My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  She didn’t hear Cocoa singing to bring her out of her trance. Cocoa sang clearer and harder to break the barriers between reality, memory, and hallucination. She was looking for a way not only to pull Sol out of the dream, but to also be heard by those on the outside. The fire had made it possible for sounds from the outside to pour in, but, sucked so far into the surreal, Sol could hear none of it. She was deaf to the hum of idling engines and muffled talk that intoned like a backup choir harmonizing with Cocoa’s wails. Together they praised the house, the fire, the remaining candles, Marie-Ange’s spirit, and the goddess Ezili for breaking the silence.

  In her catatonic state, Sol could not hear Cocoa’s escalating exultation. She’d gone deaf to the hallelujahs for the damage to the house’s infrastructure that had compromised the soundproofing of the safe room. Sol couldn’t break free from her mind’s incarceration to feel Cocoa’s hands on her chest rubbing her into consciousness. But she wept as if she could see someone kneeling beside her singing an unrecognizable song. Sol gasped suddenly. She took in air like the first breath of a drowning swimmer rescued just in time. She could finally hear everything clearly—Cocoa’s singing, the outside noises that came from cracks in the wall instead of Lucien’s one-way intercom.

  She held Cocoa’s hand still on her chest, to stop her singing. They needed to ration their strength because soon a hunger they’d never felt before would suck the sound from their diaphragms. It would knock them into an abyss deeper than the dungeon where they’d been hoarded for too many years.

  LA KAY

  What had been an ordinary morning of keeping Its eyes and ears peeled for tidbits of news turned into a day of rage and outrage, of tears from men who’d held them back at their mothers’ funerals. La Kay leaned in as if to comfortingly embrace KAM patrons who were bawling over the near death of one of their own. Haitian cabdriver Abner Louima had been beaten and sodomized in a Brooklyn police precinct not ten miles from SOP. It had wept over the shoulders of Its occupants and visitors over the bloody beating that had made the front page of New York’s major newspapers. Since they hadn’t been able to stop talking about what had befallen their fellow countryman, It had learned more than It had wanted about the broom-handle rape and bathroom battery by cops. It had watched closely for Marie-Ange’s reaction. She hadn’t cried a single tear. She hadn’t even choked up at the newsreels of a swollen and disfigured Louima in the hospital. At least not in the presence of anyone at KAM.

  La Kay had followed her closely as she’d struggled down the basement stairs into Ezili’s new peristyle in the boiler room. She cried then to her goddesses and prayed for justice if outright revenge could not be delivered. Like every good manbo and every worthwhile houngan in New York at that time, she lit candles and poured kleren over the altar and then rubbed the rest on her face to help right the horrible wrong. La Kay had kept quiet while dancing with her during truncated but potent ceremonies in a space barely bigger than a bathroom stall. It had been in lockstep with her every movement, including her final gesture spitting a last swig of kleren at the basement door behind which Lucien had been hosting his tenant, Asante.

  Less than two years later, It had mourned two deaths with the people at KAM. Marie-Ange had succumbed to cancer one week before Amadou Diallo’s murder. It had been surprised that her death hadn’t been memorialized by even an obituary in a single newspaper. It figured that she had been less important since she hadn’t died at the hands of the NYPD. But, like the people at KAM, It had wept equally over her departure as over those who’d suffered at the hands of evil, empowered authorities.

  It had learned that police beatings were nothing new to KAM. Some had fled the same at the hands of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s Tonton Makout before immigrating. At least in America there had been a semblance of justice painted in the media. Even if it wasn’t real, the gesture had meant a lot to those who could never have hoped for the same in their native country.

  Lying prostrate after the crippling fire, La Kay remembered the record Lucien used to play about Makout abuse. He’d blasted it for the entire neighborhood to hear. But no one had been able to play it in Haiti without fear of a sound thrashing while Baby Doc occupied the Palais Nacional.

