His boots were still on as he climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. Maybe he could make a home with his LeLe. Maybe they could unofficially adopt two or three young and struggling welfare mothers. Evenly light-skinned ones with syrupy curls who would resemble his family far more than Veille, Clair, and Dor. Leona’s hair texture, complexion, and pure gullibility made her the ideal wife. But he couldn’t let go of his house. It didn’t deserve to be torn down, not after everything he and Marie-Ange had invested in it and planned for it. To have their girls, at least one of them, come with a family of her own and live there. To have that one take it over after their deaths or an indefinite return back home. His house deserved better, to be restored, nursed back to health. If it had to die, it deserved the same care Marie-Ange had received. It deserved Leona’s prayers, stroking, and tears. Why couldn’t she love it like she loved him? She could not truly love him if she couldn’t love the only thing he had left.
He tried, but he could not get himself to admit that he had nowhere else to go. Leona’s place would have to do for now. He would leave as soon as he could.
Deep in sleep under clean sheets, even his hacking cough did not awaken him. He didn’t know when or if Leona came to bed. But she’d removed his boots, cleaned his face, hands, and feet with a washcloth, rubbed him down with Vicks and luile maskreti. He could have dreamed it all.
The next morning, he told himself that he didn’t care if she’d done any of those things at all. Without acknowledging it, he knew that he was undeserving. Lucien lay awake with eyes closed, hearing the echoes of what he’d said in his sleep. I am nothing.
SOL
“In case smoke starts to fill the room, stay as close to the ground as possible. The air is more breathable there.” Sol remembered this from fire department presentations given in elementary school. It’s not like she could get up if she wanted to. She could barely breathe. She wondered but could not see or hear how the others were managing with the smoke and cold that had made their way into the safe room. There had been no heat in two days. At least she thought it had been two days. She had started counting only from the time the smoke started to come in. That’s when she’d begun to imagine the sky again. She hadn’t seen it in the years she could deduce had passed only based on the size of the boy who had once been an infant.
She slowly raised herself on her elbows. She didn’t know for sure, but she felt like she was dying. The crackle of calcified phlegm in her lungs stabbed her rib cage. It felt like the worst heartbreak made palpable, physical, by the cold air she breathed. Like a vertical glacial sheet, her hurt iced over, cracked a line down her torso, and rose back up toward her chest. She wanted to scream but had no voice. No point trying to over the sound of machinery and muffled voices coming from outside, the first she’d heard in years besides Lucien’s and the others caged with her in the safe room. She didn’t open her eyes. There was nothing to see that she didn’t already know from memory. The shadowed faces of the others. The boy’s decayed teeth that lit up the room when he smiled, just because he smiled. The steel walls that connected on the front and right sides of the room. The cavelike stone walls of the other two sides. And the soundproof door like the entire insulated room. The intercom. The fucking one-way intercom. At least the sounds she was now hearing were not coming from his goddamned “sweet box,” a steel perforated contraption built into the wall. She knew every one of the hundreds of dead glass botanica votives with the various iterations of Vierge Marie lining the walls, stacked, ready to topple and crack. They had once held wax and wicks lit over the years. They’d once held hope, prayers to the Black Madonna and the woman who had purchased all of them for her temple. Sol knew every crevice they had tried to penetrate to no avail. So, no, she didn’t open her eyes, not even to see if the boy was smiling, because if she could hear the outside sounds, surely he, who had been out there more recently than they, recognized foreign voices and running motors. Was he imagining the sky?
She used to ask him if the sky looked the same as she remembered. Then she stopped asking, stopped imagining. Before the safe room, she used to look upward at the expanse, no matter its decor or dance except that once, that once when it had been pouring so hard that she had had to lower her head, run for cover under the gas station’s steel awning, and wait for the sky to wring itself out. If she could have lived somewhere high enough that she could feel as if she could touch it, just low enough to stare at it from a distance, she would have given her soul. She had never flown in an airplane and couldn’t imagine what it was like to cut through the sky’s layers below or above the clouds. Despite having seen countless planes scar the expanse with their wings, it was impossible for her to know if she would have loved being truly in the sky. But she was so tall that she had been willing to settle for seeing it from the ground, except for that one day when she’d first forgotten to, then couldn’t, then would never again look up and see it.
