Claire of the Sea Light

  First Max Junior helped the boy into the car. This gave him another opportunity to touch his son as he held the child’s hands, guiding him to settle in the backseat. He tried to pull the seat belt across the boy’s chest. The straps rose to the child’s neck, so he decided to forgo it. He shut the door, opened the passenger side for Flore, then finally climbed into the driver’s seat. The hem of Flore’s dress rose high above her knees as she settled into her seat and quickly she pulled it down. She could have sat in the back with the child, making him feel like their chauffeur, but she didn’t.

  He had never been deep inside Cité Pendue. He had only driven with his parents, on their way farther south, by the main road that circled it, the road by the sea. Still he felt as though he had already been there. He’d been there in the way his friend Bernard Dorien had described his parents’ restaurant, which was, according to Bernard, practically attached to the Rue des Saints warehouse, once occupied by the men of Baz Benin. He’d been there through the music that the Baz Benin men had produced and recorded and brought to him on CDs and even cassettes, to play on his radio program, their praise of and laments about precarious life and certain death in the geto.

  “What’s a good way?” he asked Flore as he turned the Jeep toward a line of calabash trees in front of his father’s gate. Ten years before, it would have been best to use the road by the sea, but he wasn’t sure anymore and wanted to confirm this with her. And she agreed with a reluctant nod.

  Even after ten years, the road along the sea was still tarred and mostly paved. There were more cars now, and the traffic crept along the two wide lanes going in opposite directions. Several young men and women tapped on the car window, offering to sell him fried foods and meats, plantain chips, and bottled water. Others followed, hawking cell phone chargers and batteries.

  In the cars and camions in front and on the other side of him, he saw that many of his fellow drivers and their passengers passed the time by talking on cell phones, something which, a decade before, when he’d left the country, you wouldn’t have seen. On the opposite side, a funeral procession was stuck in the gridlock with a hearse leading a small caravan of cars that motto taxis snaked through.

  When the traffic did move along, it reminded him how pretty Ville Rose still was. On one side of them were the same moss-blanketed marshes he remembered from years ago and in the distance some funnel-shaped mountains.

  Soon, though, they passed a new line of low-grade brothels, where women sold sex in individual bungalows. A loud bell sounded in Flore’s purse and she pulled out a cell phone, then switched off the ringer. She turned around and handed the phone to the boy, and occasionally when Max Junior looked in the rearview mirror, he would see the boy tapping the keys hard and fast while playing some kind of game. He realized that he had forgotten his own cell phone in his room at his father’s house.

  Glancing now and then at Flore’s profile, which she kept nearly frozen, almost like a statue, he found it difficult to remember most of what they’d once talked about. It was never consequential, nothing ever too deep. Aside from the usual things about what he wanted her to cook on a particular day, he would try to make her laugh with him at the love-stricken girls who wrote him letters, for example, but she never did. He would make fun of some friend of his father’s who had come to dinner with his wife and met his mistress there—a dinner she had served them. She would never join in his teasing and criticism.

  Back then, she’d seemed interested in magazines, especially the beauty magazines left behind by his father’s female friends. He would sometimes catch her staring at the women in those pages, her mouth open, her eyes widened in awe. He would try to bring home more of those magazines from the radio station, as many as he could, and he would leave them lying around the house for her to pick up and look through when he was out. She often straightened her own hair with a box of relaxer she’d buy from a vendor of hair extensions at the open market, but they never discussed any of that. They never even discussed how she had come to his father’s house when she was barely sixteen, why she had been made to leave school to replace an aunt who’d worked there for years until the aunt was too old to work.

  The child was still lost in the cell phone game, pounding the keys even harder now, as though there were something dire at stake.

  “Why did you name him that?” he asked her quietly.

  “What?” she snapped, without turning her face.

  “Why did you give him such a name?” He did not even want to say it so as not to bring the child’s attention to their conversation.

  “Because I wanted to,” Flore said.

