Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [71]
I only learned of my uncle’s predicament that Thursday night. Tante Zi had called her daughter in New York, who had passed the news on to my father.
During our nightly phone conversation, my father calmly said, “You’re pregnant, so don’t upset yourself too much, but your uncle’s had some problems in Bel Air.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know all the details myself, but I hear there’s a gang in his house right now.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He and Maxo are at Zi’s house. They’re coming to Miami tomorrow. You’ll see them before any of us will.”
After sharing the news with my husband, I called Tante Zi’s cell phone. In her usual exuberant way, in things both good and bad, Tante Zi detailed as much of the story as she knew, as much as my uncle had told her.
I asked her if I could speak to my uncle.
“He’s asleep,” she said.
“Maxo?”
“Him too.”
She didn’t have the heart to wake them, she said, because they’d been through so much and had slept so little these past few days, plus they had to get up early the next morning to catch their flight.
“Please tell them to call me in the morning,” I said. “Tell them my husband and I want to know what flight they’re on so we can pick them up.”
One of my uncle’s minister friends was picking them up, she said. My uncle had already arranged it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’ll call you when they get there.”
No Greater Shame
The next day, Friday, my father’s health took a turn for the worse. Worried about my uncle, he hadn’t slept the night before. His voice was so hoarse from coughing that he could barely speak when I called. His eczema and psoriasis had returned and he’d completely lost what little appetite he had.
My daughter had just begun to kick at night and her fetal acrobatics left me totally exhausted in the morning. I was in bed fighting a fainting spell when Bob called to tell me about Papa.
“Maybe you should take him to the hospital,” I told Bob.
“He doesn’t want to go,” Bob said. “He says they’ll just send him home like all the other times.”
As Bob spoke, I could hear my father coughing and moaning loudly in the background.
“He’s getting worse,” Bob added. “And this thing with Uncle’s not helping.”
I wanted very much to be in New York with my father, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself there. I am sitting on the edge of his bed and we’re watching my father’s favorite game show, The Price Is Right, on television. Unsure of the answers, we guess wildly but still get all of them right anyway. This makes my father so happy that he rises out of bed and starts to dance. At first he dances like a ballerina in slow motion, but then he increases his pace, until he’s jumping up and down, bouncing on and off his bed.
When I woke up, I wasn’t sure whether this was reverie or dream. However, when I looked at the digital clock on my bedside table, it was after three p.m.
The phone was ringing, which is why I’d woken up in the first place. I picked it up, expecting my uncle and Maxo. Instead it was Tante Zi.
“Are they with you?” she asked.
“Non,” I said.
Perhaps they’d called and I’d missed them. I looked for the flashing message button on the phone. The call log also registered no calls.
“Their plane should have landed by now,” Tante Zi said. They’d gone to the airport very early, but their plane had left sometime after noon.