Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  She pointed to some coils of light winding their way throughout the city. They were people, hundreds of them, dressed in white and carrying candles as they walked toward the port and the sea.

  “It’s called a shedding,” she said. “As you walk to the sea, you shed from both your body and spirit all the awful things that have happened to you in the previous year.”

  “Have you ever done it?” I asked.

  “Every year, after I came back here, with Aunt Ruby and my mum,” she said. “And with Greg, too, when I was older. He proposed to me at the beach after a procession like this three years ago.”

  “Madame,” one of the security men said. “The PM’s ready to begin his address.”

  * * *

  —

  The live broadcast of the prime minister’s address was in the residence’s main sitting room, whose most notable features were its high cathedral ceiling and the sheer-white, all-around, floor-to-ceiling curtains. When she arrived, Callie gently stroked her husband’s cheeks as he was getting powder dabbed on his face.

  “I thought you’d skipped out on me,” he said.

  “Sir, we’re ready,” the young cameraman said.

  Callie stepped aside right before Greg began speaking.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he said to the camera. “Our ancestors were forced to abandon everything they knew. Some jumped off slave ships because they were seduced by the dream of an eternal freedom. Our ancestors must have surely dreamed of a day like this when we would gather to freely enjoy the bounties of our own land for yet another year. We start this New Year grateful for both our triumphs and our pain. We start this New Year anticipating the future we are creating for generations to come. My wife, Callie, and I wish you and your families a healthy, prosperous, and joyous New Year.”

  I imagined people watching him and being full of hope. It wasn’t so much what he’d said, but how he said it. Perhaps it was the tone of his voice—calm, measured, confident—like a father making unbreakable promises to his children.

  I did not see them enter the room, but before Callie and I could, Finance and the Runner walked over to congratulate their friend on his address. Callie drifted over, and I could see in their lighthearted four-way razzing and easy laughter a kind of luminosity.

  “I’m going to bed.” Greg reached for Callie, drawing her onto his lap as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Cal and I have the children’s hospital visit tomorrow.”

  “Settle this old people’s early-to-bed business between the two of you, then,” Finance said while playfully jabbing at his friend’s biceps. “We’re getting out of here before this thing catches.”

  * * *

  —

  I only got a few hours of sleep before it was time to go on the children’s hospital visit. For some reason, I thought Callie and Greg would show up somewhere unexpectedly and surprise some neglectful staff, who would then be shamed and punished for their misdeeds. Or maybe that’s what I was hoping would happen. Instead they were led, with cameras rolling, to spotless wards filled with children clad in new hospital-issued pajamas. The children barely looked sick as they lay in their pristine beds, some with snow-white casts on their legs and full IVs attached to their arms. Callie and Greg took pictures with the staff, pinched the cheeks and stroked the heads of the children. This seemed to be Greg’s favorite part, as he lingered by the beds and tickled the feet of and made faces at the kids, who’d obviously been told to be on their best behavior and maybe even to smile.

  In the car on the way back to the residence, sitting with his wife between us, Greg asked me what I thought of the visit.

  “Interesting,” I said, lying.

  But he could see that I was lying and mock gasped. “Oh no! You caught on that they staged all of that. There’s no way around it. Unless we just show up without letting them know, and doing that might mean embarrassing them on New Year’s Day.”

  “Frankly, there’s no way you can see the real country with us,” Callie said. “I’m going to ask one of the security guys to take you around tomorrow. He’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  I would still be a voyeur, but at least I’d be out of their bubble for a few hours.

  “When your father was PM, did he hate the stagecraft of these things as much as we do?” Greg asked Callie.

  “He quite enjoyed it,” she said. Then turning to face me, she said, “I was with Daddy on the morning of the day he died. His last visit was to an orphanage for blind children. He dropped me off at school afterward, went to work, and never came home.”

  Greg reached over and wrapped his arms around her when it seemed like she was fighting back tears. We sat there and listened to the hum and vibration of the speeding car for a while.

  “I was in school, too, when it happened,” Greg said, filling in our silence. “My mother came and got me, just like a lot of the other parents picked up their children that day. My parents were working for the Health Ministry then. We got in the car and drove to the airport. We got on a plane, a charter arranged by a few families. We spent the same amount of time Callie spent away, except we were in Belize, waiting it out.”

  I wondered why Callie and her mother did not go on the chartered plane with them.

  “In any case, let’s change the subject,” Greg said. “Kim, tell me more about what she was like in New York with you when she was a little girl.”

  “She was unbearable,” I joked.

  “Not true!” Callie protested.

  I thought of one of the moments I couldn’t fit into the essay, about the first time Callie saw snow.

  We had woken up, I told Greg, to find our street blanketed in white. My mother asked Miss Ruby if Callie would come out with us to Prospect Park. Callie, bouncing from foot to foot, squealed with delight as she attacked whole fields of untouched snow with the winter boots I lent her, leaving a line of sunken tracks everywhere we went. I was so thrilled to be showing her something she had never seen before. Still, she refused to stick her tongue out and catch some of the snow like I did.

