Lucien climbed back in bed and spooned Leona. He drifted off with Dieuseul on his mind, hoping that his inner alarm clock would suffice to wake him. As he drifted off, he tried to figure out how the fire had started in the first place. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Sol had started it. She was the smartest and the toughest. If anyone could have found a way, it would have been her. She would have preferred to kill all of them, had even threatened to do so, just to starve him. Lucien half-regretted taking Sol. He’d chosen her because she reminded him of his first and favorite daughter, Veille. The resemblance turned out to be barely skin-deep. Sol turned out to be as vocal, cunning, and defiant as his second daughter, Clair.
He tossed and turned and finally drifted off thinking of his three daughters. He missed them as much as he missed Marie-Ange, as much as he missed the dewy girls and balmy breezes back home at Bar Caimite. No one could take the place of his daughters, even now. He didn’t understand his love for his daughters because he didn’t understand love at all. He understood possession but never felt that they were truly his. He’d fallen for them only after he’d figured out how to keep them. His way of loving them had been to watch them even when they weren’t performing. But once Clair had discovered his spying and figured out his mechanisms, she’d turned the tables and enlisted her sisters in games to stalk the stalker. His daughters had become three falcons with a bird’s-eye view of a wily squirrel. By the time they’d hit their teens, they had grown weary of stalking their predator to evade his lascivious designs. They’d honored their pact to move out the minute their high school graduation ended. With full scholarships, room and board included, to the best schools they could get into, they’d fled and looked back at only their mother.
In his disturbed slumber, Lucien’s mind bumped over memories like wheels over potholes as he recalled the last time he’d seen his girls. Prior to Marie-Ange’s funeral, they hadn’t spoken to him in years and then only because Clair had served as intermediary to manage Marie-Ange’s care in her final days. And, before that, at high school graduation, when they’d kissed their mother good-bye and gotten into their prepacked U-Haul and left South Ozone Park for good.
They had kept their promise to perform at Marie-Ange’s funeral in identical outfits that complemented but did not resemble her own. It was Clair who’d insisted that they wear white, as was the custom when someone younger died. The girls had thought it fitting since Marie-Ange had been more the child than the mother. Each played her part and did what she had always done best. Dor sang. Clair spoke. Veille protected, standing soldierlike next to her sisters onstage, staring down at Lucien, daring him to look at them so she could leap on him and rip out his throat.
Lucien could hear his daughters’ voices in his dream. Dor had a sweet, clear voice that she sometimes allowed to go breathy or sleepy because she didn’t like to talk much. Although she was a born singer, she preferred to shush and soothe. People were always surprised to hear how beautifully and passionately she crooned, given how shy and quiet she was. They were never surprised that she could emote softly like Roberta Flack. But when she belted out ballads like Whitney Houston, people took notice. Clair and Veille had just enough talent to sing backup and harmonize with her.
With her sisters’ supportive vocals, Dor had retched up the funeral dirge as if she’d been kicked in the gut by a pimp determined to forcibly abort an unborn. It was not “well with her soul.” Her mother had not died peacefully or honorably. Although she’d felt light-headed throughout her performance, the confidence that her sisters would catch her if she fell, pick up the song if she couldn’t go on, kept her steady enough to finish. Sensing her weakened state, Clair and Veille powered through the harmony and wailed like reeds that had been ripped from the riverbed where they’d been born. They were mourning their own orphanhood.
Dor’s head became heavy and started throbbing the minute she heard the piano’s last chord reverberating her last note. She was always like this after performing, as if she had to shed the skin of the entity that had possessed her and produced overwhelmingly powerful sounds that her real self never could have. She all but ran offstage after singing, soaked with sweat as if she had a fever. Relieved to be offstage, she felt no guilt at having left Veille and Clair up there alone.
