Island on the Edge of the World

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “It is nothing to be troubled about,” Mambo Michèle said. “Èrzulie Dantòr asks little in return for her blessings. She is fiery, and she is tough, but she will do anything to help a child. If you need the courage to fight,” the mambo continued, “she is the one to go to.”

  The mambo was looking at Senzey as she spoke. Lizbeth noticed the girl lowering her eyes to the table.

  “Well, that’s all fine and dandy. But we still don’t have a clue about where to find that child. And Charlie is still about as welcome as a wet shoe up there on the mountain. So where on God’s green earth does that leave us?”

  The five of them sat spooning up the last of the griot, sipping their water, mopping their damp brows, the only sound coming from the squeaky fan above.

  It was the mambo who finally spoke, and when she did, it was in a rush of Creole to Senzey. Lizbeth watched as Senzey stood and bolted from the table.

  “What was that all about?”

  Mambo Michèle shrugged her shoulders. “I was only trying to give her some encouragement. That is all. To tell her she is lucky to have support from people like you. And I told her a saying I heard many times from my mother, something I thought would be of help.”

  “What’s that?” Lizbeth asked.

  A delicious, cool breeze rolled across the table.

  “Tete pa janm twò lou pou mèt li.”

  “And what does that mean?” Bea asked.

  “Something like ‘breasts are never too heavy for those who have them’.”

  Bea laughed. “Easy for them to say.”

  “What the heck?” Now Lizbeth was sure they had all gone nuts.

  “I think,” Robert said, “it is saying that one must always assume one’s own responsibilities, even if it is a difficult thing to do.”

  30

  When Charlie pulled up to the hotel, returning from the orphanages with the church women, the first thing she saw was Lizbeth practically tripping down the stairs toward her.

  “Whoa there, careful,” she said as the woman fell into her arms.

  “She’s gone, Charlie. Senzey’s missing!”

  “Hold on a sec. What’s going on?”

  “She was there at lunch with us, but now she’s just up and disappeared!”

  Charlie checked her watch. “Maybe she went to do an errand, or take a walk.”

  Lizbeth shook her head. “Nope. She took her things with her. That girl wasn’t fixing to come back. How’re we ever gonna find her?”

  “Did she leave a note? Anything?”

  Lizbeth fumbled with her pocket. “Just her little sketchbook.” She handed the spiral-bound pad to Charlie. The pages were covered with pencil drawings, doodles, and half-finished renderings that were signs of some serious practice. Flipping through back to front, Charlie stopped. Looking up at her from the paper was a sweet portrait of Lizbeth, her eyes shining bright, and with a smile that couldn’t help but cause Charlie to smile herself. On the page facing it was a drawing of a young man, with those same eyes, that exact same smile.

  “It’s gonna get dark out before you know it. I’m worried sick.” Lizbeth’s eyes shifted down the driveway toward the street.

  “Senzey knows her way around. She’ll be fine.”

  “But why wouldn’t she tell us where she was off to?”

  By nightfall, Charlie, too, began to worry. Of course Senzey knew how to take care of herself, but Lizbeth was a wreck. And Charlie feared that the longer they waited, the more difficult it might be to find her. That’s when she turned to Mackenson for help. “Please ask around your neighborhood,” she told him over the phone. “Find out if anyone has seen her.”

  It wasn’t until around ten o’clock that Mackenson finally called back. He’d found Senzey walking, alone, in Cité Soleil. She was in a bad way.

  Charlie ignored Mackenson’s advice that she should wait until morning to come to his house. “It is not safe to be driving in this city at night,” he insisted. “Not even just for a woman alone, but for anyone.”

  Once on the road, Charlie did start to have second thoughts. It was pitch dark, with no streetlights anywhere. The roads were deserted, save for the few spots where small crowds had gathered, for one reason or another. She drove slowly, leaning into the windshield, stopping frequently to check the directions Mackenson had provided along with a warning not to deviate one bit from what he told her.

