He felt like a rag doll in the hands of the EMTs as they lifted him up and out into the cold. He couldn’t tell the difference between the inside temperature of the stairwell where he’d been and the outside air through which he was being carried.
He felt when he was rolled and then lifted into the waiting ambulance, where they took his pulse and temperature, listened for the breath in his chest, pricked his fingers and toes to see if he would respond. He was conscious only long enough to feel the tires dip into greedy potholes. The ambulance did not think that his status warranted blaring sirens and let its silent lights move them through the traffic along the Van Wyck Expressway to Jamaica Hospital. Minus the disturbance of noisy sirens, Lucien allowed himself to be dragged deeper into the more than two decades he’d spent adjusting things in his dungeon. He kept hearing the crack, crunch, and purr of his intercom, the only way he’d been able to communicate with his girls without going into the basement. He could think clearly enough to be proud of himself for figuring out how best to keep and enjoy his captives.
Lucien woke up in the hospital shivering in the warmth. He was babbling about his things and his girls. In the years since Marie-Ange’s death, since the day he’d last seen his daughters, his hoarding had escalated. The redundant towers of dysfunctional stereo parts in his basement had been one of dozens he’d built throughout the house and in his garage. His desire for collectibles had driven him to grab girls whom he should have known better than to snatch. Nihla had been his first absolute miscalculation since his successful testing with Zero. The white girls he’d previously prospected had resembled the porcelain figurines in his aunt’s curio. Cocoa had been a mistake made too close to home that he’d resolved with his donation. The neighborhood search had nearly cost him every penny he’d had in the bank as well as his first three captives. His contribution to the reward pot had been money well spent. She had always been a treasure. She’d reminded him of all three of his daughters—a multi-event track star, a poised dramatic orator, and a singer a deaf man could feel. She was as pretty as an animator’s film-screen invention.
If his daughters had been Disney characters, Veille would have been Nala. Clair—Lady. Dor—Bambi. Veille was the lightest of the three, her complexion the closest to Lucien’s. During winter, she would get so light that she looked biracial, shining like the brightest on the scale of sepia photography. She tanned easily in summer, her skin a glowing peach. Her only flaw, if it could have been considered that, from head to toe had been a small black mole in the middle of her forehead that made it appear as if her eyebrows met. She had the long, curly hair of the women in his family but kinkier like Marie-Ange’s. He remembered her slender frame with a high behind that had made her look like she had curves even as a little girl. She’d been a late bloomer who didn’t acquire the accoutrements of full puberty until age nineteen, when she’d left home for college. Her body had waited for her to be out of her father’s house to come into its own. She’d survived the years since the first and last incident, mastering her limber stealth walk that had made her steps inaudible even when she and her sisters had run around playing tag in the house. She had been the feline who could stalk her predator, sense his approach before he even knew where he was going, and alert her sisters to dress faster, pull the belts of their robes tighter, avoid the bathroom, lock the bedroom door, close the closets so he couldn’t peep through the holes. She had always stood poised to pounce, her body tilted forward like a sprinter awaiting the sound of a gunshot to take off racing. She had been hypervigilant because she was easily startled, a remnant of being caught unawares that time before. She had always been ready to flee or fight because, during that first episode that was also the last, she had frozen. Never again.
Running track had come easily to Veille in high school, but she could just as well have been a pole-vaulter or a boxer. Her body’s energy had been divided evenly between her feet and her fists. However, female boxing had been an oddity before being legitimized by Laila Ali, who brought it into the mainstream. After laying waste to several ignorant and arrogant boys in elementary and middle school, Veille had become afraid of the power in her hands and lunged at the track instead. She had achieved the rare feat of concurrently holding records in long distance and meter dashes in college. She had opted out of the Olympics to remain close to her sisters, with whom she’d shared everything. Even in college, she’d talked to them every day, several times a day, in her soft voice that sounded like hair through a brush.
