by Roxane Gay
My escort laughed, sliding his hands down my bare arms. His hands were surprisingly soft. I looked at his fingernails, long but well manicured. He did not give the impression of a man who works hard. I had never felt anything so off-putting but then, I was only beginning to catalogue my discomfort. I had an inadequate frame of reference.
I stood straighter, forced my chin forward, continued to hold his gaze in the mirror, foolishly hoping bravado might save me from the inevitable. “Take your hands off me.”
When he grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, my body understood what would happen next. The body holds a certain wisdom the mind does not. I threw my arms in front of my face as he pushed me forward, tried to slam my head into the mirror. The glass shattered. Tiny shards burrowed into my arms, creating tiny but very sharp dots of pain. It was hard to focus. I could only think of one word, fight. He pulled me toward him and I saw myself in the fractures of glass that remained. I already did not recognize myself. Seeing what fear looked like in my eyes was an honesty I wasn’t prepared for. I whispered, “You will survive this.” My escort began fumbling with the waistband of my jeans, his fingers pressing against the bones of my hips as he tried to tug my pants down. I kicked back and connected with his knee. He growled, muttered angry words. The barrel of his gun dug sharply into the back of my neck. “Enough,” he said. “Fight me and you will regret it.”
I kicked again. He wouldn’t pull the trigger. He couldn’t pull the trigger. My life mattered. I had one damn thing worth something to the men holding me. “You can’t shoot me,” I said, “or you won’t get paid.” I twisted from side to side trying to get away, reaching for the door. If I could make it into a different room, I would be safe. All I had to do was open that door.
He grabbed my hair again, practically lifting me off my feet. All my life I’ve been the small girl with the big mouth and both of those things were working against me. My escort was much bigger. All the men I had seen, I counted seven, were much bigger. They had lean and long bodies and strong hands and angry mouths. Once, they had been good boys. I needed to believe that. Thin streams of blood trickled along my forearms. My skin began to swell around the shards of glass.
“You do not understand your position,” my escort said. “I will teach you.”
He pulled me against him. His chest was tightly muscled, more like stone than the meat of a man. He shoved his hand down the front of my jeans, grabbing at me, forcing a finger inside of me. The intrusion was painful and unexpected. A wet sound curled in my throat as I tried to free myself from his grip. Finally, I found air. I screamed loud enough to make the walls shake.
He shoved his gun back in his pants and used his free hand to cover my mouth. “Make one more sound and you will regret it.”
I ignored his threat, screamed into the palm of his hand as he forced his fingers deeper, feeling around for something he could not find. He burned my neck with the heat of his breath.
Suddenly, the bathroom door flew open and the Commander stood, glaring. My escort stopped, seemed to shrink into himself. I no longer felt his breath on my neck.
The Commander looked at my escort and shook his head. “This is not how we do business.”
My escort pulled his hand out of my pants and pushed me away. Another man appeared in the hallway. I straightened my clothes, smoothed my hair. I refused to bow my head. I walked steady. I would not falter. The Commander ordered the newcomer to take me back to my cage. As I was led away, I looked back. My escort rubbed his fingers beneath his nose, smiled, nasty man.
Alone again, I sat on the bed. I was calm. I was calm. I was calm. I began carefully picking glass from my arm and setting the thin shards in a small pile on the floor next to my feet. When I finished, I looked at the small pyramid of bloody glass I had built. It was almost beautiful. There was a sharp ache between my thighs. Another wet scream curled in my throat but it felt important to stay calm, calm, calm. I covered my mouth with my hand and began rocking back and forth.
I waited. I had nothing but the memory of a strange man’s fingers inside me, twisting, reaching, taking. I prayed this would be the only terrible thing I had to carry.
It had grown dark. No one came for me. I was thirsty, so very thirsty. I was hungry. I was tired. My body ached. All I could think about was the hot breath of a man I did not know on the back of my neck as he forced his fingers inside me and how he was going to come for me and no matter how hard I fought I would not be able to stop him.
I guessed Michael would be giving Christophe a bath, a bottle in the absence of my breast, putting the baby to bed. I wondered if Christophe would fall asleep easily without me. I talked to my son every night as he fell asleep, told him important and silly things so he could hear the sound of my voice, so he could always know I loved him and chose to spend time with him. Michael would talk to Christophe as he fell asleep. My husband would do that for me but it would not be the same. Christophe would know I wasn’t there.