  Suddenly her headlights revealed a commotion in the street ahead. Charlie slowed even more as she approached, and saw that it was a policeman signaling her to keep moving. Behind him was his partner, standing over a body lying in the gutter, motionless.

  She was relieved to find Mackenson waiting for her outside his house, waving her in with his lit cell phone as if she were a pilot taxiing on the tarmac. From what she could make out in the dark, most of the neighborhood leading to Mackenson’s place was one of the most desperate she’d seen all week—shacks made from cardboard and metal, homes that looked like they were constructed out of scraps from the dump. But now Charlie found herself parked in front of a tidy cinderblock house, painted a cool green that reminded her of ice-cream.

  Mackenson led her through a small concrete patio, and hesitated before opening the front door. “I have to tell you something before we go in. My job was not all that we lost in the earthquake.”

  It wasn’t until Charlie was introduced to Mackenson’s wife that she understood what he meant. In the darkness of the candlelit room the woman stood with her armpits resting on two crutches, her one leg planted firmly on the floor.

  “This is my wife, Fabiola. Fabiola, sa a se Charlie.”

  The woman leaned on one crutch and held out her hand. Charlie felt a warmth in her handshake that seemed to come from deep in her soul.

  Charlie took in the room around her. The walls were bare, save for a large, mahogany cross, and a clock that seemed to have stopped doing its job long ago. A looming credenza and a solid rectangular dining table with six matching chairs were the only furniture in the room, except for a chalkboard that stood in one corner, its surface curiously covered with numbers and sums.

  “Where’s Senzey?” she asked.

  Mackenson pulled up a chair for Fabiola, and pointed toward one of the two sheer curtains that separated the room they were in from the rest of the small house. Charlie imagined there must be a kitchen through one of the doorways, and that the other led to a bedroom.

  “She is finally resting. When I found her, it was like she was in a trance, just walking, her eyes not telling me anything. I asked her if something happened, but she wouldn’t talk. I could see that she had been crying, because her face was stained with tears and dust. I brought her here, and she still wouldn’t talk. Fabiola tried to give her some ginger tea, but she would not drink it.”

  “What could have happened to her?” Charlie wondered out loud.

  Mackenson shook his head. “I don’t know. Finally, Fabiola got her to lie down, to try to sleep.”

  “Thank you, Mackenson,” Charlie said. “Thank you both.”

  Fabiola stood at the sound of a cry from behind the curtain, and returned to the room with a skinny young girl in a nightgown trailing behind her.

  “You have kids?” Charlie asked, suddenly embarrassed by how little she knew of Mackenson’s life.

  “Yes. This is our daughter, Rozalie. And we are also raising the two sons of my cousin.”

  Charlie’s eyes went to the chalkboard.

  “I am teaching them what I can,” Mackenson said.

  Charlie noted a defensiveness in his tone. How could she not have known this, with all that talk about how parents didn’t have the money for education. Never once had it occurred to her that Mackenson might be in that very situation.

  “Maybe the next session,” he added. “We are trying.”

  Charlie watched Mackenson take his wife’s crutches and help her settle back into the chair, where the sleepy child hung her arms around her mother’s neck and curled up onto her la
p as if they were one.

  “I found them.”

  Charlie looked up to see Senzey standing in the doorway. Her eyes were cold, her posture limp. The striped jersey dress she’d been wearing when they left Jacmel now looked soiled, and seemed to hang on her slender frame like a sack.

  Charlie went to Senzey’s side. “Who?” she asked as she led her to a chair. “Who did you find?”

  “The people. The man and the woman who took my baby.”

  “The baby-finders?” Mackenson asked.

  Senzey’s words came out flat, as though squeezed of their feeling. “I walked all over looking for them, going first to the house where they lived in Cité Soleil, where they took me a few times. Nobody was there. Then I went to the places they used to take me. To the clinic, where they first met me outside. They were nowhere. Finally, I went back to the house, and waited in front, to see if they would come home. And they did.”

  “Where is he?” Charlie asked. “Where’s Lukson?”

