Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [5]
"Do you know why I always wished I could read?"
Her teary eyes gazed directly into mine.
"I don't know why." I tried to answer as politely as I could.
"It was always my dream to read," she said, "so I could read that old Bible under my pillow and find the answers to everything right there between those pages. What do you think that old Bible would have us do right now, about this moment?"
"I don't know," I said.
"How can you not know?" she asked. "You try to tell me there is all wisdom in reading but at a time like this you disappoint me."
"You lied!" I shouted.
She grabbed both my ears and twisted them until they burned.
I stomped my feet and walked away. As I rushed to bed, I began to take off my clothes so quickly that I almost tore them off my body.
The smell of lemon perfume stung my nose as I pulled the sheet over my head.
"I did not lie," she said, "I kept a secret, which is different. I wanted to tell you. I needed time to reconcile myself, to accept it. It was very sudden, just a cassette from Martine saying, 'I want my daughter,' and then as fast as you can put two fingers together to snap, she sends me a plane ticket with a date on it. I am not even certain that she is doing this properly. All she tells me is that she arranged it with a woman who works on the airplane."
"Was I ever going to know?" I asked.
"I was going to put you to sleep, put you in a suitcase, and send you to her. One day you would wake up there and you would feel like your whole life here with me was a dream." She tried to force a laugh, but it didn't make it past her throat. "I had this plan, you see. I thought it was a good plan. I was going to tell you this, that in one week you would be going to see your mother. As far as you would know, it would just be a visit. I felt it in my heart and took it on Monsieur Augustin's advice that, once you got there, you would love it so much that you would beg your mother to let you stay. You have heard with your own two ears what everyone has said. We have no right to be sad."
I sunk deeper and deeper into the bed and lost my body in the darkness, in the folds of the sheets.
The bed creaked loudly as Tante Atie climbed up on her side.
"Don't you ever tell anyone that I cry when I watch Donald and his wife getting ready for bed," she said, sobbing.
I groped for my clothes in the dark and found the Mother's Day card I had made her. I tucked it under her pillow as I listened to her mumble some final words in her sleep.
Chapter 2
The smell of cinnamon rice pudding scented the whole kitchen. Tante Atie was sitting at the table with a bowl in front of her when I came in. I felt closer to tears with each word I even thought of saying, so I said nothing.
I sat at my usual place at the table and watched out of the corner of my eyes as she poured a bowl of rice pudding and slid it towards me.
"Bonjou," she said, waving a spoon in front of my face.
"Your bonjou, your greeting, is your passport."
I kept my head down and took the spoon only when she laid it down in front of me. I did not feel like eating, but if I did not eat, we would have had to sit and stare at one another, and sooner or later, one of us would have had to say something.
I picked up the spoon and began to eat. Tante Atie's lips spread into a little grin as she watched me. Her laughter prefaced the start of what was going to be a funny story.
There were many stories that Tante Atie liked to tell. There were mostly sad stories, but every once in a while, there was a funny one. There was the time when she was a little girl, when my grandmother was a practicing Protestant. Grandmè Ifé tried to show her Christian faith by standing over the edge of a snake pit and ordering the devils back into the ground. Tante Atie was always bent over with laughter as she remembered the look on Grandmè Ifé's face when one of the snakes