  But what he meant to ask her was which way she’d intended the name. Not his? Or his? But he couldn’t think of a way to ask without the child understanding exactly what they were talking about. He looked back in the rearview mirror, and the boy now had the phone closed on his lap and his thumb wedged in his mouth.

  “Aren’t you too old for that?” he asked the boy.

  The child pulled his finger out of his mouth and placed his hands on the seat, under his thighs.

  “I’ve tried so many things,” Flore said, more to the boy than to him. “Even rubbed a hot pepper on it.”

  “A hot pepper?” Max Junior grimaced. “Terrible.”

  When it grew quiet in the car again, Max Junior turned on the radio. A newscaster was droning on about demonstrations against high food prices in Port-au-Prince. Could Jessamine have been caught up in that? Could that have kept her from making it to Ville Rose either last night or this morning? It already felt like weeks since he had seen her, although it had been only twenty-four hours.

  “Are there any children’s programs on Radio Zòrèy the way there used to be?” he asked, trying to think of some other way to entertain the child.

  Flore shrugged. She either didn’t know or didn’t care.

  When Max Junior looked back in the rearview mirror, he saw the boy was now asleep, lying across the backseat with both his legs fully bent. He was indeed a beautiful boy, Max Junior thought, not just handsome, but beautiful. It was a kind of beauty that he thought everyone could admire. No one could look at this child sleeping, his eyes tightly closed, his chest rising up and falling down, his face so relaxed that he looked defenseless, no one could look at that child, he thought, and not find him free of blame and shame.

  It had taken nearly ninety minutes to drive eight miles, but they were finally entering Cité Pendue. He could tell by the way the sea on the side of the road had turned from green-blue to brown to ashen black. The streets narrowed, rising in a line of sloped hills packed with cement and cinderblock homes, tin shacks, and open markets filled with exhausted-looking women and wilted food.

  “The house isn’t too far in.” Flore was guiding him. “My mother wanted something not far from the street.”

  He turned a narrow corner that seemed like it was never made for a car to pass through, then down a crisscrossed trail, where he finally found the house.

  It was different from what he’d expected, prettier. Box-shaped with pink grille metalwork covering the front. He tried to park the car as close to the front as possible and leave room in the narrow alley for people to walk by.

  The boy was still asleep in the back. Max Junior picked him up, cradling him in his arms. This is what it must have felt like to hold him as a baby, he thought. A very heavy baby. The child was breathing deeply, and when he pushed the boy’s body into his chest, the child wriggled, twisting himself back in place.

  “Where should I put him?” Max Junior asked once Flore opened the front door.

  Inside, the house smelled overpoweringly of vanilla essence, the liquid type you might add to lemonade and cakes. The living room was sparse, with four plastic-covered chairs facing one another across a narrow table pushed against a back corner. A lightbulb dangled on a cable from the ceiling and on the walls were beauty-queen calendars, advertising beer and skin-bleaching soaps and creams.

  A bamboo curtain hid
a bedroom with a large bed that took up most of the room, along with two large stuffed-looking suitcases. As he placed Pamaxime on the bed, Flore turned on a standing fan and aimed it in the sleeping child’s direction. Flore seemed surprised that the fan came on, that there was any electricity at all.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked when they stepped back into the front room.

  “In the market,” she said.

  His nose full of the vanilla essence—his eyes nearly watering from it—he was filled with regret, but did not know how to tell her. In the end, in spite of these surroundings, she seemed to have somehow triumphed. She had now proved, by letting him meet his son, for one thing, that she was no longer afraid of him. And what had he done? He’d brought into the world a child whom he had ignored. He’d left his home and his country for years. And he’d kept secrets.

  “I’m sorry, Flore. I’m sorry for what was done,” he said, pacing now, across a cement floor that was as uneven as the ceiling.