Hair, brush, and comb. Nala, Lady, and Bambi—Disney’s animal princesses. Veille had been more than the hair on her head. She had been the hair itself: untamed, temporarily subdued, quick to rise up and fight off oppressive hot combs, recalcitrant against relaxers, finicky and compliant for the right strokes and pomades. Even Marie-Ange hadn’t been able to manage her, especially not after.
Veille had not craved her mother’s attention since having been cast aside at eleven months for the twins. She’d clung to Nen-nen and suckled at the childless lugawou, who’d figured out how to produce milk from breasts that had never experienced the required biological changes. Veille’s precocious walking at six months old had gone unnoticed until it was developmentally appropriate, which is to say when everybody had taken notice of her sisters pulling up on frail furniture in imitation of what they’d seen her doing.
By the time Lucien had returned to Haiti to christen the twins, primarily, and her, incidentally, she’d already been running laps around the perimeter of Nen-nen’s hut. She had neither sought nor missed the recognition of the adults around her. But the loneliness of being excluded from the oneness of twin sisterhood had made her settle for any gesture that brought her into the closeness Clair and Dor shared. Veille rejoiced when Marie-Ange bought her a third, slightly larger size of whatever clothes she’d chosen for the twins. She’d showed an unusual gratitude for whatever adult affections approximated love, including Lucien’s. By age six, Veille was clearly Lucien’s favorite, his firstborn, pleasantly compliant, bright, and needy to the point of desperation. Like any lonely child would, she eventually fell victim to the emotional trap he’d been laying for years. She was already his first and he had been determined to be hers.
Lucien hadn’t expected Veille to tell Marie-Ange. He had not expected that single experience, in which there had been no penetration, digital or otherwise, to change her. Afterward, she’d regressed and failed at school. She’d been left back in the third grade, so she and the twins had ended up in the same class. This had made people mistake them for triplets even more often, which Veille loved. She was officially bonded to the pair, which was why she’d told her sisters first what their father had done and finally told Marie-Ange much later.
Clair had been the catalyst and accelerant for the disclosure. As a precocious five-year-old, she couldn’t wait to tell. But she’d waited until she could be part of the solution. After overhearing Marie-Ange threaten Lucien, she took it upon herself to confront her father for a crime she could not yet understand. Out of well-deserved disrespect, she started calling him by his first name and convinced Veille and Dor to do the same. This hadn’t felt natural to her twin, but it had given Veille the emotional distance she needed by eliminating some of her confusion about the father-daughter connection, at least where titles were concerned. The three would come to understand the degree of Lucien’s aberrant behaviors in high school after reading the only black-authored book in the tenth-grade curriculum, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Clair had even alternated between calling her father Lucien and the name Cholly, although he had had no idea that she’d been referring to the unforgivable rapacious father in the novel. She had taunted him with reminders about the goddess in the basement that had precipitated his nightmares. She’d also dreamed about making good on Marie-Ange’s threats.
In his half-frozen state, with fear filling his chest like smoke behind a closed door, Lucien was desperate to expel the t
houghts of his girls, past and present. He hadn’t been able to get to the latter and the former had excommunicated him once again after Marie-Ange’s funeral. He’d always known that they must have heard or somehow been told what their mother had said to him, how she’d questioned his manhood and paternity after finding out what he’d done to Veille. Especially that Clair, that saucy, vindictive, beautiful brown girl. She must have been the one who’d heard and then conveyed her mother’s venomous lambaste to her sisters verbatim.
Lucien couldn’t move his limbs. Even when he coughed, he could not expel whatever had invaded his chest. He could not summon the stamina to silence the memories that moved through his entire body like blood. As he lay on what could have been his deathbed, he heard Marie-Ange’s threatening upbraiding through every pore and felt her unanswerable questions pricking every nerve, despite the numbness of frostbite.
