My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  La Kay wanted to get into his mind. It had done it before, outsmarted him and won. It wanted him to come back so It could find out what he knew, what had made him plead to be let back in, to risk being burned or buried alive. If It had to live while waiting to be demolished, It wanted to, at least, toy with Its nemesis and, perhaps, get him to kill himself.

  It didn’t care what Its neighbors thought. Their condescension, fear, and pity were of no consequence. It didn’t give a damn if, like their owners, they wanted It torn down. It didn’t give a single golden fuck what It looked like to them after the fire. Boarded up, KEEP OUT signs posted all over, spray-painted with graffiti by hood vandals or artists. It was way past the point of caring about anything, even music and children almost. It just wanted to collapse and let the demolition team end it all. But It wanted Lucien to come back inside and suffer the same.

  He’s the one who’d brought It to this point. He deserved to pay for inflicting so much pain on all Its occupants. He didn’t deserve a second or third chance, a new life somewhere else. The misdeeds La Kay had witnessed warranted incarceration in the bowels of a crumbling building where his remains would mix in and be discarded with the decades of debris he’d collected. He deserved to be scooped up and dropped into a metal trash bin, indecipherable from the rest of his garbage. La Kay held firm to Its belief that he needed to be dismembered alive by Its broken windowpanes, crushed to death by Its sandwiched ceilings, and pressed into a junk pile while his mind remained alive to witness his own demise.

  It had plans for Lucien, one final coup before resigning Itself to an undeserved death that would also be a well-earned rest.

  Two

  LUCIEN

  Lucien slept through first light. He missed the red rising of the sun shrugging off the night while basking in its own glow. He didn’t even hear Leona step out of the taxi in front of his house. He’d known for decades that he couldn’t hear anything over his motorcycle-engine-like snoring, including the snoring itself. He could remember Leona reminding him of what his now deceased wife, Marie-Ange, had said constantly: that he slept as deeply as death. He would always respond that this flaw was perfect for living in South Ozone Park, where low-flying planes sounded as if they were taking off from or about to land in their backyard. He’d never known the word for the condition, but he’d listened carefully when Leona had later explained narcolepsy to him. For decades, he’d lived with his condition and accepted that he could and did fall asleep whenever he was seated and still, wherever he happened to be—stopped at a red light; having a conversation that did not require intellectual agility, did not involve money, or did not require counting or calculations. Conversations with Leona especially had always bored him, and as soon as he’d known that he could trust her, which is to say that he could manipulate her into behaving the way he wanted, he hadn’t bothered listening for her arriving or departing footsteps. He’d continued to sleep this way to keep from hearing anything she said, the same way he couldn’t hear the voices of people speaking in his dreams.

  His self-awareness had allowed him to judge his own features that helped produce the sleep sounds. He never believed that anything could compromise his good looks, including the flaps of his nostrils that were as wide as the wings of a Cessna. The shape of his nose spoke for itself—the visual manifestation of a plane engine roar when he slept. For the better part of his life, he’d been so absorbed in the privilege of his light skin that he hadn’t seen that it was merely a superficial veil thrown over distinctly African features. When looking into mirrors, he had judged his lips as copious and pleasurably kissable, perfect for embracing targets by choice or by force. He would complete his assessment by looking deeply into his hazel eyes. He appreciated the heaviness of his eyelids that allowed him to pretend convincingly to be asleep.

