Isabelle being here, in this way, momentarily feels like yet another return. It feels as though she had been sent on some kind of journey, as a rite of passage. Like she’d been told to go into a forest to retrace the footsteps of her ancestors and resurface here, now, not as a young girl, but as a woman. Except she has not walked out of the forest on her own. We had to carry her here.
Mom tips a smaller version of the urn we left at home and sprinkles part of the ashes into the half calabash.
The last time Isabelle and I were both standing at this same spot, we’d introduced Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine to step dancing.
It was the end of the summer and we were about to leave. Everyone was sad. Isabelle thought that doing a little step dance for our grandparents would cheer them up.
We started slowly, rocking our bodies back and forth. Then we marched military style, loudly thumping our feet. We pounded our hands on our chests and legs as though our skins were drums. We kept moving faster, doing our best to echo each other’s shoulder and hip gyrations. But as much as we tried, we didn’t look like we were in sync or coordinated. As we yelled out suggestions for moves to each other, Grandma Régine said we were acting as though we were possessed.
Every time I think of something like this, I feel like Isabelle is with me. At least for a little while. Then I have to let her go.
Now, standing in my grandparents’ garden, I’m being asked to let go of her again. And on our birthday, too. Our fingers are being pried apart, just as they were in the car that night, just as they’d been on the day we were born.
I tug at the two necklaces around my neck, then cup my palms around the half calabash while looking at the faces around me. Dad shifts his weight on the cane he now uses and nods his head, signaling that it’s okay for me to let go. The smaller urn is locked in the crook of Mom’s elbow, but Dad is holding her other hand. Their fingers are so intertwined that unless you’re looking closely you might miss the glint of their wedding bands.
Dad leans over and kisses Mom’s cheek. They look at each other, and their teary eyes and half smiles make me think that Aunt Leslie is right, that their MO will probably kick in. Maybe Dad will now spend more time at home, and with both me and Isabelle out of the house, Mom will figure out what she wants to do next.
I can’t help but feel that it’s Isabelle’s MO that has brought them back together. Aunt Leslie and Dr. Aidoo, too. Dr. Aidoo, who, it turns out, is rather quiet when no one’s half-unconscious in a hospital bed. Dr. Aidoo, whose presence on the trip everyone has quietly come to accept.
That particular development would have really stunned Isabelle. We’ve had so much pain, she might have said, that maybe everyone is looking for love, capital L-O-V-E. Aunt Leslie and Dr. Aidoo, Uncle Patrick, Alejandra, Grandma Régine, and Grandpa Marcus all bow their heads and keep their eyes on the grass, where parts of Isabelle will soon land. The parts of her that will not blow away. The parts of her that will grow roots and become flowers here, the parts of her that will forever rest in the shadow of the silk-cotton tree.
Although I wear them less and less now, I’m glad that I have my cat eyes on. I look up at the sky, and even through the dark lenses, I can see a cloudless periwinkle sky.
A warm breeze blows over us that, if I just keep standing there, might possibly sweep the ashes out of the calabash before I get a chance to scatter them myself.
I wish I could puff Isabelle away like a dandelion floret. I wish I could blow into her like a balloon. I wish I could watch her float away on her own, towards that periwinkle sky. I wish she’d jump out from behind one of those trees and tell me exactly how to do this.
I want to sprinkle a dusting of her over the passion vines. I want to dash some over the azaleas, and a little more over the yellow oleanders. But most of all, I want to just stand there with her still holding my hand. And even as I tilt the calabash and the midday breeze starts sweeping the ashes away, I want them to come back to us and dance around us like pixie dust.
I am doing this wrong of course, now scattering willy-nilly, in front of me, behind me, on either side of me, into and against the breeze. But Isabelle will eventually do what she wants to do anyway. She will land wherever she wants. Somewhere I can’t guide her to.