Clair had fluidly, almost coolly, delivered the eulogy, saying all the right things with the erudition of an overachieving Ivy League graduate, while her anger and grief waited to explode from any unmanned, unplugged orifice. As she climbed off the stage to take her seat in the front pew, a dark spot bloomed on the back of her virgin-white skirt. She bled out her grief. The passion she’d suppressed to keep from crying during her speech gushed out and exposed all she’d tried to hold back.
Still onstage, Veille had stood ready to take up arms to protect her sisters when she saw them in their distraught and vulnerable states. Her pupils assumed the fire red of a car’s brake lights on a dark, deserted back road. She knew that if Lucien even looked directly at or dared to approach either of her sisters, her anger would cascade off the stage and flood the church. She would become angry enough to cry, and the flames in her pupils would turn to liquid—first to lava then to blood—in the whites of her eyes and breach her lower lids. She would become a red hellcat and pounce.
To let Veille know that he was not a threat, Lucien had shrunk in his seat and flicked Leona’s hand off his shoulder. He knew that he’d turned Veille into a brawler. She’d always been and remained a nice girl, a people pleaser, even when her violent temper materialized. She’d never initiated but always defended her sisters, finishing any fight more viciously than the instigator. Still, most preferred Veille’s bite over Clair’s bark, including Marie-Ange, whose spirit had intervened during the eulogy to keep Clair’s sharp tongue in check. Clair still managed to get in a few barbs at certain oblivious deaf, dumb, or blind attendees, including her father, who’d all but lain down in a fetal position on the pew to play dead in the presence of a grizzly tongue, an armed panther, and a vomiting voice that had brought everybody to tears.
Lucien jolted awake as if he’d felt Veille’s threat in his sleep. He gripped the covers with his good hand and covered his head. He had not been surprised that his daughters had been too angry to visit him in the months and years after the funeral. At the repast immediately following the burial, they’d complained about the junk he and Leona had tried to hide at the house. He knew what they thought of him, that he was a stubborn slob who’d insulted their dead mother even further by refusing to hold the second part of her home-going at the catering hall they’d paid for in full. They’d gotten over Leona’s behavior. He’d allowed her to act like the woman of the house after her little performance of humility at the church and graveside. She’d looked so dumb as she’d practically curtsied and grinned sadly, offering guests another patty, glass of wine, or bottle of water. They ignored her out of pity because it had been clear that she’d been completely taken with Lucien. They hadn’t even cared if he’d been sleeping with her while Marie-Ange was alive, which they’d correctly guessed as true. They’d been grateful that at least the infamous Asante, the basement tenant Marie-Ange had told each of them about during separate too-long phone conversations, had not shown her face. Leona’s presence had been tolerable because she’d been useful. They couldn’t be angry with her since they had helped choose their father’s next wife. They had reserved their disdain for Lucien himself.
Lying on his back, Lucien placed his claw on his chest and felt palpitations. Although he’d always understood why, his daughters’ rejections still hurt in the spot where he knew he should have had a heart. To calm the threatening tears thumping rapidly in his throat, he counted the members of his newest family whom he would try to rescue in the morning.
Zero, always start from zero. One, Two, Three, and Four. She’s dead. Don’t count My. He is not one of them. One, two, three, four, five gallons of water. Twenty-two slices in a lo
af of bread plus two end pieces. They have sardines and confiture. In the morning I will count again.
Until then, I cry out of nowhere. I cannot stop or count. There is nothing there.
SOL
Three days after the fire, with the frigid air outside penetrating the insulation, the sweat on the back-room walls had frozen over. The rancid smell of dissipated smoke, molten metal and plastic, burnt wood and fabric, and ruined indiscernible objects turned Sol’s stomach. Although these odors were an improvement over the musk, sweat, and excrement fermented in the back room over many years, they were alien and, therefore, nauseating to her distorted nasal palate.
