Hold Tight, Don't Let Go

by Laura Rose Wagner

  “I’ll take care of him, I promise,” said Safira, as though she knew what was in my mind. “He’s going to have a good life.”

  There will always be children. There will be children whose parents work in other people’s houses or cross the border to cut cane, whose fathers take a boat to search for life, whose mothers work the streets selling food or clothes or vegetables or their bodies. There will always be children whose parents love them so much, they’d give them away and let them go. In a just world, love could keep them all from sinking.

  “I’ll go hungry so he can eat if I need to. I will. And I’ll send him to preschool, and by the time he’s older, primary school will be free . . .”

  His tiny pink hand gripped her finger as he slept, and she studied it with such fierce intimacy that I knew she was making a covenant. Here’s all I can promise you: that I’ll try to be the hero of your one small life.

  Safira’s mother came in and gave me a tin cup of coffee and a packet of Guarina crackers. “Next time you come, I’ll cook you a real meal. Do you eat salami?”

  “When are you coming back?” asked Safira. “When will I see you again?”

  “Soon.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “No, I will. I will.”

  “And you’ll come to his baptism.”

  “Yes, I’ll come.”

  “Okay. I believe you.” And Safira bent over her baby boy and began, quietly, to sing.

  Dodo, do ti pitit manman,

  Si ou pa dodo,

  dyab la va manje w,

  Dodo dodo ti pitit manman,

  Dyab la va manje w.

  Sleep, mama’s little one.

  If you don’t sleep,

  The devil will eat you.

  Sleep, mama’s little one

  Sleep, the devil will eat you.

  WE ARE PREPARING TO LEAVE THE CAMP behind. They say that soon—though we don’t know if it’s weeks or months—an NGO is going to come and give every tent $500 US and then break the tents down with hammers. Every day now Tonton Élie goes out looking for a room we can rent. It will work out okay for us. I refuse to think it won’t work out for us.

  We got a kitten to catch rats and cockroaches. He is brown and gray with the stripes of a miniature tiger. Tonton Élie said we’d just call him Mimi, but I said no, we had to give him a real name, so I’m calling him Kirikou after the cartoon, because he is small but brave. I say, “Kiri-kiri-kiri-kou!” He says, “Miaou” with his bright pink tongue. He sleeps in my bed with me, curled up against my chest.

  I hear from Nadine sometimes. I go to the Internet café, when I have some money, and log on to Facebook. Nadou posts photos of herself, in Miami, standing on the beach with people I don’t know.

  She’ll write, Ki jan ou ye, bou? How r u? on my wall.

  And I’ll write back, I’m fine, chouchou, wi. I’m not bad. It’s easier over Facebook, close yet distant, nothing like a phone call at all.

  Nadine is present and not present. She is connected to my life, but it is not the same thing at all. I know, now, not to ask her about anything else—not to ask her when she will send for me, when she will get my visa. I turn off my heart and pretend that I haven’t waited all these months for her to mention it to me.

  I WAS HEADING DOWN ROUTE DELMAS LATE this morning, trying to get to Wharf Jérémie to pick up some white yams and salt fish that Tonton Benisoit was sending with my cousin Jonas on the boat.

  I was trying to flag down a taptap to Kalfou Avyasyon when a car stopped behind me and I heard someone call, “Magdalie!” The voice was instantly familiar, but the person’s name wouldn’t coalesce in my mind. “Magda-lie!” I turned around.

  Mme Faustin had gotten out of the car. A sudden apparition. Her eyes popped and burned like a demon’s. “Oh-oh, Magdalie. You’re ignoring me like a dog in the street?”

  I wanted to escape and couldn’t. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world than right there, in front of Mme Faustin. Her voice was huge, her presence was huge, her chest jutted like a general’s. I stood gasping and gaping like a dying fish flopping around in the bottom of a canoe.

  “Bonjour, madame,” I said. My stomach hurt.

  “Are you in school?”

  “No.”

  “Where is your sister?”

  “In Miami.”

  “You never come see me. Ungrateful child.” Her lips pursed into a sour, fleshy frown, and I thought she might strike me. “You never come see me. After all I ever did for you people.” Her eyes shone with true pain. I think: Crybaby.

