Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [43]
While twirling for the lady, Claire wondered whether her father had already been made the usual promises, that she would not be whipped, that she would be kept clean, that she would be well fed, that she would be sent to school, that she would be taken to a clinic when she was sick. All this perhaps in exchange for some cleaning both at home and at the shop. The woman had no living children so there would be no older kids to tease and beat her.
“You would be staying with a nice lady,” her father had told her on the way to the mayor’s speech that afternoon. “It would be like an adoption. You’d be a doll for her to dress up, the little girl she lost.”
But as soon as Claire stopped twirling, the woman turned to her father, her long shiny fake hair blocking half of her copper face.
“My girl was older,” she said.
Gaspard’s eyes dropped from the woman’s fancy hairpiece to her pricey open-toed sandals and bright red toenails. “She’ll grow,” he replied.
“I can’t afford to wait for her to grow.” The woman headed for the narrow doorway.
“No problem,” her father said, following her out.
Claire allowed them the breezy darkness outside and moved closer to one of the moths circling the kerosene lamp.
“Why would you want to give your child to me?” she heard the woman ask her father over the loud sound of the evening waves.
“I am going away,” he said, “pou chèche lavi, to look for a better life.”
“Ohmm,” the woman groaned a warning, like an impossible word, a word she had no idea how to say. “Why would you want your child to be a rèstavèk?”
“This is what would happen anyway,” her father said, “with less kind people than you if I suddenly died. I don’t have any more family here.”
Her father put an end to the woman’s questioning by making a joke about the mayor’s victory and how many bad speeches Gaspard would be forced to suffer through if he remained in town. This made the woman’s jingly laugh sound as though it were coming out of her nose. Reaching closer to the kerosene lamp, Claire expertly captured a spotted tiger moth between her palms, not sure whom she wanted to imagine it to be, the fabric vendor or her father.
The good news, though, was that this would be the only day her father would do this for a year. The rest of the year, he’d act as though he would always keep her, letting life go on as usual. During the week, she’d go to the Protestant preschool where she had received a charity scholarship, requiring her father to only pay a few Haitian dollars a month. At night, she would sit by the lamp and try not to be distracted by the moths as she recited the alphabet out loud. He would enjoy the singsong and her hard work and would miss it during her holidays from school. The rest of the time, he would go out to sea at the crack of dawn and always come back with something for her to eat. He’d talk about going to work in construction or the fishing trade in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but he would always make it sound as though it was something the two of them could do together, not something he’d have to abandon her to do. But as soon as her birthday would come, he would begin talking about it again, chèche lavi, going away to make a life for himself, placing her with someone, finding her a family. His and his dead wife’s relatives, whom they’d left behind in the hills, had it even harder than he did. Rather than a nearly barren sea, they had the dry eroded earth to contend with and already too many mouths to feed. If he died they would take the girl, but only because they had