Whenever the boy returned from an outing, she’d question him about the sky as if asking about a long-lost sibling. It reminded her of her origins—not the country where she was born, but the place where she was not her body or her mind. Where she was only her soul. But after what felt like longer than a decade in the back room and a cough that held her chest captive, a fever boiling her very blood, sweat as copious as shallow water, she gave in and settled into being merely human.
The back room stole time. Its darkness allowed no knowledge of night or day, weeks, months, or years. Sol knew only that she was fifteen when she’d climbed into Lucien’s van to keep from seeing her blood running in puddles of rain. When he’d dragged her into the back room, she’d found Asante, who was well into her thirties and had already given up trying to escape. A few years later, Sol hadn’t known exactly how many, she’d stopped fighting after her sister, Chiqui, had been brought in. He’d tricked the twelve-year-old into his van, carried her out, and thrown her into Sol’s lap—a gift tossed like trash. Cocoa had said that she was fourteen when she got there. Sol could only guess how old they were now. She’d seen snippets of newspaper brought in by My from his outings with Lucien. The greasy print had told her that he’d been eating French fries or plantains. It had also let her know that she must be thirty or more. She was six when Chiqui was born. Sol didn’t bother with the subtraction. The last to be taken, Cocoa had kept close count of the years, at least she thought. If she had been free, she could legally vote, buy alcohol and cigarettes, and be chosen for American Idol without her parents’ permission. Asante didn’t want to know that she was now over fifty.
Sol chose to hear now. One of the others, Cocoa, was speaking again about finding a way out. She figured that, if they could hear outside sounds without the intercom, then maybe they could finally be heard. Sol could hear Cocoa starting to sob while mumbling to herself about their chances of rescue, if they would be buried alive once the demolition that she had heard snippets of commenced. Or maybe Lucien would make it to the house before that and slaughter them all. He had never been violent enough to break bones or draw blood, but anything was possible if he was scared enough. And the discovery of his girls in the back room would surely make him afraid. But he loved them in his own way, so maybe he would get them out and just let them go. Cocoa sucked up her tears because Sol, the sky lover, wasn’t crying and she was worse off than any of them.
Sol spoke now, more of a rattling low growl. “Listen, I’m weak. I’ve already died. So find a way out; even if you have to leave me, just get out.”
Chiqui overheard and trembled at the thought of her sister dying. “We’re all getting out.”
“It’s okay.” Sol consoled despite the pain that had taken over her body for weeks.
“No, it’s not. It never has been.” Chiqui didn’t want to argue but she needed to speak. “But now we have a chance to make it so.”
“Not even rescue can right this wrong, but we are getting out or we are going to die trying.�
� Cocoa wiped her nose on her forearm.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ve made my peace.”
“Then make peace with the fact that we’re leaving. All of us. Alive.” Chiqui seemed unable to stop crying. “I’m not going to let you die.”
“Nobody’s dying. If we can hear them, then they must be able to hear us. This is happening for a reason.” Cocoa placed one hand on Chiqui’s shivering shoulder and her other hand on Sol’s foot. “I am going to sing us out of here as loudly as I can. And then I’m gonna dance my ass out of whatever hole opens wide enough. Doesn’t have to be big because we’re all skinny as hell now.” She tried to laugh. “The back-room diet!”
Asante, Lucien’s first, the mother with no maternal instincts, finally stirred. Sol had always known that Asante’s internal deterioration was not unlike her own. Asante had been dying in her mind and overtly expressed her desperate wish for an end to her unbearable life. Sol had been trying to banish her own suicidality. But she had not reached that point because she could always compare herself with Asante, who had been in the back room the longest. Sol understood why Asante didn’t speak much. She’d gotten used to the older woman’s silence. At one time or another, Sol and the others had forgotten that Asante was even there. If they were getting out, her screams would never join their chorus to holler for help.
