“Where are the men?” I ask. “Fishing?”
“You are back,” Aunt Leslie says.
“Are you sure Mom and Dad aren’t staying away on purpose?” I ask Aunt Leslie.
“Why would you say that?” Grandma Régine moves closer to the railing and looks directly into my eyes.
“I don’t know,” I say, but I do know.
I know it’s crazy, but I’m worried that my parents might be angry with me for not dying, for hanging around to constantly remind them of Isabelle.
“I had to threaten them to keep them away,” Aunt Leslie says. “I got all doctor on them and told them to stay home and rest. They lost Izzie here. They nearly lost you. Coming in and out of here is not the best thing for them.”
This makes sense logically, but I can’t help thinking back to the last time I was hospitalized here. Izzie and I were ten years old. I had a terrible case of food poisoning after eating badly cooked fish at a seafood restaurant. Isabelle was fine but she insisted on being hospitalized with me, a wish my parents only partially granted. She was pulled out of school, where she wasn’t concentrating anyway, and was allowed to spend the three days with me, but she had to go home at night and sleep in her own bed. My parents, though, took turns spending those nights in a cot next to my bed. I know that if I ask either Aunt Leslie or Grandma Régine to spend the night in the hospital with me, they will. But it’s not the same.
Anyway, when I get out, just like Mom and Dad, I want to stay out of this place for good. I never want to come back.
Grandma Régine steps away from my bed. She looks preoccupied. Like she has many other places to be. I know there’s a lot happening outside this hospital room. My parents must feel like they can finally make arrangements for Isabelle’s funeral. They believe I can make it there. Aunt Leslie and Grandma Régine are taking care of my parents, too. All while trying to live a fragment of the lives they had before.
Aunt Leslie lets me talk to Mom and Dad on her cell phone, but they don’t keep me long. They seem worried about tiring me out.
“Make sure you get plenty of rest,” Mom says, as if I had some other choice.
I ask Dad about Dessalines and he chokes up. He coughs to cover up his sobs.
When Uncle Patrick comes by later that night, we talk about his new artist. Uncle Patrick has just signed Emeline to his new label, Gemelita Iz, the label he’s just started with Alejandra. He’d hoped to work with Isabelle one day, he says, either as a producer or songwriter. Gemelita Iz might be as close as he ever gets.
“I know how much Isabelle loved Emeline’s music,” he says, “so after Isabelle”—he stops himself and takes a breath—“after things happened, I started listening to Emeline around the clock, and both Alejandra and I fell in love with her voice.”
Emeline does have a powerful voice, a voice that can cradle and soothe you after you’ve been hurt, but can also make you get up and dance when you never thought you could. Her voice is high at times and deep at others. It sounds like every voice you’ve ever missed and longed to hear in your entire life.
“Emeline made me laugh,” Uncle Patrick says. “She made me dance. She made me cry. She made us pray. I had to have her on our new label, and I am so glad she said yes.”
I am glad, too. Isabelle would have been ecstatic, over the moon. The idea of three of her favorite people making music together would have thrilled her to no end.
After Uncle Patrick leaves, I can’t sleep. I can only think of Isabelle. Was it a failure of twindom that I didn’t figure out all by myself that she was gone? Or maybe I didn’t want to feel it. I didn’t want to believe it.
That time when I fell down the stairs, Isabelle was sitting in English class when her head began to hurt. It was a different kind of pain than a headache, and it came on so suddenly—like a blow to the head—that even before the nurse sent for her, she knew I’d hit my head.
Sometimes we’d have the same dreams. We were tourists in each other’s heads. Our dreams were like bad student horror films, full of loose unconnected plots. They were extreme adventures. We would dream ourselves going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, floating aimlessly in a hot-air balloon over a shattered post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. We would dream ourselves trying to out-ski an avalanche, swatting a beehive off our bodies with our bare hands.
