Tina gets up to make room for him on the bed, but then he motions for her to stay put and he squeezes himself between the two of us.
“Don’t you guys have school today?” I ask.
“Today’s Saturday,” he says.
Grandma Régine brings us dinner in my room, large plates of sympathy food that could feed a small family: macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, a piece of pineapple upside-down cake, plus ice cream.
Comfort food galore, as Isabelle might say.
After we eat silently, Jean Michel carries our half-full plates out to the kitchen. He’s gone for a while, so I guess he’s either washing dishes or helping to load the dishwasher. Then I hear my parents talking to him about Gloria.
Dad’s asking him if he knows her.
He doesn’t know her, he says.
When Jean Michel comes back, Tina gets up to go to the bathroom.
“How are you holding up?” he asks me.
“I’m fine,” I say, knowing how lame those words must sound given everything that’s going on. Even the question is lame. He must know that, too.
“Everyone was so worried about you,” he says.
“I heard.”
“Shed a couple of tears when I was visiting you,” he says.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I say.
I don’t want to dilute the kiss so I’m not going to ask. I’m not going to ask. I want to NOT ask, but I can’t help myself.
“Did you kiss me in the hospital?” I ask him.
“I might have,” he says, bobbing his head. “Was that bad?”
“No.”
“Good,” he says, his head still in motion. “I can help,” he adds.
Help? How? By kissing me again? It’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure he fully understands what he’s saying. No one can really help. Not even him. Even though everyone thinks they can. By showing up. By bringing tons of food. By hugging me too tight.
“I can help,” he says. “Tina, too. We’re learning some great stuff in the computer science lab.”
Then I finally catch on. He’s telling me that he and Tina can help me learn more about Gloria Carlton. Maybe they have already learned more than Tina has let on. Knowing Tina, she probably wants me to be part of a big reveal.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Call me,” he says, “because I can’t call you.”
I wish he could touch my back again and make me forget myself. Make me forget everything.
“My phone,” I say. “I don’t know where my phone is.”
Mom cracks the door open and puts her head through just as Tina’s coming out of the bathroom.
Before I can ask Mom about the phone, she says, “Tina, your parents are leaving.”
Mom tilts her head in Jean Michel’s direction, making it clear that he has to go, too.
“I guess I’ll see you soon,” Jean Michel says.
“Sooner the better,” Tina says.
When I was in the hospital and floating in and out of consciousness, I would have given anything to have my friends visit me. Had I known that they were there, I would have pleaded with them, begged them to stay. But now I’m kind of relieved to see them go.
I don’t want to keep them trapped in this sad and lonely place with me. I want them to go out into the world with their fresh and hopeful eyes and never even have to think about my sister and me. I don’t want them to be afraid that the next time they get into a car they might end up like her. Or that they might end up like me, riding this thing that I can’t quite name. This thing that isn’t really death, because it feels nothing like any other death I’ve been connected to. This thing that is partially like my own death. Or the death of this other girl I used to be.
The house is quiet after Jean Michel and Tina leave. Once the rest of the family goes to bed, I hear my parents talking in their bedroom across the hall. They’re talking in low voices just like they used to, except they’re not joking or talking about happy things. They’re talking about Isabelle’s funeral service.
They were sorry to have postponed it for so long, but they were glad that I was able to see Isabelle one last time. Wasn’t it nice that so many people came? Maybe they shouldn’t have called off the official repast Grandma Régine had planned for after the service. Nobody wanted that much fuss, though, even though it was hard to avoid. People came to the house anyway, Dad says.
They wonder how I’m holding up. Are they speaking to me enough? Even Aunt Leslie thinks I’m doing better than expected, Mom says. And what was wrong with those police officers, Dad asks? How come they can’t figure out what’s going on with that Carlton girl? And to just hand Giz that screen with the girl’s face on it. How insensitive was that?
It’s good that my friends came to spend a bit of time with me. They both agree on that. But too much time might not be so good, Mom says. They might make me go against the doctor’s orders without meaning to, and keep me in front of screens all day long. Jean Michel seems like a nice boy, though, Dad says.
“Thank God for Tina,” Mom says. “She always knows what Giz needs and when she needs it.”
Mom and Dad are definitely a thing again.
According to Aunt Leslie, after Dad came home from the war, Mom asked him to come visit her in Miami. They hadn’t seen each other since he’d joined the army.
Mom bought a special dress for the occasion, an off-the-shoulder red lace number. Dad was caught in traffic and was two hours late for their reunion dinner. Mom waited for him that whole time.
When he finally got to the restaurant, Dad sat down, put his head on Mom’s shoulder, and asked, “When are we getting married?”
“Yesterday,” she said.
They got married in front of a judge the next day.
That night, surprisingly, I hear a bit of laughter coming from my parents’ bedroom.
Nothing can reunite fighting people more than a discussion of Grandma Régine’s ways.
“Your mother is something else,” Mom says.
“Who you telling?” Dad says.
I wait until I can’t hear them anymore before heading into the shower.