Sol’s internal quiet and attentive spirit allowed her to hear Asante’s whisper.
“Fuck all of y’all,” she muttered under her breath. “Leave me here too. Ain’t no point now.”
Sol remained still hearing Asante echo her own sentiments.
He say Asante is Zero. Chiqui is Two. Cocoa is Three. Which one is me? Which one is My? I am not his first. Zero. She is gone, gone, gone. She is all thought, all body, all full of him. She is her Zero self. I am not her. I am One. I feel me. But not like before he took me. I am killed, dying, and dead. I am fever, sweat, and cough. I am ready. I am more than body or mind. I am knowing. Everything about everything. This is not thought. This is me. Knowing.
Sol sat upright for the first time since the fire. Unwilling to torture herself with thoughts of seeing the sky again, she focused on Zero, Asante, who had been living in Lucien’s basement for two years before she’d found out that there was a safe room. Sol didn’t need to open her eyes to see Asante, who was almost invisible in the candlelight. Sol had insisted that her cellmates conserve candles. For months she’d allowed them only one votive per day. If the house came down on them, if Lucien found a hole to plug, they might never see light again. So no more lighting up multiple candles at once, hoping that one of the saints or versions of the Virgin Mary or their guardian seraph Marie-Ange would save them. No more five, six, seven candles at a time. That was before, when they’d had real hope of getting out. Before she’d started counting like him—rations, lighter fluid, ounces of water in the gallon, shots from the gallon’s cap, sardines, drops of Spam jelly on their fingertips, matches, sips of breath, minutes before he arrived, seconds before the intercom cracked on, footsteps and thumps before the music turned off, beats in their heads keeping time with silence made by the memories of sounds heard freely, outside and at will. None of them had taught four-year-old My to count, but still he had learned on his own as children will do in the absence of proper instruction. Asante hadn’t taught anyone anything. She had even refused to tell any of them how she’d gotten in and how to get out of the back room.
Sol’s memory of Asante the first time she’d seen her ran like wet paint dripping down a canvas. She wouldn’t see the face or learn the name of her cellmate for months. Names and faces were meaningless inside the unsafe safe room. They were nameless objects in his curio, things he collected and owned, things he could admire or destroy. To scare her, Lucien had told Sol his version of Asante’s story—how he’d first worshipped then wooed her, captured and then broken her down to Zero. That’s who Sol remembered in the darkness, the outline of a disjointed sketch, a bowed skeleton in the far corner of the room, not a body but an unfilled husk, the Zero from which he’d always counted when listing the inventory of provisions stockpiled for the harem he would amass.
He was proud of his first, a woman to whom he’d rented his basement for a mere $300 a month. Marie-Ange had been as hot as her cooking pots when Lucien relegated her vodou peristyle to the boiler room so he could house his mistress in the finished basement apartment. Asante had lived there with her twenty-year-old daughter and one-year-old grandson. None of them had discovered the back room in the years they’d lived there. Asante used to laugh to know that she had displaced spirits masked as saints and yet another wife. But she had ended up in hell. Marie-Ange’s payback. Ezili’s last laugh.
Sol had seen Asante’s torment that persisted even now. Asante continued to wish that Lucien’s wife would really die and die forever, instead of living inside her head and telling her that she had been and still was zero by comparison. Just a quick fuck for Lucien when he was in a rush. Just a long suck when he’d had more time to make her earn the rent money that she had not been able to come up with. During the few times he’d spared a full hour, he’d fucked her like a porn star. Sol remembered every detail he’d painstakingly shared.
