Claire of the Sea Light Read online

  When after some time Claire did not surface, many of Nozias’s neighbors walked over to him and took turns telling him some variation of the idea that she had probably fallen asleep somewhere and would surely be home soon.

  Caleb’s wife, Josephine, came to embrace him. Her face was swollen from her many hours of crying, and the mourning scarf around her coarse black hair slid toward the back of her neck. Josephine was mute and suffered from elephantiasis in her right leg, which was double the size of her left leg. So Josephine moved slowly and spoke with her hands in a way that over the years Nozias and a few others who were close to Caleb had grown to understand. She touched her lips and mimed, “Mèsi, thank you.” For what he wasn’t sure. For spreading news of her husband’s death among their neighbors? For witnessing the death itself?

  Pounding both hands against her chest, she signaled “kouraj, courage,” perhaps wishing it both for herself and for him.

  As Josephine limped away from him, dragging the weight of her leg behind her, Nozias begged those heading to town to keep an eye out for his daughter. But inside of him was a new calm. He was certain that Claire would return, and he wanted to be there when she did.

  Madame Gaëlle offered her white Mercedes. They could drive around town, looking for Claire, she said. But he was convinced that Claire hadn’t gone too far, and he wanted his to be the first face she saw when she came back.

  “I can’t leave.” Madame Gaëlle reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “She left because of me.”

  She was probably right. Claire had never done anything like this before. Yes, she would sometimes go off walking, wandering around town, as her mother used to. But someone—if not him, then one of the women who kept an eye out for her—always knew in which direction she was headed, where she was going, and when she’d be back. But he felt it wouldn’t be right to let Madame Gaëlle spend whatever time it would take Claire to return standing out on the beach. She also sensed his unease and suggested she wait in his shack.

  “Don’t worry, Nozias,” she said. “Haven’t I been here before?”

  Madame Gaëlle’s pearly gown now seemed as bright as the shiny side of the moon. She smelled like gardenias, like the gardenia-scented pomade the fishermen’s wives who combed Claire’s hair sometimes used to grease Claire’s scalp. Madame Gaëlle walked in, just as she had the year before, when she’d come to see them. But this time she sat down on his cot. Her eyes were like two vacant pits, and in them he recognized a void that he could easily identify but could never soothe, not even in himself. She was there but not really. At one moment, her mouth opened and closed but nothing came out. She seemed to be recalling things she could not put into words.

  He, though, was concentrating on his modest surroundings, on the way his cot caved in slightly under her weight. On the way the lamp was fluttering between shadow and light. Was it too hot in there? he wondered. Too cool? Too bright? Too dark? Her insistence on staying made him ashamed of his lack of comforts, of the smallness and feeble nature of his world.

  “She will return, Madame,” he said. “Excuse me.”

  He backed out of the door, as though to show her his behind would be the height of disrespect. Then he left her alone in the shack and walked over to wait next to the rocks where the two of them had been sitting with Claire before Claire had disappeared.

  The Frogs

  Ten years before the night she showed up to take Nozias Faustin’s child, Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud was expecting her own child. It was so hot in Ville Rose that year that dozens of frogs exploded. These frogs frightened not just the children who chased them into the rivers and creeks at dusk, or the parents who hastily pried the slimy carcasses from their young ones’ fingers, but also twenty-five-year-old Gaëlle, who was more than six months pregnant and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a few weeks, but Gaëlle hadn’t noticed at first. They’d been dying so quietly that for each one that had expired, another had taken its place along the gulch near her house, each one looking exactly the same and fooling her, among others, into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old, and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Just as it was for everything else.

  After one sleepless night during which she’d been haunted by visions of frog carcasses slithering into her mouth and down her throat, Gaëlle had lingered under the mosquito net draped over their mahogany four-poster bed, as her husband, Laurent, slipped out of the room.

