I never quite understood why they were separating in the first place. Everything seemed fine until it wasn’t. They’d been like any other parents, snapping at each other now and then, but then making up soon afterwards. The giggles had grown less frequent, the arguments more so, in hushed tones, along with Dad’s pleas for understanding, Mom’s sobs.
Even with all of that, the separation announcement had seemed unnecessarily drastic and sudden. Like the crash.
You wake up on a sunny day and go to school. You come back home and have dinner. You get in a car and nothing is ever the same again. Everything changes.
Some things are just unstoppable. You have no control over them. My parents’ separation had grown to seem that way. And now there’s nowhere to go but back. Like the stories that keep popping up in my mind, stories from the life I had before, about the way things used to be.
So it makes sense that Mom and Dad want to go back, too. Back to a place where everything seemed okay. Back to when Isabelle was alive. Back to when we were all together.
“I know a policewoman came to see you,” she says, changing the subject. “An officer, a detective.”
Yes, the policewoman.
I want to hear all about the policewoman. What did the policewoman mean when she said that what happened might not have been an accident? Maybe Mom knows.
Mom pulls herself up by grabbing the sides of the wheelchair. Her face tightens and she is beginning to sweat. Sweat rolls down her cheeks from underneath the bandage on her forehead. She looks like she’s in a lot of pain, but soon she’s standing without help. She takes a cup and straw from the side table, then pushes the straw past my lips.
I try to press the top of my mouth down on the straw to pull the water up, but I can’t get more than one drop. Mom moves my face to the side so that one drop of water will slide out and not choke me. That drop of water tastes really good. I had been craving it without realizing it. I wish there were ice cubes for her to rub against my lips the way the nurses do.
Looking defeated, she pulls the straw out, then takes a few sips herself. After she puts the foam cup down, she’s shaking so much that it looks like she’s going to fall down. She holds on to the bed’s railing to balance herself.
Sit down! I want to scream. Sit down now!
She looks back at the wheelchair as though she’s carefully measuring the distance, the one or two steps she’d have to walk to get back to it. She grunts as she takes those steps, backwards, then she plops herself down quickly into the chair.
“Ouchie,” she says.
Isabelle liked to say, “Ouchie.” Never ouch, but ouchie. We all started saying ouchie because of her.
“Let me rest a minute,” Mom says, catching her breath.
After she’s rested a bit, she says, “The funny thing is that the girl who hit us is fine. She’s not even in jail. She’s out. She’s fine and Isabelle is gone.”
Who is this girl, I wonder. What kind of person would drive that way? And kill a person and be fine?
The hunky male nurse—I realize now that he has a beard—walks back into the room. He looks down disapprovingly at Mom, as though he can tell that she’s been doing something she’s not supposed to.
“Your husband’s out of surgery and he’s asking for you,” he says.
Mom looks relieved. I can tell that everything is now a big deal. Little things now mean a whole lot. You can die going to a concert, so why can’t you die in surgery? Or from just lying in a hospital bed? Why can’t you die from broken ribs for which there are no casts?
Mom raises her hands and waves goodbye as the nurse wheels her out. And I know now that for the rest of our lives there will be no simple goodbyes.
Mom is a woman of style, a stylish woman, some might say. She can wear the heck out of a hat, especially a black one. She knows how to walk in really high heels without seeming like she’s walking on stilts. She always knows all the best lipstick–eye shadow combos. She knows how to make a great flower arrangement for any party, even without flowers. At home, her desk is the definition of neatness. Before the crash, short, twisted plaits draped where her bandages are now.
Sometimes she’d wear her sunglasses inside the house, like a movie star. Her jewelry is always simple but elegant: diamond stud earrings, her spaghetti-thin platinum wedding ring, and a gold Tiffany bracelet Dad bought her for one of their wedding anniversaries. Her “core” is usually toned to the hilt, and whether her weight goes up or down, she always wears her bikini to the beach to show off the small wreath of red and yellow begonias tattooed in a circle around her belly button and in the middle of her back. Her tattoo seems to have entered on one side of her body and burst out of the other. Like a bullet. At times it also looks like it has roots, growing into her abdomen and spine. Mom accidently pressed the inside of her left elbow against a charcoal grill when she was Isabelle’s and my age. That scar now looks like a sepia picture of a russet forest. When her body fights, it wins.
When Isabelle and I were little, before Mom would leave us alone in a room or walk a few inches behind us on a narrow sidewalk, she’d always lean over and whisper to both of us that we should just holler, “Rele, if you need me.”
Somehow, even as little girls, we knew that this was a promise she would always keep. Wherever we were, we knew that the slightest whimper would bring her to our side. She’d proven it to us many times, at the first sound of a wail, a scream. When we felt water rushing into our noses in a pool. When our tricycles rolled too fast ahead of her, when we scraped a knee or elbow on a pebble or a rock. She’d swoop out of nowhere and rescue us.
The hunky bearded male nurse doesn’t know any of this. The doctors don’t know it, either. And maybe Dad has forgotten, too. I certainly had.
After Mom leaves, I hear the faint sound of the radio again. This time there’s music playing. A faint flute solo. I try to move my head forward to hear it better, but my head is going nowhere.
