The Dew Breaker Read online

  When I get up the next morning, my father’s already dressed. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bowed, his face buried in his palms, his forehead shadowed by his fingers. If I were sculpting him at this moment, I would carve a praying mantis, crouching motionless, seeming to pray, while actually waiting to strike.

  With his back to me now, my father says, “Will you call that actress and tell her we have it no more, the statue?”

  “We were invited to lunch there,” I say. “I believe we should go and tell her in person.”

  He raises his shoulders and shrugs.

  “Up to you,” he says.

  We start out for Gabrielle Fonteneau’s house after breakfast. It’s not quite as hot as the previous morning, but it’s getting there. I crank up the AC at full blast, making it almost impossible for us to have a conversation, even if we wanted to.

  The drive seems longer than the twenty-four hours it took to get to Lakeland from New York. I quickly grow tired of the fake lakes, the fenced-in canals, the citrus groves, the fan-shaped travelers’ palms, the highway so imposingly neat. My father turns his face away from me and takes in the tropical landscape, as though he will never see it again. I know he’s enjoying the live oaks with Spanish moss and bromeliads growing in their shade, the yellow trumpet flowers and flame vines, the tamarinds and jacaranda trees we speed by, because he expressed his admiration for them before, on the first half of our journey.

  As we approach Gabrielle Fonteneau’s house, my father breaks the silence in the car by saying, “Now you see, Ka, why your mother and me, we have never returned home.”

  The Fonteneaus’ house is made of bricks and white coral, on a cul-de-sac with a row of banyans separating the two sides of the street.

  My father and I get out of the car and follow a concrete path to the front door. Before we can knock, an older woman appears in the doorway. It’s Gabrielle Fonteneau’s mother. She resembles Gabrielle Fonteneau, or the way Gabrielle looks on television, with stunning almond eyes, skin the color of sorrel and spiraling curls brushing the sides of her face.

  “We’ve been looking out for you,” she says with a broad smile.

  When Gabrielle’s father joins her in the doorway, I realize where Gabrielle Fonteneau gets her height. He’s more than six feet tall.

  Mr. Fonteneau extends his hands, first to my father and then to me. They’re relatively small, half the size of my father’s.

  We move slowly through the living room, which has a cathedral ceiling and walls covered with Haitian paintings with subjects ranging from market scenes and first communions to weddings and wakes. Most remarkable is a life-size portrait of Gabrielle Fonteneau sitting on a canopy-covered bench in what seems like her parents’ garden.

  Out on the back terrace, which towers over a nursery of azaleas, hibiscus, dracaenas, and lemongrass, a table is set for lunch.

  Mr. Fonteneau asks my father where he is from in Haiti, and my father lies. In the past, I thought he always said he was from a different province each time because he’d really lived in all of those places, but I realize now that he says this to reduce the possibility of anyone identifying him, even though thirty-seven years and a thinning head of widow-peaked salt-and-pepper hair shield him from the threat of immediate recognition.

  When Gabrielle Fonteneau makes her entrance, in an off-the-shoulder ruby dress, my father and I both rise from our seats.

  “Gabrielle,” she coos, extending her hand to my father, who leans forward and kisses it before spontaneously blurting out, “My dear, you are one of the most splendid flowers of Haiti.”

  Gabrielle Fonteneau looks a bit flustered. She tilts her head coyly and turns toward me.

  “Welcome,” she says.

  During the meal of conch, fried plantains, and mushroom rice, Mr. Fonteneau tries to draw my father into conversation by asking him, in Creole, when he was last in Haiti.

  “Thirty-seven years,” my father answers with a mouthful of food.

  “No going back for you?” asks Mrs. Fonteneau.

  “I have not yet had the opportunity,” my father replies.

  “We go back every year,” says Mrs. Fonteneau, “to a beautiful place overlooking the ocean, in the mountains of Jacmel.”

  “Have you ever been to Jacmel?” Gabrielle Fonteneau asks me.