Sol was too cold to sit up. They all were. She let Chiqui, Cocoa, and My huddle together close to but not with her, as if that little distance between them could keep them from catching whatever she had. They were One, Two, Three, and the boy. Sol, Chiqui, Cocoa, and My. They knew better than to invite Asante to snuggle. They let her be. Only Sol thought of and kept an eye on Zero. She understood Asante’s preference for solitude. She knew that she’d been in the basement the longest and had spent years with no companions. During the weeks in between visits, Asante had even looked forward to seeing Lucien. Sol also understood Asante’s separation from herself, the distance between her self and her mind. How far away from them she had to go so she didn’t have to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there and, god forbid, wonder when she might get out.
Zero is not One. He counts from nothing and taught me the same. Asante is Zero. Zero is not fine. I should not call her that. Asante is broken. She is of no use, but he uses her still. She is the one he always comes back to after every One, Two, Three, Four. Even after My. She has nothing left that he has not taken. She is not me. She has forgotten the sky. She is not my sister, Two; or Three. She is alone. And we are not enough. We are three-quarters of a gallon of water.
One-half of one-half of a sardine. The confiture from fallen apples is too sweet. Apples are easy to count until they meet sugar and water and fire. They become inseparable pieces of themselves. There is no bread. Not even little-big-men loaves. Only fish. Can upon can. There is never rice. Takes too much time to count. Beans are easier. They grow in the garden only My has seen. We know the season has changed when he smells like dirt, smells green, smells sweet. Zero smells like dying. I am already dead. I have died before I die.
Sol heard Asante start to groan. She didn’t force herself to see from where or from whom the extended growls were coming. She knew Asante’s sounds almost as well as she knew her own voice inside her head. Still, she asked the others to light another candle. She didn’t address anyone specifically or directly. For the past three days, she’d become indifferent to rationing. It was too cold. Why count? Why save? At least four of them would make it out before they died of thirst, starved, or were crushed by the collapsing house. She shivered a little as Chiqui jumped at the chance to help. Cocoa scurried to plate a sardine and a generous scoop of marmalade into a saucer to serve her. Sol nodded, thanking them and asking for water at the same time.
With her eyes closed, Sol calculated Lucien’s next move. He normally brought rations on Monday, so the water was almost gone. Asante had been on her umpteenth hunger strike in umpteen years, so there was more for the rest. Since the fire, Chiqui and Cocoa had kept their consumption to a minimum to ensure that Sol and little My had enough.
Sol understood their desire to light more candles. Her hallucinations scared them. She fell into the darkness and saw things that were not and had never been there. She would forget what was real and what wasn’t. Thinking about her trances plunged her into one again. With eyes closed, she saw the steel wall sweating with an outline of a face traced by an invisible finger. Behind her, another face appeared, crying like a battered woman with hardened lumps and permanent bruises as dark as the mud-stained stone wall. Her mind flipped the reinforced steel wall and laid it flat like an endless kitchen counter. On it, animal carcasses lay skinned and eviscerated, awaiting a butcher’s carving. Sol quickly opened her eyes and saw that a second candle had been lit, but it did not light up her mind. She passed her hand just above the steel counter as if soothing the dead animals. She was not remembering these things. They were real to her.
She had never seen a stainless steel kitchen counter. She’d never seen any gutted animals except the odd fowl her mother would buy from the livestock place. She couldn’t have been channeling the long-gone ceremonies Marie-Ange had held in the basement because there had never been animal sacrifices to Ezili. There had been one goat slaughtered in the yard during the Louvertures’ first summer in SOP. But that had been just for show—to scare the few remaining Italian neighbors and solidify Marie-Ange’s reputation among the as yet thin Haitian community as a credible and powerful priestess. But Sol could not have known any of that. Even in her deepest dreams and memories, or with possession, she could not possibly conjure up a sacrifice. Only in her delusions could she see a little light-skinned brown girl gutted, splayed, and waiting for the butcher to arrive and finish her off.