  She watched as Senzey’s gaze turned to the sleeping girl in Fabiola’s lap. A tear began its path down her cheek as she spoke. “My baby—they told me—they think my baby did not survive.”

  31

  The three women stood in the morning sunlight, waiting for the gates of the lime-green cinderblock building to open.

  “What kind of a hospital is this, not open at night?” Lizbeth asked. “What, folks are supposed to need their help only by the light of day?”

  Charlie could see that Lizbeth was having a hard time accepting this latest blow. She’d been all business when Charlie had arrived back at the hotel with Senzey, pouring herself into fussing over the girl, doing anything she could to try to avoid feeling the pain that must have come from hearing what Senzey had to say. She’d jumped at the chance to go with them to the hospital, to have a concrete task on which to focus.

  It was Mackenson who had encouraged Charlie to take Senzey back to the place where the baby was born, to try to get the full story, to maybe find out where the child was buried, so that Senzey might at least be able to properly grieve. It is important, he insisted. After the earthquake, so many nameless bodies disappeared, carted away in trucks to be dumped into mass graves. People were still suffering from the loss as if it were yesterday. It should not have to be that way, this time, for her.

  He had also explained to Charlie just how common the story the baby-finders had told Senzey was. The baby had only made it for two days, they said, never leaving the hospital. Babies dying soon after birth was not uncommon in Haiti, Mackenson told her.

  Finally the doors to the hospital were opened. Once inside, Charlie saw Lizbeth’s tight mask drop, her eyes falling on the stained mattresses of the gurneys lining the halls, the used syringes discarded into open bins, the floors spattered here and there with what she could only assume was dried blood. Lizbeth held her hand to her nose, to block out the stench of human waste that filled the place like a sour perfume.

  Senzey looked haunted by being there. They followed her down a long hallway as she led them to the ward she remembered as the place where she’d given birth. She poked her head in the door and slowly looked around, as if she might find some trace of her lost child in the crowded room. Charlie peered over her shoulder, rolling her eyes at the irony of the plastic shower curtains embossed with beach scenes and palm trees that separated one little cubicle from the next.

  She turned to see a woman dressed in white rushing down the hall toward them, alerted by the presence of the two blans. In a torrent of Creole she began to question Senzey. Charlie heard Senzey reply and recognized Lukson’s name. The woman shook her head and continued down the hall. Charlie could sense the chaos building as the corridors filled with people. Senzey was stopping anyone and everyone who looked remotely official to ask about her baby. No one seemed to have an answer.

  It wasn’t until they were about to leave when Charlie noticed a young nurse do a double take at the sight of Senzey’s face. Senzey seemed to do the same back at her. They stopped. They talked. Senzey’s brow became wrinkled with confusion.

  “What? What’s going on?” Lizbeth asked, looking as though she were about to burst. “What’s she saying to you?”

  “She remembers me,” Senzey said. “She remembers my drawings. And she remembers my baby. She was the one who stayed with me while he was being born. She held my hand, and she told me to give him a name. She says she would be surprised if Lukson did not make it. He was healthy and fine, just like I remember him, the last time she saw him. She says that maybe my baby is alive.”

  The car felt like it was filled with electricity as the three women sat, stuck in traffic worse than Charlie had ever seen it. It was all stop and go on the route through the city and back to the hotel, where they were headed to try to figure out their next move. She didn’t dare risk a short cut, and instead chose to concentrate on the market stands and painted storefronts she’d come to rely on as landmarks to find her way around.

  They turned left and crawled down a street Charlie thought she recognized from her outing with the church ladies. As they neared the low cinderblock building she remembered from their visit, traffic slowed nearly to a halt. Charlie noticed a flash of yellow in the rearview mirror. It was a truck, inching its way around her, pulling past them to come to a stop on the other side of the street. The traffic came to a standstill. She slid down in her seat.

  “What? What is wrong?” Senzey asked, craning her neck to see for herself.

  Charlie pointed to the truck, her stomach lurching as she spied the logo on the front passenger door. She truly thought she might be sick.

  “So? It’s a truck,” Senzey said.

