The other piece of breaking news is that, just as Officer Butler and Officer Sanchez had suspected, the people who’d been arrested with Janice were not her parents. Her most recent foster family had run off with her, then had given her to these other people, after putting an ad on a website. Janice had taken this new couple’s minivan and was trying to escape from them that Friday night.
I keep waiting for this to make total sense to me. I keep hoping for it to offer some relief, some serenity, some deep sense of satisfaction. I want to be celebrating something. Bad people have been caught. A lost girl has been rescued and saved. A grey wolf? A princess? A firebird? But Isabelle has not been rescued. Isabelle is still gone. She’s still in the urn that Mom keeps glued to her body.
Maybe we’ve had too much and others too little. Who says we deserve joy when others constantly live in pain? Who says we must have a good life when others are riding with death every single day?
My heart is so crushed that I don’t even know how to be glad for Janice. My sister’s gone and my friends seem to be falling in love. Janice has survived, but I’m being left behind.
I have no desire to explain what I’m feeling. I have no one to explain it to who would fully understand. Only Isabelle would have understood.
Isabelle would have also understood that no one has won here. These types of celebrations are temporary anyway. Judging by Mom’s disappearing into her office with that urn, the survivors are too busy trying to figure out what to do with their dead.
I START DRAWING again after Dr. Aidoo tells me I can. Usually I like to draw people alone in a wide landscape, something I find quick and easy to do.
One of my favorite things to draw is a person walking alone on a beach in the middle of the day, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. I usually spend more time drawing the shadow than the person, because shadows are a lot more interesting to me. I like the way you can stretch or shrink them based on the light source.
My ninth-grade art teacher, Ms. Walker, used to say that to be good at drawing you need to simplify. You have to break things down into small parts, into lines, dashes, and dots. Bodies become shapes. Faces become circles. Chests become squares. Legs become cylinders and cones.
My favorite part of drawing has always been shading, filling in a pencil outline by adding darker and darker layers for more depth. I also love drawing broken things.
“Ruins,” Ms. Walker said, “are a lot easier to draw than perfect things.”
And here I am surrounded by ruins.
I begin by sketching our backyard, starting with the mango and avocado trees, then adding the new red hibiscus bushes, jasmines, and crocuses that Grandma Régine had planted. Then I draw the kidney-shaped pool and the deck where Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus are lounging next to each other, their faces covered with wide-brimmed straw-colored sun hats.
Grandpa Marcus is wearing green swim shorts and Grandma Régine a matching monokini. They’re quietly taking in the sun, while also watching my parents, who are sitting across from them, on the other side of the pool, fully dressed, in the shade.
Mom’s head is almost completely healed, the scar on her forehead getting less and less visible every day. Dad is still going around on his crutches but is wearing a lighter sling on his arm and a medical boot on his leg. He will be starting physical therapy soon.
Before, when I would try to sketch a moment like this—a still and uncomfortable moment—if Isabelle was there, she’d turn around and look at me now and then, waving as if to a camera to make sure I could see her. So I sketch Isabelle in. I sketch her right in the middle of my ruins.
Later I will shade her in. I’ll draw her doing a breaststroke in the pool, and I will draw myself sitting on the edge of the pool watching her. I will fill all of us in, watching Isabelle swimming. I’ll even add Dessalines lurking in a corner somewhere.
While trying to frame and sketch all of this, I keep wishing there was some way to make it come even more alive and feel more real. So I drop the sketch pad, and when no one is looking, I slip into the pool. And while doing my breaststroke, I don’t feel dizzy. I don’t sink under. I don’t drown.
Mom and Dad and Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine get up and move to the edge of the pool. At first they look frightened. Then on their faces I see something that looks a little bit like wonder. Like, wow. She is doing this. She is really here. Even though her sister is not.
One day I’ll be able to sketch myself alone. One day, I will be able to draw myself as no longer a twin, as the dosa, the untwinned one. The untwined one. But not just yet.
BETWEEN MOM AND Dad, Dad is the first to go back to work. He’s still not able to drive, so a partner from his law firm picks him up in the morning, then brings him home in the late afternoon. Someone from his office also takes him to his doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions.
In spite of what Aunt Leslie said, his life is already moving on, outside of the house, away from us.
Dad has always seemed calmer when he’s working. Mom, who one might think has the more fun job, always looks tense when she’s leaving for work.
Being around so many news people must have finally gotten to her, so one day while we’re eating a lavish dinner of rice and beans and stewed conch that Grandma Régine has cooked for us, Mom announces that she quit her job. And this time for good.
She’s not sure what she’s going to do next, but she doesn’t want to do makeup anymore.
“I think I might go back to school,” she says.
She’s not sure what she wants to study.
She sounds like one of my friends, one who doesn’t know which Advanced Placement classes to take.
“I have a sister who’s a doctor,” she says. “It can’t be that hard.”
“No one ever said you couldn’t do anything you wanted to do,” Dad says.
Then Mom just tunes out everyone else and starts speaking to me.
“What would you do if you were me, Gizzie?”
She tosses the question off lightly, but I take it seriously.
