Sleeping Awake

by Noelle, Gamali

  “You belong to me,” he said.

  I held his gaze, sealing my fate. “Yes.”

  I was bound to him. Dead and reborn that night in his hard arms. His Lady Lazarus. I no longer ran from my fate.

  *~*

  Hours later, a loud pounding on the door abruptly pulled me from my sleep.

  “Are you fuckers up as yet? It’s past noon, you know!”

  “Ta gueule!” Nicolaas groaned. He pulled a pillow over his head.

  “Shut up indeed!” Bryn yelled. “I’m coming in, so cover up your naked derrières.”

  The door opened a few seconds later, and Bryn entered the room with a tray in hand. “Oh good.” He grinned. “You’re up.”

  “No thanks to you,” I replied. It felt as if someone had spent the better part of the night trying to break into my head.

  “One for you.” Bryn handed Nicolaas his famous hangover concoction. “And green tea for you.”

  “Thank you, darling,” I said. I immediately took a sip; it was jasmine.

  “So have you kids made up as yet?” Bryn asked sitting down on the bed. With his red velvet smoking jacket on, all that he needed to look like Hugh Hefner was a pipe.

  “When would we have gotten the chance to?” I inquired.

  “So you fucked before fixing the problem?”

  “Go away, Bryn,” Nicolaas said.

  “Fine.” Bryn sniffed. “I’m hungry. I’m giving you both an hour to fix whatever’s broken and get downstairs. I’ll call a car.”

  Slowly, I finished the rest of my tea without daring to look at Nicolaas and set the cup on the side table. When I turned around, Nicolaas was staring at me with an unreadable expression on his face.

  “Please don’t tell me that last night happened solely because you were high,” I said.

  “It didn’t.”

  I sighed, relieved. The look was still on his face. Finally, after a long pause, he began. “What happened to you?”

  “I was bouncing between mania and depression,” I replied. “You just came at a bad time.”

  I figured that there was no need for silly questions and beating around the bush. I was just going to tell him everything and hope that he could somehow forgive me.

  “Because of your mother?”

  “I was depressed long before I found out about Maman, but yes, that added to my depression. I have Bipolar Disorder; I was diagnosed when I was fourteen.”

  “And why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to think that I was crazy,” I said.

  “Noira, I wouldn’t have thought that.”

  “And how was I supposed to know? Everyone else thought so. It seems as if my entire time in the States has been spent with one psychiatrist or the next.”

  “Stop being defensive,” he said. “I just wish that you would have told me. I would have been better prepared to handle the problems that arose.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Most people just think that I’m crazy, so I decided not to tell you.”

  “I never thought that you were crazy,” he said. “But I knew that something was wrong.”

  “How?”

  “Whenever you seemed happy, everything would be fine and we’d be great. But then it would be like someone flipped a switch and you would turn into someone else. You’d get angry for no reason and push me away from you. You have no idea how frustrating it was dealing with that. I never knew which Noira I would be greeted by.”

  “Well now you know,” I said, leaning against the headboard.

  “Stop trying to brush it off as if it’s something casual.” Nicolaas pulled me towards him. “It’s not.”

  “Why do we have to make such a big deal about it?” I whined. I snuggled into his chest, glad to be that much closer to him.

  “Because it is a big deal, Noira,” he said. “You get so depressed that it consumes your entire life and prevents you from functioning like a normal person. Then sometimes it’s as if you’re on your own personal high, and it scares me. Isn’t that a big deal?”

  I said nothing. I had discussed my problems at Golden Ridge so much that I was sick of it.

  “Noira,” Nicolaas said. He tilted my head so that I had no choice but to look up at him. “I’m not trying to patronize you and pretend that the Bipolar Disorder is more important than who you are, but it would have helped me a lot if you’d told me in the beginning. Do you have any idea how frustrating it was trying to be in a relationship with you sometimes?”

  I pulled away. “Then why didn’t you walk away?”

  “Because you’ve ruined me for others, woman!”