  But I don’t say anything. What we always learned— what Manman taught us, without ever telling us in words—was to keep your mouth shut and your head down. That’s how it has to be, when you’re the servant’s family and they can send you away whenever they want, when they can take away everything, when your home and your life and even your body were never really your own in the first place.

  You’re free, Magdalie, I told myself. Magdalie, aren’t you free?

  I made my voice perfectly calm and smooth, like boiled milk that’s been run through a strainer. “You’re wrong, Madame Faustin.”

  I was standing there alone on the sidewalk, facing her, but I was not alone. I clenched my hot fist, and I visualized everyone I’ve ever loved, alive and dead, holding hands and sending strength and patience to me. They formed an invisible chain of souls and became the stuff of protection and God.

  “You are wrong. We’re the ones who lost someone. You were supposed to come see us. You were supposed to come to our house and see us. That’s how it works.”

  Mme Faustin’s face quivered, in anger or despair. “I miss her,” Mme Faustin whispered, her eyes shimmering like melting ice. “I miss her.”

  “Then why didn’t you treat her better? Why did you keep her on her feet all day, even when she was sick? Why did you call her to your room at all hours of the night, for whatever little tiny nothing reason? Why did you never pay her enough to have a better life than she had? Why did you say she was your family, but you made her walk behind you, carrying your handbag in church like she was your slave?”

  I didn’t feel angry as I said any of this. I’d stopped feeling it. I could have been reciting multiplication tables. I don’t have anything to prove, and I’m as bare as bones.

  Bruised fury flashed through her eyes. “Yolette was my family. I always took care of her. I always took care of you and your sister. I lost my home that day, too. I lost everything I had. Magdalie, why do you hate me so much?”

  Mme Faustin didn’t look so much like a general now. She looked old and sad, older than she did two years ago, as if her flesh had pulled away from the inside of her skin.

  “No. I’m the one who lost everything I had.” But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t really true. For a long time I thought I had; I thought I’d lost everything. I saw my dreams stripped away, one by one, peeled off and tossed into the gutter like the petals off a dead flower. I will never go to America. I will never see Nadine again. I will never go back to school. But I’ve still got Tonton Élie and everyone in St. Juste. I have Mackenson, and I have Safira, too. I’ve got my memories, which I float on and through all day. I’ve still got Manman and Nadou as they live in my mind: the ghosts I love. And I’ve still got myself.

  “Why do you hate me so much, Magdalie?” asked Mme Faustin again. “After all I’ve done for you, why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you, Madame. I just don’t want to see you.”

  And I walked away. I had nothing more to say. I jumped on the next taptap for Kalfou Avyasyon, squeezed in next to an old man and a woman with a baby, and rode it all the way down Delmas. Past the Dominican beauty salons and the cracked old Sogebank building, through this breathing, shifting city. I rode down to Avyasyon and got off the taptap, slipping through the crowds, making my way to the wharf. I was invisible, another anonymous shadow on the street.

  Wharf Jérémie is always mayhem when the boats come in, sea-green
and creaking. These ferries! Back and forth they go, from Jérémie to Port-au-Prince. They are dangerous, but they are our lifeblood.

  A hot, pressing swirl of people jostled forward to unload, sell, bargain, receive. If I could find the right kind of coconut, I’d buy one for Michlove as a peace offering. But my first priority was finding Jonas and picking up the yams and fish. A big salted sunfish. There will always be these small moments of pleasure. Small, good things. I should content myself with them and stop asking God for too much.

  I get home late in the afternoon, arms aching but pretty pleased with myself. My plastic woven sack bulges with big yams and some big green plantains and not one but two salted fish (a dorad and a jofi, which I love because it’s just got one big long bone you can pull out all at once). I’m happy because we have food, and because if Tonton Benisoit has enough yams and salted fish to send this much to us, he must be having an okay season—the rains enough but not too much. And there is something else, too: a bunch of juicy kenèp, picked by Mackenson from his tree and sent to Port-au-Prince just for me.

  Tonton Élie is half working, half watching a soccer game with the volume on low, Chelsea versus somebody, when I return. Not Real Madrid or the volume would be super high. It’s background noise as he pries the back off an old radio and starts prodding around inside.

