Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [56]
The morning of my uncle’s departure, he stopped several times in the narrow hallway while walking from the guest room to my father’s bed. Pressing his face against the wooden panels, he was crying. Before entering my father’s room, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his eyes.
That morning, my uncle prayed the longest he had ever prayed at my father’s bedside. My father closed his eyes and listened quietly, only occasionally chiming in with “Yes. Thank you.”
“Lord,” my uncle said, “You already know our deepest wish. You know how much it would please us to see your servant rise from this bed and live and work again among those who are well. You know how even the angels would hear our cries of jubilation if his pain were to disappear. You know how much wisdom he would gain, how much insight he’d have to share with others who take their lives for granted.”
My uncle lowered the hand that wasn’t holding the voice box and pressed it against my father’s forehead. He then recited the Lord’s Prayer, encouraging me to join with a nod of his head.
“So you’re going?” my father said when we were done.
Maybe I should have convinced my uncle to stay. Maybe it would have helped, done my father some good, helped them both.
“I must go,” my uncle said.
“Okay,” my father said, “but don’t frighten the others in Haiti. Don’t tell them about the hospital and the oxygen. Don’t make it sound like I’m on my deathbed.”
“I won’t,” my uncle promised. Then, stroking my father’s prednisone-rounded face, my uncle said, “I will keep praying for you.”
A hush came over them, just long enough to make me think that if he stayed even a minute longer Uncle Joseph might miss his plane. The silence was broken by the youngest of my uncles, Franck, who lived not too far from my father in Brooklyn, honking his car horn downstairs.
“Brother, I’m going, but I’m leaving you with a heavy heart,” Uncle Joseph told my father. “I really am.”
Reaching up to shake my uncle’s hand, my father said, “I know you are.”
“I don’t know if or when we’ll see each other again,” my uncle said.
“God knows,” my father said.
Then my uncle slapped his forehead the way he did when he remembered something that had previously slipped his mind.
“I’ll be coming to Miami in October to visit some churches,” he said. “I’ll come up and see you then.”
My uncle was aiming for my father’s forehead, but fell short, his mouth landing on the bridge of his nose. Still it ended up being a gentle kiss, like a grown man kissing a sick child, partly with love, but mostly out of fear.
“Why don’t you walk Uncle out,” my father said to me, to avoid, I am certain now, having me see him cry.
I followed Uncle Joseph down the steps and to the door of my uncle Franck’s car. That morning the tilt of his body seemed a little more pronounced.
“You know we can’t all stay together all the time,” he said.
Knowing how much my father would not only miss but worry about him, I stood there on my parents’ tree-lined street and waited until the car had turned the corner and was completely out of sight.
In mid-October, my husband and I learned our child’s gender from our midwife, Colleen, at the Miami maternity center where we’d chosen to have our baby. Based on how quickly my belly had grown in a few weeks, I was sure I was carrying twins, while my husband was convinced it was a boy. So during the sonogram, rather than marvel at the crescent-shaped bubble that was our daughter, my husband was looking for a penis and I for a sibling.
My daughter’s sex, however, was not what we discussed most that afternoon. Colleen pointed out that I had a low-lying placenta, which was usually self-correcting but could complicate the delivery if it remained unchanged. Statistically three out of four such cases resolved themselves, she said, and the placenta drifted upward as the pregnancy progressed; however, it was something we’d need to keep an eye on.
“If you’re going to have a problem, that’s the one you want,” Colleen added in a gentle, comforting voice. “It’s not a huge deal.”
Still I worried,