Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  The first time her husband took her to the doctor, before all the brain scans and spinal taps, the doctor asked about her family’s medical history. He asked whether her parents or her grandparents had suffered from any mental illnesses, Alzheimer’s, or dementia. She had not been able to answer any of his questions, because when he asked she could not remember anything about herself.

  “She’s not a good historian,” the doctor told her husband, which was, according to Victor, the doctor’s way of saying that she was incapable of telling her own life story.

  She is not a good historian. She never has been. Even when she was well. Now she will never get a chance to be. Her grandson will grow up not knowing her. The single most memorable story that will exist about her and him will be of her dangling him off a terrace, in what some might see as an attempt to kill him. For her, all this will soon evaporate, fade away. But everyone else will remember.

  They are about to roll her out of the apartment on the gurney. Although her wrists are strapped down, her son is holding her left hand tightly. Jeanne gives Jude to his other grandmother and walks over to the gurney. She moves her face so close to Carole’s that Carole thinks she is going to bite her. But then Jeanne pulls back, and it occurs to Carole that she is playing Alo, Bye, another peekaboo game her children used to enjoy. With their faces nearly touching, Jeanne crinkles her nose and whispers, “Alo, Manman,” then “Bye, Manman.”

  It would be appropriate, if only she could make herself believe that this is what her daughter is actually doing. It would be a fitting close to her family life, or at least to life with her children. You are always saying hello to them while preparing them to say goodbye to you. You are always dreading the separations, while cheering them on, to get bigger, smarter, to crawl, babble, walk, speak, to have birthdays that you hope you’ll live to see, that you pray they’ll live to see. Jeanne will now know what it’s like to live that way, to have a part of yourself walking around unattached to you, and to love that part so much that you sometimes feel as though you were losing your mind.

  Her daughter reaches down and takes her right hand, so that both of her children are now holding her scrawny, shaky hands, which seem not to belong to her at all.

  “Mèsi, Manman,” her daughter says. “Thank you.”

  There is nothing to thank her for. She has only done her job, her duty as a parent. There is no longer any need for hellos or goodbyes, either. Soon there will be nothing left, no past to cling to, no future to hope for. Only now.

  Seven Stories

  As the plane was landing, I pressed my forehead against the window to check out the island from my seat. The airport was surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped concrete wall that was interrupted in some places by patches of bougainvillea and bamboo palms, which seemed to have been strategically placed to hide still-visible cracks. Everything outside the perimeter was dangerous. Or so the main windowless, bunkerlike terminal seemed to indicate. I might be better off taking the next plane back, I thought. But I’d been personally invited by the island’s prime minister’s wife.

  “My dearest Kim,” Callie Morrissete had written me a few weeks back from her private e-mail account. “I read your essay about that life-changing month (at least for me) we spent together in Brooklyn when we were little girls. I’ve been waiting so long to see you again and will have more free time than usual over the holidays. I will make all the arrangements. Please come!”

  * * *

  —

  It was late afternoon on New Year’s Eve and a roasting ninety degrees, even in the Caribbean shade. The other passengers in the terminal were mainly tourists or locals returning home from colder climates. The returning locals were dragging oversize hand luggage bursting with gifts for their loved ones. The rest of the passengers were white missionaries, mostly older men, but some women and college students of both sexes, too. On the front of their T-shirts was the phrase TOUCH LIVES NOW, SAVE SOULS FOREVER. The dates of their weeklong revival, which were printed on the back of their T-shirts, happened to coincide with my stay, from New Year’s Eve to the day after Three Kings’ Day. I’d thought about staying longer, but I didn’t want to abuse my hostess’s hospitality. After all, we hadn’t seen each other since we were seven years old.

  A young bearded protocol officer met me as I entered the main building. He was holding an enlarged version of my author photo from the online magazine where I was a staff writer. I was wearing tons of makeup in the picture, and now, blown up on an eight-by-twelve foam poster board, my oval face, wide nose, too-close-together eyes, and curly half bun looked like they all belonged on a clown.

  The protocol officer signaled for me to follow him to a luxurious lounge, whose bright marble floors were covered with Persian rugs, bordered by alligator-skin sofas. On the front-room walls, surrounding the official portraits of Callie and her husband, Gregory Murray, were nearly a dozen watercolors of considerable size and with extensive floral details.

  In the last year or so, I had occasionally looked Callie up online and recently found some articles describing her pet initiatives, from vaccination campaigns to disaster preparedness for the quarter of a million or so people on their island of about a thousand square miles. In her first newspaper interview as the prime minister’s wife, she promised that she’d push her husband to “do his best,” that she wouldn’t hesitate to criticize him publicly if she saw him slacking.

  “I married my wife not just for her beauty but also for her strong mind,” her husband was quoted as saying in the same article. “She is a citizen of this country with the same rights as every other citizen to speak as freely as she wishes.”

