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Why does he want to think of her as brave? Perhaps he’s thinking of the twenty-six hours of labor that ended in a C-section, during which her son was pulled out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He had nearly died, the doctor told her, because of her stubborn insistence on a natural birth.

  The pregnancy had been easy. She’d worked a regular schedule until the day she went into labor. The pain was intense, pulsating, throbbing, but bearable, even after the twenty-fifth hour. First babies can put you through the wringer, the nurses kept telling her, but the second one will be easier.

  She was lucky, blessed, her mother said, that the baby was saved in time.

  After his toast, James kisses Jeanne’s cheek.

  “Hear! Hear!” her brother says in his booming minister’s voice.

  Jeanne’s eyes meet her husband’s, and she wishes that a new spark would pass between them, something to connect them still, besides their child. She feels like crying, but she does not want to incite one of her mother’s rants about her being a spoiled brat who needs to stop sulking and get on with her life. In all the time since her child was born and she realized that his birth would not necessarily make her joyful, and in all the time since she became aware that her mother’s mind, as well as her mother’s love, was slipping away, today at the church was the first time she has cried.

  3

  A week before Jude was born, Carole went to the Opa Locka Hialeah Flea Market, which Haitians call Ti Mache, and got some eucalyptus leaves and sour oranges for her daughter’s first postpartum bath. She bought her daughter a corset and a few yards of white muslin, which she sewed into a bando for Jeanne to wrap around her belly. But because of the C-section, neither the bath nor the binding was possible, which was why her daughter’s belly did not go back to the way it had been before. Jeanne became larger, in fact, because she refused to drink the fennel-and-aniseed infusions that both Carole and Grace brewed for her. And she refused to breastfeed, which not only would have melted her extra fat but would also have made her feel less sad.

  When Jeanne and Paul were babies, no other woman was around to help. Carole didn’t have the luxury of lying in bed while relatives took care of her and her children. Her husband did the best he could. He went out and got her the leaves and made her the teas. He gave her the baths himself. He helped her retie the bando every morning before he left for work, but during the hours that he was gone she was so lonely and homesick that she kept kissing her babies’ faces, as if their cheeks were plots of land in the country she’d left behind.

  She couldn’t imagine life without her children. She would have felt even more lost and purposeless without them. She wanted them both to have everything they desired. And whenever money was tight, especially after she and Victor bought their house in Miami’s Little Haiti, she would clean other people’s homes while her children were at school and her husband was at work, something her husband and children never knew about. Her secret income made him admire her even more. Every week, before he handed her the allowance for household expenses, he would proudly tell the children, “Your manman sure knows how to stretch a dollar.”

  Her cleaning money also paid for all the things her daughter believed she’d be a pariah without—brand-name sneakers and clothes, class rings, prom dresses. Her son wasn’t interested in anything but books, and only library books at that. He would happily walk around with holes in his cheap shoes.

  She should have told her daughter about the sacrifices she’d made. If she had, it would be easier now to tell her that she couldn’t stay sad forever. Where would the family be if Carole had stayed sad when she arrived in this country? Sometimes you just have to shake the devil off you, whatever that devil is. Even if you don’t feel like living for yourself, you have to start living for your child, for your children.

  4

  Jeanne doesn’t realize that her husband and her mother have wandered off with Jude until she finds herself alone with her father.

  She hasn’t discussed her mother’s condition with him for some time. She does not want to tell him or her husband how earlier in the week, when her mother was visiting, she’d forced herself to go out and sit by the pool while her son was napping. As soon as she put her feet in the water, she glanced up and saw her mother watching her from the terrace. Her mother looked bewildered, as though she had no idea where she was. Jeanne was in the middle of a phone call with James. She ended the call quickly and ran upstairs, and by the time she reached the apartment her mother was standing by the door. She pushed the door shut, grabbed Jeanne by the shoulders, and slammed her into it. Had Carole been bigger, she might have cracked open Jeanne’s head.

  Jeanne kept saying, “Manman, Manman,” like an incantation, until it brought her back.

  “What happened?” her mother asked.

  Jeanne wanted to call an ambulance, or at least her father, but she was in shock, and her mother seemed fine the rest of the day. Jeanne avoided her as much as she could, let her watch a talk show she liked, and made sure that she was not left alone with Jude.

  The next day, her mother showed up after James had gone to work and began shouting at her in Creole. “You have to fight the devil,” she yelled. “Stop being selfish and living for yourself. Start living for your child.”

  Those incidents have made Jeanne afraid both of and for her mother. She agreed to go through with the christening in the hope that it might help. Perhaps her mother was only pretending to be losing her mind in order to get her way.

  Sitting next to James on their living-room sofa, with Jude in her arms, Carole appears calmer than she has been all week. Paul is sitting on the other side of her, and the three of them seem to be talking about Jude, or about children in general. Then James’s friend Marcos joins them, and Jude reaches out for his big cloud of an Afro.