  “What was done? You mean for what you did.” She seemed to have been waiting for him to bring up the subject—or dreading that he would. Her arms began shaking as she tried to dust one of the plastic-covered chairs with her bare palms. She rubbed her hands together, then balled both her fists as though she were getting ready to punch him. He could tell that her anger had been simmering not just today, but for the last ten years, and now that she was in her own neighborhood, in her mother’s house, she could release it.

  “I went there today,” she said, “because your father found us in Port-au-Prince and asked me to come. But now? No, no, I don’t want to see you again.”

  Looking around the room, which was a fifth the size of his room at his father’s house, he thought that it could use a window. A window might take away some of this awful vanilla-essence fragrance. It might let in more light. It might allow the boy to see the sky when he woke up from his sleep. A window might make the entire house feel bigger, make them feel freer. A window and some plants, like some of the plants in his father’s garden, were what this little house needed, he thought. But the spot in the wall where the window might be was needed for the neighbor’s wall, and a window might make them less safe here. A window might make it easier for someone else to come in and hurt them.

  “What about the boy?” he asked, because everything was now centered on the boy. The boy was everything. “He drew me,” he said. How could the boy have known what he would look like? What would he have drawn if he’d been asked to sketch the boy? “He drew me without a face. Just a circle, a blank circle.”

  “Did you want your face to look like an ass?” she asked, a triumphant smirk flashing across her mouth. She tried to suppress it, but it remained there, like her own personal victory.

  A decade ago, he’d tried to convince himself that he might love her, that he might want to make a life with her. He tried to make himself believe that this would be best. But this was one of many false dreams he held close to his heart, like the one of finally making love to a woman who could fully satisfy him, whom he would long for and miss every morning when he woke up.

  “I’d like to contribute,” he said, now raising his head to examine the slab-sided pink ceiling above their heads. “I’d like to contribute to a good school in Port-au-Prince. A school like Papa’s school.”

  “Your father gave me some money,” she said. “Your mother sent me some too. You must know that.”

  Actually he did not know that. He found it easier to believe that his mother would wire her money from Miami, but not that his father would hand Flore some. Or that this was something his parents would do together.

  Flore walked to the door, grabbed the wobbly metal handle to open it, then motioned with an abrupt movement of her head for him to leave. He reached into his pocket for his wallet nevertheless, but he’d left his father’s house in too much haste and, along with his cell phone, had also left behind his wallet. He made a gesture toward her, but, pushing his empty hands away, she said, “Ale tanpri. Please go.”

  She followed him out. He muttered hello to some of her neighbors, who were sitting out on their cement porches as he climbed into the Jeep.

  “Where can I find Rue des Saints?” he asked once he’d slouched down behind the wheel.

  Flore looked up at the closest neighbors, two women, one old, one young, and a teenage boy who seemed to be the older woman’s grandson. A curious look passed between her and her neighbors. Had Flore told them, told everyone, about what he’d done?

  “Rue des Saints is no longer Rue des Saints, I know,” he said to the young man. “I just want to find out how to get there.”

  He’d heard about it in Miami. The morning he’d left Ville Rose, Bernard Dorien had been arrested. The next day he was found dead. Then someone had set fire to Baz Benin, a fire that not only had destroyed Baz Benin but, as it spread, had razed Bè, Bernard’s parents’ restaurant. He didn’t know where Bernard’s parents were spending the rest of their lives. (Had they returned to the mountains? Did they start another restaurant elsewhere?) In the Haitian newpapers he’d read in Miami, only Tiye and his lieutenant, Piye, had been listed as having died in the fire.

  This cascading news had shattered him, but there was nothing he could do from Miami. Or was there? Even if he’d returned to Haiti, Bernard would still be gone and his parents’ business too. There was nothing he could have done.

  “Can I still get to Rue des Saints?” Max Junior asked.

  The young man used the life lines in Max Junior’s palms as coordinates on an imaginary map. Max Junior followed his directions, driving nearly a half hour between tin shacks on dirt roads before he reached Rue des Saints.