I imagine Isabelle raising the flute to her lips and swaying her upper body in a half circle, the way she sometimes did when trying a piece out on me. I close my eyes the way Isabelle often did when practicing without her sheet music.
Isabelle is now standing at my bedside, with both her hands, her perfect, unhurt hands, resting on the railing of my hospital bed. She’s wearing her orchestra uniform, the white blouse, black pencil skirt, and black bow tie, the same one she was wearing in the car, the one she, Mom, and I had picked out together, out of five possible options, at the mall. Her braids are brushed up and piled on top of her head, with a few strands left hanging to frame her unbruised face. Around her neck is the gold chain, the Hand of Fatima, that Aunt Leslie had given us.
In the dream, I can speak, so I tell her, “Hi.”
“Hi yourself,” she answers.
“Remember that time you asked me to trim your eyebrows and I plain shaved them off so you wouldn’t look so much like me? I’m sorry about that,” I say.
“I had no business trying to trim my eyebrows,” she says. “I was twelve. I’m sorry I asked you to undress in the middle of the street that time you were wearing my Emeline T-shirt.”
“Thank God I was wearing a bra,” I say.
“One of your better ones,” she says.
“Actually it was yours, too,” I say.
Then, her voice sounding both bubbly and nervous, she says, “You stun me. You astonish me.”
I know she’s borrowing “astonish” from Little Women. But the “stun me” is all hers. She liked to say “Stun me” the way other people say “Bite me.” It was also her way of saying “Impress me.” So if you told her you could walk ten miles, she might say, “Stun me and walk twenty.”
“You’ve really astonished me here,” she says, looking down at me in the bed. “You’ve been great. Super great. For the rest of your life, you keep stunning me. Just keep stunning me.”
“Are you here to say goodbye?” I ask her.
“We’ll never say goodbye,” she s
ays.
I remember learning in my seventh-grade science class how sounds might possibly live on forever. We were doing a lesson on Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio. Guglielmo Marconi thought that one day a machine would be invented that would pick up sounds that had been floating in the air since the beginning of time. He believed that sometime in the future we’d all be able to hear the original cave dwellers moan, Jesus weep, Leonardo da Vinci lecture, or our own first cries as babies.
I would always hear the sound of the crash, the clang of metal against glass. I would always hear Isabelle’s voice shouting, “We’re late! We’re late!”
“I’m so sorry for everything I’ve ever done to you,” I tell her.
“No worries,” she says, just as she always did after we fought. And she would mean it, too. There would be no grudge after that.
“No worries at all, Gizzie.” She stops to listen to the radio sonata, turning her face towards the door as if to see where the music is coming from.
“You’re not going to die,” she says, her face tilted towards the music.
“You’re not going to live,” I say.
“I could have told you that,” she says, smiling.
“I wish I’d known,” I say.
I want to cry, but I can’t. It is as if crying is forbidden in that type of dream. So instead I say, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says.
I don’t remember us ever saying “I love you” to each other before. We never needed to.
“I love you,” I say again, wishing I could say it for every other time that I could have said it in the past. Before I can say it again, the music stops and she’s gone.
We had been fighting in the car.
Before she asked Dad to put the CD in, we had been fighting. She kept saying “We’re late” or “We’re going to be late” and I was tired of it. I was tired of hearing her voice, when I just wanted to sit there and think about Jean Michel Brun. I wanted to look pretty for him, and I wasn’t sure I was looking pretty enough. I would have liked one more chance to change my clothes again. Another fifteen minutes to pick another outfit, to touch up my makeup. So when she said, “We’re going to be late” for the hundredth time, I shouted at her. I yelled, “Chill!”
And she calmly answered, “You’re the one who needs to chill.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled.
“Les filles!” Mom shouted.
“What’s wrong with both of you?” Dad turned his head and gave us a long, harsh stare from the front seat. Maybe too long a stare.
“You’re not some famous rock star,” I continued. “You’re just going to play in a stupid high school orchestra.”
That seemed to finally get her, but she didn’t want to show it. Instead she opened the flute case—a flute case I’d helped her pick out—pulled out the practice CD, and handed it to Dad. She wanted to help me chill. She wanted us all to chill. She also wanted me to see that this stupid high school orchestra was important to her.
“Let’s hear this how the ‘Maestro’ intended it before we butcher it,” she said. She was trying to rise above, act more mature than me.
Relieved, Dad turned around again to take the CD from her. Maybe he looked away from the wheel for too long.
Then The Firebird.
Then the oncoming red minivan.
Then the crash.
I wish that rather than shouting at her, I had simply said, “Yes, we’re late.” That way she wouldn’t have had to shout back at me, and Dad wouldn’t have had to get excited, and maybe a little bit less attentive at the wheel.
Details, funny how they are the first to go.
In a long line of fuzzy events, we lose the details first.
THEY SAY AFTER people have been together for a long time, they start to look alike. My parents are not there yet, but my dad’s parents, Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine, look like they could be twins, frats, fraternals. Old age has even shrunken them down to the same height. Grandpa Marcus used to hover around six feet two, but now he’s about five seven like Grandma Régine. They have the same roundness about them, too.