Asante had still had her salon back then. Marie-Ange had been able to walk in for her wash and set, chirping whenever Asante’s boomerang boyfriend stepped in. He always wore Timberland boots, two pairs of pants, a gun in the small of his back tucked in the waistband of his underwear. If it had slipped down into his crack, he would have gotten fucked by his own gun. Asante never minded him stopping by. She couldn’t have stopped him from coming if she’d wanted to. The shop had been more his than hers—a front for the real profit maker. He would come in with rolls of cash hidden in the lower pockets of the cargo pants worn underneath his designer jeans—the genuine article, not Jamaica Avenue back-of-the-van knockoffs. Asante would bring the money to the bank later, passing the money off as profits from her beauty shop. She would have had to complete ten weave heads daily at $500 apiece with five other stylists doing the same to earn that kind of money in one week. But she was fine with their arrangement. She was still getting laid by her first love, her baby daddy. She had had no more children after their daughter. He’d made sure of that. Paid the shady doctor to tie her tubes. Selfish prick. Making that baby girl an only child, at least on her mother’s side. Marie-Ange had studied all this and knew what Asante was before Lucien came to explain why they needed to take her in and let her rent the basement. “She can sleep in her goddamned salon!” Marie-Ange gave in when she saw Asante’s infant grandson. “Tonère! Go ahead. Don’t break anything. And don’t fuck that bouzin sansavé in my house.” At first, he’d tried to conceal his involvement with Asante. But Marie-Ange had sniffed it out like rotting leftovers in the back of a refrigerator.
Sol recoiled at the thought of Lucien’s treatment of a woman he had truly loved. If that was love, then it was no wonder he had done so much worse to others.
The memory of Lucien’s descriptions oozed through Sol’s mind like a rotten yolk from a cracked eggshell. Disgusted, she tried to scoop the slime back into its irreparable casing. The leakage persisted, and she thought of what he’d told her: the way he’d arranged the women in his love triangle, how well he’d manipulated them, so he could have them both simultaneously with minimal hassle. He’d explained this to her to ensure that she understood how skilled he was at handling women. With disdain for Lucien’s version, Sol allowed the memory of Asante’s account to come forth. It sprouted in her mind like a bean in a glass of water.
Asante had been a welfare mother before opening her beauty shop. She had been the kind that Marie-Ange and all hardworking Haitians hated—an able-bodied youngster who’d failed to take advantage of the country’s limitless opportunities, a lazy girl who’d gotten herself knocked up, preferring government handouts to hard work. But she had also done hair in her small kitchen, which made Marie-Ange
a bit more merciful with her criticism. The kitchen-salon had squatted above the store that would eventually become her shop. Asante had become Marie-Ange’s hairdresser the same week she’d stopped working at the law firm. No longer having to go into Manhattan to work and having been accused of theft because she was black, an immigrant, smart, alluring, and black again, Marie-Ange decided to give Asante’s salon a chance. It was just up the road from the Q9 bus stop where she’d stood every morning to catch a dollar van to the Sutphin Boulevard E train subway station. When Asante told her that she was actually Haitian, born not raised, Marie-Ange had been pleasantly surprised and relaxed her judgment even more.
Asante had immediately felt Marie-Ange’s prejudice. She had experienced it all her life among Caribbeans who cut her no slack because (a) she had spent less than a year in Haiti after birth; (b) she didn’t speak Kreyòl fluently, although she understood it completely; (c) she was an academic failure (a high school dropout no less!); and (d) she’d had a baby in her teens. And that was just the stuff her mother couldn’t hide from Haitian Brooklynites, which is what she had been when her stereotypical life unfolded.
Asante had been shown no mercy by black American kids in the 1970s either. They called her “African booty-scratcher” until they found out that she was Haitian. In the ’80s, “Roll-AIDS” was the punch line to a joke about Haitians on skates. Asante’s skin was navy into midnight, with eyes just as black. A man might fall into them as easily as a country well on a moonless, starless night down South. She started wearing colored contacts in the 1980s and kept them even when they went out of style. She changed her eye color to match her mood and clothes sometimes but, like her weave, they were neither natural-looking nor her own. She was pretty enough—petite, barely a hundred pounds, not even five feet tall. She had been lifted and thrown by angry lovers one time too many. Her taut, muscular body persisted without exercise. She had enough curves to convey that she was indeed female. But if she dressed in an androgynous fashion—boxy Lee jeans, Adidas sneakers, a white T-shirt—she could have easily passed for a teenaged boy from the neck down. She made up for that with her giftedness at the most feminine profession imaginable. She’d become skilled in changing her appearance, which had just become vogue, when Lucien started courting her.
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