“Oh, what are you doing there?”
“Visiting people.” I can’t tell Nadine what we’re doing here, that we’re really here for Manman’s final prayers. The words rattle around emptily in my head.
“Oh, okay,” says Nadine. I am the strong one, as Tonton Élie said, so I lie to her. I lie, and I have never felt as far away from her as I do right now.
“What’s that I hear in the background?” I ask, to change the subject.
“Independence Day, with Will Smith. You should see this apartment, Magda. Papa’s got a big-screen TV, but he hasn’t got money for furniture yet.”
“When are you going to invite me to see it?” I ask, teasing, but it’s a little joke wrapped in barbed wire.
“Oh, you know . . . you know . . .” I can already feel Nadine pulling away, packaging herself up. Static howls and crackles across the line.
“Nadine, you never call. You never call me, you never call Élie, you never call any of us. We miss you, we miss the sound of your voice. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s not true,” Nadine says, sounding stung. “You don’t know, okay? There are things . . . You know I’m far away, baby. I’ll call you again demen-si-dye-vle.”
There is no demen; there is only demen-si-dye-vle. There is no tomorrow; there is only tomorrow-God-willing. My whole life I’ve been hearing demen-si-dye-vle, demen-si-dye-vle, and I’ve never really thought about it. To a lady selling green peas in the market: I can’t buy any pwa frans today; I’ll buy them demen-si-dye-vle, if they pay me. To a friend: I’ll come see you demen-si-dye-vle. I used to say those words out of habit because everyone did. Now I feel in my blood how fragile and unpredictable tomorrow is.
“I’ll call you demen-si-dye-vle, chouchou,” says Nadine again.
“I don’t believe you.” The words stun me even as they slip from my mouth, not because they’re angry but because they’re true. I don’t believe Nadine. “You’re never going to send for me. You never will.”
“Don’t do that to me,” Nadine pleads. “I miss you. You know Haiti is my home. Please, cheri—” and then, with a beep-beep, her phone card ends, and the call drops.
Suddenly severed from Nadine’s voice, I feel confused and unmoored, like a forgotten fishing boat bobbing in the tide. Her words ring in my ears: Haiti is my home. Where is my home? I was born in St. Juste but raised in Port-au-Prince; I don’t remember living anywhere else. Port-au-Prince’s streets and taptap routes and landmarks are the ones I know—even the landmarks that aren’t standing anymore except in our memories. The map of the city is the map of my experience. I’m afraid of riding donkeys and mules, and I can’t swim. But I’ve always known my people are moun Jeremi, that the foods we ate at home, the way we spoke, the place we felt we were of, if not from, is St. Juste and the mountains around Jérémie. I wonder if I, and all the other rural Haitians who had left their homes to seek a better life in the cities, have always been displaced people.
AS WE LEAVE CHURCH ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON after the regular service, Mackenson slips a folded-up piece of paper into my hand, slightly damp from his sweaty palm. I look up, a half-formed question on my lips, but Mackenson looks so shy, I don’t say anything at all.
Later, after I help Matant Marie-Lourdes sweep the house, I sneak out behind the pigsty, where no one will disturb me, and open the piece of paper. It has pale lines and a serrated edge, ripped out of a notebook. Mackenson’s handwriting is neat and careful, in blue ballpoint. His spelling is only so-so.
When I see you, I feel warm inside
When I see you, the planets colide
When I see you, I can’t help but grin
When I see you, I am saved from my sin.
When I hear your name, it is the most beautifull word
When I hear your voice, I imagine singing birds
When you are far, I’m filled with fear
That dissapears when you are near.
I wish my fingers could be the ribbons in your hair
I wish my very breath could be your air
I wish my arms could be the belt around your waist
I wish my kiss could be the sweetest thing you taste.
You are the sugar in the papaya juice I drink
You are the happiest idea I could ever think.
Folding up the paper and slipping it into my bra, I feel the blood rise to my face. I bite my bottom lip and think of Nadine, how she would often do that, not knowing whether or not to smile.