Marie-Ange had lowered her voice and come so close that he’d felt her breath and spittle hitting his nose. She’d wanted to snatch his Adam’s apple from his throat. She’d spoken to him in a low growl only accessible to fearful, injured, and protective she-cats and -wolves, mother bears, and lionesses.
Didn’t you love her enough to hold back? Like my father? He’d held back. He waited outside doors while I changed into the fine things he’d brought back. He insisted on sealed doors for the room he’d built and furnished for me with things paid for in francs. He didn’t have to count. There was only one of me. He didn’t have to touch finger to finger, skim or steal from the excess in the president’s Swiss bank accounts. I know that he’d imagined the flawless French ladies he’d dared not touch. His eyes never touched me. It was enough to hear me breathe as smooth and fluid as French. His one requirement in public: no Kreyòl, except to him in private so he would remember that I was not the saleslady who’d brought him clothes he hadn’t been allowed to touch until he’d paid for them. Kreyòl covered up his little lady in impeccably tailored grown-woman gowns. White gloves for First Communion. Lace veil. White shoes. On ordinary days, barely tinted light-colored fabrics that almost looked white. A reminder to hold back, lest he leave an imprint. I was covered.
Mahogany door. Covered. Windowpanes with double wood shutters. No storefront. No curio. Nothing to see! His height, his brown skin, his uniform, especially his beret for generals only, his guns, his heart, his eyes watered over, his lips parted to show teeth. Not a smile. A threat. He would help me alight from the car, walk me to the classroom door, shake every teacher’s hand, letting them know who and whose I was, in case they hadn’t heard. He’d pat his sidearm as a greeting and trace the strap of his machine gun while telling them my name. His palm on the leather sheath of his machete to make them understand. Duvalier’s second-in-command. First to see the president in the morning, the last at night. Same with me. His first and last. And he, mine. His lawful wife, my second-in-command.
Lucien backed into the memory blindly, splitting his head against its wall, letting its grit penetrate into the cut in his scalp. He wanted to think about her, not the things she’d said to him. He didn’t want to hear her any more than he wanted to hear himself say, I am nothing. Her stories about the man he could never measure up to echoed his own. Her first love. Perfect because he’d been disappeared or made dead. A martyr, although he’d murdered more and deserved worse. He didn’t want to see her perfect father. I am nothing. He wanted to see her. I am a mirror, nothing, until she looks into me. But all she’d done since that morning in Bois Droit was talk about the man whose features he knew by heart. Dark-skinned like cocoa dust. Too dark to have been president in a country that still honored light skin. Tall, over six feet. Always in uniform or a suit and tie. Perfect posture. Always strapped with several weapons. He’d come from money and added more as the president’s most trusted. As smooth and gentle as his fencing sabre. Composed. Restrained. Perfect French. Exceptional Kreyòl. Imposing. Threatening.
He didn’t want to hear as Marie-Ange had spoken through clenched teeth with balled fists, standing in his face, poised to pounce.
He never would have allowed me to marry you. Look at what you’ve turned me into. Look at what you’ve done. You could never be him. I wish I’d inherited his weapons—his side piece, his machete, his long gun or AK…I would not hold back. I wish you and I were in Haiti. I would rip open your throat from ear to ear without reprisal or jail time. I’m holding back. And you will too. Or I will send Ezili’s hands down your pants to stroke you to your last coming before she does what should be done. A blood sacrifice to the Vierge Marie.
Thereafter, Lucien would suppress his own questions. Why did she stay? It had been the same question Marie-Ange had asked herself until the day she died. Veille, Clair, and Dor had asked it, even at her funeral. He’d never wanted to know the answer because it had had less to do with him and more to do with the good man, the best man, her first and last love. She needed security. She could not manage on her own with three young daughters in a foreign country she had not yet figured out. She did not have enough money to live and support them on her own. She needed what he had provided since rescuing her from the backlash of the coup in Port au Prince. Although he did not fully understand or feel love, he knew she had never loved him. He had been her indispensable crutch and later he’d become a part of her, a permanent prosthetic that she could not do without.
