Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  A few days after she left him at the shelter, he was playing dominoes with his new friends, while also watching a television perched against a back wall in the recreation room, when he saw a news story about a boat that had capsized in the waters near Turks and Caicos. Twelve bodies had been found: seven men, five women. Ten more were still missing.

  He thought he would never see her again, but she came by the shelter soon after he started working. They went out into the yard, where there was a set of rusty swings. The swings reminded him that children could also stay at this shelter, but, thankfully, there were none there now. Across from the swings was a basketball court, with a mural of adults and children playing in a tropical forest filled with coconut palms. They stood together by the swings.

  “I have a son,” she told him. “His father died at sea.”

  For a moment, he thought that she and the boy’s father had been separated before this man died in the sea. But as her eyes filled with tears, he realized that she had been at sea with him. And that she had watched him drown the way those who’d come with Arnold had drowned.

  “How did you make it?” he asked her.

  “I had to pull our son out of the water,” she said.

  “What’s your son’s name?” he asked.

  “Paris,” she said, and, before he could respond, she added, “It was his father’s dream to go there one day.”

  He then imagined the boy’s father, a young man like himself, not just fleeing misery but answering the siren call of a distant city, where he felt he belonged. Arnold had been imagining a life in Miami since he was a boy. Many people he knew in Port-de-Paix had gone to the Bahamas by boat, and a few had moved from there to Miami. He’d felt as urgent a longing for Miami as Paris’s father must have felt for the French capital.

  What he had not foreseen about Miami, though, was the plethora of stories like his. He had also not realized that there would be homeless families sleeping under a bridge a few feet from the luxury hotel that he was helping to erect. The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.

  It started drizzling in the yard with the swings. He thought that Darline would run inside and was ready to follow her, but she didn’t move.

  “Where’s your son now?” he asked.

  “I have a friend from work who has a boy like him, and she sometimes watches him for me. We take turns.”

  By “a boy like him,” did she mean a fatherless boy, a sea-orphaned boy? Or did her child suffer from some type of infirmity?

  “Is he sick?” he asked.

  “He was the first one to fall in the water,” she said. “It may have done something to his head.”

  She was laying out all her life’s complications for him to consider. She was telling him that he could either go or stay. He wanted to stay.

  She squeezed her body into a swing and tried to force it to move. He listened as the metal chains squeaked above her. She pushed herself back and forth a few times, then dug her shoes into the dirt to stop. When her feet were firmly on the ground, he leaned over and kissed her.

  They went inside, and he asked her to wait in the dim, narrow hallway while he went to the room he shared with three other men and made her son a paper airplane. This was the only kind of toy he’d had when he was a boy. Whenever he found pieces of paper in the trash or on the ground, he’d make himself a paper airplane. Eventually, he had become an expert at it. The first paper airplane he made for Paris was plain white and unadorned, but it had long, narrow wings so it could fly far.

  She had a habit of making lists in a small notebook. Lists of things she needed to do for the day, lists of the people she’d taken to shelters from the beach, even though she hadn’t gone there since rescuing him. The Coast Guard had become more vigilant, and the landings had decreased.

  One day, she read him something from the notebook. His name was the only one on a list she titled “People from the Beach I Have Kissed.”

  He took the opportunity to ask her why she’d kept going back to that beach after her husband had drowned there.

  She always called for help for those who were drowning, she said, just as she had the day Arnold arrived. She never jumped into the water to save anyone, because she didn’t think she’d be able to stay afloat. Besides, a desperate person can use your head as a step stool to climb out of the waves, and she had her son to think about. She kept coming back to the beach because it was her husband’s burial place, and her own. The person she’d been when the three of them, she and her husband and her son, had gotten on that boat and left Haiti—that person was also lost at sea.

  * * *

  —

  This landing was even more abrupt than his last one. His free fall ended as his body slammed into the drum of the cement mixer. He was being tossed inside a dark blender full of grout. Every few seconds, his face would emerge from under the wet, pounded sand and pebbles, and he would keep his mouth closed, trying to force air out through his nose and push away the grainy mix that his body was trying to inhale.

  He pretended that he was swimming and tried to flutter kick, just as he had when the speedboat stopped in the middle of the ocean and he was told to swim ashore. He attempted arm strokes, but couldn’t move either his arms or his legs. Still, his body was in constant motion, because the mixer continued to turn. He reached for the shaft, what in a more stable space, in a house or a temple or some other holy place, you might call a poto mitan, a middle pillar. He used what was left of his strength to propel his body toward the shaft and wrap his hands around it. He was able to hold on only briefly before he was pulled in another direction.

  He felt lighter now, even lighter than he had when falling. His bones were melting, his blood evaporating, and he was now like parchment or something porous—tulle, or the white eyelet lace Darline adored. He had not been paying attention to the alternating hum and jangle of the mixer. He hadn’t noticed that there were streaks of blood polluting the cement, or that he was feeling no pain. Then the mixer stopped spinning, and he heard the stillness, which was soon replaced by screams and grunts and “Oh, my God.” Then he heard the sirens, which took him back to the beach, to the gray sand and Darline’s sable face, her azure jogging suit, Paris’s red shirt, and his own orange-and-green-speckled vomit at the fast-food place.

