Everything Inside Page 9

  “Are you insane?” she asked.

  “Apparently.” He dangled the bottle over her head, waiting for some word from her to either pour it or not. The fireworks show was over, and some of the patrons were returning to their tables.

  “If you’re going to do it, do it,” she said.

  The water felt ice cold against her hair, flattening it. It dripped down past her bare shoulder, through her bra, and down her stomach.

  “Okay, you can stop now,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. By the time he lowered the bottle, it was empty.

  She hated herself for how happy she felt sitting there, soaking wet in her brand-new dress. They were now a spectacle that some of the other patrons were watching, some with envy at their apparent joie de vivre and others clearly disapproving. She told herself he needed her in a way he hadn’t before, to protect him from loud noises and shaking buildings, to keep him out of the nuthouse, as he called it. But even that was a weak excuse. She was there now, just as she’d been before, because she wanted to be. And maybe neither one of them was worthy of moments like this, but she wanted more of them.

  Their waiter walked over and handed them a few extra cloth napkins.

  “I’m sorry I lost it over there.” His face grew somber again, though not as much as when he’d been fleeing the fireworks. “I felt like Qadine out at Bayfront Park last year.”

  Qadine was the name of his daughter. Dina was his wife. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned his daughter to her by name.

  “My head was exploding just now,” he said.

  “I had no idea what I was going to do with you,” she said.

  The waiter returned with their check. Thomas insisted on paying and added a large tip.

  “So what will you do with me now?” he asked.

  * * *

  —

  Water was still dripping off of them as they walked the three blocks to her apartment. The streets were packed with postfireworks crowds, which, along with his slower gait, made the walk back to her place take twice as long as usual.

  Walking into her apartment, he seemed relaxed, even while looking over the crowded living room, her packed bookshelves, her old gray sofa and chaise longue, and her pair of rustic floor lamps.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

  “Not water,” he said.

  Somewhere in her kitchen was a bottle of Chilean Pinot Noir from the last time they’d seen each other. He had enjoyed the wine so much that he convinced their waitress to sell him an unopened bottle. He’d left the wine in her apartment to drink during a future visit, which never took place.

  She was thinking of bringing the bottle out when he said, “Never mind. I think I’m done with liquids for tonight.” Then he began undressing. He unbuttoned, then peeled off, his wet shirt, then his white undershirt, which he dropped on the floor. He unbuckled his belt and let his pants fall to his ankles.

  “I can throw them in the dryer,” she said as she bent down to pick up the clothes.

  “No need.” He sounded so certain that she put them down again.

  Now in only his plaid boxer shorts, with his pants at his feet, he lowered himself and sat on her carpeted floor. His body was scarred all over, she noticed, with tears, dips, folds, keloids, and patches on his back, stomach, and thighs, where he’d been bruised, scratched, pricked, or had lost layers of skin. Sitting on the floor, he raised first his own leg out of the pants, then the prosthetic.

  The prosthetic looked nearly identical to his other leg, the dark surface skinlike. He twisted what looked to her like a silicone mold, looping it back and forth, then pulled it off at the knee. It came off with a puff, a reverse-suction sound. Underneath was a bulging ball of dark skin, with a track of scarring that looked like it had been made with staples.

  “You wanted to see,” he said. “I could tell.”

  She hadn’t expected to see that way. She slid down and sat next to him, the amputated leg lying limply on the carpet between them. She heard his breath racing again; this time, it seemed, from embarrassment or self-pity.

  “Can I touch it?” she asked.

  He said nothing, so she reached over and tapped her fingers gently against the rounded tip, then ran her palm over the jagged skin, where his knee bone rested. In some spots, the nub felt slippery like glass, in others doughy, like warm bread. She was afraid to touch the suture marks, which, because of the gaps of lighter skin peeking out between them, made the rest of the leg still look unhealed.

  “Seen enough?” he asked.

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. He brushed her hand away and reached for the prosthetic, pushed, it seemed to her, the absent leg into it, and quickly popped it back in place. He then put on his wet clothes, more slowly than he had taken them off. First the pants, then the undershirt, then the shirt.

  When he was fully dressed, he held the wall and stood up. She stood up, too.

  How could she have thought that her meager gift would offer any kind of comfort for all of this? A small framed color-pencil sketch of his wife and daughter as birds, birds in repose and not even in flight, birds with human faces and legs, a life study of dead models. Drawn against an umber-and-red background, the wife was an Antillean mango bird with iridescent purple tail feathers and emerald-green wings; and the daughter, a ruby-throated hummingbird with a gilded body.

  The package was on a side table near her sofa. She walked over, picked it up, and handed it to him. She thought, as he unwrapped the plain brown paper, that it seemed like it might be meant for an ancestral shrine. Looking down at it, he tipped his head to the side as if to confirm what he was seeing. Then his mouth fell open as it sank in.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “An expression of regret,” she said.

  She now realized that not just giving him the sketch, but her making it at all, was confusing to him. This had not been her intention. She wanted it to be a kind of memorial to his wife and daughter. But it was too soon.