  It was only after she heard the jingle of silverware in the dining room and her husband’s effusive compliments to Inès, the housekeeper, about Inès’s fried eggs and herring, that Gaëlle opened her eyes. But she didn’t leave the bed until the engine of her husband’s old Peugeot Cabriolet had been started, signaling that he was leaving for the fabric shop.

  Soon after he was gone, she got up. Without changing out of her nightgown, she grabbed the ceramic chamber pot, which she kept by her bed. With the ever-vigilant Inès out of sight, Gaëlle walked out of the house and followed the almond grove that veered into a field of wild vetiver grass, then into a brook.

  The sun had not been up for long, but it was already blazing in the middle of the sky. Still, the rocks and pebbles around the brook felt icy under Gaëlle’s bare feet. She walked on them as she would a bed of dirt or grass, following the water’s flow downstream until she spotted her first frogs. Just a few inches from the nearest lily pad, she noticed a green-horned frog that looked like a leaf with horns. Its legs were like a chicken’s and it seemed to be almost frowning. Soon after, she found a brown dwarf jungle frog, which had the more ordinary look of a frog, except for what seemed like a long middle finger on its hind legs. The third was a tiny scarlet koki, whose melodious staccato song was believed to lull babies to sleep.

  Gaëlle looked more closely. All three frogs, she saw, were dead, though of a more natural-seeming death than the frayed remains she’d seen in recent days. The three dead frogs were in crouching positions, as though frozen mid-jump or -crawl.

  Rubbing her belly, she crouched down to pick up the frogs, then dropped them in the chamber pot. As she walked toward the base of a particular almond tree, where every day in the last week she’d performed a wordless burial for a handful of frog skins, she cradled the pot against her stomach. Most mornings when she’d reached the brook, she’d hoped to find at least one live frog, but carrying the dead frogs away made her feel useful, as though she were performing a crucial service that no one else would or could do. At times, it also felt like an extension of some of the childhood play she and her husband had relished as kids: the lizard burials in matchboxes, the butterfly and firefly trappings in glass jars. Though she vowed that each morning’s brief hunt would be her last, she couldn’t stop, so much had she convinced herself that the frogs needed her and she them.

  She dug into the dew-softened dirt with her fingers, making a hole large enough to bury the frogs under the almond tree, then went back into the house and spent the day in bed. Some days, she felt so free that she hardly remembered the baby in her body at all. But on other days, days like today, she felt as though she were carrying a nest of snakes in her stomach. Inès brought her meals to her in bed on those days, but she barely ate anything: the breakfast of boiled plantains and fried eggs, the lunch of rice and beans, and the baby-fattening fried fish and stewed meats all looking to her even less appetizing than the dead frogs she’d planted in the ground.

  “This heat and all this trouble with the frogs is surely a sign that something more terrible is going to happen,” Laurent told her when he came home that evening from town. He bent over to kiss her cheek, his face soaking with sweat.

  Laurent Lavaud—Lolo to intimates, Lòl to his wife—was a small man, thinner and shorter than Gaëlle in her bare feet. He had a head of thick peppercorn hair and a wide grin that he seemed unable to restrain even when he was angry. He was from a family of tailors and textile shop owners
, and because of the abundance of fabric at his own shop in town, dressed very well, lately favoring airy custom-made guayaberas and loose cotton pants.

  While sliding into one of the two rocking chairs on the porch, Laurent told Gaëlle how when leaving Ville Rose’s only radio station, WZOR, Radio Zòrèy or Ear Radio, where he sponsored programs and sometimes sat in the studio to listen to some broadcasts, he’d seen a group of young thugs hanging around the station entrance. Rubbing her belly with one hand, as had become a habit now, while fanning herself with a straw hat with the other, Gaëlle was only pretending to be listening when she said, “Don’t think about it, Lòl. It will ruin your appetite.”

  He nodded, and then went back to talking about the frogs. “In all my life, I’ve never heard of creatures dying like this.”