Thanks to Josiane, or maybe it was Grandma Régine’s handiwork, the bathroom shows no sign of Isabelle: no foggy mirrors, no sinks filled with soapy water, no wet towels draped over the bathtub, no robes or dirty underwear on the floor, nothing of hers in the cabinet except a strawberry-scented bodywash that she liked and I hated.
I pour the entire bottle over myself while sitting in the tub, letting the thick, sticky, strawberry-scented liquid slide down my back. I then hug the empty bottle tight and let the warm water wash it off of me.
The house is still quiet, so I throw on a T-shirt and shorts, then open the door to Isabelle’s room. The light from the bathroom creates a path to her bed.
When we were little, we used to share a room, where we played indoor hopscotch and dared each other to see who could cannonball closest to the ceiling from our twin beds. We shared a flowered rug we called the Magic Carpet and a seashell chandelier that now hangs from Isabelle’s ceiling. Her headboard is also a bookcase, where she mostly kept her acoustic speakers and magazines, some of which she’d had for years.
Across from her bed is a daybed that used to be her crib when she was a baby. (Mine is in storage somewhere.) On the daybed are two mason jars filled with dozens of buttons in different shapes, colors, and sizes. Some of the buttons are still in the tiny plastic bags in which they came, attached to the insides of brand-new clothes. One of those two jars had once been mine. I’d stopped collecting replacement—or understudy buttons, as she called them—but she hadn’t. Everything else in her room, every wall, sheet, or curtain is either red, white, or black, her three favorite colors. She used her walls mostly as a bulletin board, for things she didn’t want to forget. There’s a large calendar above the daybed, with the day of the concert, the day of the car crash, circled in red. Next to the calendar are several pages of sheet music, some for the sch
ool orchestra, some for the church choir, and some that she was learning on her own.
Tacked to her reddest accent wall is a blown-up eight-by-ten-inch selfie of her and Ron Johnson on the beach with the two pilot whales in the background. Her cheek is pressed against Ron Johnson’s cheek, and all their teeth are showing. She took that picture when they learned that the whales were going to be okay.
As I walk to her bed, I leave wet footprints on the cherrywood floor, which would have driven her crazy. I look through her desk and skim through a few loose pages of her handwritten stories and poems, many of them with To Be Put to Music One Day printed in bold letters at the top.
Some of the pages have one word or two, which are written backwards as though to be read in a mirror. Words like evol, traeh, nor.
Is “nor” Ron?
Isabelle and I hadn’t done any mirror writing since we were kids, leaving some of these same words, along with our names, as messages to each other on every mirror in the house.
I go through her closet and try on some of her clothes, her red skinny jeans, the ones with the holes at the knees, and two of her favorite T-shirts, with the faces of Scott Joplin—ragtime king—and Denyce Graves—opera goddess—printed on them. I put her crown of plastic red cardinal flowers on my head. We should have put it on her head, I think, in her coffin.
I try on her winter boots, the furry-looking brown ones she liked to wear to New York. And I even find some of my things in her closet, a hooded jumpsuit, a striped jersey dress, and a pair of sand-colored espadrilles.
This is a lot more than I should be doing. My neck is starting to feel wobbly, achy, not strong enough to hold my pulsating head. I stumble over to Isabelle’s bed and climb under her red chenille throw and raise it over my head.
Slipping under her covers reminds me of when we were little girls and I used to jump into her bed. I would wake up from a nightmare and there she would be, waking up from the same nightmare, just in time to rock me back to sleep. Now I will always be alone with my nightmares.
The hallway door, the one with the STAY OUT sign, cracks open, and I hear footsteps. Someone is walking towards Izzie’s bed. I hear a purr, from up high, not from the floor. Dessalines is in somebody’s arms.
When I pull the throw off my head, I see Mom and Dad there. Dad is leaning on his crutches in the doorway. Half his body is broken. He’s wearing a tank top and pajama shorts. Mom is standing next to the bed in one of her long nightgowns. She’s holding Dessalines.
“I thought I heard someone in here,” Dad says from the doorway.
“Didn’t mean to scare you guys,” I say.
“I think we scared each other,” Mom says.
“It’s been strange having both rooms empty while you were still in the hospital,” Dad says. His words fall so heavy on all of us that if we were a ship at sea, they’d immediately sink us to the bottom.
My parents seem to realize that there are no safe places left in the super-booby-trapped minefield all around us, so they stand there quietly, both of them staring at me, until Dessalines’s purring momentarily snaps us all out of it.
“Thought you might like some company,” Mom says.
She leans over and puts Dessalines in my arms. Dessalines rubs his whiskers against my cheeks. He starts kneading my chest with his paws, then slips away and curls up at the foot of the bed.
Dad wobbles over on his crutches, and Mom helps him slide onto one side of the bed. He groans as if in agony while sitting on Isabelle’s super-hard mattress. Mom turns off the light and climbs in on the other side of me. They are guarding me like rails, as if to keep me from falling.
The bed creaks under all our weight, and I’m afraid that the box spring might snap and come crashing down, but it doesn’t.
Dessalines dashes off.
“I don’t think that cat likes any of us,” Dad says.
“I think he just liked Izzie,” Mom says.
I’m tempted to say, “Remember when …” and tell some story about Izzie and Dessalines. There are so many.