  “I didn’t ruin…” I sat up.

  “Yes you did!” He grabbed my hands to prevent me from getting up. I felt as if someone had taken a pair of scissors to them, but I didn’t so much as flinch. “Before you, I was perfectly happy with my life. I would have died with a smile on my face if only I could continue screwing models and dabbling in whatever miracle drug would guarantee me a flight to the moon. And then you walked up to the Jacuzzi, looking like Lust and telling me that you wanted to be my bed-mate for the summer. You! You ruined me with your voodoo, and even after you ran away, I wanted you.”

  “I turned my back on everything that I knew out of some mad desire to make you mine,” Nicolaas continued. “And for what? Do you know how many girls have turned up here this summer in various states of undress once word got out that I was in New York? And I turned them all away. Me! The person who used to believe that monogamy was synonymous with ‘great bore.’ You made me fall in love with you, and don’t you for a second pretend as if you didn’t want me to, because you did. So I don’t care what it takes, but we are going to fix our problems now, because I am not allowing you to walk away again. I know that you thought that you’d never see me again, but I had every intention of coming to you if you hadn’t gotten over yourself by the end of the week.”

  “I’ll be in Jamaica at the end of the week,” I replied. “How did you plan on finding me then?”

  Nicolaas looked at me as if the answer was obvious to everyone but me. “Noira, I’m a member of the Dutch royal family. Did you honestly expect that I wouldn’t be able to find you?”

  His eyes were as black as the darkest of nights. I winced. Love was such a peculiar thing. It could even make a stupid girl doubt herself and expect that her lover would realise how pathetic she was and one day leave. But there he sat, knowing how pathetic I was, having witnessed my insanity, and telling me that I was the one who was not allowed to leave him.

  “Are we done with this cat and mouse game?” Nicolaas asked. He took my hand and began making the tiniest of circles in my palm.

  Unable to meet his eyes, I watched his fingers instead. “I’m sorry for not appreciating you the way that I should have,” I murmured. “You deserve better.”

  “Who could be better than you, Noira?”

  “Anyone,” I said. “I’m not sure if I would have been a brave enough person to do half of what you’ve done for me and put up with when it comes to me. I would have written you off as insane and moved on.”

  “I don’t agree, or else I wouldn’t be with you,” he insisted. Seeing the way that he looked at me made as happy as it made me ashamed.

  “I don’t deserve this second chance,” I said.

  Nicolaas cupped my chin and tipped my face upwards. “I wish that you would stop being afraid of being happy, Noira. It’s not a sin to live a full life; it’s a sin not to. I could go on forever with all of your good attributes, and they’d trump whatever you think is bad about yourself. I love you for who you are; the good and the bad.”

  “Thank you,” I managed.

  “For what? Even if you hadn’t made your proposition that night in the Jacuzzi, I would have found some other way to see you again. I honestly think that I loved you from the start, Noira.”

  I closed my eyes, fingering the necklace that he’d given me. I’d started wearing it after he’d walked out on
me. I felt the same way about our meeting in the Jacuzzi.

  “I was scared to let you love me,” I began. “I kept saying that I was learning to love and that I was going to stop letting Philippe dictate the terms of my life, but I don’t think that I ever meant it. Secretly, I was just waiting for you to leave. And because I was waiting on you to leave, I didn’t want to need you, and I did things to make you leave. It’s also why I would pull away whenever you came too close. I thought that if I prepared myself enough, it wouldn’t hurt when you finally left. I was wrong. I’ve spent the last few years existing in a vacuum, because that was the only way that I knew how to survive¾living solely by the hour and not thinking about what happened next. I’m not saying that if you hadn’t come along, I would never have decided to make myself whole again or that I needed you to rescue me from myself. However, I met you and realised that if I allowed myself happiness, it would come. I don’t want to go back to the way that I was.”

  “So what are you saying then?” Nicolaas asked.