  Only the deliberate slamming of the car door woke him up. He saw no need to open his eyes to watch Leona walk from the taxicab to his van. He did not stir under the coarse gray blankets more suitable for wrapping and moving furniture than for comfortable deep sleep. He liked the feel of the three formerly scratchy covers that he’d worn smooth whenever he didn’t want to sleep alone in his house. He burrowed his body deeper into the pile. Surrounded by the broken legs of a large table he had not had a chance to unload, he insulated himself against the January cold with an immaculate coffin-sized cardboard box that read HANDLE WITH CARE. On it was an outline drawing of a couch. He had picked it up from a gentrifying neighborhood on the border of Morningside Heights and Harlem—same neighborhood, different shades of people. He’d wished that the owners had also discarded the Italian nubuck sofa bed the box had once held. He thought he knew the type of people who wouldn’t give a second thought to tossing good furniture when the style no longer suited their taste. These sorts were comfortable, well-housed owners with pampered pets more contented than the human being loading the empty box shell into his van. He’d considered his own privilege, knowing that he had no need for and was less entitled to that perfect carton that would have sheltered a homeless man more fittingly. He’d appreciated the irony of looking homeless while owning a home. But with his house ravaged by fire and about to be torn down, he had finally earned the box, that luxurious domain of the housed and well-fed, and the right to sleep outdoors as he had previously done out of insanity and vanity.

  Lucien could feel Leona peering into the back of his van. Of course, she’d checked and hadn’t found him in the front seat. He snored a little bit louder in the hopes that she would go away, although he knew she wouldn’t. He tried to make himself small under the cardboard box. He knew that she wouldn’t bother opening the back doors even though she could do so quite easily. His minivan’s doors—driver’s side, passenger side, and rear—had no locks. He loved how the unlocked doors kept people out, that it confused them as much as the look of the van. Whereas the even yellow of his taxicab made him itch, he found the chaos of his minivan’s exterior soothing. A patchwork of dented salvaged steel in various shades of gray stitched together like the mismatched strays he’d pieced together into a family. But the odor that engulfed the van had been the real deterrent. He still enjoyed catching a whiff of stale swigs of beer in the bottles and cans he collected more to give him opportunities to count than for the nickel apiece that added up to hundreds a month. He could get three, sometimes four rounds of counting out of one haul. Once when picking them up behind closing bars and restaurants. A second when taking them out of the thick black plastic bag, large and opaque enough to conceal and carry a body. Then a third time when rinsing each one. And a fourth and final time when sadly packing them away for the trip to the recycling center. He used to get a fifth round placing them one at a time into the supermarket’s crunching machine, but he’d been banned from bringing his loads there. He noted how many vessels he’d collected after every trip, adding up the numbers and then counting from zero until he reached the tens of thousands.

  He heard Leona climb cautiously into the driver’s seat and start the engine with the spare key he’d thought he’d lost long ago. He crawled out of his pretend slumber as the icy van warmed up. He didn’t bother sitting up until he smelled Leona’s perfume floating above the smell of stale, burning motor oil the van emitted. Her scent was rather ordinary, unlike the varied, expensive French perfumes that Marie-Ange had worn even in her coffin. Heartbreak and missing Marie-Ange’s scent finally made him sit up properly amid his sleep pile. He didn’t bother climbing into the passenger seat to sit beside Leona. It was easier to talk to the back of her head when he lied; not that he had ever had difficulty doing so to her face. He hadn’t even told her his true birth date, that he had his mother’s last name, Louverture, not his father’s, or why his children had cut all ties with him after their mother’s death.

  He watched as Leona fidgeted, clearly unaware that he was awake until he finally spoke. “I’m waiting for them. They can’t tear down my house!” he shouted, startling Leona. S
he was jolted and banged her neck against the metal of the stripped headrest. She gripped the door handle as if ready to run out. He didn’t want her there anyway, but his words had given her all the invitation she needed to stay and get started on one of her monologues.

  “The house isn’t safe. Do you want to die in there? You have to care. You’re too old for this…”

  Lucien tuned out Leona’s admonishing lecture. “My girls are there. My girls,” he repeated in a whisper.

  She ignored him but still felt the twinge of jealousy that he could be so worried about the daughters who had abandoned him. Despite her hurt, she tried to allay his fears.

