Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [32]
“I hear it can be just as dangerous in New York,” Tante Denise’s other brother, Bosi, said. “As dangerous as it can be with the macoutes here.”
This led my father into two urban legends from New York’s Haitian community. A woman was robbed weekly by a masked young man in the elevator of her apartment building. One day she carried a kitchen knife, which she used to stab her robber. When she removed the thief’s mask, she realized it was her son. In the other story, a young man had led some school pals to five thousand dollars that his mother was hiding in her mattress and in a struggle for the money the mother had been shot.
My father told these stories as though he had seen them happen, in the elevator, in the bedroom. As he spoke, his audience gasped, in awe, in fear, in admiration of his pluck.
“New York, like today’s Haiti,” he said, while bouncing a tired-looking Kelly on his lap, “is a place where only the brave survive.”
My father yawned, reminding us that he, my mother and Kelly and Karl had an appointment at the American consulate early the next morning. Dressing for bed, I wondered whether Bob and I would be excused from our usual sleeping arrangements—he with Nick and me with Liline—to bunk with our prodigal family. But there wasn’t enough space. In one of the spare rooms, my father and Kelly were already sharing a cot so my mother and Karl could have a bed to themselves.
I waited until everyone else in the house was in bed before going in to say good night. Walking on the tips of my toes, I rapped softly on the door so I wouldn’t wake the baby. My mother was already asleep with Karl at her side. Before my mother had left us, one night she and Bob had dozed off together in bed tucked tightly against each other, just as she and Karl were now. This was my first experience of nearly heart-shattering jealousy.
There was only my father to say good night to now, and Kelly, whose eyes were barely open, his super-long eyelashes batting between wakefulness and sleep. Fearing the wiry hairs on my father’s prickly beard, I closed my eyes when I kissed his cheek. And even as he pulled me into his arms and poked at my ribs and tried to make me laugh, I was still certain that I would open my eyes and he’d be gone.
The next morning my parents left for the consulate at dawn. As Bob, Nick and I ate our breakfast, the house seemed strangely empty, void of their sudden, but now vital presences.
Fidgeting on the edge of his seat, Bob said, “Manman and Papa had an appointment. They’ll be back.”
“Be quiet,” I ordered. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know,” he said. His mouth curled up and he looked like he was going to cry.
I could imagine him announcing to the other children in his class that his parents, who his classmates knew were living in New York, had come back. He didn’t seem to understand that they’d not come to stay.
Returning from school, we found my father sitting in the living room next to my uncle, the two of them sifting through a handful of pictures from their mother’s funeral. Granmè Lorvana had died soon after everyone had moved to Bel Air and was the first member of our family to be buried outside of Beauséjour. Hers was our clan’s first funeral procession with hired musicians trailing her hearse as it crept toward a newly constructed city mausoleum. In their mother’s funeral pictures, my father, mustached and youthful, was photographed standing next to the brand-new mausoleum with his brothers and sisters.
“Look at this one.” My father held out one of the pictures to my uncle, suddenly reminding me of the way Bob and I sometimes sought my uncle’s attention. For most of my father’s life, my uncle had been more a parental than a fraternal figure. With twelve years between them—in his time, my uncle liked to say, a twelve-year-old was already a man—neither one of them had any memory of ever playing together. When my father was born, my uncle had been too busy studying, working, and doing his best to help look after the family.
“How was school?