  Through her window, Charlie could see the driver’s-side door of the truck opening. She slouched even lower in the seat, waiting for those two pointy cowboy boots to cross the street toward them.

  It wasn’t until the approaching figure was practically up against her front bumper that Charlie realized who it was. On the face beneath the wide-brimmed hat the eyelids were a little puffier, the freckled skin a little more drawn, but there was no doubt about it. It was her mother. Her mother, who was rushing toward the door of the orphanage as if she owned the place, leading a small girl by the hand. Charlie felt as though she’d been spun around a million times.

  And in a flash her mother was back, alone, flying across the street and into the yellow truck, its engine roaring to life.

  Charlie sprang into action without thinking, cutting off the oncoming wall of traffic to a blast of honking horns, forcing an awkward U-turn as she jammed her way into the jumble of cars and motorbikes and tap taps heading the other way, to secure a spot two car-lengths behind her mother.

  “What the heck are you doing?” Lizbeth asked, peering out from behind her fingers. “You’re gonna get us killed!”

  Charlie kept the yellow truck in her sight, riding the bumper of the Toyota directly in front of her to block anyone else from cutting in. The streets were teeming with pedestrians, making the going even slower as they darted in and out of the traffic. Charlie had no plan for what she was going to do once she caught up with her mother. All she knew is that she couldn’t stop following her.

  “Just bear with me,” she asked of the others as she inched the car forward. “There’s something I need to do. I’ll explain later.”

  When the Toyota made a turn, Charlie found herself just one car-length away from her mother, a battered SUV sandwiched between them. Charlie felt as though the city was swelling around her, the crowd growing denser, the traffic closing in on all sides. She opened the window. The traffic had once again come to almost a complete stop. She closed her eyes for a quick moment, trying to ease the nausea that was building inside her. They flew open again when the car jerked with the movement of the bumper being tapped from behind.

  “Watch it!” Lizbeth yelled.

  But Charlie didn’t react. Through the windshield she saw her mother edging her way around a tap tap and turning down
a side street toward who knows where. Charlie rested her head on the steering wheel. They were boxed in, stuck in place, unable to move an inch.

  “What is going on?” Lizbeth’s voice was crackling with fear.

  Charlie looked up to see a sea of pedestrians rushing toward them, motorbikes pivoting and heading back in the direction they had come, as if a tide had suddenly turned. Drivers were leaning out of the windows of their cars for a better view.

  “I don’t know.” She rolled back the sunroof and stood on her seat. About forty yards ahead, she spied the problem. The intersection was littered with garbage piled high. Charlie watched a mob of young men running around, rolling tires into the mess. Suddenly flames began shooting up like a fiery curtain, blocking the spectacle from view.

  “What’s that god-awful smell?” Lizbeth cried out.

  Charlie sat down and closed the sunroof. “Rubber. They’re burning tires.”

  “It is a demonstration. They are angry about the government taking money that was meant to help the people,” Senzey explained.

  “A riot!” Lizbeth gasped.

  “Calm down, Lizbeth. It’s only a little protest. They just want to be heard. Nobody’s out to hurt anybody.” Charlie shifted the car into reverse, following the lead of other drivers around her. They began backing up in a crazy dance, crawling backward toward escape, when a popping sound rang through the air.

  “Now they’re shooting!” Lizbeth crouched down on the seat behind Charlie.

  “It is probably the police,” Senzey said. “They come with rubber bullets, and tear gas, to chase the people away.”

  “Oh my Lord. Be careful! You’re like two sitting ducks up there in front.”

  “We’ll be fine, Lizbeth,” Charlie said. She’d managed to point the car toward a side street, where there was at least a semblance of forward motion.

  It seemed like hours before they arrived at the hotel, the route back a maze of wrong turns and dead ends, Lizbeth on edge, her eyes peeled for signs of another flare-up. But Charlie’s mind remained focused, fixed on only one thing—the yellow truck, and her mother inside. What she didn’t want to think about was another thing—what her mother was doing dragging that poor child into that wretched place.