The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [18]
Nadine smiled to herself at this ability of Josette’s to make an ordinary encounter feel so intimate, then turned her face to the view outside, to the brown buildings and their barred windows. She let her eyes linger on the nursing station of the Psych ward across the alley and entertained a vision she often had of seeing a patient dive out of one of the windows.
“Ms. Hinds is back from ICU,” Josette was saying. “She’s so upset and sezi that Doctor Vega had to give her a sedative.”
Nadine and Josette worked different ends of Ear, Nose, and Throat and saw many post-op patients wake up bewildered to discover that their total laryngectomies meant they would no longer be able to talk. No matter how the doctors, nurses, and counselors prepared them, it was still a shock.
Josette always gave Nadine a report on the patients whenever she came to take over the table. She was one of the younger Haitian RNs, one of those who had come to Brooklyn in early childhood and spoke English with no accent at all, but she liked to throw in a Creole word here and there in conversation to flaunt her origins. Aside from the brief lunch encounters, and times when one or the other needed a bit of extra help with a patient, they barely spoke at all.
“I am going now,” Nadine said, rising from her seat. “My throne is yours.”
When she returned to her one-bedroom condo in Canarsie that evening, Nadine was greeted by voices from the large television set that she kept on twenty-four hours a day. Along with the uneven piles of newspapers and magazines scattered between the fold-out couch and the floorto-ceiling bookshelves in her living room, the television was her way of bringing voices into her life that required neither reaction nor response. At thirty, she’d tried other hobbies— African dance and drawing classes, Internet surfing—but these tasks had demanded either too much effort or too much superficial interaction with other people.
She took off the white sneakers that she wore at work and remained standing to watch the last ten minutes of a news broadcast. It wasn’t until a game show began that she pressed the playback button on her blinking answering machine.
Her one message was from Eric, her former beau, suitor, lover, the near father of her nearly born child.
“Alo, allo, hello,” he stammered, creating his own odd pauses between Creole, French, and English, like the electively mute, newly arrived immigrant children whose worried parents brought them to the ward for consultations, even though there was nothing wrong with their vocal cords.
“Just saying hello to you.” He chose heavily accented English. Long pause. “Okay. Bye.”
Whenever he called her now, which was about once a month since their breakup, she removed the microcassette from the answering machine and placed it on the altar she had erected on top of the dresser in her bedroom. It wasn’t anything too elaborate. There was a framed drawing that she had made of a cocoa-brown, dewy-eyed baby that could as easily have been a boy as a girl, the plump, fleshy cheeks resembling hers and the high forehead resembling his. Next to the plain wooden frame were a dozen now dried red roses that Eric had bought her as they’d left the clinic after the procedure. She had once read about a shrine to unborn children in Japan, where water was poured over altars of stone to honor them, so she had filled her favorite drinking glass with water and a pebble and had added that to her own shrine, along with a total of now seven microcassettes with messages from Eric, messages she had never returned.
That night, as the apartment seemed oddly quiet in spite of the TV voices, she took out her mother’s letter for its second reading of the day, ran her fingers down the delicate page, and reached for the phone to dial her parents’ number. She’d almost called many times in the last three months, but had lost her nerve, thinking