Sol didn’t remember much of her early childhood, certainly not before age four. She and her mother, Cara, had started their trek from the Yucatán Peninsula where the corners of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico fused and confused the nationalities of their inhabitants. She remembered best the time they’d spent walking through the middle of Mexico. Sol had been a misleadingly petite six-year-old when Cara, who was five months pregnant, increased the pace of their journey, hoping to give birth on the Arizona side of the Sonoran Desert. Sol had been more frightened of Cara’s wrath after they’d missed their target. Cara had riled for weeks after giving birth in Agua Prieta instead of Douglas. Sol had watched as her mother bled for weeks because of her pulsing rage. Although weakened by the pumping of what was truly life’s blood, Cara’s adrenaline and drive for survival had pushed her forward with a nursing infant in tow. Since she couldn’t have intercourse, she’d perfected sucking, like the baby at her breast, to pay her way across the country to Washington Heights, New York. She’d pretended to have a cousin who would give her a job sorting and selling produce street-side. Sol recalled clearly how her mother had managed to rent a bed in a small room in a tiny apartment in a diminutive squatters’ building managed by a Mexican super who was even shorter than she was.
Sol preferred memories to hallucinations. Lying in her own sweat, she drifted in and out of conscious remembering. She could see her eight-year-old self as she’d accompanied Cara on Saturdays and Sundays to sell fruit and flowers on North Conduit Avenue. They’d stood on a strip where the Van Wyck and Belt Parkway kissed and parted at a red light, creating 134th Street and 134th Place. That’s where, for years, she used to see Lucien and Marie-Ange driving in a struggling minivan that looked like it might break down at any minute. She’d in fact seen it pushed to the gas station nearby so many times over so many years that the station had borne a different name each time. Sol remembered that Marie-Ange had preferred carnations over roses and always asked for mangos that they never had. She’d rejected the bottled water that Lucien guzzled in one go, preferring to stop at the gas station store for an ice-cold Pepsi. Cara had started stocking a secret stash of soda just for her special customer who spoke Spanglish to her whenever a red light and Lucien’s patience had permitted.
Sol raised herself on her elbows and placed her face in her hands to maintain her composure while remembering one of the worst days of her life. She skipped over the weeks Chiqui had spent bawling over Cara’s disappearance. She’d tried to console her little sister but could not explain that their mother had vanished into an INS detention center. Sol could see her teenaged self selling flowers on her own. She saw her hand reaching into Lucien’s van to hand him change. She saw him mostly alone for months and then later with a new woman, dressed in all black, who sat in the front seat of his van wanting only red carnations. Neither of them had spoken Spanish or cared to explain that the f
lowers had been for Marie-Ange’s grave. Sol had known only that two distant women had disappeared from her life at about the same time, leaving her motherless and more vulnerable than she could have imagined.
Sol turned her head toward the stone wall against which Chiqui was leaning as if listening for exploitable faults in the newly compromised back-room wall. She couldn’t believe how grown her sister looked now. But even if Chiqui had been a blossoming woman, Sol never would have taken her baby sister with her to sell on North Conduit. She had been determined to make things different for Chiqui.
Sol had removed Cara’s picture from its frame and proclaimed herself the only mother Chiqui needed now that their mother was gone. Sol would wake up at dawn on weekend mornings to hock her wares along North Conduit and try not to lose herself in the sky. She had had to look down more to make the money needed to keep up the appearance of being cared for by an adult. So she’d had to imagine, instead of witness, the miraculous sky. She’d had to believe, instead of reading her story in which she was as much a miracle as the magical intersection of the Yucatán where she’d been born.
Sol sat up again and stared blankly. Her hallucinations slammed the door on memory and took over again. The stone walls were now gushing waterfalls. She was trying to stuff the innards back into the carcass on the bloody kitchen counter. She sewed a seam like a zipper from south to north, from the little girl’s pelvis to her breastbone. She ignored Chiqui’s and Cocoa’s attempts to stop her frantic hands and wipe her forehead. She was sweating more water than she’d consumed all week.
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