The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [80]
It was obvious that she now felt she’d been there to save him, to usher him back home and heal him.
13
It would be impossible to explain all that followed, to her daughter or to anyone. It wasn’t that she thought the fat man was her half brother, the one who’d disappeared into the sea so long ago, that this girth, this vastness was something the youngest child in her family had garnered from his lost years of inhaling seawater and weeds. It wasn’t that she thought he’d emerged from the cemetery, enlarged by the bones and souls of other ghosts. It wasn’t that she believed he could help her find her stepbrother, the minister, the one they’d just arrested and taken to jail the night before. It wasn’t that she was thinking of the selfsacrificing martyrs who now made miracles possible: Saint Rose de Lima, who’d sanded and blistered her face with peppers to avoid vanity; Saint Veronica, who wiped floors with her tongue; or Saint Solange, who, after being decapitated, had carried her own head to a church altar. It wasn’t even that it had occurred to her that if he wasn’t one of her brothers he was surely someone else’s, who had just surfaced from another kind of grave. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was all of them. Plus a hollow grief extended over all these years, a penance procession that has yet to end.
A few minutes later, when he got his landlord, the doctor, out of bed to sew his face, she watched from a corner as the doctor pulled a silver thread in and out of his skin. It seemed like some kind of torture, the type you might inflict on someone you truly hated, but he didn’t seem very pained from it. Heeding the doctor’s warning that if he grimaced too much or insisted on smoking a cigarette while his wound was being sewed, his face would heal in a way that would make him look like a monster, he remained still until the doctor was done.
She couldn’t easily remember when she’d first heard that her stepbrother, the preacher, had died. It might have been from the vendor’s radio, the one that was giving the news that morning. Or it may have been from the doctor’s casual chatter, something about “a preacher from Bel-Air killing himself at Casernes.” But she’d slipped out of her own body then, just as now.
When her daughter called her from Lakeland after her husband’s confession to ask, “Manman, how do you love him?” she was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a piece of pie. It was not what she thought she’d be doing when that question finally came. Like her husband, she’d thought she might be on a trip, some kind of journey with her daughter. She had imagined the two of them, just the girls, on the ocean, on a cruise liner or some other place from which her daughter couldn’t escape. But here they are, thousands of miles apart and not even looking into each other’s eyes as she attempts an explanation.
“He tell you?” Instead she replies with another question.
“Yes,” the daughter says. Her voice is cold and dry, unlike the high-pitched shrill it was when she’d been so worried about her father’s disappearance earlier. From the tone of her daughter’s voice, she gathers that their child is already passing judgment on them. And she hasn’t even heard the whole story.
She puts her spoon down next to her half-eaten piece of pie, walks over to the garbage pail, and drops it in. Now she’s tapping her fingers against the telephone mouthpiece and clicking her tongue, to eliminate the distracting silence all around her.
“Is there more?” the daughter says. And she sounds afraid that the “more,” the rest, the whole story could be worse than what she’s already heard.
Unlike her husband, she would never know how to tell a story like this, how to decipher all the details and make sense of them. But this much she wants her daughter to know.
“What he told you, he want to tell you for long time,” she hears herself whispering now in her awful English. But in her head, her words have a little more order. It was a miracle,