I want to tell her to not change a thing, to keep her same job, and to stay married to Dad. So much has changed, I want to say, why don’t we just keep everything else the same?
I can’t bring myself to say that, though, because I don’t want the same things, either. I want to move away for one thing, far away from everything that’s happened.
“Marriages change,” Mom declares to all of us. “And as we learned recently, life is short. So I’m not going miss any of it.”
Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus put their forks down at the same time and stare at Mom. Both their mouths are open, aghast. They look totally flabbergasted, like the mystified parents of an insolent child.
Some people never get to grow up. Others never stop growing up. My mother, I realize, is still trying to grow up. Whatever other dreams she’d had, she’d given up to take care of Isabelle and me, and she did her best to protect us from feeling guilty by never even mentioning what those dreams were. I never fully understood or appreciated that side of her until I had to watch her try to defend it.
“I didn’t realize you’ve been missing out on your life,” Dad says. He sounds all choked up, like he’s fighting back tears.
“I need to live a little bit more for myself,” Mom says. “Just like I told you before all this happened.”
So the separation was her idea.
Hearing all this makes me think back to a few months earlier when Mom and Dad and Isabelle and I were at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, looking at some Chinese vases on a raised platform on the floor. Some of the vases were over two thousand years old. They had been painted in bright and pastel colors by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the pamphlets we were carrying around said that they were valued at a million dollars each.
We’d spent nearly an hour looking at all sixteen of the vases, with Dad saying that the paint had defaced them, reducing their value as artifacts. Mom liked that the
y were painted over and saw it as a sign of renewal. Isabelle was barely hanging in there, doing her best not to bolt for the nearest exit to go meet her friends at the mall.
Just as we were heading out of the room, a man walked in, picked up one of the vases, and dropped it on the floor, smashing it to pieces. The man then stood quietly and waited for the police to come and arrest him.
As two policemen handcuffed him, he told them that he was an artist himself and that he had been staging a protest against the museum. Others saw what he had done as live art. A couple of tourists even clapped.
This was the last time we’d all had an outing together before that evening in the car.
It’s hard to not keep thinking of lasts.
Isabelle used to say that for good things, you think of firsts. For bad things, you think of lasts.
These are the first things I want to remember, the last things I want to forget:
Sometimes Isabelle would read a book backwards. She would start with the last chapter and work her way to the front so that she could first read about the characters after their lives had changed. Isabelle loved road trips. She wanted to learn to ski. She hated hot dogs and the sound of blow-dryers, and she was always the first one to jump in the pool at anybody’s pool party. Holding your breath to play the flute was a lot like holding your breath to swim or dive, she always said.
The last time I saw Tina and Jean Michel together, I asked them both to meet me at the Pérez museum where Ai Weiwei’s fifteen remaining vases were still on display, with some new heavy-duty motion detectors and a few more security guards.
Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine drove me there, but they went to check out a Caribbean art exhibit while I spoke to my friends amidst the invisible ruins of Ai Weiwei’s broken vase.
I wasn’t sure that they needed it, but I gave Tina and Jean Michel my blessing.
“I’m going to tell you both this just once, then we’ll never have to mention it again,” I said, as they stood on either side of me, shifting their weight from one leg to the other, fidgeting.
The words didn’t exactly come freely, but I tried to tell them that whatever was going on with them, they wouldn’t be smashing my heart, like that artist had smashed Ai Weiwei’s million-dollar vase. My heart was already in a million pieces. No one, or nothing, could ever shatter it again, the way losing Isabelle had.
They both looked as distraught as I felt, and neither one seemed to know what to say next.
“I don’t ever want to love anyone again the way I love Isabelle” is really what I wanted to say. Instead I told them that as soon as I’m cleared for travel, I will go spend the summer with my grandparents in Haiti. Then in September, even if it means graduating later than Isabelle and I were supposed to—especially if it means graduating later than Isabelle and I were supposed to—I’m moving to New York to intern at Uncle Patrick’s new label and live with him and Alejandra while I finish high school in Brooklyn.
They both held their hands out to me, as if to keep me from falling. But I wasn’t falling. I was deep inside my chrysalis and I was waiting to be transformed into some kind of hypoallergenic butterfly.
“You’re wrong,” I heard them say.
“We’re not!” they shouted at the same time.
Their simultaneous denial startled them, too. Jean Michel’s mouth stayed open, as though thousands of jumbled-up words were invisibly pouring out. Tina’s face crumpled up like paper, even as she was fighting to keep it intact. She was doing her best not to cry, and so was I.
Then after the most pregnant of all pregnant pauses, Tina muttered something under her breath and all I heard was “Whatever.” Then Jean Michel echoed her with “Yeah, whatever.” And maybe just so he could keep talking to me, he proceeded to tell me in a suddenly cool and unflustered-sounding voice that helping to find Janice made him think that he’s a better computer geek than a visual artist, so rather than a summer art program, he was going to take a bunch of computer classes at the University of Miami.
Tina, following his cue, said in her best church-announcement voice that she was going to stay in town, too, to work summer camp with Pastor Ben at the church.