  “There are legal options to stop them from tearing down the house, Lulou. And there’s a snowstorm coming that will delay everything. The temperature will drop below zero. No one will want to work in that weather. The house is in bad shape. But it won’t fall down in a day or two. It might hold up for a few weeks or more. Even if it was about to fall, it wouldn’t collapse straight down into itself. You don’t see how it’s leaning? To its right, toward the garden, not the neighbor’s house. Let’s go, Lulou. I have to get to work. Where are my keys? Lulou? Lulou?”

  Lucien hated hearing Leona call him by one of Marie-Ange’s pet names for him. At least she didn’t call him by his favorite, Luci, which had been reserved for the bedroom. Marie-Ange had been his everything and, as far as what he understood of love, the real thing. Like knockoff perfume, Leona’s was only an imitation of Marie-Ange’s loving. But so was his.

  Hearing the demolition crew arriving, he jumped out of the back of the van while Leona was midsentence. Before they could make it to his front gate, he started pleading. It was his turn to be tuned out. At some point, he stopped listening to their refusals and disappeared into his counting, taking mental inventory of the people and supplies in the back room.

  There is at least one, no two gallons of water left. The confiture from last fall’s fallen apples is good for another 365 days. There are at least two jars. The bread must be gone by now. Twenty slices in a loaf. Four for each of them. The canned sardines are likely still there. They never liked sardines. The cans didn’t require a can opener. The Spam either. Even its jelly could be eaten in a pinch. Anyway, it had been only a day and a half since he’d seen them down there. No, today is Monday. I saw them last Wednesday. The fire…Oh, the fire! Toné! Yesterday, Sunday. Let me see…Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, yes, Wednesday will make one week. They’ll need water. One, two, three, four gallons. Four girls, grown women really. They mostly look like my Ange. Why did she leave me? Why did they? Don’t they know? I am nothing. Nothing without them.

  “Lulou! Get in the car! Let’s go. I have to go to work.”

  Lucien ignored Leona as she climbed out of his van and headed to her car. He could hear her keys jingle as she unlocked the driver’s-side door of her immaculate Corolla.

  “Let’s go, Lulou!”

  He didn’t want to leave, but the workers hadn’t even looked at him, let alone listened to his pleas. He ducked his head as he climbed into her back seat. He refused to sit next to her. He didn’t want to see her, not even her profile. He liked her to be faceless, almost invisible, certainly inconsequential, even now that he had nowhere to stay. He didn’t want to see her because that would mean she could see him. And he wanted to count. Zero, One, Two, Three. Four is gone. One and a half gallons of water. Enough confiture. No bread. Spam jelly. Sardines, if they got hungry enough to eat what they hate. He half listened as Leona picked up from where she’d left off.

  “Lulou, you’ve done all you could. You did everything for those girls. And our Marie-Ange too.”

  Leona had claimed Marie-Ange as her own, not because of the time she’d spent caring for her, but because she believed, and told everyone she met, that it was Marie-Ange’s spirit that had sent her to Lucien. She remembered conversations that had never happened between her and the dying woman. She’d received the wife’s blessing before the husband even became a widower. Better yet, she’d been instructed to care for him in every way, even, and maybe especially, sexually.

  “She’s okay, Lulou. I know you think she’s mad at you. The house. The way it is now.”

  Lucien hated to hear Leona speak about Marie-Ange, to hear anyone claim his saint besides him.

  Marie-Ange wouldn’t just be disappointed by the collapse of the house they had worked so hard for, borrowed against repeatedly, lost to the loan sharks while still living there, and then repurchased for three times the original cost. She would have died all over again to know that he couldn’t rescue the girls.

  Maybe she had been right. Maybe he had been distracted by his tenants, as she’d always insisted. Boss Dieuseul, the man upstairs who shared shifts driving his taxi and who rented their daughters’ empty bedroom, was still there. Asante was “gone.” After all the fuss over the downstairs tenant for whom he had displaced Marie-Ange’s statues of the goddess Ezili and the glass-clad candles to the boiler room, leaving her nowhere to properly honor her deities. Maybe the fire was Marie-Ange’s payback for that. Maybe she’d lit and knocked over some candles. But she would never harm his girls.