No boy has ever really liked me before. As soon as my breasts started to grow, men on the streets in Port-au-Prince started hissing, calling me “pretty little girl” and “mi amor” and trying to give me their phone numbers. I know perfectly well what it means to be wanted for sex, but I’ve never had something so silly and sweet handed to me before.
Mackenson is different from the boys in the capital, who start growing up early on the streets. Boys like Jimmy. So many of them have become hardened jokers, laughing without smiling, turning their anger, pain, and disappointment into cruelness. Mackenson has innocence to him. In some ways he is like a child, but in others—his agility with a machete, a hoe, or a fishing net, and his wisdom—he’s like a grown man. He is kind. I tell myself, He is kind, Magdalie. He doesn’t want to hurt you. And he is handsome enough, with his dimples and clear, soft skin. But his ears are a little big.
I don’t know what to do with this note. Half of me wants to run to Mackenson right now, and half of me wants to hide inside and never face him again. I suspect he might want to kiss me. If I went to him now, would he try to kiss me? Do I want him to kiss me?
I go back to the palm-covered kitchen, apart from the main house, where Joanne is helping her mother peel breadfruit for this afternoon’s tonmtonm. “I’ll help,” I say, and I grab a knife. They don’t know what I’ve got tucked in my blouse, next to my heart.
TODAY TONTON BENISOIT AND TONTON ÉLIE went fishing and brought home a basket of conch in their shells. When the lambi has nearly finished cooking in its sauce, Matant Marie-Lourdes gives me a taste. She tips the sauce and a little strip of lambi off her stirring spoon onto the heel of my palm. The sauce is spicy, salty, and delicious. The lambi is tender and sweet.
“Be careful with that lambi, Magdalie,” says Matant Marie-Lourdes with a shy, knowing smile.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, lambi heats you up! You don’t want to eat too much unless your boyfriend is nearby.”
All my blood rushes to my face. “What do you mean, Matant? I don’t have a boyfriend!”
Matant Marie-Lourdes laughs and laughs. I can’t tell if she’s teasing me or if she really knows something.
“Matant! Matant, it’s true. I’ve never had a boyfriend in my life!”
As the sun dips below the sea, Tonton Benisoit bends, tying knots in his fishing net. “Do you like it here?” he asks.
“Very much,” I say. “It’s so beautiful. The air is so clear and light.”
Tonton Benisoit nods. “This is our home. I feel more comfortable here, more like myself here, than I ever could in Port-au-Prince.” He cuts the rope with his knife. “What are you going to do when you go back?”
“I am going to school, Tonton. I’m going to go back to school.” My own words surprise me, but as I say them, I realize it’s the only thing I want, the only thing I can want. But admitting this scares me, too, because it means coming to peace with the fact that Nadine will never send for me, at least not anytime soon.
Tonton Benisoit sucks his teeth. “I wish I could help you, Magdalie.”
“I know.”
“But I can’t.”
“I know.”
“We barely get by as it is. I don’t make very much money, taking the boat to sell breadfruit and yams.”
“I know, Tonton. It’s okay. I’ll figure it out. Martelly’s promising free schools. Or else I’ll find a patron. Or . . . I’ll figure out someth
ing. I have to.” I speak with confidence I don’t feel, just to reassure him. “It’ll be all right.”
Shadows flicker across Tonton Benisoit in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp. His hands are hard and callused, his arms covered with faded machete scars. His body is thin and sinewy, at once muscular like a young person’s and buckled like an old person’s. Hardship and stress age people. I’ve seen it all my life in Port-au-Prince, too—the swift transformation of vibrant young people to old.
What would Manman have looked like if she had been so lucky as to grow old? I think she would have been a beautiful ti granmoun.
THE SUN DESCENDS AND SPARKLES ACROSS the deep blue sea as Mackenson and I sit in the shade of his family’s garden, snapping thin green kenèp skins with our front teeth and sucking the sweet pink-orange flesh off the stones, talking about nothing, making blades of grass whistle between our fingers. “Where were you, on January twelfth?” I ask.
“Playing dominoes,” he replies flatly. “They started dancing.”