Looking at the rest of my family members, both old and new, I can’t help but smile while they each try to wipe away tiny particles of Isabelle now clinging to their faces, dots of sand-like grains that once might have been her skin, glints of beige that were once her bones.
The sun is beating down hard. We are all sweating like crazy, and the sweat and ash combination makes us look like we’re fetus-in-fetu marked, or are wearing partial Isabelle masks.
I imagine Isabelle looking down at all of us and laughing. I imagine her admiring how hard we’re trying to hold on to her, to let go of her only one speck, one particle at a time.
Somewhere out there, I know she must be whispering, “Stun me. Stun me.”
We’re certainly trying.
BEFORE WE HAVE lunch, we all shower and change out of our now Isabelle-covered clothes. Grandma Régine assigns bedrooms and everyone pairs off effortlessly.
Mom and Dad will be in the bedroom Dad and Uncle Patrick once shared. Uncle Patrick opts for some other rarely used room, as does Aunt Leslie. I will sleep in the room I have always shared with Isabelle, the one where we slept in the same queen-size, four-poster bed with a mosquito net draped over the canopy, the room our grandparents told us was ours.
After every visit, Isabelle and I would purposely leave something behind to mark our territory, and when we’d return we would look for it in the place we had left it to see if it had been moved. Sometimes we’d leave clothes, books, CDs, handheld video games, things we thought we’d need to fill endless hours of boredom that never came, since Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine always had us programmed for drop-in visits with their friends or road trips.
It’s kind of bizarre to see Dr. Aidoo walking around my grandparents’ garden in his khaki shorts and plaid cotton shirt. He looks curiously at ease, hungrily taking everything in. He looks like someone who’s coming home to a place he never knew was his. Maybe Aunt Leslie has described this place to him. I can almost hear her preparing him for what he would see.
We are going to stay, she might have told him, in this impossibly large house on top of a hill, in a place where few other people have houses like this, where there’s a beautiful garden, almost like a secret garden, on top of a broken city, in this country that is still beautiful though it isn’t supposed to be.
This, if he had been able to access her brain, is also how Isabelle might have described this place to Dr. Aidoo. This is how she may have described it to Ron Johnson or anyone else she cared about. And there was a lot of Aunt Leslie in Isabelle and a lot of Isabelle in Aunt Leslie.
As the only non-blood or marital relatives among us, Dr. Aidoo and Alejandra drift away from the rest of us for a minute, maybe to compare notes.
The family pairings break up and reassemble around me. They couple and uncouple as brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. I am the only uncoupled one, alone, though they try not to make me feel that way, unyoked, untwined, without my sister.
If Isabelle were here, I would be with her and when we’d approach one of these couplings, it wouldn’t seem strange at all. I would not be the odd girl out. But I am. Even as we sit down for a late lunch around a long, benched table on my grandparents’ terrace, a table that usually sits twelve.
Grandma Régine puts me at the head of the table with one of my parents on each side. My parents’ bodies buffer me again, but not enough to make me forget that instead of Grandpa Marcus, it would be Isabelle sitting at the opposite end of the table, placed as far away from me as possible, so that she and I would have no choice but to speak to other people.
The others do their best to fill out the table, crowding the empty spaces so that it seems like no one is missing, that everyo
ne who is supposed to be here already is.
Grandma Régine likes to say that empty spaces at tables where people are eating leave room for wandering spirits to join in, spirits who are hungry for more than food, spirits who are hungry for company.
As the food is served by my grandparents’ two elderly cooks, Delira and Annaise, I notice Grandma Régine sliding away from Uncle Patrick and moving closer to Dad, leaving a body-size gap, a space wide enough for another person to sit down next to her.
At the lunch, which is supposed to be a combination birthday celebration and wake, some of us tell stories about Isabelle. We barter our grief, exchanging pieces of her that were solely ours.
“Remember when …” we say.
“Remember when the two of you had the Hula-Hoop competition on your thirteenth birthday?” Grandma Régine starts off in English so everyone can understand. “Your bones ached so much you both couldn’t walk the next day.”