  La Kay had heard no songs for Marie-Ange or Louima. But, later, Diallo would get a well-deserved, but ironic, twenty-one-gun salute in one of Wyclef’s songs. When KAM had learned that Diallo had been murdered by police in the vestibule of the Bronx tenement where he’d lived, every taxi driver in SOP had wanted to pack up and move back home. If that had happened, half the houses in the neighborhood would have been left vacant. Under the pretext of preventing a recurrence of the Louima and Diallo incidents, La Kay had pulled together a huddle of Its associates owned by taxi drivers to learn exactly what had happened in the Bronx. However, Its real purpose had been to learn if that might be a way to get rid of Lucien without having to kill Itself in the process.

  It had marveled at the randomness of the Louima and Diallo incidents. It had read about and watched national news broadcasts about another cabdriver, Rodney King, who had been beaten on the side of an L.A. road by a bunch of cops. Sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins had been shot to death in Bensonhurst. Trinidadian Michael Griffith had been murdered just up the road in Howard Beach. Willie Turks had been stomped to death in Gravesend. It had wearied of going back through the previous decades up to Its birth date. It couldn’t have even imagined what had happened in the centuries before then.

  La Kay had gathered Its closest associates to find out not only why these murders had been perpetrated, but why those men. It couldn’t have known if they’d done anything besides being poor, black, and/or immigrants. It had deduced, based on the newspaper articles and the television news, that these had been good, innocent men. So why them? Why not the hundreds of murderers on Rikers Island? No, not the innocent ones serving sentences for petty offenses or crimes they hadn’t committed at all. Not the ones framed by corrupt detectives or a racist district attorney. It had been thinking of the ones who had taken lives, committed rapes (no, not the wrongly accused teenagers who’d been tricked into making false confessions). The real criminals who’d been caught red-handed and about whose guilt there had been no doubt. Those ones. Why not them? Why not a man like Lucien, who’d been preying on women since Bar Caimite? How could It get to him? Set him up to be shot twenty-one times on the side of a road without a day in court. How could It find the right mob or an easily persuaded group of cops who needed no probable cause to go after a black man; to take him out for all of his evil? La Kay wanted to know, to plan, to execute.

  It hadn’t even learned the worst. It hadn’t yet acknowledged the scratching at the steel-reinforced door in Its long-ignored coccyx. It hadn’t yet heard the cries or the songs, or felt the movement of four, maybe five women, a child, and god knows who else Lucien had been keeping for an unknown number of years. While lamenting Louima, It had had no idea that Asante had already been locked up in Its back room. KAM had been talking about Asante’s shop that had just been raided by the police and sent her running to nobody knew where.

  Things had gone quiet in the wake of Marie-Ange’s death. After the initial parade of people who’d started their immigrant lives at KAM, only a few diehards and hang-abouts had continued to visit Lucien. For the most part, La Kay had felt the presence of only Dieuseul and Leona. A few patrons would stop by periodically with takeout containers from local eateries. La Kay had joined them, missing the smell and taste of Marie-Ange’s cooking. It had gleaned more from their foam food containers than their newspapers. The restaurants in SOP had been enjoying an uptick in business since her death. They’d gone from merely catering to Caribbean tastes with a few items on their menus to being owned by Guyanese purveyors who provided all manner of delicacies from all over the West Indies. Only the Chinese restaurant had held its own over the decades. La Kay and the few KAM stalwarts had gagged on the smell of Leona’s cooking and wat
ched as Dieuseul stockpiled appliances in his bedroom to prepare his own meals.

  La Kay had perked up every now and then at Lucien’s visitors, new immigrants who’d heard about KAM from their people in New York. They’d been disappointed to know that KAM’s heartbeat, Marie-Ange, had stopped. But they’d brought news of Haiti’s politics and natural disasters, which It had found satisfying enough not to look in Its basement for traces of Asante.

  The next catastrophic distraction came on 9/11. It had been easy to slip someone past It then. It had been ducking from low-flying planes into and out of JFK. It could not be faulted for missing a lone girl and a fading woman in Its basement. The entire world had been focused on the four planes flown over and then into U.S. soil, so how could It have known that Lucien had been preparing to take Sol and then Chiqui two years later and then Cocoa after seven dormant years and then Four. While It had been mourning abuse after abuse, death after death, four, maybe five women had been futilely pounding on Its doors. If It had known, It would have found a way to off Lucien long before It had attempted a murder-suicide in the middle of winter. Now that It could feel their presence, It was determined to end their terror. It tried to figure out how to get to him before he came to make them disappear or make them dead, which were one and the same.