  I sit down and wipe the sweat from my brow with my handkerchief. I always feel filthy when I get home, covered in dust and sweat, but it’s not good to bathe with cold water when you’re already hot. Tonton Élie cracks his knuckles expectantly. “I have good news for you, Magdalie.”

  “Yeah? What have you got for me, uncle-of-mine?” I pick up Yolène and bounce her in my arms. She squeals with delight, wrinkling her little nose and showing her four tiny teeth. She reaches out a hand, and I clamp it between my lips and pretend to bite it.

  He wordlessly reaches into his jeans pocket, draws out an envelope, and hands it to me. I take it, confused, and hold it in my cupped hands as if I don’t know what it is or what to do with it.

  “Well, open it, Magda.”

  “What is it?” The small package feels heavy, solid and compact, a little soft. I know exactly what it feels like. But I don’t want to begin to hope that it’s what it feels like.

  I open it. And it’s what I think it is.

  It’s a wad of money. Twenty-five 1,000-gourde bills, rolled up and bound with an orange rubber band. I’ve never held this much money in my life. I don’t think very many Haitians have.

  “It’s money for you to go to school,” says Tonton Élie. “Magdalie, you will go to school.”

  “Oh, no, Tonton,” I say. This money could buy food for us for months. Enough rice to fill the bedroom. Milk for Yolène. Cooking oil. Dried beans. Charcoal. Medicine. Or . . . I could go buy cosmetics at the Dominican border and sell them for a profit. We could do so many different things with this money. “I couldn’t. Oh, let’s buy food with it instead.”

  “It was given to you on the condition that you use it to go to school.”

  I narrow my eyes at Tonton Élie. There’s something suspicious in his tone and his face. It’s the same strange, evasive expression he got when he told me about the flowers on the place Manman was buried behind Mme Faustin’s house—

  “Ohhh . . .” My breath comes out in a punctured sigh. “Oh, Madame Faustin.”

  Tonton Élie nods and shrugs. “She stopped by when you were down at the wharf.”

  “But, Tonton, there’s so much we could do with this much money.”

  “Magdalie.” Now his tone is severe. “You are still a child. You belong in school.”

  I am not a child anymore. Still, images begin to flood my mind before I can stop myself—all my old, dead dreams, reanimated. I see myself ironing my uniform, walking to school, getting my black shoes shined. I see myself studying chemistry and French. I see myself in a few years, taking the rhéto and philo exams. All these things I had stopped daring to dream about. Now I know for certain I am not the girl I once was. A year ago, I could think only of Miami, of Nadine, of escaping the world I knew. Sometimes it’s easier to have a dream that remains ungraspable, just out of reach. But maybe those dreams stop you from living in the world right in front of your eyes.

  But why? Why is Mme Faustin doing this?

  Is she giving me the money because she loved Manman—or even because she loves me? Or is she doing it because doing this one good thing for me allows her to love herself? I remember her face as I last saw it, older, brimming with worry and sorrow. Pity engraved into the lines between her eyebrows, the lines at the corners of her mouth. Does she feel sorry for me or sorry for herself? Is she doing this because it is the right thing to do, or because she wants to absolve herself for Manman’s death and how she treated her all those years?

  And maybe it doesn’t matter. Hate the dog, but admit its teeth are white. She is sad, and mean-hearted, and alone, and for a moment, I pity her enough to forgive her and to set myself free. Next month, I will be back in school. I will be back on the path to the future. Be thankful, Magdalie, I tell myself. Let go. Be happy. Let yourself be happy.

  It seems that a lot of people want me to believe in fairness and morality. That’s what we hear in church, that if you follow the rules and accept your lot, and if you do right by others rather than follow your own pleasure, you’ll be rewarded (in the next life, if not in this one). It’s what we hear on the silly public-service announcements that the government puts on the TV and radio: Ti Joel washes his hands, and he doesn’t get cholera; smart, aware people build their houses out of good materials, and they don’t die in earthquakes. It’s what the soap operas show—whatever happens in the middle, the villains never win. It seems everyone is telling me that if you just make enough of an effort, you’ll deserve and find a happy ending.

  I don’t suppose I’ve ever really believed it works that way. It feels as if life is just like playing the lotto against someone who’s rigged the game. But we keep playing anyway—pooling our coins every week in hope of an eventual payout, even though we know the system is against us.