  “What if it kept falling but inside of me?” she asked.

  Greg pushed his head back and laughed.

  “I can’t wait to share these stories with our children,” he said.

  What I did not tell him was that on the way home from Prospect Park that day, Callie had asked my mother if she could stay with us in New York and not return to the island. My mother and I each held one of her gloved hands as my mother knelt down and assured her that her mother loved her and would always keep her safe. That’s probably all my mother thought she could say.

  I suspected even then that there were many conversations between my mother and Miss Ruby, and maybe even with Mrs. Morrissete, about Callie not returning to the island too soon. But it was decided a month after her father had died, after his killer was captured and jailed, that it was okay for everyone to go back.

  * * *

  —

  Callie found me as inconspicuous a tour guide as possible, a man in his sixties, who never stopped chewing gum, and who wore jeans and a white T-shirt and a backward baseball cap. On the way to town, he asked me to sit in the front passenger seat of what seemed like his own off-road vehicle so that he could more easily point out the sites he didn’t want me to miss.

  There was the waterfront fish market, with dozens of men and women sitting under umbrellas while selling seafood so fresh the fish were still writhing in coolers and baskets. Then the Carnival Museum, whose entrance was decorated with a mural featuring a female reveler in a sequined thong and feathered headdress. Then the Botanical Garden, which was said to have one of the oldest breadfruit trees in the world. Then the casino, which rivaled any casino in Las Vegas with its blinding glass façade and its equally opulent adjoining hotel. Then the courthouse and the National Penitentiary, both bright yellow buildings whose out
side walls were even higher than the adjacent fort, which had been used as a dungeon and torture chamber during colonial days.

  The driver was giving me a cursory view, a taste, of everything, he said, and later if I wanted to come back and look more closely, I should tell him.

  “Can you show me a real hospital?” I asked.

  The request sounded insulting, even to me. Still, the driver seemed to understand what I meant. Before I could elaborate further, he left the main road and found a side trail that narrowed into a hilly dirt path littered with flattened foam containers, plastic water bottles, and old clothes and rags half-buried in the red soil. On one side of the car was a line of men washing their motos for hire in a muddy stream, and on the other side women were cooking food for sale in large pots resting on boulders and sticks. This was probably one of the shantytowns I’d seen from the residence terrace.

  The driver rolled down the window, perhaps so I could smell the charcoal turning to ash under the cooking pots and the fumes coming from the motos zooming by. I heard some of the island’s patois being spoken between the food vendors and their customers as they haggled.

  “Since that what you lookin’ to see, yes, nou have poor peoples, too,” the driver said, dragging his words as if to taunt me.

  The road narrowed farther, and we passed lean-tos covered with corrugated tin, some with frayed sheets hanging on clotheslines out front. There were children everywhere. Minors apparently made up nearly a quarter of the island’s population. The children were on rooftops—where there were rooftops—flying kites. They were gathered in circles on the ground—where the ground was not muddy—playing marbles. They appeared suddenly in the middle of the road, young girls and boys hovering near the food vendors.

  The hospital occupied an entire block on a street that was also filled with dozens of small pharmacies. At the gate, which was being minded by armed guards, were medicine hawkers, who shoved a list of their products in front of whoever was entering or leaving the grounds.

  The hospital’s front lawn was crammed with people lying on bedsheets or pieces of cardboard. Those on the ground had been triaged, while those standing on the long line leading to the back of the box-shaped two-story building were still waiting to be given numbers.

  Under a blooming ylang-ylang tree was the mothers’ and children’s corner. Many of the pregnant women there were with female relatives or partners, who occasionally offered them water or fanned away flies. The parents of sick children sweated and fidgeted. Some mouthed prayers while cradling miniature versions of themselves.

  Among the children with chest-racking coughs and wounds wrapped in blood-soaked blouses or shirts, I spotted a little girl whose emaciated frame could be seen through her spotless white Communion dress. Her thinning hair was swept up in a tight Afro puff in the middle of her head. Her eyes fluttered as though she was too tired to stay awake. She looked like she might be the same age Callie and I were when we met.

  I thought of my pediatrician parents who had been taking care of sick children all my life, children less sick than the ones I was looking at. I understood why, as doctors and potential healers, they’d wanted me to follow in their footsteps. I also knew why I could never do that. Their line of work could break me. The fact that you couldn’t reach, or help, or save every child would destroy me.

  “What’s your name, honey?” I asked the little girl.

  She was too weak to answer. Her mother handed me a laminated piece of paper, the girl’s medical card. The mother’s name was Prudence. The daughter’s name was Mercy. It was not unusual apparently for little girls on the island to be given the names of virtues.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had with me, which was about two hundred and fifty American dollars. I bent down and discreetly squeezed it into the mother’s hand as I returned the card to her.