  For the first time since we awoke, I looked him in the eye for a more than a few seconds. I took a deep breath. “I’m saying that if you’ll have me, I’m yours.”

  Wordlessly, he pulled me onto his lap. I felt his love in his kiss; it consumed me entirely. “I love you,” he whispered, pulling away.

  “I love you,” I replied.

  **~*~*~**~*~*~**

  ¯ CHAPITRE SEIZE¯

  I WOULD LIKE TO CALL IT BEAUTY

  There were a million things that I could think of that would have been more interesting than sitting around the pool that night and waiting for Maman’s heart to stop. Watching the grass grow. Walking until we found the end of a rainbow. Trying to see the wind. Anything but I was doing.

  “Maman, are you scared?” Camelea asked.

  “Scared to die? No,” Maman replied. “Scared to leave you girls? Yes.”

  The dramatic changes in her appearance were frightening. In three weeks, she had decomposed into purple, bruised flesh and slapped on makeup that failed in its attempt to give her some dignity. I could see her blood swimming through her veins as she gripped her coffee cup. When she came up to my room to get me earlier, it was a struggle to not jump when she took my hand. Her fingers were cold to the touch. I didn’t want to guess how much weight she had lost.

  “This isn't fair.” Camelea snuggled closer to Maman. Her lips were stripping from her annoying habit of chewing on them when she was scared.

  “No one ever said that life was fair, Camelea.” Maman pulled her closer and kissed her forehead. I wondered how much it hurt Maman to do that. The doctors had sent her home to die with a bottle of morphine and the option of having a live-in nurse. She took the morphine and declined the nurse.

  “Do you know how many child abusers and molesters are out there having the time of their lives and are cancer free?” I said. “I feel as if God pulled down his pants and took a crap all over us. You go to church every Sunday, you donate money to charity, where is your reward?”

  I ripped a handful of flowers from a nearby bougainvillea bush. I wanted to rip every one of those cancer cells out of Maman’s body. The ground was a graveyard of pink and green as I twisted and pulled and snapped everything in sight. I didn’t stop until Maman’s icy hands reached over and clasped themselves firmly around mine. Once again, she had on her fur coat.

  “My reward was having the three of you.”

  “Because we were such a joy to have,” Cienna said, rolling her eyes.

  “You were.”

  “Yes I was,” I said. “All those suicide attempts and…”

  “Noira, arrête.”

  “Stop what?” I yanked another flower out of the earth. “Speaking the truth?”

  Maman squeezed harder. “Arrête.”

  And for what could only be described as the umpteenth time that summer, I began to cry. Even though I knew that it would solve nothing and that at the end of the day, Maman was still going to die, I cried. When she came beside me and pulled me into her lap, I ignored the scent of morphine that seemed to ooze from her pores and curled up like the infant that I felt myself to be. I held on tightly to Maman that night, and I braced myself for the worst.

  “Why are you acting so calm about everything, Maman?” Cienna asked sometime later.

  “I have to be brave for my girls.”

  *~*

  I remember when I first moved to America; I absolutely hated it. Their English wasn’t real English; their accents were funny. You couldn’t find decent cheese anywhere near our house, much less good bread. I didn’t know my way around the city, and I didn’t understand why Americans insisted on sugar-coating everything instead of just saying what was on their mind. I wanted to go home and make the nightmare disappear.

  Then something happened. I began to understand their English, and I stopped mentally comparing it to the British Standard English that I had been taught in primary school. I got used to their accents and learned how to drop my French accent so that I wouldn’t be teased. Maman found a boulangerie in Manhattan that delivered so that we could still have our daily baguette. I learned to navigate the city, and soon enough, I learned to read between the lines of what Americans really meant. I was still French first and foremost, but I was also slightly American.

  As I walked through my almost empty house, I was amazed at how easily this side of me was vanishing. My clothes, jewellery, shoes, books, etc. were sent to France via freight plane. There was nothing to show that I had ever touched American shores.