As soon as he says this, I can see it: Mackenson and his cousins, in the shade of their kenèp tree, watching the dominoes rearrange themselves, chattering like teeth across the low table. Feeling the ground grumble beneath their bare feet. Watching the coconut palms sway.
“As it got dark, everyone stood together at the spots with the best cell phone signal, trying to call Port-au-Prince. We ran all the way to Saint Victor.” I can imagine: Tonton Benisoit sweating, his cell phone pressed against his fevered, frantic cheek, trying to get news of Manman, Nadine, and me. Matant Marie-Lourdes’s long fingers worrying the fraying edges of her sisal mat as her heart pounded, fearing that we were all dead.
Mackenson goes on. “But no one could get through. The radio was just static. We knew something terrible had happened, but we didn’t know what . . . We didn’t know how bad it was.” He pauses. “We were very afraid.”
It sounds strange, but as he says that, I feel sorry for him. It doesn’t seem real for me to think about what the quake felt like anywhere other than Port-au-Prince. In a place like St. Juste, on the tip of Haiti’s southern, outstretched arm, is as far from the capital as you can get and still be in the country, where the quake was just a shiver.
“You know, I went to Port-au-Prince once,” Mackenson announces.
“So?” I ask.
“Pòtoprens . . . ,” Mackenson half sings. “I hated it.”
As soon as he looks at me, he regrets what he’s said. I feel my face blaze with defensive anger. “It’s not that bad. There are good things there, too.”
“I just mean . . . ,” Mackenson gets flustered, then pauses. “I don’t know what I mean.”
“Oh, you’re just another peasant who thinks that Port-au-Prince is a city of criminals that rots people’s principles,” I sputter. “You think we’re all a bunch of vagabonds and thieves. But you’ll have to go there someday, if you ever want to finish secondary school and go to university.”
“Then maybe I won’t finish school. Why do I need education? I can be a farmer.” He spits a kenèp pit onto the grass.
“Don’t you want a better life?” I ask.
“Port-au-Prince isn’t a better life. Here, I can swim in the ocean. I can bathe in the river. I can eat my own fruit. I’m not a slave.”
“Oh, you’re being an idiot. You’ll just end up another malere like your father and your mother and your grandfather and—and God forbid that you ever get sick, because you’ll die before they can carry you down the mountain to the nearest clinic!” I hear the hypocrisy in my own voice, and part of me wants to laugh—I’m making Tonton Élie’s argument all over again, and Mackenson’s making mine. But something about Mackenson’s disdain for Port-au-Prince makes me want to defend it— maybe not the city, but the people in it, the people who still believe in it, the people who still want to believe that it holds promise for them.
Mackenson looks angry now. “Do you really think life is so much better in Port-au-Prince, Magda? How many people left the countryside looking for a better life and have died there instead? Eh? Who’s being an idiot?”
So many people from this poor and lovely mountain have gone to look for a better life in the capital: the young people who went for high school or university, the men and women who went to repair old radios and TV sets or sell fried snacks or vegetables or pèpè on the streets . . . and people like Manman, who went to work as servants in other people’s houses. They died there, never to return home.
“Here, we’re never hungry,” Mackenson continues. “Even if we don’t have a single gourde. In Port-au-Prince, you’ve got to have money for everything.”
How many times have I drunk sugar-water to stop my stomach from growling? I want to punch Mackenson in the teeth for being right and stubborn and wrong, but instead I seize his wrist tightly. “There’s always a future, Mackenson! You can’t just sit and wait for better things to happen to you, saying you’ll begin demen-si-dye-vle.”
Mackenson pulls me toward him; I do not let go of his wrist. “Eh, byen. Then I’ll start now.” And he leans into me and kisses me.