  Jeanne wonders how her brother could fail to notice that their mother is deteriorating. In all their conversations about the christening, he never mentioned Carole’s state of mind. Was it because he was used to seeing her as a pious woman, not as his mother but as his “sister” in the Lord? Paul has never paid much attention to practical things. He spent most of their childhood reading books that even the adults they knew had never heard of, obscure novels and anthropological studies, the biographies of famous theologians and saints. Before he officially joined their mother’s church, when he was a senior in high school, he had considered becoming a priest. He was always more concerned about the next world than he was about this one.

  Her mother motions for Paul to scoot over, then lowers Jude into the space between them on the sofa. Jude turns his face back and forth and keeps looking up at the adults, especially at James.

  “How are you these days?” Jeanne’s father asks. As he speaks to Jeanne, he’s looking at her mother in a way she has never seen before, with neither admiration nor love but alarm, or even distress.

  “Okay,” she says. Usually that is enough for him. Her father, like her husband, doesn’t normally push. But this time he does.

  “Why do all this today?” her father asks, though he already knows the answer. “Did you have this child for her, too? Because she won’t be able to take care of him for you. You’ll have to do it for yourself.”

  “Of course I didn’t have my son for her,” Jeanne says.

  “Then why have him?” he asks. “It doesn’t seem like you want him.”

  This, whatever it is that she is feeling, she wants to tell him, isn’t about not wanting her son. It’s about not being up to the task; the job is too grand, too permanent, even with her husband’s help. It’s hard to explain to her father or to anyone else, but something that was supposed to kick in, maybe a light that was meant to turn on in her head, never did. Despite her complete physical transformation, at times she feels as though she has not given birth at all. It’s not that she doesn’t want her son, or wishes he hadn’t be
en born; it’s just that she can’t believe that he is truly hers.

  “What’s really wrong with Manman?” she asks, desperate to change the subject.

  “We’re not done talking about you,” her father says.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she insists.

  “She’s not herself,” he says.

  “It’s more than that.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “We need to know the truth.”

  “We,” he says, pointing to her mother, then to himself, “already know the truth.”

  Jeanne hears her mother laughing, softly at first, then louder, at something that either James or Marcos has said. She realizes that possibly there have been doctors, a diagnosis, one that her parents are keeping to themselves.

  “What are you saying?” she asks.

  “I’ll soon have to put her somewhere,” he says.

  She thinks of the expense and how her mother will not be the only one who is dislocated. Her father may have to sell the house in order to afford a decent place where her mother won’t be neglected or abused. She thinks of the irony of her family’s not being able to take care of her mother, who has dedicated so much of her life to them.

  “I’m not saying it will happen tomorrow, but we’ll have to put her somewhere one day.”

  Jeanne hasn’t seen the pain in her father’s face before, because she hasn’t been looking for it. She hasn’t been thinking about other people’s pain at all. But now she can see the change in him. His hair is grayer and his voice drags. His eyes are red from lack of sleep, his face weathered with worry.

  5

  Carole and her childhood friend Jeanne used to talk to each other through a hole they’d poked in the plywood that separated their rooms. In the morning, when Jeanne went to fetch water at the neighborhood tap, she would whistle a wake-up call to Carole. Jeanne’s whistle sounded like the squeaky chirping of a pipirit gri, the gray kingbirds that flew around the area until boys knocked them down with slingshots, roasted them in firepits, and ate them.

  One morning, Jeanne did not whistle, and Carole never saw her again. The boys in the neighborhood said that her mother had killed her and buried her, then disappeared, but Jeanne’s mother had probably just been unable to make the rent and skipped out before daylight.

  The next occupant of that room was Victor. Victor’s father worked on a ship that traveled to Miami, and everyone in the neighborhood knew that Victor would be going there, too, one day. His father brought back suitcases full of clothes a couple of times a year, and Victor would always come over with some T-shirts or dresses that his mother said she had no use for. Victor soon discovered the hole in the plywood and would slip his finger through and wave it at Carole. Then she would whistle to him, like the last kingbird of their neighborhood.

  Carole knew from the moment she met Victor that he would take care of her. She never thought he’d conspire against her, or even threaten to put her away. But here he is now, plotting against her with a woman she does not know, a fleshy, pretty woman, just the way he once liked them, just the way she was, when he liked her most.

  Her husband and this woman are speaking in whispers. What are they talking about? And why is she sitting next to this peppercorn-haired doll that her husband sometimes uses to trick her, pretending it’s a real baby. Her real babies are gone. They disappeared with her friend Jeanne, and all she has left is this doll her husband bought her.

  She looks around the room to see if anyone realizes what’s going on, how this young woman is stealing her husband from her right under her nose while she is stuck on this sofa between strangers and a propped-up baby doll. She grabs the doll by its armpits and raises it to her shoulder. The doll’s facial expressions are so real, so lifelike, that its lips curl and its cheeks crumple as though it were actually about to cry. To calm it down, she whistles the pipirit’s spirited squeak.

  Carole is trying to explain all this to the men on either side of her, but they can’t understand her. One of them holds his hands out to her as if he wants her to return the doll to him.

