The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [3]
I call my parents’ house. My mother isn’t there either, so I leave the hotel number on the machine.
“Please call as soon as you can, Manman,” I say. “It’s about Papa.”
It’s early afternoon when my mother calls back, her voice cracking with worry. I had been sitting in that tiny hotel room, eating chips and candy bars from the vending machines, chain-smoking and waiting for something to happen, either for my father, Officer Bo, or Manager Salinas to walk into the room with some terrible news or for my mother or Gabrielle Fonteneau to call. I took turns imagining my mother screaming hysterically, berating both herself and me for thinking this trip with my father a good idea, then envisioning Gabrielle Fonteneau calling to say that we shouldn’t have come on the trip. It had all been a joke. She wasn’t going to buy a sculpture from me after all, especially one I didn’t have.
“Where Papa?” Just as I expected, my mother sounds as though she’s gasping for breath. I tell her to calm down, that nothing bad has happened. Papa’s okay. I’ve just lost sight of him for a little while.
“How you lost him?” she asks.
“He got up before I did and disappeared,” I say.
“How long he been gone?”
I can tell she’s pacing back and forth in the kitchen, her slippers flapping against the Mexican tiles. I can hear the faucet when she turns it on, imagine her pushing a glass underneath it and filling it up. I hear her sipping the water as I say, “He’s been gone for hours now. I don’t even believe it myself.”
“You call police?”
Now she’s probably sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes closed, her fingers sliding back and forth across her forehead. She clicks her tongue and starts humming one of those mournful songs from the Mass, songs that my father, who attends church only at Christmas, picks up from her and also hums to himself in the shower.
My mother stops humming just long enough to ask, “What the police say?”
“To wait, that he’ll come back.”
There’s a loud tapping on the line, my mother thumping her fingers against the phone’s mouthpiece; it gives me a slight ache in my ear.
“He come back,” she says with more certainty than either Officer Bo or Manager Salinas. “He not leave you like that.”
I promise to call my mother hourly with an update, but I know she’ll call me sooner than that, so I dial Gabrielle Fonteneau’s cell phone. Gabrielle Fonteneau’s voice sounds just as it does on television, but more silken, nuanced, and seductive without the sitcom laugh track.
“To think,” my father once said while watching her show, in which she plays a smart-mouthed nurse in an inner-city hospital’s maternity ward. “A Haitian-born actress with her own American television show. We have really come far.”
“So nice of you to come all this way to personally deliver the sculpture,” Gabrielle Fonteneau says. She sounds like she’s in a place with cicadas, waterfalls, palm trees, and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes away. I realize that I too am in such a place, but I’m not able to enjoy it.
“Were you told why I like this sculpture so much?” Gabrielle Fonteneau asks. “It’s regal and humble at the same time. It reminds me of my own father.”
I hadn’t been trying to delve into the universal world of fathers, but I’m glad my sculpture reminds Gabrielle Fonteneau of her father, for I’m not beyond the spontaneous fanaticism inspired by famous people, whose breezy declarations seem to carry so much more weight than those of ordinary mortals. I still had trouble believing I had Gabrielle Fonteneau’s cell number, which Céline Benoit had made me promise not to share with anyone else, not even my father.
My thoughts are drifting from Gabrielle Fonteneau’s father to mine when I hear her say, “So when will you get here? You have the directions, right? Maybe you can join us for lunch tomorrow, at around twelve.”
“We’ll be there,” I say.
But I’m no longer so certain.