pa wè yo.”
Anika, too, had joined in, mouthing, though not really wanting to, “Pou sa n pa wè yo. For those we don’t see. For those who are not here.”
* * *
—
The restaurant was filling up, and the waiter’s visits to their table became less frequent. They were now both drinking more than they were eating. The bottle of wine was empty.
The way his assistant had told it, his in-laws’ neighbors had a stocked liquor cabinet that had somehow survived the earthquake. They’d brought everything they had to the field hospital, where his leg was amputated at the knee joint. He had gulped down a bottle of thirty-year-old scotch before a surgeon friend cut off his crushed left leg. There had been no hope for the leg and not enough time to airlift him, or get him to a hospital out of the country for a more sterile procedure.
“When you called, you said you had a gift for me.” He was looking at her again, and his eyes began to seem more familiar, full of playfulness and desire. He was acting as though what he’d said, about never having intended to leave his wife while also being with other women, didn’t matter. He held his hands out to her, as though waiting for her to produce the gift. She let his hands dangle until he pulled them away and stuck them in his pockets.
In the past when she was in this restaurant with him, she used to wish that she had met him before he’d met his wife. But then she would have been the wife, and he would have cheated on her, and not just with one person, as he’d just told her, but with many other women. She didn’t believe there had been other women besides her and his wife, though. If that were true, he wouldn’t have blurted it out like that.
“Why’d you really want to see me?” he asked now.
She wanted to fashion some answer that would sound reasonable. “I wanted to give you a gift. I also wanted to tell you about our baby that never was, our spirit child. I thought seeing you would make me realize that no one is worth wishing two people dead for.”
The gift was in her apartment. She had imagined some scenario where she would have him wait in his car, and she’d bring it down to him before they said their final goodbye. She did not want to see him react to it. She didn’t want him to talk to her about it. She didn’t want to know whether he’d keep it or throw it away.
“I wanted to see you because I thought we should end this face-to-face,” she said.
“It ended when they died,” he said. “You must know that. We didn’t have to see each other for that.”
He tilted his head back as though offering her his throat to cut, then he spread his hand over the front of his neck to protect it. Seeing her, she knew, was shattering him again. She was one of many offenses he would struggle to forgive himself for. She’d even felt this a few months back when she kept calling him, to both offer her condolences and tell him about their baby, and he would not answer her calls.
* * *
—
It wasn’t that devastating as far as miscarriages go. She was tired after a class and drifted off to sleep that evening, just as the sun was setting over the bay. A few hours later, she woke up with her pelvis cramping so much that it felt as though it was hammering itself into her back. She started spotting, and then there were some clots, then it was full-on bleeding. She drove herself to a nearby emergency room at midnight, and a few hours later was told that she’d had an “inevitable” miscarriage.
“Why inevitable?” she asked the young, exhausted-looking obstetrics intern on call.
“That’s the medical term,” he said. “Your cervix was dilated and your fetus had no heartbeat. There was no other possible outcome.”
* * *
—
The Fourth of July fireworks were about to begin now. Some of the patrons were making their way to the glass wall. Others went up to the roof lounge. She held out her hand to him to help him to his feet. He was up faster than she expected. He pushed aside the crate table, moving ahead of her. When he reached the wall, he formed a triangle with his back, the concrete wall, and the glass. He then stepped aside and allowed her to slip between his arms, even as more and more people were crowding in.
The fireworks began with a single exploding red star, which burst into a trail of red, white, and blue streaks. His knees buckled against hers. His body tensed up. He wrapped his arms around her waist, not to embrace her but to hold himself up. He was shaking. His quivering lips brushed against her ear. He was saying something she couldn’t quite make out. Then he pressed down on her shoulder with both his hands and turned her body around.
“The ground is moving,” he shouted in her ear.
His face was sweating, his breath racing. The building, it now felt to her, too, was vibrating as the fireworks grew louder and more elaborate. She worried that the glass wouldn’t hold and that she, he, and all the other people there would fall several stories into the bay.
“I need to get out of here,” he mouthed. He might have been yelling, but the words were trapped in his mouth.
“Let’s g
o back,” she said.
She held both his hands as they moved away. The people closest to them noticed that something was wrong and stepped aside to make room for them to pass. He kept his hands in hers as she guided him toward their table.
She motioned for one of the waiters to bring her some water quickly, and he returned with a glass bottle. Thomas tried to slow down his breathing by inhaling deeply through his nose, then pushing the air out of his mouth. It was obviously not the first time this had happened to him.
As she poured him a glass from the water bottle, he caught his breath long enough to say, “If this was a Haitian restaurant, I’d pour some water on my head.”
“Why would it have to be a Haitian restaurant?” she asked.
“My people would understand.”
“Who says you can’t do that here?” she asked.
Looking down at the bottle and at the full glass in front of him, she said, “I dare you.”
“Do you really?”
He picked up the glass, then slowly poured the water over his bald head. As the water slid down his face, he tried to catch some with his tongue before it crawled down his chin onto the front of his shirt.
“Your turn,” he told her, making no attempts to wipe the water.
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