The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [53]
The man’s eyes wandered toward the heart-shaped pool and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s pretty busy. Sorry you couldn’t get a room. We’ve got to take advantage while we can.”
With that, he got up and walked away. Romain kept his head down, kept on sipping his Coke. I should have been too young to understand what was going on, but I did. Twelve years for a boy like me, a boy without a father, a boy with a mother who tried to protect me so much that her actions incited me to go out and discover everything myself, was like twenty years for another kind of boy.
“He sometimes brought women here,” Romain said. “I used to follow him here. I thought he might have come here today.”
“Who, your father?” I asked.
I don’t know why, but every now and then I would ask a dumb question like that, demand an explanation for something I already knew.
“No,” Romain snapped, “your father, Christophe.”
I don’t think he even realized why he said it. He was impatient, angry. His nerves were raw. Besides, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected it. Unaware that I was paying attention, people had often whispered things around me, from the girls in the neighborhood who coyly commented how much I looked like Tobin, the child of the wife, the “inside” child, to even Tobin himself, who was sometimes kind to me and sometimes refused to look me in the eye as though we were rivals, to the wife who refused to ever come anywhere near the tap station in order to avoid facing her husband’s indiscretions and their living results. Still, it was too painful for me to be reminded that I had a father who lived and worked so close to me and still didn’t call me his son. I didn’t understand why my mother had to struggle so much to earn money when she could have asked him for it, why she had to force Rosie into virtual slavery to keep us afloat. I didn’t understand why Christophe hadn’t offered my mother money to feed and clothe me, why he only sold her water at a discount and did not offer it to her outright since it was water that I, his son, could also use.
As I sat there with Romain with the straw separated from the Coke bottle yet still hanging out of his mouth, it wasn’t the shock of hearing Christophe declared my father yet again that made me cry. I was simply ashamed to be considered a dishonorable secret.
Romain tried to reach over and stroke my head, but I shoved his hand away. I wanted to grab one of the Coke bottles and smash it against his skull, but I knew he would catch the bottle before it could hurt him.
He had brought me here, he’d said, to make me a man. Was this what he meant? Did he think that seeing his own murderous father hiding out in a low-grade hotel to keep from being burned alive would illustrate what kind of man I ought not to be? Was telling me, reminding me, about Christophe in this blunt, off-the-cuff manner his way of teaching me that I shouldn’t want to be too much like Christophe either? Or was it simply Romain’s way of forcing me to accept what he was about to do?
It was becoming clear to me that Romain was leaving, going off someplace where I couldn’t follow him.
“The taxi’s waiting for you outside,” he told me. “He’ll get you back to your mother.”
I was too angry at him then to ask him where he was going. I didn’t care.
“I’m leaving the country,” he said. “I’m getting out tonight.”
“But you didn’t do anything.” I heard myself sobbing, but I didn’t know whether I was crying for Romain and Regulus or for Christophe and myself.
“I just can’t stay here,” Romain said.
“What about your mother?” I asked. “What about Regulus?”
“I’ll get in touch with my mother when I reach where I’m going,” he said. “As for Regulus, he’s not my problem.”
And then it was very obvious to me, starting with the way his hands were shaking and his frowns were sinking deeper into his sweating forehead, that Regulus had always been his problem, the biggest problem of his life.
“Go on now,” he said. “The taxi