  From where he was lying inside the cement mixer, he saw an airplane cut across the clear blue sky. And that was when he realized that he was dying, and that his dying offered him a kind of freedom he’d never had before. Whatever he thought about he could see in front of him. Whatever he wanted he could have, except what he wanted most of all, which was not to die. He had wished for something with wings to pluck him out of the cement mixer, and there it was up in the sky now, in the shape of an airplane. He and Darline had been putting money away to take Paris on an airplane. It was either a trip or a ring, and they were essentially already married, Darline had told him. Paris was their ring. They loved each other and they loved him. He was their son.

  He wanted to see Darline and Paris again. If only one last time. He wanted to see their faces. He wanted to hold their hands. He wanted to kiss them in the different ways he often had, her on the lips and him on top of his head, where his fontanel would be if he were still a baby.

  The plane was slipping out of view, and he heard himself whisper, “Rete la, wait, quédate.” He meant to tell the airplane to stay, or Darline and Paris to stay in his mind, but the fat pink face of his foreman was blocking the sky, and he heard the usually gruff man say, “Don’t worry, Fernandez. I’m not going anywhere. Help is on the way, bud.”

  Oh, yes, the papers he’d used to get the job said that he was Ernesto Fernandez from Santiago de Cuba. No one on the site, not even the other Hait
ians, knew his real name. They didn’t believe he was “Cuban Cuban,” as they’d said, but since he spoke some Spanish, they thought he’d spent some time there and had taken the name.

  He did not know how long this half consciousness would last, his being able to think and remember, so he wanted to keep pushing, to see how far he could take it. What if he made himself float out of the cement mixer? What if he traveled through the city and visited the only two people he loved? He wanted them to see him or, if they could not see him, sense him. He wasn’t sure how this would work. They would feel a hot wind or a cold breeze. Something near them could move. A picture frame might slip, a drinking glass shatter. Might they notice his shadow out of the corner of their eye, sniff for his pungent after-work smell, or hear his favorite song? Would their palms itch? Would they feel the flutter of his kisses? Or would he appear in their dreams?

  Paris might be more susceptible to receiving signs from him. The boy was already “touched.” His mind had been partly lost somewhere between the sea and the beach.

  Arnold felt the time growing shorter, so he would not be going all the way back to his childhood in Port-de-Paix. It was a time he’d been trying to forget anyway. He had never met his parents, never knew who they were. He had been raised as a child servant in a household, given away by whoever had brought him into the world. He knew only that he shared neither blood nor a surname with the woman in whose house he grew up. Nor did he have any biological link to her two sons, whose clothes he washed and ironed, whom he walked to school and cooked for, even though they were a few years older than him. Maybe his parents were dead. The woman who raised him had never mentioned them, except to say, whenever he messed up her food or didn’t clean her house properly, that he was worthless and didn’t deserve to have parents.

  He had escaped her and her sons as soon as he could, moving to the border, where he slept in a warehouse from which he hauled bags of flour, sugar, and rice to Haitian vendors and merchants. It was one of those merchants who had told him about a boat leaving for Miami. Her brother was the captain, she said. He gave her all the money he’d been saving up so that he could go back and show his cruel owner and her sons that he’d made something of himself.

  After he moved in with Darline, he learned, when she took him to a free immigration clinic in North Miami, that she was still waiting for her papers. She had just completed her baccalaureate in Haiti when she became pregnant with Paris. Paris’s father had been her classmate in Latibonit, and they shared, as she put it, an impractical love. She loved her family. She loved her country. She wanted to stay in Latibonit. She wanted to grow old and die there. She and Paris’s father had sufficient resources from their families to get by. But when Paris’s father told her that he was leaving for Miami on a boat, there was no question of her and Paris staying behind.

  “It was crazy,” she told Arnold. “I thought I couldn’t live without him. I thought I’d stop breathing if he wasn’t near me. Especially after we’d made this baby together.”

  When they got to Miami, only she and Paris made it out of the water. Her husband’s body was never found. After a short hospital stay, they were sent to a women’s shelter. The lawyer at the immigration clinic called it “humanitarian parole.” The same lawyer told Arnold that he had entered the country “without inspection.” That is, he had not gone before any immigration official the day he arrived in the United States, which meant that, technically, he wasn’t even here.

  I want to see Darline, Arnold told himself. He now had a better sense of how this might work. What he didn’t know was whether or not there were limits to the wishes he could be granted.