I had to go to the bathroom again but the ransom for that small dignity would be high. A car raced through the alley blaring music. I was so tired. My body felt heavy. I lay on my side, my back to the wall so I could keep my eye on the door. I waited and waited and tried to ignore everything my body needed and would soon have to endure. In the before I took the sanctity of my body for granted. In the after my body was nothing. It was a matter of time. I had known that from the moment I was taken. The waiting was worse than anything I could imagine. My imagination was still quite limited then. That is no longer the case.
Waiting. It was terrible. The house was quiet, too quiet, a cavernous and echoing shell without Mireille. Michael had never gotten used to his wife’s family’s wealth. When they were in Miami it was easy to pretend his wife was more like him, middle-class, born and raised. Sure, they lived a nice life but they worked hard. In Haiti, there was no way to pretend. The opulent homes, the cars and the drivers and people always waiting on you hand and foot and beach houses bigger than most people’s houses back in the States and everyone wearing designer everything and so many unspoken rules about how to behave. Half the time, Michael was afraid to open his mouth for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing around people he knew nothing about. Miri always assured him he was fine but he felt out of place around his wife’s family and secretly suspected they didn’t think he was good enough for her though Lord knows they were too mannered to admit it.
Michael sat up in the large bed he normally shared with Miri when they visited her parents. He could almost see the outline of her body in the sheets, feel her feet stretched over his legs. Next to him, Christophe slept fitfully, twisting around. Michael frowned. Normally their son slept peacefully.
The laptop on his thighs was warm, the fan whirring softly. Michael’s eyes were dry and heavy. Too much time had passed. He continued scouring the Internet for as much information as possible about international kidnappings and ransom and proof of life—developing a bewildering vocabulary for a nightmare he had never imagined, not even in his darkest moments of trying to understand his wife’s country.
The sharp pain just beneath Michael’s breastbone would not go away. Every sound startled him from his stupor, but only briefly. Mostly, he thought, “This can’t be real. This is not happening. This cannot be real.”
Earlier, after a cursory visit from a pair of police officers who took a few notes and promised to “investigate,” Michael and his in-laws waited for a phone call that did not come. The kidnappers were sticking to their schedule. It would be another day still before they would know where to bring the ransom, how much that ransom might be, a ransom Sebastien seemed unwilling to pay. Michael couldn’t allow himself to even consider such a possibility. It made no sense. Sebastien had to be posturing. Michael pressed his hand against the baby’s chest. No father would refuse a ransom for his child, especially no father with so much money at his disposal. He shook his head. “No,” he said into the quiet room. “No.” They were going to get Mireille back, soon, and this would be
over, forgotten. They would go home to their real lives. They would forget all about this place; finally, they would be free of it, forever.
If he could just hear Mireille’s voice for a few seconds, the tightness in his chest might loosen. He might breathe again. He might let go of the nagging realization that all this was too far beyond his control.
Kidnapping. The word didn’t even feel real. When Michael called his parents just before putting Christophe to bed, they listened in disbelief, promised to pray for Mireille even though they weren’t usually much for praying, not anymore. The more he thought about it, Michael could not think of a single person he knew who had much faith at all. He was starting to understand why. “You get her back, no matter what,” his mother, Lorraine, said, her voice steely. “You get her back right now and then you get on a plane with my grandson and bring your family home.”
Michael promised he would and his parents pretended they did not know how hollow those words were.
His head still hurt, and the wound on his forehead itched beneath the gauze. Michael closed the laptop and set it on the floor. There was too much online, too much to know and see—stories of people held hostage for years, tortured for no reason at all, ears cut off, human trafficking. Michael rolled onto his side, pulling his son into the warm cave of his body. He closed his eyes and reached for the empty space just beyond the child. He could almost feel Mireille’s skin against his, how she smiled in bed when she turned toward him, her chin jutting gently forward, her lips slightly parted, eyes half-lidded. She was the most beautiful girl and she was his. Her smile. That’s what he would focus on. Before long, Michael had drifted into a sleep as fitful as his son’s.