“Remember when Izzie accidently dropped Dessalines in the pool, then dived in to save him and he nearly scratched her eyes out?” I say.
“I don’t think it was an accident,” Dad says. “I think she was trying to see if he could swim.”
“We learned that day that cats don’t like water,” Mom says.
“That bugger sure can swim, though,” Dad says.
“They made up right afterwards,” Mom says. “Which proves my theory. I don’t think he would have forgiven any of us the way he forgave her.”
Izzie’s bed was the only one Dessalines would ever sleep in.
Another “Remember when” moment.
When Dessalines first came to live with us, I had a cold that my parents thought was a cat allergy, and we almost gave Dessalines away.
“Can we give Giz away instead?” Izzie asked my parents.
Once, when he came to Sunday dinner with his latest girlfriend, Dad’s friend Moy told Dad that we were dishonoring the name of the great Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines by giving it to a cat.
I couldn’t tell whether my parents were mortified or proud when Isabelle took it upon herself to offer a monologue as rebuttal.
“Isn’t it great to honor the things and people we love in whatever way we can, to keep them as close to us as possible, in both body and mind? Isn’t it better to call a cat Dessalines than to forget Dessalines? At least here, we call out Dessalines’s name several times a day. Aren’t there people who call their children Dessalines? Yes, I know you’ll want to tell me that a cat is not the same as a child. What if the cat is my child? And are you absolutely sure that there are no cats whatsoever in all of the United States of America that are named after George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson? If not, we should change that.”
She was channeling her two-year winning streak in debate team, but I think she was mostly trying to impress Moy’s TV newscaster girlfriend, who was a new audience for her.
I don’t remember the rest of the speech, but I thought I heard a rousing rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing in the background as she brought it to a close. I half expected her to get up on the table, fist raised while waiting for her standing ovation.
“She’ll make a great politician one day,” Moy said.
Mom and Dad just shook their heads.
“I think she’s already one now,” Moy’s girlfriend said.
But student government and the like never interested her. They required too much time—much like the debate team had—time that she wanted to devote to her music. The thing about it being okay to call a cat Dessalines was yet another thing she wanted to put to music one day.
My parents and I share all this, with what exact words I’m not sure. The words drift between us, and we each take turns filling in some of the gaps. Until we fall asleep.
UNCLE PATRICK AND Alejandra leave for New York the next day. Aunt Leslie is going to hang around a while longer, and it seems like Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus will be staying until the beginning of the summer.
Grandpa Marcus and Aunt Leslie drive Mom and Dad to their doctors’ appointments and I stay with Grandma Régine. Not being able to read, write, sketch or draw, look at screens, or see my friends, the only thing left to do is listen to the radio.
I search up and down the dial on the kitchen radio to find a local news station that mentions us, but none of them do. I am thinking we’re already yesterday’s news, or no news at all, when Grandma Régine, after finding a Creole station that’s broadcasting news from Haiti, hands me a folder full of newspaper clippings.
Sometimes Grandma Régine is an actual rebel, even if a silent one. Here she is, handing me newspaper articles when I’m not even allowed to have visitors who might show me words.
Mom told Tina and Jean Michel Brun to stay away until the doctor cleared me for screens. It doesn’t seem fair that people were allowed to come and see
me when I was in the hospital, but not at home. Thankfully, Grandma Régine is not a full-on believer in absolute medical decrees.
The words in Grandma Régine’s newspaper clippings blur into black masses, but I can make out the pictures if I look away now and then. Or after I close then reopen my eyes.
The first article must be about the crash because there’s a picture of the wrecked cars, both ours and the one Gloria Carlton was driving. It’s strange to see the aftermath the way others have seen it. The cars are not as mashed together as I would have thought. The front of the red minivan is mostly gone, but our car is pretty much whole except on Izzie’s side, which is caved in. Even Dad’s door was spared in comparison. Izzie did take the brunt of it, for all of us.
The next article has our recent school portraits, mine and Isabelle’s. I can tell that the pictures were downloaded from our school photographer’s website because his name stamp is still on them. The third article is about Isabelle’s death. It’s the front page of the Miami Herald. The headline is so big that I can easily make it out. TEEN TWIN CAR CRASH VICTIM DIES.
I squint to see what they wrote about Isabelle, but I see my name where Isabelle’s should be. I am the one everyone thought had died.
I imagine Ron Johnson and all of Isabelle’s friends seeing the story and thinking Isabelle is alive, then finding out she’s dead, their guilty disappointment that it wasn’t me who’d died.
The next clipping explains the mistake, or so it seems, from the few lines I can make out before my head starts throbbing again.
When the Haitian news program is over, Grandma Régine asks me if I want her to read any of the articles to me.
I shake my head no. Even though I know this is a big thing coming from her. She doesn’t like reading to people, and she doesn’t like reading in English. So basically she’s trying to do me a solid, as Dad might say.
“You don’t have to read it to me,” I say. “I know how it turns out.”
Except I don’t.
Once my head stops throbbing, I look again through the pile of newspaper clippings that Grandma Régine has so carefully cut out for me. Knowing her, she probably did it in case I got amnesia or something.