Every now and then, we’d have one calm and reassuring recurring dream. We would see ourselves swimming with a pod of rare pink dolphins, in an endless river, deep in the Brazilian rain forest. We were both lucid dreamers. We knew when we were dreaming and could always control our dreams. Maybe Isabelle already knew that her life would be short. She tried to get as much living in as possible. Even when she was asleep.
I GET MY prescription sunglasses and my discharge papers at the same time. The sunglasses are cat-eyed with black sequins on the top corners. I would have loved some aviators, but I could have done worse than what I got. I have a feeling Aunt Leslie picked them out.
These are my discharge orders: I can’t read or watch TV. I can’t look at my laptop or any other kind of screen. If I do, I risk hurting my brain.
The head duck says I should expect to feel nauseated now and then. I might also get dizzy and forget things. He says I should wear the sunglasses whenever I’m outside. He says I might feel tired a lot and be extremely sensitive to noise and light. He says I might have mood swings and might have trouble sleeping.
Even with all that, I’m so ready to go home that if they don’t let me out, I’ll escape.
My departure day turns into an almost celebration. Grandpa Marcus brings in a large bouquet of daisies from Ms. Volcy, the principal at Morrison High.
“This is only a sample,” Grandpa Marcus says as he takes Jean Michel’s painting down from the wall. “Everyone is happy that you are going home.”
I imagine my parents putting on their church clothes, getting ready for Isabelle’s service that same morning.
Before I can put on the dress that Grandma Régine has in the garment bag, I have to get a final checkup from the head duck doctor. This time, when he walks into the room, alone, without his ducklings, Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus do not walk out.
“We like what we’re seeing,” the head duck says as he listens to my lungs and heart. And of course beams that penlight into the windows to my soul.
“I’ve discussed all this with your parents and with your aunt Leslie,” he says and lingers on Aunt Leslie’s name. “You have to take it easy and get lots of rest. Don’t overexert yourself after the service today. You can see how you feel when you get home, but you should be able to go back to school in a few weeks.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
I want to hug him, but I just add, “Thank you.”
My voice is still scratchy, still way too deep, and I’m not sure he hears me until he says, “You’re welcome. Now let me go and sign your paperwork.”
He seems like a different person than when I was under. Not just an arrogant duck, and not that bad looking, either. He looks younger now, hipper. There’s suddenly something very self-assured, very dapper—rather than dabbler—about him.
For the first time since he’s been taking care of me, I notice the name embroidered on his lab coat: Dr. Emmanuel Aidoo. Under his name, in the same dark blue lettering, is the word Neurology.
When Dr. Aidoo leaves, Grandpa Marcus walks out with him so I can get dressed.
In the garment bag Grandma Régine is holding is a knee-length black dress with the tag still attached. I’ve lost some weight. The bell-shaped dress is so loose that it hangs like a tent on my body. Grandma Régine walks over to the wall and picks up my necklace. I sit back down on the bed; she unlatches it and puts it around my neck.
Grandpa Marcus knocks on the door before coming back in.
“J’apporte ces choses à la voiture,” Grandpa Marcus says while gathering my things, including Ms. Volcy’s daisies. “I’m taking these to the car.”
It seems like Grandpa
Marcus and Grandma Régine have worked out everything for our trip to the funeral parlor.
After Grandpa Marcus leaves, the redheaded nurse comes in with a wheelchair and helps me into it. She’s wearing pink scrubs with a bunch of cartoon characters, which I don’t remember her having worn before. She motions for me to walk over to the chair, then ceremoniously bows as though it were a throne.
I fall too fast into my throne, and there’s no cushion for my behind. The redheaded nurse’s concerned gasp sounds sweet to me. I am going home, but not before attending Isabelle’s service.
“You can put on your sunglasses,” the redheaded nurse says. And I do.
“You look like a 1960s movie star,” she says.
Before they start protecting me from the glare of the world, my sunglasses shield me from the world of the hospital hallway, from the other nurses—including the hunky bearded male nurse—waving goodbye. I don’t get to fully see the other patients turning their heads to get one final envious look at me. The glasses also hide the tears bubbling up in my eyes.