  * * *

  —

  In the car on the way back, I closed my eyes and tried not to see anything. At the residence, Callie’s private secretary met me at the car to tell me that Callie and Greg were out on official business and would not return until late.

  I went up to the suite and called my parents. They both got on the line and asked if I’d spent any more time with Mrs. Morrissete, and I told them that I’d not seen her since New Year’s Eve. They asked again about Callie and if she was well.

  “I’ll fill you in on everything when I get back,” I told them.

  I checked in with my editor, looked at the magazine site, read a couple of the new pieces that had just gone live, then I began writing another essay, this one about my visit to the island.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning at breakfast, in the rooftop garden, on the rosewood table under the canopy, Callie told me that I could come with her and Greg to Finance and the Runner’s wedding, which, as it turned out, was a last-minute decision. The wedding was taking place in two days.

  “Are you sure I can come?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. Then looking down at the sun-drenched city and the blue-green ocean in the distance, she asked, “How did things go with your tour yesterday?”

  “It was fine,” I said. “I saw a lot.”

  “The guide is available again today,” she said.

  “I’m going to stay in and do some work,” I said.

  I thought she would scold me for working on what was supposed to be a vacation, but she didn’t. “I’ve been reading your work for a while,” she said instead. “I googled your name two years ago, and this website popped up, and I’ve been reading you there since. I wasn’t sure you’d even remember me until I read what you wrote about me a few months ago.”

  “I hope it was okay that I did write about you,” I said.

  She reached for a large leather purse, which was dangling off the back of her chair. She placed the purse on her lap and out of it pulled a round pink velvet box, capped with a lilac bow. I knew the box well. I had given it to her when we were seven years old. Inside were the five rolls of taffeta, chiffon, brocade, damask, and gingham, multicolored ribbons I had gifted her. They were still neatly stored in their individual velvet-lined compartments, still coiled around their plastic spools, as though they had never been touched.

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon, she took me to see her father’s ashes at the Charles Morrissete National Museum complex. On the walls of the cavernous lobby was a series of giant photographs, similarly posed official portraits, of a thin, dark, high-cheekboned man, who seemed to have only worn hip-length Nehru-jacketed suits. Callie looked a lot more like him than she did her mother, whom I couldn’t imagine with such erect posture and with such a gleam in her eyes in front of a camera.

  In an alcove facing the photographs was a silver urn, a shiny cube encased behind layers of shatterproof glass. Engraved on the wall on top of the urn, in giant calligraphy letters, was the phrase FATHER OF THE NATION AND MARTYR FOR ITS CAUSE. On the urn was also Charles Morrissete’s name and the dates of his birth and death, which were thirty-nine years and three months apart.

  “I know it’s crazy,” Callie said, “but I spent years and years wishing we’d all died together that day, Mum, him, and me.”

  I put my arms around her shoulders because that’s all I could think to do.

  “Then I kept hoping he was in hiding somewhere just like we were hiding in Brooklyn,” she said.

  I looked around and realized that there was no one nearby, no museum heads, even no security people. The place had been emptied for us.

  “My mum suffered a lot because of me,” she added. “That’s why I’m not having any kids. Greg wants them, but I don’t ever want to have them.” She cocked her head to one side and folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t ever want to have them,” she said. “I’m going to have to tell him soon.”
r />   * * *

  —

  Finance and the Runner’s wedding was out in the countryside, on the coast, in a small fishing village called Maafa. There were no hotels in Maafa, only fishing huts, gatehouses, cottages, and one or two villas, like the hillside mansion where I was staying with Callie and Greg and the rest of the wedding party.

  At sunset, we all gathered on the horseshoe-shaped beach, between the rolling dunes and sea-grape-lined promenade, framed by towering limestone cliffs rising out of the turquoise water. The Runner’s and Finance’s parents were there along with a total of twenty siblings, aunts and uncles, and nieces and nephews. Everyone, except the bride and groom, who wore a simple silk dress and a tux, had on running clothes, which thankfully Callie had also provided for me.

  The ceremony was held inside a sunken part of the beach, an oculus accessed through steps carved into the rose-pink beach rock. Greg was both the officiate and the best man. As I stood there listening to Finance and the Runner recite their very traditional vows, I could not keep my eyes off Callie. She was trying to look attentive, but instead she looked preoccupied and lost, a bit like she did when I first met her in Brooklyn. Minus the tears.

  * * *

  —

  The wedding dinner was held in the villa where we were staying. We ate at a long table by an infinity pool overlooking the beach. I sat between Callie and one of the Runner’s uncles, who spent the entire time lecturing Greg about everything from cricket and soccer to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Thankfully, there was a sky full of stars to gaze at anytime one of us rolled our eyes.

  After dinner, a wall of flames rose on the beach. It was time for the wedding bonfire, which according to Callie was a timeless tradition on the island.

  “If the woman started having any regrets at this point, she’d just throw herself into the fire,” Callie joked as the others got up from the table and started for the beach. Greg held out a hand to her, but she motioned for him to follow the others.