  Four

  LUCIEN

  With the rescue of his family on his mind, Lucien couldn’t fall asleep properly. He tossed and turned in Leona’s bed trying not to fall into the crack between the sadomasochistic twins of narcolepsy and insomnia. A former night-shift driver, he’d fought both for decades. They were like single beds brought together to deceptively form a tortuous king. His narcolepsy had been uncontrollable and incurable with over-the-counter solutions. His insomnia had been easily addressed with all manner of accessible tried-and-true herbal and chemical remedies. He’d often preferred the sleeplessness, had even prolonged the mania because the accompanying energy and acuity had helped his overnight hunting. At two in the morning, he didn’t so much as wake up as open his eyes to find his way out of bed.

  Lucien dressed himself in the dark hallway outside of Leona’s bedroom. He climbed down the stairs and sneaked past the second portrait Dieuseul had painted of his daughters. It was different from the first one that both men wanted to rescue from the burned house. The one at Leona’s house was wilder, more abstract, like a collaboration between Casimir and Picasso—a Haitian Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. The deconstruction and distortion of the girls’ bodies was a style Dieuseul had developed as a reminder of his childhood spent bent before the tourists purchasing his paintings. Before then, the portraits of the neighborhood girls had all been realistic, merciful, and soft, proof of an art produced out of tenderness and empathy. But Lucien preferred the later works in which Dieuseul had manipulated the female form in a way that conveyed a desire to break the girls whose figures would not bend for him. Lucien had found the paintings fantastically violent but orderly, bodies crowded into the canvas, curved into the painter’s preferred positions. He’d always appreciated the way the painter had dismembered then reassembled his subjects into figures that pleased him. Maybe, Lucien thought as he traced the forms in the painting in the dark, Dieuseul would know how to squeeze and contort the women to get them out of the basement.

  Lucien dismissed the thought before getting into his cab with Dieuseul. He quietly closed the car door so Leona wouldn’t hear. Even if Dieuseul’s paintings intimated the empathy of a kindred spirit, there was no way Lucien would invite him into such a precious confidence. He had never and would never share the knowledge of his girls with anyone, let alone allow someone to see and touch them. Lucien scarcely trusted his own shrunken conscience with his secret. What he knew of Dieuseul made him only half trusting.

  Lucien didn’t need to ask Dieuseul any questions. He knew that the former soldier could keep a secret because he had done so under the most severe commander in chief Haiti had ever seen. The only secret Dieuseul had not kept had been his life story, which he’d recounted during their long discussions between shift changes. Lucien had listened closely for elements he could exploit. He’d confirmed that soldiers at war had to be guardians of the clandestine and, when required, the keepers of prisoners. He’d also understood Dieuseul’s hunger for superiority. Before Dieuseul had entered Baby Doc’s pitiless army, he had been a victim of many oppressors: Haiti’s light-skinned upper class, who’d kept an artistic prodigy from the right schools because he couldn’t speak proper French; the white tourists in Cap-Haïtien, who’d paid for his portraits with hard-to-get junk food instead of cash, who had praised, pampered, and groomed him until he’d sold them his own body rather than those in his precocious portraits. They’d paid him in greenbacks for his bareback, leaving him HIV positive and with a taste for all things foreign and an entitlement to scarce luxuries. He had been so distracted by the things he’d been able to afford that he’d stopped visiting his family in his hometown of Cité Soleil. He’d sent them American money, food, and clothing instead of giving them the present of his presence. He’d even started to swear that he would never return to the slum where no light penetrated, not even the ubiquitous equatorial sun. Inhabitants had easily forgotten that the sky was always beautiful no matter what lay beneath it. They’d stopped believing that whatever the sun shone upon became light because it seemed to skip over them. Sunrise and sunset were the privileges of other Haitian towns. In Cité Soleil, there was no distinction between day and night. The sun always seemed to sleep late into the evening, forgetting to wake itself up.