  They are crowding around her now. The fleshy young woman, too, is moving closer. Carole doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. She just wants to take the doll out to the yard, the way she often does when her husband isn’t around. She wants to feel the sun-filled breeze on her face and see the midday luster of the pool. She wants to prove to everyone that not only can she take care of herself but she can take care of this doll, too.

  6

  How does her mother get past James and Paul and run to the terrace with Jude in her arms? Jude is squirming and wailing, his bare pudgy legs cycling erratically as her mother dangles him over the terrace railing.

  Her father is the first to reach the terrace, followed by James and everyone else. Though Carole is standing on the shady side of the terrace, she is sweating. Her bun has loosened as though Jude, or someone else, had been pulling at it.

  Jeanne isn’t sure how long her mother’s bony arms will be able to support her son, especially since Jude is crying and twisting, all while turning his head toward the faces on the terrace as though he knows how desperate they are to have him back inside.

  Paul has rushed downstairs, and Jeanne is now looking down at her brother’s face as she tries to figure out where her son might land if her mother drops him. The possibility of Jude landing in his uncle’s arms is as slim or as great as Jude landing in the pool or on the ficus hedge below the terrace.

  Marcos also appears down by the pool, as does James’s sister, Zoe. James is on the phone with the Fire-Rescue. Jeanne’s mother-in-law, Grace, has Jeanne caged in her arms, as if to keep Jeanne from crumbling to the floor. Jeanne’s father is standing a few feet from her mother, begging, pleading.

  Once James is off the phone, he switches places with Jeanne’s father. Jude balls his small fists, reopens them, then aims both his hands at his father. He stops crying for a moment, as if waiting for James to grab him. When James reaches for him, Carole leans and pushes Jude farther out. Everyone gasps and, once Grace releases Jeanne, she doubles over, as if she had been sliced in two.

  “Manman, please,” Jeanne says, straightening herself up. “Souple Manman. Tanpri.”

  Other tenants come out of their apartments. Some are already on their terraces. Others are by the pool with Paul, Zoe, and Marcos. Her son at his last checkup weighed nineteen pounds, which is about a fifth of her mother’s current weight. Her mother will not be able to hold on to him much longer.

  Jeanne walks toward her husband, approaching carefully, brushing past her father, who appears to be in shock.

  “Manman, please give me my baby,” Jeanne says. She tries to speak in a firm and steady voice, one that will not frighten her son.

  Her mother regards her with the dazed look that is now too familiar.

  “Let me have him, Carole,” Jeanne says. Maybe not being her daughter will give her more authority in her mother’s eyes. Her mother may think that Jeanne is someone she has to listen to, someone she must obey.

  “Baby,” her mother says, and it sounds more like a term of endearment for Jeanne than the realization that she’s holding a small child.

  “Your baby?” Carole asks, her arms wavering now, as if she were finally feeling Jude’s full weight.

  Jeanne lowers her voice. “He’s my child, Manman. Please give him to me.”

  Jeanne can see in the loosening of her mother’s arms that she is returning. But her mother is still not fully back, and, if she returns too suddenly, she may get confused and drop Jude. While her mother’s eyes are focused on her, Jeanne signals with a nod for her husband to move in, and, with one synchronized lurch, her father reaches for her mother, and her husband grabs their son. Her mother relaxes her grip on Jude only after he is safely back across the railing.
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  James collapses on the terrace floor, his still-crying son pressed tightly against his chest. Jeanne’s father takes her mother by the hand and leads her back inside. He sits with her on the sofa and wraps his arms around her as she calmly rests her head on his shoulder.

  Two police officers, two black women, arrive soon after. They are followed by EMTs. A light is shined in her mother’s pupils by one of the EMTs, then her blood pressure is taken. Though her mother seems to have snapped out of her episode and now looks only tired, it’s determined that Carole needs psychiatric evaluation. Jude is examined and has only some bruising under his armpits from his grandmother’s tight grip.

  Jeanne sees the dazed look return to her mother’s eyes as she climbs onto the lowered gurney, with some help from Victor and from Paul. Her father asks that her mother not be strapped down, but the head EMT insists that it is procedure and promises not to hurt her.

  Jeanne had hoped that her mother was only trying to teach her a lesson, to shock her out of her blues and remind her that she is capable of loving her son, but then she sees her mother’s eyes as she is being strapped to the gurney. They are bleary and empty. She appears to be looking at Jeanne but is actually looking past her, at the wall, then at the ceiling.

  Carole’s body goes limp as the straps are snapped over her wrists and ankles, and it seems as though she were letting go completely, giving in to whatever has been ailing her. She seems to know that she’ll never be back here, at least not in the way she was before. Jeanne knows, too, that this moment, unlike a birth, is no new beginning.

  7

  Carole wishes she’d see more of this, her daughter and her son-in-law together with their baby boy. James’s arms are wrapped around his wife as she holds their son, who has fallen asleep. Perhaps Jeanne will now realize how indispensable her son is to her. Carole regrets not telling her daughter a few of her stories. Now she will never get to tell them to her grandson, either. She will never play with him again.