  I shake my head no.

  “We’re fortunate,” Mrs. Fonteneau says, “that we have a place to go where we can say the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter, our beaches prettier.”

  “So now we are tasting rain and weighing dust?” Mr. Fonteneau says and laughs.

  “There’s nothing like drinking the sweet juice from a coconut fetched from your own tree.” Mrs. Fonteneau’s eyes are lit up now as she puts her fork down to better paint the picture for us. She’s giddy; her voice grows louder and higher, and even her daughter is absorbed, smiling and recollecting with her mother.

  “There’s nothing like sinking your hand in sand from the beach in your own country,” Mrs. Fonteneau is saying. “It’s a wonderful feeling, wonderful.”

  I imagine my father’s nightmares. Maybe he dreams of dipping his hands in the sand on a beach in his own country and finding that what he comes up with is a fistful of blood.

  After lunch, my father asks if he can have a closer look at the Fonteneaus’ garden. While he’s taking the tour, I make my confession about the sculpture to Gabrielle Fonteneau.

  She frowns as she listens, fidgeting, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as though she’s greatly annoyed that so much of her valuable time had been so carelessly squandered on me. Perhaps she’s wondering if this was just an elaborate scheme to meet her, perhaps she wants us out of her house as quickly as possible.

  “I don’t usually have people come into my house like this,” she says, “I promise you.”

  “I appreciate it,” I say. “I’m grateful for your trust and I didn’t mean to violate it.”

  “I guess if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it,” she says. “But I’m very disappointed. I really wanted to give that piece to my father.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I should have known something was off,” she says, looking around the room, as if for something more interesting to concentrate on. “Usually when people come here to sell us art, first of all they’re always carrying it with them and they always show it to us right away. But since you know Céline, I overlooked that.”

  “There was a sculpture,” I say, aware of how stupid my excuse was going to sound. “My father didn’t like it, and he threw it away.”

  She raises her perfectly arched eyebrows, as if out of concern for my father’s sanity, or for my own. Or maybe it’s another indirect signal that she now wants us out of her sight.

  “We’re done, then,” she says, looking directly at my face. “I have to make a call. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  Gabrielle Fonteneau excuses herself, disappearing behind a closed door. Through the terrace overlooking the garden, I see her parents guiding my father along rows of lemongrass. I want to call Gabrielle Fonteneau back and promise her that I will make her another sculpture, but I can’t. I don’t know that I will be able to work on anything for some time. I have lost my subject, the prisoner father I loved as well as pitied.

  In the garden Mr. Fonteneau snaps a few sprigs of lemongrass from one of the plants, puts them in a plastic bag that Mrs. Fonteneau is holding. Mrs. Fonteneau hands the bag of lemongrass to my father.

  Watching my father accept with a nod of thanks, I remember the chapter “Driving Back Slaughters” from The Book of the Dead, which my father sometimes read to me to drive away my fear of imagined monsters. It was a chapter full of terrible lines like “My mouth is the keeper of both speech and silence. I am the child who travels the roads of yesterday, the one who has been wrought from his eye.”

  I wave to my father in the garden to signal that we should leave now, and he slowly comes toward me, the Fonteneaus trail
ing behind him.

  With each step forward, he rubs the scar on the side of his face, and out of a strange reflex I scratch my face in the same spot.

  Maybe the last person my father harmed had dreamed moments like this into my father’s future, strangers seeing that scar furrowed into his face and taking turns staring at it and avoiding it, forcing him to conceal it with his hands, pretend it’s not there, or make up some lie about it, to explain.

  Out on the sidewalk in front of the Fonteneaus’ house, before we both take our places in the car, my father and I wave good-bye to Gabrielle Fonteneau’s parents, who are standing in their doorway. Even though I’m not sure they understood the purpose of our visit, they were more than kind, treating us as though we were old friends of their daughter’s, which maybe they had mistaken us for.