  The street that was once Rue des Saints was now mostly a row of wooden shacks next to a reeking landfill smoldering on the edge of an oil-streaked storm drain. Max Junior stopped the car. On both sides of him were mountains of trash, tires, and thousands of tiny plastic juice bottles and foam food containers. A few people stopped to stare at him before continuing on their way: two old women returning from the market, a group of sweaty boys taking turns clutching a ball on their way home from a soccer game. If not for those people, it would have been impossible for him to imagine that this had ever been the kind of place where people lived, where his friend Bernard had lived.

  Sitting in the car, he thought of the last time he’d seen Bernard. Bernard had been typing a news script at the radio station and had taken a moment to look up and invite him for a meal at his parents’ restaurant. Max had been too embarrassed to tell Bernard he was afraid to go there.

  The windows were closed now. Still the fetid smell of decomposing trash penetrated the car and was nearly choking him. Max Junior started the engine and kept driving until he found the sea once again. He followed the sea out of Cité Pendue until it turned a robin’s egg blue, the Ville Rose color he had longed for most when he was in Miami.

  He rolled down the windows, and with a hot gust of air blasting his face, spent all afternoon going home. He allowed himself to linger in the bottleneck traffic, then he realized that it had been some time now since he’d thought about Jessamine. He looked in the tight wedge between the driver’s seat cushion and backrest and found the white envelope with the five-hundred-gourde note his father always kept there for emergencies. He stopped at a street corner for fried plantains, goat, and pork, which he ate from a dented metal plate in front of the vendor’s pot of sizzling oil, then washed it all down with a bottle of imported fluorescent juice. Leaving the food vendor’s, he drove slowly, purposely taking the wrong turns, stopping to sit on the side of smaller streets and out-of-the-way trails before returning to the busy main thoroughfare by the sea.

  It was nearly dark when he pulled up in front of his father’s house and saw Jessamine sitting with his father on the brightly lit front porch. She was wearing dark leggings and a plain white tunic top, yet still looked elegant, as though she were heading out to a ball. Both Jessamine and his father saw the Jeep through the open
gate. He lowered his head, pretending he had some task to complete in the car before he could come out. A radio program was blaring from one of the neighboring houses and he could have sworn he heard Flore’s voice on it. But that couldn’t be right. He had left Flore in Cité Pendue not that long ago.

  A bouncy commercial jingle cut off the Flore-like voice. It was followed by a loud pitchman touting health shakes, cigarettes, and beer in the same breathless voice. He stopped paying attention. He was contemplating instead the fact that Jessamine didn’t call out his name or run to him.

  Watching her and his father sip something or other, he imagined his father learning that Jessamine was a nurse and asking her for medical advice about his old judo injuries. He imagined them talking about his father’s paintings, his garden and flowers. But he could imagine Jessamine having also told his father how she was not really his girlfriend and how she had agreed to come with him just so his father would think he had a girlfriend, and how they had even debated whether he should buy her a ring and call her his fiancée. Maybe she was telling his father how she had agreed to come with him, as a good and loyal friend, only so that he would come and meet his son.

  His father got up and waved. Though he didn’t move from behind the wheel, he waved back, indicating he was coming. It was obvious that Jessamine had already conquered his father, most likely with compliments about the town, the house. Or maybe his father was overly impressed that though she was born in Miami, she could still speak Creole, even with an accent. Jessamine was glad, he knew, to see the place that had, in part, made him.

  The commercial jingles continued on his father’s neighbor’s radio. A scripted dialogue between two popular comedians about two competing cell phone companies was playing now. Max Junior wondered whether if he were still living in this town—not in his father’s house, but in a house of his own—he might feel obligated to drive by every afternoon to see if his father was all right. Might he also sit outside, in a car, feeling grateful that he’d escaped this house and its rueful memories? He pretended that he was actually inside this moment that would never be, and the second both Jessamine and his father turned their faces away from him and toward each other, he started the car and drove away. He sped forward, heading down Pied Rose Avenue toward the beach.