Outside, Grandma Régine, the redheaded nurse, and I wait for Grandpa Marcus to pull up. Grandpa Marcus is driving Mom’s grey SUV.
When Grandpa Marcus pulls up in front of us, I panic.
A car.
A road.
If I hit my head again, I might die.
My eyes quickly adjust to the sunglasses. I pull myself up and slide into the second row of Mom’s car. Grandma Régine waits for me to settle in before she gets in the front seat next to Grandpa Marcus. The redheaded nurse keeps waving goodbye as we pull away.
“Do we know that nurse’s name?” Grandma Régine asks Grandma Marcus in French. “It would be nice for Giselle to write her a thank-you letter.”
“Je l’ai noté,” Grandpa Marcus answers. “I took note of it. Her name is Frances Harper-Naylor.”
I love you, Frances Harper-Naylor, I whisper to myself.
Grandpa Marcus stays on local roads. He’s driving at least ten miles under the speed limit.
Isabelle and I were supposed to stage out of our learner’s permits and get our licenses in a few weeks, just before our seventeenth birthday. Mom and Dad have both taken turns practicing with us. We were going to use Dad’s car for our road tests when it was time.
Every now and then, I would hear Mom joke about our driving with Mrs. Marshall.
“Wait till they’re driving by themselves,” Mom would say, “then we’ll be in some real trouble.”
Dad would joke about intimidating the boys who’d want to ride with us.
“I’ll have to pull out my old fatigues and sidearm and scare some sense into those boys,” he’d say.
We are now in a residential neighborhood. Even with my sunglasses on, I can tell that Grandpa Marcus is lost. But I don’t want to say anything.
Grandpa Marcus drives even more slowly for the next half hour, through more neighborhoods of single-story houses and neat lawns and the occasional schools and churches.
Finally, Grandma Régine speaks up and says, “Nou pèdi? Are we lost?”
Grandpa Marcus is as lost in his thoughts as he is on the road.
“Not lost, okay?” he says, picking up a little speed.
Soon, we are where we really don’t want to be, but where I have fought so hard to be. We are outside Pax Villa Funeral Home and Crematorium. Isabelle is waiting for us.
THE LAST TIME we were at Pax Villa was for Grandma Sandrine’s wake. Mom decorated the chapel with Grandma Sandrine’s paintings. Grandma Sandrine’s silver coffin was so shiny that, while we were sitting in the front row, we could see our reflections on it.
“This coffin is going to blind God,” Dad whispered during Aunt Leslie’s eulogy. He was trying to make Mom laugh.
“With its beauty,” Mom whispered back, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.
In one of Grandma Sandrine’s lucid (or maybe not so lucid) moments, Mom had asked her to pick out a coffin from a catalog, and she chose one that was practically a mirror.
Just a few weeks ago, Isabelle was thinking about picking out a car, not a coffin. Still, as I follow Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus down the carpeted hallway leading to the holding room next to the chapel, I keep hoping that Isabelle’s coffin will be a nice one. The thought doesn’t make sense, any more than Isabelle being dead does.
It seems that Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus took care of this part of things, too. When we walk into the waiting room behind the chapel, Mr. Daniels, the funeral director, greets them like old friends.
My parents, their faces locked in a kind of numbed shock, are sitting next to each other on a couch in the middle of the room, as my grandparents chat with Mr. Daniels. Dad’s leg is stretched out on the wheelchair in front of him. He’s wearing black sweatpants that cover the leg cast. His dark jacket is hanging over his shoulder and is partially hiding his arm cast.
Mom’s dress is identical to mine—thanks to Grandma Régine. Mom’s also wearing a black beret.
Alejandra, who’d left and flown back from New York, is the first to say hello.
“¿Cómo estás, mi amor?” she asks.
“Más o menos,” I answer.
“Me gustan,” she says, pointing to my sunglasses.
I forget that I’m wearing the sunglasses. Still, I don’t take them off. They feel like another kind of safeguard now. They feel like armor, like a shield.
Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick, who are standing behind my parents, both call out for me to be careful when I hug Dad. They don’t want me to displace his arm or trip over his leg.