  As the Fonteneaus turn their backs to us and close their front door, I look over at my father, who’s still smiling and waving. When he smiles the scar shrinks and nearly disappears into the folds of his cheek, which used to make me make wish he would never stop smiling.

  Once the Fonteneaus are out of sight, my father reaches down on his lap and strokes the plastic bag with the lemongrass the Fonteneaus had given him. The car is already beginning to smell too much like lemongrass, like air freshener overkill.

  “What will you use that for?” I ask.

  “To make tea,” he says, “for Manman and me.”

  I pull the car away from the Fonteneaus’ curb, dreading the rest stops, the gas station, the midway hotels ahead for us. I wish my mother were here now, talking to us about some miracle she’d just heard about in a sermon at the Mass. I wish my sculpture were still in the trunk. I wish I hadn’t met Gabrielle Fonteneau, that I still had that to look forward to somewhere else, sometime in the future. I wish I could give my father whatever he’d been seeking in telling me his secret. But my father, if anyone could, must have already understood that confessions do not lighten living hearts.

  I had always thought that my father’s only ordeal was that he’d left his country and moved to a place where everything from the climate to the language was so unlike his own, a place where he never quite seemed to fit in, never appeared to belong. The only thing I can grasp now, as I drive way beyond the speed limit down yet another highway, is why the unfamiliar might have been so comforting, rather than distressing, to my father. And why he has never wanted the person he was, is, permanently documented in any way. He taught himself to appreciate the enormous weight of permanent markers by learning about the Ancient Egyptians. He had gotten to know them, through their crypts and monuments, in a way that he wanted no one to know him, no one except my mother and me, we, who are now his kas, his good angels, his masks against his own face.

  SEVEN

  Next month would make it seven years since he’d last seen his wife. Seven—a number he despised but had discovered was a useful marker. There were seven days between paychecks, seven hours, not counting lunch, spent each day at his day job, seven at his night job. Seven was the last number in his age—thirty-seven. And now there were seven hours left before his wife was due to arrive. Maybe it would be more, with her having to wait for her luggage and then make it through the long immigration line and past customs to look for him in the crowd of welcoming faces on the other side of the sliding doors at JFK. That is, if the flight from Port-au-Prince wasn’t delayed, as it often was, or canceled altogether.

  He shared an apartment in the basement of a two-story house with two other men, Michel and Dany. To prepare for the reunion, he’d cleaned his room, thrown out some cherry-red rayon shirts he knew his wife would hate, and then climbed the splintered steps to the first floor to tell the landlady that his wife was coming.

  The landlady was heavyset and plain, almost homely, with deep ridges on her wide forehead.

  “I don’t have a problem with your wife coming.” She often closed her eyes while speaking, as if to accentuate the pauses between her words. “I just hope she’s clean.”

  “She is clean,” he said.

  “We understand each other, then.”

  The kitchen was the only room in the main part of the house he’d ever seen. It was pine-scented, spotless, and the dishes were neatly organized behind glass cabinets.

  “Did you tell the men?” she asked, while sticking a frozen dessert in her microwave.

  “I told them,” he said.

  He was waiting for her to announce that she’d have to charge him extra. She and her husband had agreed to rent the room to one person—a man they’d probably taken for a bachelor—not two.

  “A woman living down there with three men,” the landlady said, removing the small pie from the microwave. “Maybe your wife will be uncomfortable.”

  He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t up to her to decide whether or not his wife would be comfortable. But he had been prepared for this too, for some unpleasant remark about his wife. Actually, he was up there as much to give notice that he was looking for an apartment as to announce that his wife was coming. As soon as he found an apartment, he would be moving.

  “Okay, then,” she said, opening her silverware drawer. “Remember, you start the month, you pay the whole thing.”

  “Thank you very much, Madame,” he said.

  As he walked back downstairs, he scolded himself for calling her Madame. Why had he acted like a manservant who’d just been dismissed? It was one of those class things from home he still couldn’t shake. On the other hand, if he addressed the woman respectfully, it wasn’t because she had more money than he did or even because after five years in the same room he was still paying only two hundred and fifty dollars a month. He was only making a sacrifice for his wife.

