Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [19]
I’ve since discovered that children who spend their childhood without their parents love to hear stories like this, which they can embellish and expand as they wish. These types of anecdotes momentarily put our minds at ease, assuring us that we were indeed loved by the parent who left. Unfortunately, I wasn’t told many stories like that. What I did often hear about was the future, an undetermined time when my father would send for my mother, Bob and me.
Once my father was gone, Uncle Joseph would stop by every now and then to see us after work, and of course my mother, Bob and I continued to attend services at his church. Fiercely independent and too proud to seek his involvement or ask for loans when the monthly allowance my father sent her ran out, my mother continued my father’s work, sewing school uniforms and flags. One Sunday morning when she had no money at all, my mother dropped us on my uncle’s lap after church so we could have a proper Sunday meal with him and Tante Denise.
“One day this will stop,” my mother told him. Then she ran home, crying.
Two years after my father left, when I was four and Bob was two, the one-month tourist visa that my mother had applied and been rejected for several times was finally approved. When it came time for her to leave, we drove with her—Tante Denise, Uncle Joseph and Bob and me—to the airport. Bob sat on my mother’s lap in the backseat and I sat next to her with my head leaning against her arm.
In the airport, at the gate, my mother’s eyes welled with tears as she handed Bob over to Tante Denise, who quickly removed her gloves to receive him in her arms. Back then Tante Denise rarely removed her gloves in public, so the very careful gesture, her removing her gloves and patting her wig slightly with her well-manicured fingers, seemed to me to indicate that something big was going to happen. I didn’t know exactly when the word had come that my mother could leave, but I should have suspected something. All that week, my mother had been sewing me dresses: long ones with large bows and elaborate collars, short ones in carnation prints and others with pink lace ruffles. By the end of the week I had ten dresses in total, most of them too big for me, so that, I realized now, I could wear them in the future, while she was gone. She had even made me a matching version of the plain white cotton dress that we were both wearing at the airport, a dress that resembled the kind of modest frock one might wear to be immersed in water at an adult baptism at my uncle Joseph’s church. It was all making sense. She had also bought Bob three brand-new suits, two of them with short pants and one large one with long pants. She had given away the light blue unopened sheet set she kept under her bed for a sick day to Marie Micheline and her ceramic pitchers to Tante Denise. But she hadn’t moved our things from our house. Our beds? Our clothes? And a treasured birthday gift from my uncle, a copy of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine. These things, were they even now being moved to Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s house?
When it was time for my mother to board the plane, I wrapped my arms around her stockinged legs to keep her feet from moving. She leaned down and unballed my fists as Uncle Joseph tugged at the back of my dress, grabbing both my hands, peeling me off of her.
“Kalm,” he said. “Calm yourself.” And for a moment his voice, deep, firm, did pacify me. After all, it seemed that he and Tante Denise would now be in charge of us. They would be our parents. But what if our mother went away and never came back? Just like our father.
Panicked, I leaped out of Uncle Joseph’s arms and ran right to my mother, pressing my face against her legs. I pushed