  As an adolescent, Laurent had been a frequent hand-rolled-tobacco-leaf smoker. At times, when he made some pronouncement—for he had one of those voices that sounded as though it were always making pronouncements—he sounded a bit out of breath.

  With their house in the middle of a notorious floodplain, near a tributary that joined several brooks, creeks, and rivers, Gaëlle thought that hundreds of rotting frogs might be an obvious catastrophe. But each morning, she made it a point to sniff the morning air and found no smell of dead frogs at all. As soon as their burnished skins and tiny organs were exposed to the sun, she realized, most of the frogs dried up, dissolving beneath the lily pads or into the riverbeds.

  That there was no putrid odor was a lucky thing. At this stage of her pregnancy most things still sent Gaëlle retching. And yet two smells bothered her not at all: the clammy odor of dead frogs and the inky fragrance of brand-new cloth, which she enjoyed so much that at times her husband suspected her of secretly nibbling away at their merchandise whenever she was at their fabric shop.

  A few weeks after they first began to die, the frogs and their cadavers disappeared altogether. The early-summer rains flooded the town’s creeks and rivers, drowning the remaining frog population and depositing a tall layer of sandy loam near Gaëlle and Laurent’s house. The waters had been strong enough to unearth the lengthy roots of the young vetiver grass that grew wild near their home. Some years they’d actually made a profit from their wild vetiver, which was not only good for the soil but also much sought after by two perfume company suppliers in the nearby southern city of Les Cayes. Those years when the vetiver flourished, Laurent and Gaëlle would use the extra money to plant a few more rows of almond trees near the outer sections of their property. Gaëlle especially loved the almond trees, and before she was pregnant and developed an aversion to them, would crush their fibrous fruits with river stones to dig out the kernels.

  One evening, noticing that Laurent had returned late from the shop yet again, Inès, the bold and barrel-chested woman who’d been their housekeeper since they’d gotten married, greeted him with a silver tray and a glass of lemonade.

  “Will Msye be eating tonight?” Inès asked in a scolding voice as deep as Laurent’s.

  Laurent shook his head no. He didn’t like to eat at night and often arrived home late, after his wife had had her supper.

  It had crossed Gaëlle’s mind—as maybe it had Inès’s—that since Gaëlle had known her husband since she was a girl and had become pregnant only a month into their marriage, he might have already taken up with another woman in town. Gaëlle also knew of his interest in the radio—his eagerness to watch the program hosts and hostesses work from the control booth was as strong as his erotic desires—and she believed him when he said that this was what he was doing in town after he closed the shop.

  The next evening, Laurent came home early, carrying a handful of red azaleas for Gaëlle. Over the past few months, Gaëlle had learned that she could tolerate her husband’s errors and obsessions, as long as they ended with red azaleas. There was comfort in that.

  To escape the heat, they got in his Cabriolet and Laurent lowered the top and drove into the oldest part of town, past the vine-covered lookout tower of a castle that had been started in the years when Haiti was still a French colony, as a gift for Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline. The castle, one of the town’s most remarkable relics, had been left unfinished in 1802, when Pauline Bonaparte’s husband died from yellow fever and she sailed with his body back to France. Some of its stone walls remained, although no one had seen fit to make any type of official monument out of them. Tubers were planted where Pauline’s drawing rooms and boudoir should have stood. Cows and goats grazed around them. Children played afternoon soccer games in what would have been the zoological park meant to house Pauline’s large menagerie of wild native animals.

  Once they passed the ruins of the castle, which was called Abitasyon Pauline, Laurent drove over the old tracks behind the sugarcane fields and the umbrella-shaped roof of the kleren plant emerged. The smell of raw liquor filled the entire street; it was said that if you stood long enough on that street you could get drunk just from the air. Laurent and Gaëlle had tried it many times and it hadn’t worked. They tried again that night to inhale some hazy happiness and forced light-headedness, but it still didn’t work. They then continued to the public lycée on the corner. The first floor was made of concrete and the second story was made of wood. Most of the structures in that part of town were built like this; construction materials were randomly mixed, creating a piecemeal that the people called achitekti pèpè.