  After his conversation with the landlady, he decided to have a more thorough one with the men who occupied the other two small rooms in the basement. The day before his wife was to arrive, he went into the kitchen to see them. The fact that they were wearing only sheer-looking loose boxers as they stumbled about bleary-eyed concerned him.

  “You understand, she’s a woman,” he told them. He was not worried that she would be tempted by their bony torsos, but if she was still as sensitive as he remembered, their near-nakedness might embarrass her.

  The men understood.

  “If it were my wife,” Michel said, “I’d feel the same.”

  Dany simply nodded.

  They had robes, Michel declared after a while. They would wear them when she got here.

  They didn’t have robes, all three men knew this, but Michel would buy some, out of respect for the wife.

  Michel, the youngest of the three, had advised him to pretty up his room, to buy some silk roses, some decorative prints for the walls (no naked girls), and some vanilla incense, which would be more pleasing than the pine-scented air fresheners that the people upstairs liked so much.

  Dany told him he would miss their evenings out together. In the old days, they had often gone dancing at the Rendez Vous, which was now the Cenegal nightclub. But they hadn’t gone much since the place had become famous— a Haitian man named Abner Louima was arrested there, then beaten and sodomized at a nearby police station.

  He told Dany not to mention those nights out again. His wife wasn’t to know that he’d ever done anything but work his two jobs, as a night janitor at Medgar Evers College and a day janitor at Kings’ County Hospital. And she was never to find out about those women who’d occasionally come home with him in the early-morning hours. Those women, most of whom had husbands, boyfriends, fiancés, and lovers in other parts of the world, never meant much to him anyway.

  Michel, who had become a lay minister at a Baptist church near the Rendez Vouz and never danced there, laughed as he listened. “The cock can no longer crow,” he said. “You might as well give the rest to Jesus.”

  “Jesus wouldn’t know what to do with what’s left of this man,” Dany said.

  Gone were the early-evening domino games. Gone was the phone number he’d had for the las
t five years, ever since he’d had a telephone. (He didn’t need other women calling him now.) And it was only as he stood in the crowd of people waiting to meet the flights arriving simultaneously from Kingston, Santo Domingo, and Port-au-Prince that he stopped worrying that he might not see any delight or recognition in his wife’s face. There, he began to feel some actual joy, even exhilaration, which made him want to leap forward and grab every woman who vaguely resembled the latest pictures she’d sent him, all of which he had neatly framed and hung on the walls of his room.

  They were searching her suitcase. Why were they searching her suitcase? One meager bag, which, aside from some gifts for her husband, contained the few things she’d been unable to part with, the things her relatives hadn’t nabbed from her, telling her that she could get more, and better, where she was going. She’d kept only her undergarments, a nightgown, and two outfits: the green princess dress she was wearing and a red jumper she’d gift-wrapped before packing so no one would take it. Neighbors who had traveled before had told her to gift-wrap everything so it wouldn’t be reopened at the airport in New York. Now the customs man was tearing her careful wrapping to shreds as he barked questions at her in mangled Creole.

  “Ki sa l ye?” He held a package out in front of her before unveiling it.

  What was it? She didn’t know anymore. She could only guess by the shapes and sizes.

  The customs man unwrapped all her gifts—the mangoes, sugarcane, avocados, the grapefruit-peel preserves, the peanut, cashew, and coconut confections, the coffee beans, which he threw into a green bin decorated with fruits and vegetables with red lines across them. The only thing that seemed as though it might escape disposal was a small packet of trimmed chicken feathers, which her husband used to enjoy twirling in his ear cavity. In the early days, soon after he’d left, she had spun the tips of the feathers inside her ears too and discovered that from them she could get jwisans, pleasure, an orgasm. She’d thought then that maybe the foreign television programs were right: sex was mostly between the ears.