The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [45]
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway next door forced Aline to move away from the window. She walked back to the front of the house until she could see Beatrice once more, sitting out on her front steps, sewing.
“Are you looking for someone?” The next-door neighbor was standing in his driveway, leaning against his car and twirling a set of keys, watching Aline. He must be the Jamaican schoolteacher, Aline guessed. The lilt in his voice as he said, “Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” confirmed this.
Aline answered, “Dolly?”
“Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” he repeated, grinning, as though he would have very much liked her to be.
“Isn’t there a man living here?” Aline asked. “A corrections officer?”
“No one’s lived here since Dolly Rodriguez,” the man said, bouncing his keys from hand to hand. “And that was over a year ago. I know she’s trying to sell, but it’s hard to do that from Bogotá. She just has to get her butt here and stay a while, if she ever wants to be rid of this place.”
“Thank you,” Aline said. “I didn’t know.”
“No sweat,” the man replied. He kept waving as she walked away from him. Perhaps he knew she was lying, for only when she made it to Beatrice’s front steps did he walk into his own house.
Beatrice had unbraided her cornrows so that her hair, now high and thick, looked like an angry cloud, a swollen halo floating a few inches above her. Aline sat down on the last step, where Beatrice’s slippered feet lay, and watched silently as she meticulously stitched the hem of a taffeta wedding slip, possibly her last.
Beatrice said nothing, as if trying not to break her own concentration. When she was done with the hem, her face relaxed and in this late-afternoon light, she seemed as airless as the green ash leaves that had gathered in small heaps around her.
“You’re back,” she said, gathering the slip on her lap so that, resting there, it looked like a large animal covered in gauze.
“The house is empty,” Aline said.
Beatrice didn’t seem shocked, as Aline had expected, or even embarrassed, as Aline had been, facing Dolly Rodriguez’s next-door neighbor.
“Of course it’s empty,” Beatrice said, raising her hands in the air as if to emphasize that it couldn’t have been any other way. “That’s where he hides out these days, in empty houses. Otherwise he’d be in jail, paying for his crimes.”
Beatrice moved the taffeta slip from her lap and gently placed it on the floor, at her side. She was not looking at Aline but was staring at the street, waiting for a few cars to go by before speaking again.
“I think the reason he finds me all the time is because I send notes out to my girls,” Beatrice said, keeping her eyes on the street. “I let all my girls know when I move, in case they want to bring other girls to me. That’s how he always finds me. It must be. But now I’m not going to send these notes out anymore. I’m not going to make any more dresses. The next time I move, he won’t find out where I am.”
Growing up poor but sheltered in Somerville, Massachusetts, Aline had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others. Maybe Aline herself was one of them.
These were the people Aline wanted to try to write about now, no matter what Marjorie Voltaire said. And if Marjorie didn’t like it, then she would quit and go work somewhere else. She might even return to Somerville and, at last, let her parents learn who she was. Or she might escape to Florida for a while, to avoid eating that five-star-restaurant meal by herself.