  Callie’s father, Charles Morrissete, the island’s most famous prime minister, was assassinated by one of his security guards when Callie was seven years old. Her mother fled with her to Prospect Park South in Brooklyn, seeking refuge with Miss Ruby, our next-door neighbor, who was Callie’s mother’s aunt. A few weeks later, after the assassin was caught, tried, and jailed, and was himself assassinated in prison, Callie and her mother returned to the island, taking Miss Ruby with them. Over the years, there were several failed election attempts while the country was being run by a council of citizen advisers, a kind of board of directors. Finally, two decades later, Callie’s husband, who was a child of the island’s oligarchy and had been working as one of the government council’s youngest lawyers, was elected by the majority of eligible voters, who, like their new prime minister, were under thirty years old.

  * * *

  —

  Callie Morrissete walked into the airport lounge wearing a short, body-hugging bottle-green dress that was belted around her tiny waist. Her only jewelry was some gold hoop earrings and a thin platinum wedding band on her long tapering fingers. She looked like a runway model on her day off, flaunting her flawless onyx skin and her short dark hair, blown out and tucked behind her ears. Callie and I were about the same height when we were seven; she now towered over me in high-heeled strappy red sandals.

  “It’s good to see you, Kim.” She spoke with a trained accent that merged French, English, Spanish, and Dutch, all languages she’d grown up speaking on the island. At seven, she had been mostly an English speaker, her voice not that different from mine. Or at least that’s what I’d thought.

  Her husband was standing behind her, waiting his turn to say hello. He was with an entourage of half a dozen dark-suit-clad men and women, whom I suspected were part of his security detail. He, too, looked a lot like he did in his pictures, including the official one on the wall. An imposing tall and muscular man, he had a square, ocher, sharply defined face. Looking at them standing side by side, him in a tan suit that I was sure Callie had picked out for him, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing when he was seven years old.

  Seven

  BY KIMBERLY BOYER

  …When she first came to Brooklyn, my scrawny and sad frien
d cried herself to sleep every night. Her father, her country’s prime minister, had been driven outside the city limits by one of his bodyguards and shot. Her mother’s elderly aunt, Miss Ruby, who lived next door to us in a large Victorian house filled with elaborate embroideries and rococo furniture from their island nation, was the one who brought us together.

  The first time this friend came to my house she was crying. My parents—pediatricians both—brought her to my room and, with pleading looks in their eyes, asked me to entertain her as she sobbed.

  When my mom and dad shut the door behind them, I walked over to where she was leaning against the wall, bawling in her hands, and asked her what game she wanted to play. I expected her to bark at me and run for the door, but she didn’t. She just stood there and continued to cry.

  I didn’t know much about her situation. My mother had simply told me that a little girl who was special to Miss Ruby was coming over and that she had “suffered a great loss.”

  “What’s your great loss?” I’d asked my new friend.

  She was taken off guard. Perhaps this was not the question she was expecting as a follow-up to “What do you want to play?” She raised her face from her hands and stopped crying long enough to say, “Everybody is going to die.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, because if everybody was going to die, my parents and I would also be dying and I did not want us to die.

  “Everybody in my country is going to die,” she clarified.

  I considered this for a moment, then asked, “You have a country?”

  “Yes, I have a country,” she answered, her pride at knowing more about the world than me momentarily comforting her.

  “This is not your country?” I asked.

  “Here? No!”

  “Tell me about your country then,” I said.

  “My country is green,” she said. “And warm.”

  Her country, in other words, was everything Brooklyn was not in the winter.

  “We have beaches,” she continued. “Lots of them. The beaches have different-color sand. White. Black. Gray. Pink. Gold. My father once showed me a golden beach at sunrise.”

  She looked up at my stenciled ceiling as though she was trying to imagine a more idyllic world. I knew my parents were probably listening outside the door, and when she started crying again, my mother reappeared.

  My mother’s presence made her stop, and when my mother left the room this time, my friend did not cry. After hearing about her country, I realized that I had never heard of it. It was possible that everybody there was going to die.

  “I’m sorry about your country,” I said, then I asked her again, “What do you want to play?”

  She looked at me the way my parents did sometimes, when they told me something I was supposed to understand but didn’t.

  “Why do you think everybody’s going to die?” I sat on the edge of my bed and motioned for her to come sit next to me.

  “Because my father is dead,” she said, not budging.

  “Are you sure?”

  “My mum keeps saying it, so it must be true.”

  She looked like she was going to start crying again, so I lay on the bed, my arms stiffened at my side, as my grandmother’s had been in her coffin the year before when she died. I closed my eyes and said, “Now I’m dead, too.”

  “You can’t be dead if you’re talking,” she said.

  I fell silent for a while. My friend began singing what she called a funeral hymn, which I would later realize was “Ave Maria.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon playing funeral, taking turns at being the cadaver and the priest. My mother interrupted us with some fruit snacks, but as soon as she was gone we started playing funeral again.

