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In many other ways, however, very little had changed. The crippled beggars were still lined up on the steps of the national cathedral and the used-booksellers’ scattered stands across from it. The water women still carried water by the bucket on their heads. The colorfully painted lottery stands were still selling hundreds of tickets to hopeful dreamers. The visa applicants still gathered in droves at the gates of the American consulate.

My uncle’s street was now crammed with oddly shaped unfinished concrete homes. The alleys were gutted and filled with trash. Yet, when he showed me his list of casualties, written in handwriting so tiny he had to help me decipher them, all I could see was Jonas, Gladys, Samuel and the hundreds of men and women who’d died, their mutilated bodies eternally rotting under the boiling sun.

Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s apartment was painted pink like the old house, except the dining room overlooking the tiny courtyard, which was a bright turquoise. Tante Denise was considerably thinner, her movements measured and slow. Her hair, which she’d begun and then stopped dyeing was bright red at the tips and gray at the roots. She touched it self-consciously when she saw me.

“I don’t have my wig.” She winced and pushed her head forward even as I moved closer.

She was sitting on a cot in the living room, where she took her naps and sometimes also spent the night. Her swollen legs were propped on a low stool and an open-toed sandal dangled from them. A pedestal fan was spinning in a semicircle in a corner by the window and occasionally blew a stream of warm air into her face. She was wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, which I was told she wore most of the time. She smelled of castor oil and camphor just as her Granmè Melina had. Her glamour, her elegant dresses, her pretty face, her wigs, her gloves now seemed very far in the past. She, like those buildings, had been disassembled while I was gone. She didn’t recognize me at first.

“It’s Edwidge,” I said, feeling like a stranger now not just to her but to Bel Air and to Haiti itself.

“Mira’s daughter, Edwidge?” she said. Her lower lip was drooping, slightly slurring her speech.

Grabbing my hand with more strength than I expected, she pulled me down on her lap as if I were still a child.

“Edwidge, let me tell you a story,” she said, pressing her elbows hard into my ribs.

The story she told, slowly, haltingly, with her arms braced tightly around my body, was about God and the Angel of Death. It was one of Granmè Melina’s stories, one that Granmè Melina said you told to keep death away. In the end, Granmè Melina stopped telling that story because she had wanted to die.

“One day,” began Tante Denise. A line of drool trickled from one side of her mouth, which I kept dabbing with a towel that draped the back of her chair.

“Father God and the Angel of Death were strolling together in a neighborhood like Bel Air, in a very crowded city like Port-au-Prince,” she continued.

During their walk, the Angel of Death would stop in front of many houses and say, “A man died here last month. I took him.” Then as they continued down the street, the Angel of Death added, “I removed a grandmother from this house yesterday.”

“I make people and you take them,” said Father God. “That’s why they like me more than they like you.”

“You think so?” asked the Angel of Death.

“I certainly do,” said Father God.

“If you’re so sure,” said the Angel of Death, “why don’t we both stop here on Rue Tirremasse and each ask the same woman for a drink of water and see what happens?”

So Father God rapped on the nearest door and when the lady of the house opened it said, “Madame, can I trouble you for some water?”

“Non,” the woman answered, irate. “I don’t have any water to spare.”

“Please,” said Father God. “I’m parched.”

“Sorry,” said the woman, “but I can’t spare any water. The public tap has been dry for days and I have to buy water by the bucket from the water woman, who’s doubled the price.