  It could have been his obsession with his house that he’d run around drilling holes into, trying to make it perfect. Maybe his home, adversarial but beloved, had had enough and spontaneously combusted just to destroy all the junk weighing it down. But if his house could feel the burden of his hoarding and get pissed off enough to set itself on fire, then it had to know about his girls in the safe room. Maybe the room had been too perfectly insulated, so that even his overly sensitive house could not feel their heartbeats, their coughs, their dry-mouth whispers, the soft chewing of mushy canned meat, marmalade, and homemade Haitian manba. Maybe the room was so safe it had made itself smaller, quieter, invisible, undiscoverable, even by a hurting house on the verge of suicide. Maybe his house had never felt their pounding fists, their constant scraping at every crevice that looked weak and penetrable. Maybe that room was an amputated limb lying adjacent to, but no longer a part of, the body. Like him and Leona even when they were having sex.

  He felt as apart from Leona during the act as he did sitting in the back seat refusing to join her in the front. Maybe she was not a reward but one of Marie-Ange’s punishments. Maybe Leona LaMerci was no gift to be thankful for like her last name implied. Maybe she had set his house on fire to force him closer to her. They were like the house and its back room—adjacent but so separate that one could easily live without the other. She was the surviving appendage on a corpse, throbbing with blood, aching but determined to persevere. He did not experience her as a living limb but as the removable leg of a doll, the brainless, faceless plastic figure too dumb and needy to acknowledge that they were not together. He felt nothing for her, not even the shadow pains of dismemberment. He was the numb body that knew no emotion except for a hatred he could not acknowledge. He didn’t even know that he had no true feelings at all, that he’d learned only to mirror those of others with none of his own. Nothing.

  He could not shake the suspicion that Leona did feel their separateness and had been angry enough to murder his house to bring him closer. How much closer did she want them to be? They were practically neighbors. She lived in Ozone Park, close to the Brooklyn border. He lived in South Ozone, just a ten-minute drive away. The difference between their two neighborhoods was negligible. The row houses in hers were attached at the hip. The homes in his were detached. Most of them boasted spacious rentable basements with extraordinary back rooms, a peculiarity that he believed had saved his girls. He was neither insane nor suffering from dementia. There were women in that room, protected from fire and, for the moment, the collapse of an overwhelmed and suicidal house.

  Leona revved the engine to try to cajole him into the front seat. He ignored the music she turned on to rouse him. He refused to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror. Instead, he lay down in a fetal
position, which was easy for him with one hand and one foot already crippled. He felt like the deserted child he had always been. He’d taken in strays, as his children had called them, because he felt like one of them despite his still-living parents who’d mercifully brought him, his bride, and three babies to America. The people he accepted at KAM with or without vetting by Marie-Ange were like him. They had family. Some of them were even related to him or Marie-Ange distantly. He often took these relatives at their word, not wanting to have to probe his parents or theirs for the specifics. He could not remember if Boss Dieuseul was a second or third cousin, or if they were related at all.

  “I haven’t heard from Dieuseul.” These were his first words to Leona as they drove to her house.

  Leona perked up and turned down the radio. “I haven’t heard from him either. I called his cell phone.”

  “I hate those things.”

  “That’s because you never use yours.”

  “I never use mine because I hate those things.”

  “But when I need to reach you…”

  “Nothing is ever that urgent.”

  “What about your life, your health? What about when the fire started? You could have called me.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about calling anybody.”

  “Yes, you were. But that’s okay. It’s okay to think about your children no matter how grown they are or how far away. I would want to have mine right up under me.” Leona cupped her breasts with her right arm as maternal confirmation, a gesture Lucien could not see.

  “Me too” were Lucien’s last words before his narcolepsy reeled him in like a minnow on a fishing pole.