  My parents rarely attended church, except for weddings and funerals, like my grandmother’s. But since it was part of my friend’s family’s job to attend Mass on official occasions in her country, she knew many songs to sing for the dead.

  My friend returned to my house every afternoon when I was done with my homework. After spending the day being homeschooled by Miss Ruby, she was ready to play. She got tired of funeral and became interested in other games. I was so happy that, with my mother’s approval, I gave her a box of hair ribbons I’d had since I was little. We baked imaginary cakes in my Easy-Bake Oven, had tea parties with my stuffed animals and dolls, and played dress-up with my princess gowns, which were nowhere near as ruffled, flowered, and embroidered as the actual ankle-length dresses Miss Ruby bought her. When she changed out of those dresses and into my princess gowns, she went into the closet and closed the door, and because she was used to giving orders, I listened when she told me that I was not to disturb her there.

  Every now and then, my mother would let us watch thirty minutes of cartoons in our princess dresses. My friend’s favorite moment, though, was when we played Seven Stories, a game she used to play with her father. We would list an important moment from each of the seven years we had been alive.

  “My first year, I was born,” she would say. “My second year, I walked and talked. My third year, I fell and scraped my knee when I ran away from my governess.” She raised her dress to show me the crescent-shaped scar on her right knee, which I hadn’t noticed before. “My fourth year, I started early school.”

  “You mean preschool,” I interrupted her. I was glad to have a chance to correct her.

  “We call some things by different names in my country.” She grimaced, seeming annoyed at being interrupted.

  “My fourth year, I started preschool,” she continued. “My fifth year, Daddy became prime minister,” she went on, ignoring me altogether. “My sixth year, I moved into a castle. My seventh year, Daddy died.”

  Until then I had not given much thought to my seven years of life. My first year, I’d learned from my mother, I stopped nursing. My second year, my parents moved into the house we were now living in. My third year, my mother’s mother, Grandma Rose, came to live with us. My fourth year, I started preschool and got sick so often that my mother pulled me out and Grandma Rose taught me how to read. My fifth year, I started regular school again when Grandma Rose got cancer in her belly. My sixth year, Grandma Rose died. My seventh year, Callie Morrissete arrived, crying into my life…

  * * *

  —

  In the armored SUV in the middle of the mile-long motorcade taking us to the prime minister’s residence in the hills, I didn’t ask about the landslide election that had brought the island’s first millennial prime minister to power. Instead I asked Callie how she and her husband met.

  As Callie described how they’d been part of the same social circles since they were born, and how the only reason they didn’t attend the same schools was because her mother had always put her in girls’ schools with nuns, and how they’d still attended the same parties as teenagers and even later when they were home on vacation from their different University of the West Indies campuses, Callie’s husband—who told me to call him Greg—reached over and placed his hand on her lap, then interrupted her to explain that he’d purposely been putting himself in her path since they were born.

  “There’s never been anyone else for me,” Greg said.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the 1950s, when the island was a tax shelter and one of many tropical playgrounds for the world’s rich and famous, the sprawling five-story residence, where the island’s most recent leaders, including Callie’s family, lived, had been a five-star hotel. Built on ten secluded acres, it had its own outdoor nightclub and rooftop garden.

  As the motorcade pulled into the property’s winding driveway, the centerpiece of which was a colossal wedding-cake-shaped water fountain, the car ahead of us abruptly stopped, and the security people jumped out.

  “Home, sweet home,” Callie said, tryin
g perhaps to put me at ease.

  I felt as though I knew the place somewhat, both from the pictures I’d seen of it online and the way Callie had described it during our afternoon playdates. She had called it a castle and told me that it was one of the biggest buildings on the island, a fortress filled with great hiding places. It was a wonderful place to live, she’d said, except that grown-ups with guns were always watching over her.

  Once we were out of the car, Greg excused himself and walked to the east wing of the property, followed by his entourage.

  “Would you like to see where you’re staying?” Callie asked.

  We were left with two female security guards, whom Callie waved away, but rather than leave her alone completely, they took a few steps back as we walked into the residence’s high-vaulted lobby and into a glass elevator.

  As the elevator rose, I could see the water fountain and the winding driveway and the top of Greg’s head, along with his entourage of security people. Based on the articles I’d read both in international publications and in the island’s own newspapers, it seemed as though he and Callie were very popular. Promising to be a reformer, Greg had become prime minister under the banner of her father’s MRP, or Major Reform Party, which was perhaps never more revered on the island than when Callie’s father was at the helm.

  * * *

  —

  We got off the elevator on the top floor, and before she could open the door, one of Callie’s female security guards walked out of a service elevator with my suitcase, opened the door for us, and followed us inside.

  The guest suite was nearly the size of my parents’ house to which I’d returned after graduating from college six years before, in part to save money until I could earn more. This is not something I was proud of. Not that I expected to be the prime minister of a Caribbean island nation, or the spouse of one, but I thought I’d be much further along in my career than I was.