The call to make arrangements for the ransom came the next morning at 10 a.m., as promised. Sebastien answered the phone and the negotiator picked up a second receiver, started the recording equipment.
“We have your daughter. The price is one million dollars U.S. We are ready to make arrangements for the delivery of the money and the return of your daughter.”
Sebastien tried to stay calm. He looked down at his hand, saw it was shaking. He frowned, shoved his hand in his pocket. “We don’t have that kind of money,” Sebastien said.
“Let us not play these games. They are beneath us.”
The negotiator gave Sebastien a look and Sebastien nodded, clearing his throat. “We are willing to pay one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, not one penny more. Hear me clearly.”
Michael hovered near Sebastien; his eyes were glassy with panic, more of the naked, wild emotion that made Sebastien Duval so uncomfortable.
“One hundred and twenty-five thousand,” Sebastien repeated. “And I want my daughter back within the next twenty-four hours.” He swallowed hard and hung up.
Michael’s eyes widened. “Are you insane? You’re trying to bargain them down?” He rushed at his father-in-law, swinging his arms, but the negotiator stood between the two men, gripped Michael’s arms until he stilled.
“This is how these matters are handled. You have to trust my expertise,” the negotiator said.
The three men stood in uncomfortable silence staring at the phone. It did not ring.
“This is sheer lunacy,” Michael muttered. “This is not how we’re going to get Miri back. You didn’t see them and their guns. They aren’t messing around.”
Sebastien raised his hand in the imperious manner that drove Michael crazy. He wanted to break all the fingers in the man’s hand. He clenched his jaw, forced himself to stay calm. Circles of sweat spread from beneath his arms across his back.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Sebastien counted to ten, then picked up the phone. “Yes,” he said.
“The ransom for your daughter is one million dollars U.S. We will not negotiate.”
Sebastien had always been able to make difficult decisions. When he left everything he had known, he had been nothing more than a boy, really, always hungry, his feet caked with dirt at the end of each day. He abandoned his nothing of a life to start anew in a strange country where he still had so little but knew it was possible to hope. He found his way, had made everything of himself.
“If that’s the case, I’m afraid there is nothing more for us to discuss,” Sebastien said, avoiding Michael’s stare. “That was my only offer. I expect my daughter returned to me within twenty-four hours, unharmed.”
Sebastien hung up the phone. As always, he would do what was necessary to protect his family, his entire family. Michael kicked a chair across the room and stormed out. Sebastien tried to ignore the doubt, so unfamiliar an emotion, tearing at the edges of his resolve. “This is the right choice,” he said softly. He wasn’t going to lose everything he had worked for to thieving losers, only to be left with nothing of a life again.
I sweated everywhere—beneath my arms and between my thighs, along my spine. My breasts still leaked. My body was weeping but whenever I felt like crying I bit down on my knuckles until the pain distracted me. What little air there was grew so thick I thought I might die. My chest tightened ever more.
As a child, I felt that strange sense of suffocating, often. There was the heat of a Nebraska summer and there was the heat of Port-au-Prince and they were two very different things.
Every summer, my parents took us to Haiti during the worst possible time—June and July. We always began packing in early May. It was easy to sift through our clothes—nice outfits for church and visiting distant relatives, swimsuits for the beach, T-shirts and shorts to play with our cousins. The more difficult packing was the various goods we were expected to bring—American movies on videotape and later, DVD, Gap clothing, large bottles of olive oil and industrial-sized bags of rice from discount warehouses, small electronics, Nike sneakers, cornflakes, Tampax, all the things that were outrageously expensive and eagerly coveted in the motherland, what my siblings and I called Haiti, always with a smirk. My mother coordinated the packing efforts, putting these goods in suitcases large enough to accommodate the body of a large adult male, perhaps two. At the airport, we would stand in line with all the other dyaspora and their unfathomably large suitcases. I found the whole affair mortifying and tried to stand as far away from my parents and their embarrassing luggage as possible. It was easy to spot the Haitian families not only from the suitcases, but from the hovering masses of American-born children hiding in plain sight at a comfortable distance.