  Suddenly he was standing in the kitchen of the restaurant in Little Haiti where Darline worked. The room was small and steamy, the walls grease-stained. She was cooking a large pot of cornmeal with red beans. Next to that was an equally large pot of stewed codfish. He had been in the kitchen so many times that perhaps he was just remembering it. She was perspiring so much that it was hard for him to imagine that she could last a whole day there. She took a swig from a bottle of water, then raised the lid of a pot of boiling plantains. As she worked, she hummed a song that he began to hum, too. Maybe she would feel him humming along. Perhaps she would even hear him.

  “Latibonit O” was the only song he had ever heard her sing. She sang it so often that she didn’t realize she was doing it. She sang it when she was happy, when she was worried, when she was sad. She started to sing it now.

  Latibonit o, yo voye pale m, yo di m Sole malad…

  The song, he believed, was about a sick sun looming over the town where she was born. He sang along to the part where the sun becomes bedridden, then dies and is buried. The song had always been, in his mind, a solemn farewell to the golden hour before sunset. He didn’t know what the sunsets over Latibonit looked like, but Port-de-Paix had the most beautiful sunsets, muted just enough not to blind you when you looked directly at the horizon. He now missed how time had seemed to stand still at those moments, if only for the duration of a single post-dusk breath.

  He sang along as loudly as he could, but he could not produce audible sounds. This, he discovered, was one of his limitations. He heard a buzz coming from Darline’s apron, a familiar vibration. It was her cell phone.

  Whatever she heard after she said hello annoyed her. She dropped the wooden spoon she was using to gently move the boiling plantains around. She sucked her teeth in exasperation, and it sounded as though she were whistling through them.

  Her friend Oula came in with several orders. Darline looked so distracted that Oula asked, “Sa k genyen, Darline?”

  “It’s Paris,” she said.

  “That teacher bothering you about him again?” True to her name, Oula was always there when Darline needed her. Oula also had a son who teachers thought was slow.

  He did not know how long he had, so he said Paris’s name and hoped that it would be interpreted as a desire to see the boy.

  It was morning recess at Paris’s school. Paris was sitting alone in a corner between two bookshelves, making boats out of some sheets of paper that the teacher had given him. Arnold and Paris had gone from making paper airplanes together to making boats. This activity helped Paris focus, but it also helped Arnold. The boats reminded him that he had survived the sea.

  The other children were eating their snacks and chasing one another around the classroom as the teacher threatened them with time-outs and other forms of deprivation. Paris did not even look up to observe the commotion. The principal of the school had wanted to put Paris in a special class, but Darline had refused. He was not disruptive, just overly engrossed in certain things, Darline had told the principal and anyone else who wanted to label her son anything but shy.

  Arnold knew childhood stigma too well not to agree with Darline. Paris’s teachers could not understand what the boy had been through. They did not know that his father had disappeared just a few feet from him. Paris seemed to be in perpetual mourning, like his mother.

  Paris had called Arnold “Papa” the first time they met. Darline had arranged for them to have a meal together after hours at the restaurant where she worked. Paris had said nothing during the meal, but, as Arnold was leaving, he asked, “Are you my papa?”

  “I could be,” Arnold said.

  Darline smiled, and Paris jumped into his arms. Both seemed to take his answer as a gift he was offering. Suddenly his life meant something. He became a father.

  In Paris’s classroom, Arnold crouched down next to the boy, in the narrow space between the bookshelves. He tried to wrap his arms around Paris but could no more feel the boy’s body than the boy could feel his.

  He moved his head close to Paris’s and pressed his mouth against the boy’s right ear and shouted so that he might possibly be heard: “Paris, my son, one day you will go to the other Paris. You will have a family and you will fly in a real airplane.
”

  He looked for a sign that the boy had heard him or even felt his presence, but he saw none. Paris was now on his eighth paper boat. He was folding lengthwise, then at the corners. There was always a moment in their boat making when Arnold thought that Paris might be content to stop at what looked like a hat, but then he continued until a stern or a hull emerged.

  “Goodbye, Paris,” he shouted into the boy’s ear. “Please love your mother forever.”

  Then he smiled as the boy reached up and flicked the ear he was shouting into, as though something small, like a buzzing mosquito, had grazed him there.

  Paris disappeared. Or maybe it was Arnold who’d disappeared.

  He was back at the construction site. Not wounded but whole, just as he had been when he left home that morning. He was still wearing his bright orange overalls and matching hard hat. Was time playing with him, or was he playing with time? Was he skirting the yellow police tape in the present or in the past?

  The site was closed down, and many of the men he worked with were milling around, leaning over the tape to better see the photographers who were taking pictures of the cement mixer. News trucks with extended antennas were lined up across the street, and reporters were interviewing some of his coworkers and a few passersby, many of whom claimed that they had seen him fall. His body had flailed wildly at first, they said, then plunged directly into the cement chute.

  The construction company and the developer had already issued a statement, which was read by many of the reporters for their midday broadcasts: “We are deeply saddened by the tragic death of Ernesto Fernandez. We offer our condolences to his family, his friends, and his coworkers. We are working with state and federal investigators to find out how this unfortunate accident took place and to prevent further incidents of this nature in the future.”