  He held out his hands and pulled her closer so that the two of them could see the drawing from the same angle.

  “You know this is some crazy shit, right?” he said.

  She had to admit that both the intent and execution were crazy as hell. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who needed to be in a psychiatric hospital. She looked up at the side of his face, and he seemed to be trying hard to suppress a laugh.

  “If you want to do something for me, draw me a picture where you make them look older,” he said once he was fully composed. “Like when kids are lost for a long time and the police make them look older.”

  He was talking about image enhancement, age progression. She spent the last day of her class at Miami Dade discussing forensics and courtroom sketching as possible career choices for her student artists. Even though she’d never done them professionally, she had once shown him how she could sketch anyone at both present and older ages, without even looking down at the paper. She was going to tell him that he could get software to do what he wanted to see—he could upload some pictures on his computer and add as many years as he’d like. But then she thought how soothing it might feel to age progress his daughter, to do away with the baby fat, sharpen the jawline, lengthen the neck, stretch her whole body for height, and later give her buds for breasts. Then to gift his wife with a few more years. To add gray strands to her hair, crow’s-feet around her eyes, to round out her shoulders and fill out her middle.

  “You don’t have to do it now,” he said, his eyes still fixed on their bird faces. “I might ask in a year or two. Or even later than that.”

  Was this his way of telling her they might still be in each other’s lives in two or three years?

  “I have to go,” he said, handing the frame to her. “Thank you for this evening.”

  She put the sketch back on the side
table where it had been since she’d wrapped it that afternoon, then followed him to the door. She opened it for him and gripped the handle as he prepared to walk through. Before he could step off her threshold, she asked, “Did your wife know about me?”

  He turned around to face her again and nodded.

  “You told her?”

  “She saw us,” he said. “At the restaurant that last night. She figured out that I was hanging out there a lot. She came to see what was up.”

  She now felt an extra layer of shame. She was also impressed that his wife did not confront them or cause a scene.

  “The trip to Haiti was about setting things straight with her,” he said. “We were going to work on our marriage while surrounded by family. Having family around always made us feel more tied together.”

  “You were working things out with Dina?” she said.

  Dina’s name coming across Anika’s lips seemed to startle him, as though he wasn’t aware that Anika even knew it.

  She thought just then of telling him about their baby, but she decided not to. It would just mean more grief for him to carry, another loss. Or perhaps he would be relieved that he wouldn’t have to be a father again, or be linked to another woman through a child.

  He turned his back to her, and with his neck curved as if to bow, he walked down the hall. He made up for the slight imbalance in the prosthetic leg by bouncing too hard in the other direction, which made him seem unsteady in a way that she had not noticed when he’d arrived for dinner. Watching him stagger into the elevator, she wondered how he was managing all this alone. But then she reminded herself that he had been living without her for months now.

  After the elevator doors closed, and the possibility of his returning diminished, she walked back inside her apartment. She looked for and found the old Pinot Noir bottle in one of her kitchen cabinets and brought it out with her, along with the sketch, to the terrace.

  She placed the sketch of the bird versions of Qadine and Dina on one of her patio chairs, and while sitting next to them, she looked down at the causeway and at the long line of cars slowly making their way across it, cars filled with couples, families returning from barbecues and fireworks displays.

  “You two must look after each other,” she said to the drawing.

  She wanted them to look after her child, too. Her child would also never age. Her child would never even be visible to the eye. She wanted all three of them, Qadine, Dina, and her too-early-to-be-named baby, to take in the same reflection of the downtown skyline she was seeing. She wanted them, her angels of history, to collectively admire this liquid city on the bay.

  She uncorked the wine, threw her head back, and took a swig from the bottle. The wine tasted like fizzy vinegar. It seared her tongue, then singed her throat as she forced herself to swallow. It was undrinkable. She thought of Roro and his rum pouring and emptied the rest of the bottle on her terrace’s cement floor. It was so rancid that she expected it to look like deoxygenated blood, but instead it looked mostly brown, like melted skin.

  As she watched the wine thin out and spread around her feet, she whispered, just as she had with Roro and the others the night of the earthquake, “Pou sa n pa wè yo. For those we don’t see. For those who are not here.”

  Hot-Air Balloons

  My roommate Neah dropped out of college the first semester of her first year to work full-time for Leve, a women’s organization that runs, among other things, a rape recovery center in a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. After her one-week Thanksgiving trip to Haiti with Leve, Neah sent a group e-mail, in which both her parents and I and a few of her professors were included, telling us that she was back in Miami but would not be returning to school.

  Neah’s father was Dr. Frank Asher, the esteemed Trinidadian linguistic anthropologist and chair of the Caribbean Studies Department. He was a lean, baby-faced man with ruddy cheeks and freckles. In fact, he looked a lot like Neah with her pointy cheekbones and tawny-colored skin, which sometimes seemed to disappear, along with Neah, under her loose-fitting, dark thrift-shop pants and marching-band-inspired jackets. If not for the fragile-looking wire-rimmed glasses that Neah said she couldn’t convince him to replace, and a signature plaid sports coat that Neah called his old-man blazer, Dr. Asher would look like the son of most of his colleagues. In fact, he was younger than a lot of them. He and Neah’s mother, an economist, had gotten married during their first year in graduate school. Neah came early in the marriage and was, she believed, the reason for her parents’ divorce. Still, when Dr. Asher suggested that she decline admission to, among others, the college where her mother was teaching in upstate New York, in the small town where Neah had mostly grown up, to attend the college in Miami where her father was a big shot, Neah decided to give it a try.

