The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [23]
Anne was just about to tell her husband and daughter that the crystal pieces, which had fallen out of the Lebanese girl’s eyes, were as big as ten-carat diamonds— she imagined her daughter retorting, “I bet her family wished she cried ten-carat diamonds”— when they reached the cemetery.
Every time she passed a cemetery, Anne held her breath. When she was a girl, Anne had gone swimming with her three-year-old brother on a beach in Grand Goave, and he had disappeared beneath the waves. Ever since then, she’d convinced herself that her brother was walking the earth looking for his grave. Whenever she went by a cemetery, any cemetery, she imagined him there, his tiny wet body bent over the tombstones, his ash-colored eyes surveying the letters, trying to find his name.
The cemetery was on both sides of them now, the head-stones glistening in the evening light. She held her breath the way she imagined her brother did before the weight of the sea collapsed his small lungs and he was forced to surrender to the water, sinking into a world of starfishes, sea turtles, weeds, and sharks. She had gone nowhere near the sea since her brother had disappeared; her heart raced even when she happened upon images of waves on television.
Who would put a busy thoroughfare in the middle of a cemetery, she wondered, forcing the living and their noisy cars to always be trespassing on the dead? It didn’t make sense, but maybe the parkway’s architects had been thinking beyond the daily needs of the living. Did they wonder if the dead might enjoy hearing sounds of life going on at high speed around them? If this were so, then why should the living be spared the dead’s own signs of existence: of shadows swaying in the breeze, of the laughter and cries of lost children, of the whispers of lovers, muffled as though in dreams.
“We’ve passed the cemetery,” she heard her daughter say.
Anne had closed her eyes without realizing it. Her daughter knew she reacted strongly to cemeteries, but Anne had never told her why, since her daughter had already concluded early in life that this, like many unexplained aspects of her parents’ life, was connected to “some event that happened in Haiti.”
“I’m glad Papa doesn’t have your issues with cemeteries,” the daughter was saying, “otherwise we’d be in the cemetery ourselves by now.”
The daughter pulled out a cigarette, which the father objected to with the wave of a hand. A former chain-smoker, he could no longer stand the smell of cigarettes.
“When you out the car,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the daughter replied, putting the loose cigarette back in its pack. She turned her face to the bare trees lining her side of the parkway and said, “Okay, Manman, please, tell us about another miracle.”
A long time ago, more than thirty years ago, in Haiti, your father worked in a prison, where he hurt many people. Now look at him. Look how calm he is. Look how patient he is. Look how he just drove forty miles, to your apartment in Westchester, to pick you up for Christmas Eve Mass. That was the miracle Anne wanted to share with her daughter on this Christmas Eve night, the simple miracle of her husband’s transformation, but of course she couldn’t, at least not yet, so instead she told of another kind of miracle.
This one concerned a twenty-one-year-old Filipino man who’d seen an image of the Madonna in a white rose petal.
She thought her daughter would dismiss this and just say, “Cool,” but instead she actually asked a question. “How come these people are all foreigners?”
“Because Americans don’t have much faith,” her husband quickly replied, turning his face for a moment