  Lucien knew Dieuseul’s family history well. Despite being a decade older, Lucien had acted the younger brother by pretending to be the deferential boss. Dieuseul had never recovered from his brother’s murder in Cité Soleil. The news had forced him to go back. He had reactively developed an odious rage directed at adolescent boys like the ones who’d killed his brother—the ones who had no visibly natural gift, no pedophilic patrons, no means of making money, even bareback, no homes away from home. The ones like he could have been and really had been mere moments before his baby brother got shot for failing to hand over a pair of new Nike sneakers. Dieuseul had sent them to him after being allowed to run through the commissary on the American base where his most committed customer had lived. He’d hated boys more after becoming a stepfather in New York, wishing he could disband the teenagers who’d chased his stepdaughter like wild dogs after strangers’ exhaust-smoking cars.

  Lucien had held a mild disdain for adolescent boys himself but hadn’t been able to hate them outright, because he loved the boy he used to be at Bar Caimite. Still, he empathized with Dieuseul’s desire as a former Tonton Makout to take up arms and slaughter any teenaged man-boy, including his former self.

  Lucien looked over at Dieuseul as he drove from Leona’s to their home. He didn’t know what he would find besides the sawdust boards and KEEP OUT signs. These were just barriers to get past quickly, so he could get inside. Inside, Lucien could indulge in his preferred pleasures: penetrating the barriers of women’s minds, bombarding the obstacles of their emotions, shattering their exteriors, and wreaking havoc on their defenses. He’d succeeded in doing the same with Dieuseul, who’d willingly picked him up in the middle of the night to assist in his adventurous trespassing.

  Lucien never forgot Dieuseul’s status. Without having to say the three-letter acronym, he leveraged his knowledge to get Dieuseul to do his bidding. Dieuseul had never been typically symptomatic and had discovered that he had been a carrier only after four years of marriage. By then he’d secured his green card and had gotten his wife pregnant. Lucien remembered her running to KAM, bent on murder and suicide, straight from the ob-gyn. She’d kept herself alive and out of prison only for the sake of her daughter and her unborn son. She’d immediately banished Dieuseul to keep him and herself out of danger.

  Lucien chuckled at his talent as a master manipulator. He’d managed to keep Dieuseul’s statu
s a secret from everyone except Marie-Ange. He had also convinced her to rent their daughters’ vacant bedroom to the heartbroken painter. Lucien had never stopped grooming his wife, preparing her to do whatever he’d decided and keeping her with him despite all manner of evil deeds. He had gotten her used to Dieuseul as his co-driver. She’d thought of their tenant as a harmless forlorn artist reminiscent of her father. Lucien hadn’t understood or cared about Marie-Ange’s attraction to Dieuseul. If he had, he would have seen the painter’s elegance, his relaxed, confident walk, and the easy way he seemed to collapse his six-foot-three-inch frame into a body an entire foot shorter. He would have known that the style of his later paintings had not evidenced a desire to break others but reflected his body’s memory. Dieuseul had been bending his long joints into small frames since his days sitting outside of tourist traps in Cap-Haïtien selling paintings and himself. He had folded whatever joint he’d thought might be in someone’s way. What Lucien had judged as effeminate—Dieuseul’s seated pose, with one leg crossed over at the knees—had been a remnant of a childhood spent bending for buyers. Lucien had never seen the man in private when he painted, imitating the postures in his paintings to ascertain how much he could fit on the canvas.

  Even if Dieuseul had not told him, Lucien would have deduced the secrets, including the most shameful. He’d known better than to ever expose the fact that Dieuseul could not speak French. No one at KAM would have guessed that the well-spoken gentleman who’d passed his GED exam the first time around, who’d always carried a book or The New York Times under his arm, and who’d kept threatening to take community college classes or lying that he actually had was barely literate in what had remained Haiti’s national language. But when he spoke Kreyòl, which was added as a national language out of an act of common sense in the late ’90s, he spoke it with an imitation French accent that fooled everyone. Lucien had helped Dieuseul weave the lore that he’d completed all of his classes in Haiti and had been about to graduate from university when he’d gotten a chance to come to the United States to continue his education. This was the story all of KAM’s visitors believed and perpetuated until it became truth. Dieuseul maintained the façade required by such a lie. To explain his faltering French, he’d told KAM’s patrons that he had decided never to speak the language of the colonizer. Lucien had backed him up, insisting that French was useless in America and the majority of the world.