Before every trip, my parents reminded us of the proper etiquette for children in Haiti. They did not want us to draw undue attention to ourselves. They wanted us to be seen and not heard, speaking when spoken to, never speaking out of turn, never raising our voices or being disrespectful. Despite their best efforts we always drew attention to ourselves. My brother tried to sag his jeans until a stranger in the airport grabbed him by the ears and hitched his pants up to their proper place, sucking her teeth and shaking her head. Mona and I wore low-cut T-shirts and large hoop earrings and short skirts. All three of us wore headphones, listening to music our parents disapproved of. We answered our parents in English when they spoke to us in French.
The airport in Port-au-Prince was the worst place on earth for spoiled children. It was the only place we ever visited where you had to go outside after getting off the plane and before entering the terminal. The moment we started walking down the hot metal staircase, the unbearably thick air wrapped itself around our bodies, seeping into our pores. The walk across the tarmac was interminable as the throng of Haitians, elated or miserable about returning home, pushed us forward. We waited in an endless customs line overwhelmed by the heat and the smell of so many sweaty people in cramped quarters and then, outside the airport as we waited for a cab or a relative to pick us up, it was like being thrown into the middle of a riot, everyone shouting, waving their hands wildly in the air, ignoring the rules of polite conduct and personal space.
We always stayed with my mother’s favorite sister. Tante Lola married well and owned lots of property. There was a guesthou
se with its own pool behind her house and we installed ourselves there for weeks at a time.
This is the Haiti of my childhood—summer afternoons at the beach, swimming in the warm and salty blue of the ocean. We ate grilled meat and drank Coke from green glass bottles, biting the rim, enjoying the sound our teeth made against the glass. We played in the sand and my sister and I chased my brother up and down the beach while our parents cheerfully ignored us. There is a picture of me sitting on the beach. I am fourteen, skinny, just starting puberty, late bloomer. I am wearing the first bathing suit I have ever been allowed to choose for myself. It is blue, one piece, cut high at the hips but modestly. There is a strap around my neck that reaches down to a threaded knot between my collarbones. I am wearing sunglasses because I want to look sophisticated. I want to stare at cute boys as they come out of the water, without admonishment from my parents. My knees are pulled to my chest. I am also wearing a straw hat with a matching blue band, a gift from my father. I saw the hat while we were driving through the city on the way from visiting one relative to another. A vendor had what seemed like hundreds of hats displayed on a large tarp. I started tapping the window with my hand excitedly. I begged my father to pull over and suddenly he did and I grinned like a crazy person. We all piled out of the car and hovered around the display, each trying to decide on the perfect chapeau. I would wear the hat every day for the rest of our trip and back in the States I would wear my perfect hat for the rest of the summer until school started and a classmate teased me about my sombrero and then the hat found its way to the back of my closet, crushed by sneakers, a black sock, a softball helmet.
In another picture, my sister and I are standing on the beach, arm in arm. Behind us, my parents’ beach house in Jacmel is being built and the concrete frame of the house stands, windowless. My mother is on the long veranda, already finished. She is waving, her arm midair, her fingers curled toward us. I am fifteen. Mona is eighteen. It is Mona’s last summer before college. She is radiant. She can taste freedom, which is all we ever wanted, freedom from our parents, from the endless trips to Haiti, from our parents’ rules. Our ingratitude, in the face of our happiness, was fairly staggering. In the picture, we are both wearing two-piece bathing suits, matching. Mona convinced my parents it would be fine to allow us to wear bikinis because we were good girls. Mona was not really a good girl. I knew that, always waited up for her when she snuck out at home in the States to drive around in the backseats of cars with American boys. When she came home, she smelled like beer and cigarette smoke and my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed behind her ears and knees and under her elbows. Mona taught me about kissing and going to third base and wrote silly words on my back with her fingers as she taught me everything important. She told me about kids who didn’t have to be home by eight, who didn’t have to spend their Saturdays in a stupid basement surrounded by other miserable Haitian kids. In the picture, Mona’s lips are nuzzling my ear. She’s whispering, “You’ll be free soon too.” My childhood was very different from that of my brother and sister. By the time I was old enough to want to feel free, my parents had relaxed many of the strict rules they enforced for Michel and Mona. Michel is not in the picture because he was already in graduate school. When he went away to college, he never really came home. Sons are different, my mother says. They always look for home somewhere else. Daughters, though, a mother can count on. Daughters always come home.