It’s safer to hug Mom, who, though she winces while I’m hugging her, still manages to say, “You look so nice. You do.”
Mr. Daniels, a large man who is still swimming in his loose black suit, walks over to us.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he says, grasping my hand. He points to a spot on the couch next to Mom, as if suggesting for me to go sit there. But I just stand where I am and wait to hear what he’ll say next.
“Should I bring her in now?” he says to no one in particular.
Oh, please bring her in, I want to say. But bring her in the way she was before we left that evening for the concert. Bring her in to tell us that this was all a joke, a hoax she’s been planning for weeks. A joke that everyone else is in on except me.
This would be her best practical joke ever. It would beat her silly April Fool’s pranks of scraping out the insides of minty Oreos and replacing the cream with toothpaste, or greasing our toilet seats with Vaseline.
Mr. Daniels leaves, then comes back with two assistants who wheel the coffin in. And what a coffin it is! It’s a coffin that Isabelle would not only have liked, but loved.
Mr. Daniels doesn’t need to explain the coffin, but he does. I can tell that one way he tries to comfort families is by describing to them what they’re already seeing.
“Just as you requested,” he says, turning to my grandparents, “this is a picture coffin, made of a hundred percent recycled clapboard, honeycomb based. It’s on loan for the service. She won’t be cremated in it.”
Those details are obviously important to him. And to us, too. I didn’t realize that Isabelle’s body was going to be here. I didn’t even know she was going to be cremated. Both our parents have it in their wills that they want to be cremated, something they’d sat Isabelle and me down and told us, something that none of their parents had agreed with.
Dad and Grandma Régine have argued about it a bunch of times. Grandma Régine wants a grave, a headstone, a place to visit and lay flowers. Dad believes that it’s about taking up space, using up more of the world’s resources even after you’ve left it.
I’m sure that if Mom wasn’t too sad to speak up, she’d remind everyone, just as she and Dad had told Isabelle and me, that on both sides of the family, going back several generations, parents have never gone to cemeteries to see their children being buried. If Dad had died in the car crash, for example, Grandpa Ma
rcus and Grandma Régine wouldn’t have stood by his open grave and watched as his body was lowered into the earth. They would have gone to the chapel, or the church, then would have gone home to wait for everyone else to return from the cemetery for the repast. Later they would have visited the filled-in grave, but parents were not supposed to witness their children sinking into the ground. So my parents were not going to bury Isabelle.
The picture coffin is pink, with giant hibiscus painted all over it. I’ve never seen a coffin like this, and from the way my parents’ eyes pop, neither have they.
“We thought Izzie would like it for this little while,” Grandma Régine says in her most Parisian French.
Usually this is the kind of moment that might lead to a full-on Creole brawl between Dad and his parents.
“You mean you like it,” Dad might have said.
Then Grandma Régine’s lips would have curled with hurt and her eyes would have watered in distress, and Grandpa Marcus would have had to come to her rescue by saying something like, “I know you’re a grown man, but this is not how we talk to our mothers where I come from.” And Dad would have stopped talking out of respect, but only for a minute. Then Dad would pick things up again and complain some more. Grandma Régine would get her courage back and say, “I’m sorry to have displeased you again.” And Mom would have to referee and say, “Can we take a breather, please?” Then Dad would lean towards Mom and say, “I don’t get why they always do this.” And Mom would say, “Because you always do what you’re doing right now.”
Isabelle and I would of course be captivated by all this. First of all because it would happen in a mix of Creole, French, and English. And even some Spanish if Alejandra was around. Boyer family fights were like fights at the United Nations.
“Wow, people still fight with their parents into old age,” Isabelle would joke, and this would take some, but not all, of the edge off.
But there’s no such fight in the funeral home that day. Dad is clearly not happy but he can live with the coffin. After all, this is not the only strange coffin the family’s ever seen. Grandma Sandrine’s was also “unique.” And if funerals are for the dead, rather than the people who come to see the dead, then Isabelle would have loved this coffin.