Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [38]
I only remember wishing as we soared into the clouds that my uncle had cried a torrent of tears, had thrown himself on the ground and made a scene, all the while forbidding us to go. He should have blurted out, in his old voice, the sudden revelation that I was really his daughter and that he couldn’t live without me.
Sitting in a middle seat next to my brother, who had insisted on the window I had really wanted, I had looked out at the white clouds only once when suddenly it occurred to me that since my uncle couldn’t speak on the phone and probably wouldn’t write letters to us children, we would likely never be in touch again.
This realization was distressing enough to make me want to close my eyes forever. I encouraged my brother to do the same. In the process we fell asleep, waking up only when one of the flight attendants nudged us to rouse for supper.
By then it was too dark out to see the clouds again. Bob marveled at the fact that it didn’t seem as though we were moving. Though we’d eaten what was probably the biggest lunch of our lives, we still cleaned up our tray of plane food, relishing the novelty of the tiny plastic plates on which the Haitian-style rice and beans and American-style grilled chicken breasts were served. After having spread one of his small butter squares on his roll, Bob placed the other one in his pocket, where it melted before landing.
We heard our parents before we saw them. Walking on either side of the stewardess who’d taken us from my uncle at the airport in Port-au-Prince, my brother and I made out our names above the din of the people lunging forward, flashing pictures, waving flowers and stuffed animals in the arrival lounge. Our parents’ voices, my father’s firm and resolute, my mother’s brassy and booming, were coming from behind us.
The stewardess loosened her grip on our hands but didn’t completely let go as we turned around to find them.
“Are these your parents?” she asked as they approached, my mother sweeping the crowd aside and my father following more leisurely behind her, apologizing to the shoving victims in her wake.
When she reached us, my mother grabbed us both and pressed us against her chest. I inhaled deeply, taking in her mixed scent of coconut hair pomade and baby powder that formed uneven white lines all around her neck.
My father took care of the logistics, signing a form that the stewardess had until then kept folded in her pocket.
“Bonne chance. Good luck,” she said before walking away.
My father bent down for us to kiss him. His beard, thicker and bristlier now, prickled my lips and nose. Still, I followed my brother’s lead and wrapped my arms around his neck as I kissed him.
“Where are Kelly and Karl?” asked my brother, already displaying the male sibling solidarity I would later come to suspect all my brothers of. A friend from their building was looking after the boys, my mother said. We’d see them when we got home.
In the airport parking lot, I shivered. Even though it was spring—a concept I’d have to grow accustomed to now, the actual manifestation of seasons—there was a biting chill in the air. Later I’d learn that my father had lost a job that day. He’d asked his boss at the New Jersey handbag factory where he was working if he could leave early to pick us up and the boss had said no. My father had left anyway and on his way out was told he was fired. During the drive to the airport, he decided he would never work for anybody again.
While loading our suitcase into the back of an old beaten-up gray station wagon, my father asked, “How’s Uncle?”
“Uncle seemed sad,” Bob answered for me. “I think he was sad to see us leave.”
“I suppose that’s how it is sometimes,” my father said in a whisper of a voice. “One papa happy, one papa sad.”
Gypsy
Our new home was a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of a six-story brick building in a cul-de-sac off