  I don’t need a miracle; I don’t need a swimming pool or a lot of power or money. I don’t need a new car or a Whirlpool washing machine. I don’t need to be better than anyone else. I just need a chance to gather up my wishes, to write my own ending, in which everything is the way it’s supposed to be.

  JANUARY 2020

  An Ending, by Magdalie Jean-Baptiste

  TWO YOUNG WOMEN STAND AND LOOK AT their reflection in the mirror. Nadine leans close and makes her eyes wide to put on mascara (she’s always been afraid of poking herself in the eye), and Magdalie stands farther back, applying lip gloss with her little finger. They are surprised to see how much they still look alike after all these years. Magdalie had imagined that Nadine would have grown as fat as an American missionary. But there they are, still: same soft, dark skin, same eyes, same gap between their teeth. They can still wear each other’s clothes.

  “What was the best thing about Miami?” Magdalie asks.

  Nadine thinks for a moment. “There wasn’t very much trash on the streets,” she says. “And there wasn’t chaos or unrest. There were drive-through hamburger restaurants. But I always missed Haiti. Haiti is my home.” She wipes away a few specks of black mascara that have smudged under her eye. “And I missed my family.”

  “What was the worst thing?”

  “Too many Haitians,” Nadine says immediately, then laughs. “No. That’s a joke. The worst thing was feeling poor. Because in Haiti, so many people are poor, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. And there’s always a way to degaje, to get by, even when you have nothing. But misery in the United States is harder than misery in Haiti. You feel like it’s your fault for being poor. And if you don’t have any money, you can’t eat. You won’t have a house. If you fall, there’s nowhere to go and no one to catch you. Everyone back in Haiti assumes that once you’ve arrived lòt bò, that it’s a good life, that you’re
living well. And it feels so shameful to tell anyone that it’s not true.”

  “Have you come back to Haiti for good?”

  “Yes. I’ll stay here. You know, I was just there to get my nursing degree and come back. I’ll work here.”

  “Nurse Nadine.” Magdalie smiles. “I thought you would never come back. I thought you had abandoned us forever.”

  Nadine looks at Magdalie, her eyes shining. “Sista,” she says, “I can’t lie to you. There were times I didn’t call for months. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Hearing your voice hurt too much. I felt as though I couldn’t do enough for you. I missed you so much, and it felt worse to only have a little bit of you and not have the real thing. Sometimes I’d pretend in my head that I was a different person, someone who didn’t have ties to anyone in the world. Like I was an actress in a movie. It was easier.”

  “I missed you every day,” says Magdalie quietly. “Sometimes I hated you.”

  “Have you ever loved anyone so much you couldn’t stand it?” Nadine asks. “That’s what it was like.”

  The country has changed. Magdalie had never dared to hope for so much. Now she looks at the road and thinks: I hardly recognize it, it is so clean. Where garbage and sewage and cloudy, charcoal-stained water once flowed, there are now low, eager saplings.

  The public plazas and parks are green once again, filled with children playing and young couples kissing. Vendors sell cold soft drinks and ice cream bars out of clean, modern carts, and old people with canes take slow afternoon strolls. The air is dustless and clear.

  The Haitian state demanded reparations from France and, at last, received them. They demanded damages from the United States and the international community and, at last, received them. Most of the old rubble was hauled into distant mountains or dropped into the sea, but some of it was saved. In various places throughout the city—downtown, on the Champ de Mars, on Place Boyer, on every university and school campus, in the courtyards of hospitals and churches—are monuments to the earthquake victims, constructed by Haitian artists from the broken cement and twisted metal wreckage. And out in the hills to the north of the capital, where the dead were buried by the tens of thousands, is a museum commemorating the quake. A stone wall has engraved upon it all the names that could be found (Nadine and Magdalie’s manman’s name is among them). There are photos of before and after, and photos of the dead before they were dead (when they were smiling or serious, but, in whatever case, when they were alive). Photos, shot from above, of the camps, spreading like patchwork seas. And there are displays, too—a child’s school desk, broken when the roof fell. A pair of tattered, dusty leather shoes. A pair of women’s jeans, ripped and covered in long-dried blood. Drawings by children who once lived in camps. And everyone is forced to remember, and no one will ever forget, and the dead at last will forgive.