  Those drives, to her, were also journeys into their past. When they were students at this school, so few people had cars that dreaming about having one of your own was like wishing you had an airplane in your front yard. When Lòl was seventeen and his father bought him the black Peugeot Cabriolet they were still driving, he became the leader of their pack, the prince of their crowd. And she, being his intended, was the one scheduling the car, organizing trips, deciding who could or could not be a part of their inner circle. During the feast day of Sainte Rose de Lima, because roses were too expensive and she didn’t like lilacs, they would cover the front of the car with red azaleas and she would sit next to him in the passenger seat as he drove in the religious procession with the car’s top down.

  They now drove farther uphill toward the old Anthère lighthouse, near where Gaëlle had spent her childhood. They parked in front of the bougainvillea-covered gates of her grandparents’ house, which had been empty since her mother and father had moved to Port-au-Prince. Looking down at the dark horizon over the beach, her husband reached for the flashlight on the dashboard and turned it on before they got out of the car. They followed a long and narrow footpath through the alley of palms that led down to the water. Hand in hand, they walked between the canoes and sailboats, most of which were named after saints, mothers, lovers, or wives. The flaps of many of the fishermen’s windows were open, even at this late hour. Every few feet offered a glimpse of some private act by the light of a kerosene or hurricane lamp: a child being nursed or smacked, a husband and wife arguing, another pair undressing, a late supper of bread and tea being savored.

  The fishermen’s wives called out greetings to her and Laurent as they walked by. This was both the blessing and the curse of a town like theirs, a kind of village, really, to which Gaëlle and Laurent and their families had always belonged.

  “Sea air’s good for the baby,” many of the women called behind her.

  The baby? What did they all know about the baby? Soon enough they would know everything, but for now the baby’s story was only hers, Laurent’s and hers.

  Gaëlle hadn’t wanted to do it. But because he claimed the fetus was developing too slowly, the gynecologist at Sainte Thérèse had insisted on a sonogram. The baby, determined by the images to be a girl, was shown to have a cyst growing in her chest and down her entire spine. If she lived long enough to be born, the doctor said, she would probably die soon after. Both the doctor and Laurent had thought Gaëlle should abort before she was too far along. But Gaëlle wanted to carry full term, to see the whole thing through.
/>   The next day Laurent had some other business in town and asked Gaëlle if she could spend a few hours at the fabric shop in his place. Gaëlle welcomed the idea. She relished the thought of standing behind the counter and greeting customers, who’d offer her an excuse to roll out the massive spools of muslin, kaliko, organza, and gabardine that lined the shop’s crowded shelves. All of this, she hoped, would also keep her mind off the baby.

  Gaëlle’s first customer that morning was Claire Narcis, a pretty young woman whose long, tightly cornrowed hair sometimes made her look like a child.

  After Gaëlle had become pregnant, Claire Narcis, like almost everyone else, brought her a few small presents now and then when she came into the shop. Most of the time it was food, often fresh snapper, which Claire Narcis’s man had caught and which she would show Gaëlle in the shop and then carry to Inès so it would be cooked fresh. Other times it was mangoes, avocadoes, or yams. But every once in a while, Claire Narcis would bring her something for the baby, blankets or jumpers, neither pink nor blue, but yellow or green, almost as a way of quietly inquiring about the sex of the child. This time, Claire Narcis brought an embroidered green blanket bordered in a delicate bridal lace that Gaëlle had sold her a week earlier without knowing its true purpose. That morning, with her pregnancy-sharpened sense of smell, Gaëlle could even detect on her the dead that Claire Narcis washed and dressed at Albert Vincent’s funeral home most days. She caught a whiff of the embalming fluids and lemon-scented disinfectant and tried to ignore them as she untied her own shop’s beige rope, unwrapped her own brown paper, to behold Claire Narcis’s offering.