Lying unable to twist his stiff body on the hospital bed, too cold to count, too numb to feel the warmth of an electric blanket, let alone a sensation as elusive as love, Lucien felt trapped. He knew somewhere inside himself that what Leona had shown him was love, but he could not imitate it well enough to feel it inside him. He wanted to show her that he was grateful. More so, he wanted to show her that he was getting better, so she wouldn’t insist on keeping him in the hospital. He did not want to be imprisoned at the mercy of people with absolute control over the flow and consistency of his blood, when and whether he ate or starved, wet or soiled his bed or got up to use the toilet, breathed or suffocated because he could not move a single limb.
Frozen inside and out, the only thing Lucien could move was his mind, and it kept forcing him backward to Marie-Ange’s threats. What if she’d done it? Taken the prize between his legs and left him lying in his own blood? What would he have told the people at the hospital? They would have called the police or sent him to some precinct to explain to a uniformed audience. How would he have explained it? Worse yet, they would have asked him why a wife would do such a thing. Infidelity? Or something worse? He would have plausibly copped to cheating. But how he’d lost his prized appendage would have drawn the crowd’s curiosity. He would have appeared more senile than he seemed now. Unable to move his lips, Lucien laughed a little inside to imagine his explanation.
“The statues in my wife’s vodou temple. Yes, she’s a vodou priestess. Yes, the spirits in the statues cut my…Yes, the statues came to life. Well, not like that. The spirits inside of them. Yes, inside. No, they’re not stuffed into the statues themselves. No, the statues can’t walk.” Sigh…“No, they can’t talk either. My wife…Yes, the vodou priestess. She sent them to cut…Yes, Percocet, Vicodin, and morphine. Yes, they found it. No, she didn’t throw it away. Yes, the spirits cut…No, I didn’t see them. I just woke up and it was hanging. No, I wasn’t bleeding. Not when I woke up. No, I couldn’t see the stitches. I can’t really see down there. My stomach…Yes, my wife, the vodou priestess, was there when I woke up. No, she didn’t have a knife. No, I didn’t see scissors. Listen, I could barely walk. Yes, I was conscious. She sewed it up. Or they did. Before I woke up.” Sigh…“The doctors reattached it properly. No, I can’t. No, it doesn’t. Yes, I’d like to speak to a detective. Yeah…I’ll wait here. No thanks, I can’t sit down.”
Zero, one, two, three, four, five…eleven, twelve…eighteen stitches. They are not real. They are not here. I am not there. I am nowhere. I am nothing.
Lucien’s body was completely numb and i
mmobilized. He began to worry that Marie-Ange had posthumously carried out her threat. She could have sent Ezili to do it while he’d lain incapacitated on the basement stairs so close to the boiler room. He dismissed the thought. The only person who would have and could have executed her mother’s promise was Clair, and he had not heard from her since her mother died.
He could imagine Clair, especially, laughing at his predicament. She would have been gleeful to know that Marie-Ange had made good on the threats. She would have doubled over at the comical monologue. She would have regretted only not having done the deed herself.
Lucien had correctly judged Clair as the angry but rational one. She’d believed that anger was a wasted emotion only when unaccompanied by sane, strategic action. Well-channeled rage was deadly, even when irrational, which was to say she would have acted on her mother’s promise to lop off his most treasured part so that, fearing for his very life, he wouldn’t have even dared to go to the police. He had taken his daughter more seriously than his wife for reasons besides her overt challenges. First, she was a twin, an immediate descendant of the violent Marassa lwa. He’d grown up knowing their power as vodou’s invincible sword-wielding deities. Therefore, Clair had been born with a machete in her hand. When she was a child, he’d had to explain her temperament to the people at KAM who’d forgotten what it meant to be born a twin. He’d always say that she slept with a dagger under her pillow and a cutlass by her bedside. Clair needed no introduction.
My Mother's House Page 17