Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [55]
"What about the baby?"
"You've asked the same question a million ways; you have a camaraderie with this child. I'll have it. That's what you want to hear."
"At least this child will know its father."
"I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next."
She lent me her new car for the trip to Providence, a guarantee that I would come back to visit her. She tugged at Brigitte's hat and kissed her forehead as I strapped Brigitte into the back seat.
"You forgive me, don't you?" she asked.
I leaned over and kissed her stomach.
"It will be a beautiful baby," I said.
"Don't call it a baby."
I kept seeing her face as I drove into the New England landscape. I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.
After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother's anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had "caught" from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn't both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl.
I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot, perhaps a bit more than other children. The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.
Chapter 30
I pulled into the driveway of our house shortly after noon. Joseph nearly fell down the steps as he rushed towards the car. I screeched to a halt, a few inches shy of crashing into him.
He tapped on the back window, trying to get Brigitte's attention. She looked a bit disoriented when he raised her out of the seat.
"And the child's mother, does she get a hug?"
He pressed his lips down on mine.
"Bienvenue," he said, "Welcome back."
He ran up the steps with Brigitte, leaving me to carry my own bag.
The sun shining through the window colored our wooden floors the hue of Haitian dirt. Joseph threw Brigitte up in the air, both of them laughing as he caught her.
"Tell Daddy all about Haiti," he said.
Brigitte pursed her wet lips as though she wanted to.
"Are you glad to see Daddy?" He propped her up on the sofa.
"Are you glad to see her mommy?" I asked, sitting next to him.
"It's nice to see you, but I want to kill you."
His free hand traveled up and down my blouse.
"Did you miss me?" I asked.
"Sometimes."
The bedroom was messy. There were sheets piled on top of one another and pillows thrown randomly about. I held the sheets up to my face and sniffed them for another woman's scent. The mattress smelled like his socks.
"You see I need you to put some order in my life," he said.
"You need a maid," I said.
He twirled the duck mobile on the baby's crib, which we kept next to our bed.
"How was your trip?" he asked.
"My grandmother was preparing her funeral," I said. "It's a thing at home. Death is journey. My grandmother thinks she's at the end of hers."
"You called it home?" he said. "Haiti."
"What else would I call it?
"You have never called it that since we've been together. Home has always been your mother's house, that you could never go back to."
I searched through the pile of dishes in the kitchen sink, trying to find a clean glass for a drink of water. In the nursery were the large drums he sometimes used in performance.
"I was calling the ancestral spirits, asking them to make you come back