“Remember when Isabelle took off her shoes and handed them to that woman in front of the cathedral in Cap Haitien,” Grandpa Marcus says.
I remember Isabelle, Grandma Régine, Grandpa Marcus, and I stepping out of Cap Haïtien’s main cathedral one afternoon. We were surrounded by a group of people begging for money and food. Isabelle saw a barefoot woman with a tiny baby in her arms, a baby so bald and skinny that it would have been impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, if not for the piece of white string looped like a teardrop earring around a small hole in each of her ears. Isabelle looked down at the woman’s mud-crusted feet, then at her own. Isabelle and the woman and I had what looked like the same size feet. Isabelle took off her leopard print ballet flats—no, my leopard print ballet flats, which she’d borrowed without my permission—and handed them to the woman. The woman was so shocked that she didn’t accept the shoes until some people started urging her to, by shouting that they would take the shoes if she didn’t.
Isabelle didn’t like us to tell that story. It was a cheesy story, she said, one that made her seem like she was trying to be a saint, when she’d only acted on impulse.
The shoes weren’t even hers. They were mine. No one but Isabelle and I remembered that part. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to give away the shoes I was wearing.
If she’d had money with her that day, Isabelle would have given it all to that woman. How come I didn’t remember that when I was pouting in Dad’s car that evening when we were on our way to our school’s spring orchestra concert?
The cathedral and shoes story reminds Aunt Leslie of the failed monarch butterfly pilgrimage, then the trip to Guanajuato. Uncle Patrick remembers our blizzard day at his apartment in Brooklyn.
Mom and Dad remain quiet. Too much must be coming to mind, too fast. It must be hard to choose.
Then Dad remembers how when we were nine, Isabelle and I woke up one morning and thought we were shrinking. We both looked at our hands and feet and shrieked, terrified that we were aging backwards and would turn into babies again. This happened after one of Isabelle’s nightmares had spilled not just into my head but also into daybreak.
Dad lined us up against the giraffe-shaped measurement chart on the inside of our bedroom door. He noticed that we’d actually grown, half an inch since the last time.
“Sometimes things happen backwards in dreams,” Dad had told us. “Whenever I dream that I’m going to a funeral, I’m sure to have one of the best days of my life.”
I wonder if his dreams still work that way.
Mom chimes in with a story about mirrors.
Mom used to tape mirror boards inside our cribs when we were babies. She remembers how when Izzie was with me, I’d tap my fingers against Izzie’s forehead the same way I did the mirror’s surface. Most babies think they’re seeing someone else when they look into a mirror. Izzie and I must have thought we were holding our 3-D reflections whenever we touched each other.
We were junior scientists in elementary school, Dad tags on. We’d ask him and Mom for kits and books on how to split water, make crystals, turn water into fake wine.
We also made invisible ink with baking soda, Mom reminds him. We made lava lamps and volcanoes, hot-air balloons with tissue paper.
They’re only telling stories about Isabelle and me together. (Do they know any stories that are only Giselle stories or only Isabelle stories?) They make us sound like magicians.
They make us sound magical, too.
“You guys used to sing a lot together, just the two of you,” Mom says, keeping her eyes on me. “Do you remember?”
Of course I remember.
Our middle school music classes were once-a-week group guitar lessons. I gave up the guitar pretty quickly, assigning myself the role of Isabelle’s occasional vocalist. I’d make up monosyllabic songs as Isabelle would clang away, playing the same three notes over and over again.
In the house!
Clang! Clang! Clang!
In the clouds!
Clang! Clang! Clang!
In the house that’s in the clouds!
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
When it seems like it might be my turn to speak, I try to stammer out a few words about how Isabelle and I would stand on my grandparents’ porch, lather up our hair, strip down to our underwear, and then step out in the rain. Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine even joined us once, giggling nervously as they wondered how Mom and Dad would react if they saw the four of us out there, dancing in our undies in the rain.