Sometimes you just have to know when to let go. Still, as both Tina and Jean Michel were talking, I kept thinking to myself, “Wait until Isabelle hears about this stupid decision I’ve just made!” Then I remembered once again that Isabelle was gone.
The last time I heard about Janice Hill was from Officer Butler. Officer Butler came by the house alone one night, in jeans and a T-shirt, to return our phones, Isabelle’s backpack, laptop, and flute.
Dad pressed Isabelle’s computer against his chest when she handed it to him. I reached for the flute case, and Mom took the rest.
Except for a few scratches on the outside leather, the flute case looked fine. There were no bloodstains on it. Maybe Officer Butler had cleaned it up so that seeing it wouldn’t traumatize us so much.
I walked over to the couch and slid the locks open. I ran my fingers over the dark red velvet lining but avoided touching the flute until I remembered that singer Emeline’s earring was in one of the dividers underneath the flute.
I wanted to put the flute together and raise it to my lips, just to see what it would sound like. I wanted to ask my parents to time me while I held a note for as long as I could. Just as I’d timed Isabelle hundreds of times. But as many times as I’d watched her do it, I wasn’t sure how to assemble the flute, without possibly damaging it.
Instead I raised the flute’s body and found Emeline’s earring tucked safely in the case’s lining. I held the earring in my hand and stroked the tiny metal butterflies, then I put it back in its place.
Neither Mom nor Dad opened the things they were holding, not the laptop or the backpack. Dad looked like he didn’t want to ask, but he did.
“What’s happening with—”
He couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
“Janice?” Officer Butler said.
“Yes,” Mom answered.
“She’s in a good foster home,” Officer Butler said. She was looking more pained than we were, as though she wanted to offer us so much more than that, but couldn’t.
“How do you know these people are good?” Mom asked, raising her voice. “How do you know they’re not going to traffic that girl again, sell her off to someone else?”
I was thinking the same thing.
“They’re not,” Officer Butler said. “Even if I have to see to it myself.”
I couldn’t believe she was reassuring us. About Janice Hill! Or maybe we were all reassuring ourselves.
“Will there be charges?” Dad asked.
“Not against Janice,” Officer Butler said.
The state attorney was going to press child trafficking charges against the couples who’d traded Janice online. But due to Janice’s extenuating circumstances, Isabelle’s death was ruled a very unfortunate accident. Janice wouldn’t be getting a driver’s license anytime soon, but she wasn’t going to jail, either.
The first and last time we heard from Izzie’s heart recipient, we received a one-page letter written by hand, in tiny cursive letters.
The night the letter came, I slept in Isabelle’s bed with the paper pressed against my chest, just as Mom had held the urn against hers. Somehow, hugging that piece of paper felt more like having Isabelle with me than possibly hearing her phone messages or reading the files on her laptop. I was afraid to read the files on her laptop or listen to her phone messages only to find out that she’d written or said something really mean about me. I didn’t want to learn that she secretly hated me, that she sometimes wished I’d never been born.
“I know this is very soon to contact you,” a woman, identifying herself only as Roberta (“People call me Bobbie”) wrote. “But I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for me. I’m twenty-nine years old and I have not had a happy, carefree day in my life since I was twelve. I have never even been in love. My heart has n
ever allowed me to think that I could be. That is until now. Thanks to your daughter Giselle, I was born anew.”
Roberta had not gotten the memo that it was Isabelle and not me who’d given her a heart.
One of the many files I eventually find on Isabelle’s laptop is a short poem she called “Ron.”
I felt you reaching out to me
That night for the first time
To stroke me where time led you.
I loved reaching back to you
Uncoiling myself to fill both your hand
And your heart.
THE FIRST TIME Grandma Régine, Grandpa Marcus, Mom, Dad, Uncle Patrick, Alejandra, Aunt Leslie, Dr. Aidoo, and I are all together again after Isabelle’s death is for Isabelle’s and my birthday. My family decides to celebrate it, as planned, at Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine’s house in Haiti.
Once we walk past the passion vines near their front gate, we stop at one of the many spots in the middle of my grandparents’ garden, which overlooks the city below.
Grandpa Marcus once showed me and Isabelle the original drawings for the house. He had designed everything around this panoramic view of the mountains, the arbor, and the sea. The wall-to-wall houses on the hillsides and the broken city below had come later, the very rich and the very poor stacking their homes like dominoes, one on top of the other.
Isabelle had loved this garden and this view, because from this spot, she could pretend to hold an entire city, even if a half-broken one, in the palm of her hands. And because Isabelle loved this garden so much, my parents decided to scatter some of her ashes here.
The rest of the ashes would remain at our house in Miami, and later they would travel with us throughout our lives, to places where Isabelle had dreamed of going one day, mostly because she was interested in their music scenes: New Orleans, Dakar, Cape Town, Kingston, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Bahia, Rio.
We are all standing in the shadow of my grandparents’ massive silk-cotton tree when Grandpa Marcus hands me half a calabash, which was probably grown on my grandparents’ land and has been plucked from one of their trees and has been hollowed out just for this moment.