“From eating the same meals all the time and getting about the same amount of no exercise,” they always say. They speak like a duet. Even their silence is in stereo.
Having come all the way from Haiti, they spend hours at the hospital, starting that afternoon. They take turns going across the hospital walkway between my room and Mom’s and Dad’s. When they are with me, they don’t ask my doctors and nurses questions. They don’t give me updates, either. They just sit there staring at me or reading a book.
When the nurses walk in, they don’t wait to be asked to leave, they simply walk out, one behind the other. When they come back, the one who left the room last is the first one through the door. They wear the same types of beige-shaded outfits, too, but in different combinations. Sometimes I see the same black fedora or panama hat on each of their salt-and-pepper hair at different times of the day. Same goes for Grandpa Marcus’s linen jackets, which he is rarely without.
Grandma Régine does most of the silent reading, occasionally passing her book to Grandpa Marcus, who, ever the architect, might spend up to fifteen minutes, when he’s not drawing or looking at drawings, studying a passage that Grandma Régine has casually pointed out to him. Sometimes he’ll go way beyond the lines she’s showing him and only return the book when she nudges him.
Every once in a while, Grandpa Marcus will get up, pat his jacket pocket, then walk out of the room. When he returns, he smells of cigarettes. Grandma Régine wriggles her nose as if to confirm what she smells. Then she keeps reading.
I want so badly to beg her to read to me. Read to me, I want to tell her. I would love to hear your voice.
Grandma Régine never liked the sound of her voice. It was always more gruff than her personality, which was already a bit grumpy to begin with. Someone must have told her along the way that she didn’t have a nice voice, so she stopped using her voice as much as she should. She never read to Isabelle and me when she watched us when we were little. She would just hand us books and the three of us would read quietly, separately.
Grandpa Marcus’s specialty is not as a reading companion, though, but as a jokester. He loves to tell odd little stories, which would put my parents and their Haitian friends in stitches, but which Isabelle and I never found funny. I remember one joke that was related to his not-so-secret on-and-off smoking.
A man who is about to be executed is offered a final cigarette. He turns it down because it is bad for his health. All of Grandpa Marcus’s jokes are like that. Unfunny in the worst way. But he just laughs and laughs at them, even if no one else does.
I wish Grandpa Marcus would tell me one of those jokes now, but this is not a place for jokes. It’s a place for people appearing and disappearing. Both in my dreams and in person.
While Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus are sitting there, I feel like I’m back with them and Isabelle way up in the hills above Port-au-Prince.
The sky is cornflower blue over their estate, their Victorian-inspired house and their boundless-looking garden, which overlooks the city below. In the middle of the garden is a two-hundred-year-old silk-cotton tree. Like the house, the silk-cotton tree is still standing in spite of a massive earthquake that nearly destroyed the city a few years back.
At over two hundred and fifty feet tall, the silk-cotton tree is the tallest tree that Isabelle and I have ever seen. It is so high that when we were little we thought it would take a whole week to climb it. It’s so wide that both Isabelle and I could hug it and not touch hands in the middle. Parts of the trunk, where we once carved our names, have ridges so deep that both our bodies could fit into them. Sometimes, at night, especially when there was thunder or lightning, the silk-cotton tree would light up, too, with fireflies. During the day, the roots stretched out over the ground, like snakes slithering
away from their nests.
The day before we left Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus’s house last summer, Isabelle and I spotted something that we’d often noticed while sitting on their terrace. It was raining somewhere beyond the harbor, above the sea, and around the cloud-shrouded sun was a kind of halo, a circular rainbow that Grandpa Marcus called a gloire, a “glory.”
Every time we’d see a glory, Isabelle and I would keep our eyes on it until the rain would stop and it would start to fade. We would then close our eyes and imagine that it was still there, even after it was long gone.
“We won’t say a full goodbye to it,” Isabelle would say. “We’re each going to say half.”
Then she would say “Good” and I would say “Bye” right before we’d reopen our eyes to a glory-less world.
The best part of having a birthday party for two is the invitations. Mom always insisted that Isabelle and I make all our invitations. Over the years, we’ve made birthday party invitations shaped like flowers, balloons, cowboy boots, and movie theater tickets. We’ve even passed out invitations inside recycled plastic bottles.
Our birthday parties have mostly been at our house. But Mom and Dad have also rented out jungle gyms, ballet studios, restaurants, and hotel rooms. And of course there was the Disney party and the early birthday trip to Mexico that Aunt Leslie had organized.
Our last birthday party was a girls-only sleepover in a downtown Miami hotel room with Tina and a few girls from church, Lois and some other girls from orchestra and debate team—Isabelle’s freshman- and sophomore-year obsession. We ate pizza in our pajamas and tried to watch a bunch of sappy romantic comedies that we didn’t see the end of because we were talking so much.
Isabelle and I were going to spend our next birthday with the entire family at Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine’s house in Haiti. Tina was even supposed to come.
Our seventeenth birthday party invitation was going to be in the shape of a glory. This would have been one of our best birthdays yet.