  Dr. Asher was now sitting on Neah’s bed, quietly rubbing his forehead as if waiting for her to walk through the door. Neah’s dropping-out e-mail had disturbed him enough to make him rush over to our room and talk to me in person, but he wasn’t doing much talking.

  Neah’s and my room was larger than most of the other rooms on our first-year floor, with two twin beds instead of three, a shared closet, and individual dressers on opposite ends. Next to each of our beds was a desk with a bookshelf on top. Among my opened books and notebooks, and snack wrappers, was a framed picture of me and my parents, which they had insisted we have taken at a strip mall a week before move-in day. I kept that picture on my desk so I would always think about my parents when I sat down to do my work. Seeing the three of us, my dad in his charcoal-gray suit, my mom in a pink ruffled dress, and me with a flowered maxi, all of us with our heart-shaped faces glowing with smiles, always reminded me that I couldn’t afford to fail.

  Neah had no pictures or posters on her side of the room. She thought print pictures were old school. The faces of everyone she treasured, including her friends, parents, and other family members from New York, were on her phone. Aside from my family photo, I had no other pictures on display. I found the blank white walls soothing to look at when I was sad, tired, or just daydreaming. Unlike most of our floor mates, we didn’t have a small refrigerator or microwave in our room. Neah was vehemently anticlutter, and I was used to keeping only as many belongings as I could quickly pack up and take with me.

  Neah’s bed was well made, with hospital corners and fluffed pillows, just as she had left it the morning Dr. Asher had driven her to the airport for the trip to Port-au-Prince a week ago. The books Neah left behind were neatly lined up on her desk. Dr. Asher picked up and leafed through several of them. He lingered on a book of poetry called Illuminations, in which he stopped to silently read some pages.

  Right before she left, Neah had been immersed in the work of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, which she pronounced “Rambo.” She told me she was “overjoyed” with the possibilities that a few of his poems had opened up to her. She was planning to enroll in more French classes in the spring so that she could bypass translations and read Rimbaud in the original. She said she was going to spend her junior year in Paris and eventually get a PhD in French literature and write her dissertation on the symbolists with Rimbaud as her focus.

  “Lucy,” said Dr. Asher. “You hold some responsibility for all of this.” He closed Illuminations but still held on to it. His voice was clear, resolute, and well paced, the way I imagined him speaking to his students in class. “Can you please go to that place and talk to my daughter about returning to school? She is not answering my calls.”

  * * *

  —

  Neah learned about Leve, the women’s organization, from me. My twenty-hour-a-week work-study job was in Career/Volunteer Services, and one of the first things I saw there on a bulletin board was a flyer with the Leve logo, a silhouette of a woman and a young girl staring up at a dark sky with a single star in it. On the flyer were color photographs of undernourished Haitian women who looked l
ike my mother, some carrying heavy buckets of water on their heads while walking narrow dirt paths in the countryside, others sitting on riverbanks washing clothes, a few selling fly-covered meat in an open market. At the bottom of the flyer, near the pitch to join Leve on the Thanksgiving-week trip, was a picture of a teenage girl lying in a hospital bed, her face bruised, her eyes swollen shut.

  I waited until no one was looking and yanked the flyer off the bulletin board, in part because I was afraid that people would link that girl’s bruised face to mine, as someone who, though I was not born there, considered myself “left side of the hyphen” Haitian. Where were the idyllic beaches with fine white sand that my parents were always dreaming and talking about, and that I had also seen online? Where were the dewy mountaintops, Haiti being the land of mountains and all? Where was the Citadelle Laferrière, one of the world’s greatest forts? Where were the caves and grottoes, the waterfalls, the cathedrals, churches, Vodou temples, museums, and art galleries college students could be visiting?

  That night, I had described both the flyer and my indignation to Neah. She was so quiet I thought she had fallen asleep. After a long pause, she said in her late-night-whisper voice, “It sounds really interesting. I think I’d like to go.”

  “I would not want to go,” I said. I meant without my parents, but I never managed to say that.

  It didn’t surprise me that Neah would want to go on the Leve trip, though. She had traveled all over the world with her parents, even after their divorce.

  I had grown up differently than Neah. My parents met while traveling between orange, berries, lettuce, tomatoes, and corn harvests along the Georgia and Florida coasts. For as far back as I could remember, I had slept in grower-owned housing, which was basically bunk beds and sometimes cots behind barns and stables, where only thin wooden slats and planks separated my parents and me from the animals. We’d also lived in field barracks with beaten-dirt floors, in “dorms” that looked like they’d been built for criminals doing hard labor, and in overpriced motel rooms with cracked windows, filthy carpets, and peeling paint on the walls.