  *~*

  I could retrace the trip from the Donald Sangster International Airport to Catadupa, Saint James, the town where my grandfather was born and eventually retired to. I did not need to keep my eyes open to know the bumps in the road meant that we were ascending the hill, past the town square and veering towards the first leg of Maman’s journey towards death.

  We visited Grandpa Bill once a year without fail, usually for Christmas. This year, we would be making the trip early, because Maman would not be around for the annual family feast. Grandpa kept a farm on his property and food, as well as medicine, was obtained from his land. We sometimes went swimming in the river, and the water was so cold that you had to jump in before thinking about it or you’d never make it. We got drinking water from the nearby spring, and it was better than any bottled water that I’d ever tasted.

  The fisherman came by every Sunday after church, and we’d go to a local grocer for meat on Saturday afternoons. It wasn’t unusual to wake up to a vender walking through the neighbourhood and screaming, “Broomy! Broomy! Come get yuh broom dem!” There were no malls where everything was available; you had to know someone who specialized in something and go to their house or their tiny shops. Tailors, dressmakers, shoemakers, barbers, bush doctors—they were all there in the town and I knew the name of every one of them. I remembered all these things and more as we silently took in the scenery, but not once did I forget the real reason why we were there.

  When we get to the farm, Grandpa Bill was standing on the stairs that led to the porch. He was wearing his uniform, a white button up shirt with cotton pants and a straw hat. He’d been doing work on the farm before we came. As I took in the sight of his greying hair and smooth, charcoal skin, I remembered piggy back rides up the hill that led to his house and clinging tightly to his shoulder so that I wouldn’t fall as he scampered about and pretended to be a horse.

  As soon as the car stopped, my sisters and I were out, once again transformed into children, racing each other up the drive to get the first hug. I won.

  “Grandpa!” Camelea squealed. She kissed both his cheeks and wrapped herself around him as if he was the buoy that she needed to keep afloat. “I’ve missed you,” she murmured.

  “I know, chile.”

  “Camelea!” Cienna yelled.

  Camelea pulled back slightly and paused long enough to stick out her tongue at Cienna.

  “Still impatient, Petite?” Grandpa teased.
r />   “Pa!” Cienna flew into his arms and threw herself against him. As dainty as she was to have earned the nickname that he had given her at birth, Grandpa still stumbled a bit as she wove her tiny body around him like a snake.

  “Did you miss me, Pa?” She rubbed her nose against his.

  Grandpa was a different person when he was around Cienna. Like everyone else, he was incapable of resisting her charm, but there was more to it than that. She was his favourite, possibly even more than Maman, his darling girl, and everyone knew it. I wondered how Philippe felt watching them, knowing that she had channelled all of her love and affection that she’d once had for him and entrusted them to Grandpa.

  It was my turn next. I rubbed my face against his stubble, transported back to the days when I would ride on his back and ask every question that popped into my head. “I’ve missed you.”

  Grandpa stiffened.

  Philippe came up behind us, and a deep frown borrowed its way onto Grandpa’s face. “Philippe.”

  “Hello, William.” Philippe nodded and leaned back on his heel. He dug his hands into his pocket.

  “Come, Trischa.” Grandpa took Maman’s hand and led her away. “You’ve got to fill me in on what I’ve been missing.”

  “He’s not a fan of you, is he?” Cienna commented.

  For once, she didn’t sound like she was revelling in Philippe’s misery. I decided that the cool of the main house was more important than Cienna’s peculiar behaviour and walked away from whatever moment the two were having. As I walked towards the van to get my bags, I caught Philippe’s reply.

  “He never forgave me for what I did to you girls.”

  “Blood is thicker than water,” I mumbled, reaching into the trunk for my suitcase.

  “Indeed,” Camelea agreed.

  It was the first time that Camelea and I had spoken since our fight in the Dominican Republic. She must have realised this as well, as she paused. I winked at her, pulled my suitcase out and began my ascent up the driveway. We may not ever become the best of friends, but there’d be no more animosity between us.