The first kiss sends a stab of breathless panic through me. I think of Jimmy’s heaviness and filmy, unrelenting tongue. This is not Jimmy, I tell myself. Mackenson is a good guy. Slowly I relax a little, but I’m still nervous and self-conscious. I’m kissing someone! I’m kissing someone! This kiss isn’t like Jimmy’s. It is soft and wet. I’m aware of the kenèp fibers stuck between my teeth. The second kiss is better. I let my eyes close and let my worries and fears be carried away. Mackenson’s lips are very soft and his mouth inquisitive—as though he wants to explore me but is careful not to go too far. There is no urgency and no acquisition. It’s like I’ve just drunk something very warm, like hot ginger tea that heats me up from the pit of my stomach to my face. I hold Mackenson’s bottom lip lightly with my teeth and, for a moment, have a sudden desire to swallow him whole like a snake.
Later we sit together. I rest my head on Mackenson’s shoulder as we look out over the sea.
“I’ll always protect you,” Mackenson says suddenly. “You know, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Nothing bad can happen to you as long as I’m here.” His voice is so earnest.
I squeeze his hand. “Mèsi.” Just then, I love him for saying it, even though I know it isn’t true. No one can control the ground beneath our feet. No one can promise to protect anyone in this world—not absolutely, not forever. But I thank him for his lovable lie.
Maybe . . . maybe that’s what Nadine was doing, too, even if she didn’t know it, when she promised to bring me with her. In order to protect them, we tell all kinds of lies to the people we love.
TODAY IS THE EIGHTH DAY OF MANMAN’S prayers, and tomorrow we will liberate her soul from captivity under the sea.
I’m at the cove with Mackenson, where the sea is calm and flat. In the distance, a man in a dugout canoe tosses his fishing net into the water. The sunlight glints off the rolling waves like shining silver. Mackenson peels off his T-shirt and pants until he is wearing a ragged pair of basketball shorts. Shirtless, he doesn’t look like a boy at all. All those days of walking up mountains, climbing trees, and wielding hoes and pickaxes have given him the body of a man. His arms are muscular and contoured; his torso is narrow but powerful.
I look away when I realize I’m staring at him.
“Just get into the water,” Mackenson says. “It’s not deep.”
“I don’t know how to swim. I didn’t grow up diving for conch and making fishing nets like you did.”
“It’s really easy. And you’ll float without trying. Just float and kick your feet, and you’ll be fine.”
I slip out of my blouse and jeans and fold them and place them on a piece of driftwood. I’m wearing an orange bikini that used to be Nadine’s, which is too big for me now. By the time my toes touch the water, Mackenson is already way out in the surf, diving and surfacing like a fish. The low, gentle waves rush up
and over my feet, leaving trails of white foam. “Come on, Magdalie!” he calls. “Just kick your feet!”
“Uh-uh. Never!” I yell back. “Swimming is so natural to you, you don’t even know how to teach it.” I lower myself into the shallow water near the shore, where I can sit and the water comes up no higher than my waist. It is sun-warm and sky blue. I lie back. I didn’t bring a shower cap. My hair will get salty, and I’ll have to wash it. It doesn’t matter. You’ll float without trying. Slowly I let myself drift away from shore. Water fills my ears, and all I can hear is the deep inhale-exhale of the tide. The sea is salty, and my body feels weightless in it. Mackenson is right: I float.
Did Manman ever swim here as a child? I close my eyes to the bright sun, and the sounds of the sea sing to me. Was she ever held and rocked by these waves?
I float. The water is so warm and lulling. The sun is hot, like a hand on my face. I imagine my body slipping away. I don’t know how long I float, so long I stop caring whether I float or sink. And I imagine: Lasirèn, the mermaid spirit of the sea, comes and takes my hand. She pulls me away, under the water. My hair streams out behind me. It is a beautiful place, full of wonders. She takes me under the water, anba dlo, to where the lwa and the ancestors are, where all dead souls go, to where Manman waits for me.
A hand grips my arm. It’s Mackenson. “Magdalie!” he shouts. I try to stand up, but I’m too far out, farther out than I ever thought I would go. My feet can’t find the bottom, and the water around my legs is dark and cold. There might be sharks down there. There might be mermaids down there. My head slips under, and I cough on salt water. Mackenson keeps hold of my arm and pulls me back toward shore.
“I didn’t think you’d go out that far!” he exclaims.
The water grows shallow and warm again. Mackenson looks worried, the water slick on his skin, sparkling in his hair.
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