“We knew you were doing that,” Dad says, in part to spare me the tsunami of tears he sees coming my way.
“We know everything,” Mom says, then chuckles.
I absolutely believe her.
Grandma Régine spares us all the agony of names and candles and the choice of having one or two birthday cakes. Instead, we are served pieces of her vanilla-coconut cake, Isabelle’s favorite. Then everyone sings “Happy Birthday” to Isabelle, and after ninety seconds, timed by Grandma Régine, they sing “Happy Birthday” to me. Just as we’d always done in the past.
Next year they might have to sing for me first. I am now officially older than Isabelle.
That night I lie in bed with my parents, under their mosquito net. I look up, into the dark, and try to find traces of the white ceiling above us. If Isabelle were here, I’d be in bed with her, doing the same thing, as she slept. I’d also be looking for the stray fireflies, which sometimes got into the rooms and lit up small fragments of the walls.
My parents aren’t asleep, but they don’t move or speak, so I don’t move or speak, either.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I hear a single mosquito buzzing in my left ear.
I imagine that Isabelle is this mosquito, which is brave enough to have sneaked under the net and trapped itself in with us. I know that from now on, I will always want to find some trace of Isabelle in everything that lives and breathes and tries to get close to me. I know I will listen for her breath in every piece of music. I will look for her face in flowers, inside every church, every cathedral, in the movements of every cat, butterfly, dolphin, or pilot whale. I will always look for signs that she’s working full-time trying to pierce this impossible veil between her and me.
I love you, I will want to say, even to mosquitoes. Though it might be easier to say to fireflies.
I slide to the bottom of the bed, raise the net, and climb out. I feel my way through the pitch-black room towards the door.
My parents say nothing to each other or to me. I hear them fumbling behind me in the dark, following me towards the door and maybe towards those fireflies, which are possibly waiting for me on the silk-cotton tree. I think of my parents’ bodies merging into a new version of Isabelle—Isabelle 2.0—an Isabelle that can appear and disappear, in whatever form she likes, at will.
I walk back to the bed and lie down.
My parents do, too.
THE NEXT DAY the Marshalls arrive with Tina in tow. I can tell that this was planned a while back. My
parents had already anticipated their need for reinforcements. They also know how hard it will be for me to make new friends from now on. They don’t want me to lose two sisters at once.
Tina comes out and tells me all of this as we slip into each other’s arms. For the first time since Isabelle died, I allow myself to really cry, my shoulders rising and falling with each new wave of tears.
I point to a shady corner of the garden, and Tina follows me there. I show her the spots on the grass where some of Isabelle landed, where the earth has already swallowed her up, and the morning dew has since washed her away.
“I know we have more.” I say this about the ashes, but about our memories, too.
I find the concave ridge in the silk-cotton tree where Isabelle and I once carved our names. Huge, crooked capital letters stare back at us. Isabelle’s hollowed-out name is on top of mine, with only a few inches between them. It had taken us days to carve our names with one of Grandpa Marcus’s Swiss Army knives.
We considered carving a heart around our names, but Grandma Régine said that a heart might bind us even more and might lead to our spending the rest of our lives together, two old maids in a house full of cats.
Since Mom had taken Dessalines over to the Marshalls’ before we left, I ask Tina what they’ve done with him.
Pastor Ben is watching him, she says, and he and Dessalines are going to get along just fine.
I was hoping she would tell me that Jean Michel was taking care of Dessalines so I could ask about him, too.
She senses this and tells me anyway.
“I’m so sorry about that whole thing,” she says. “I should have spoken up in the museum that day. And even afterwards.”
“I didn’t give you a chance to,” I say.
“He never liked me that way,” she says. “He liked you. He still likes you. When you said what you said, we both felt like you just wanted us to go away. We did try to go away, but separately, not together. Remotely.”