An Untamed State (40 page)

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I slipped out of bed, where Michael lay, dead to the world, Christophe next to the bed in his Pack ’n Play. I went to the kitchen, sat down, and stared out the window at the clear night sky, all those stars. The house creaked in the way of old farmhouses. I tried not to flinch at every little noise.

It wasn’t long before Lorraine padded into the kitchen. She sat across from me and smiled. “I thought I heard you. You and sleep are strangers, that’s for sure.”

“When I close my eyes . . .” I shook my head.

Lorraine reached across the table and took my hands in hers and I didn’t pull away.

“I see you are wearing a wedding ring again. It looks good on you.”

I shrugged. “Michael is trying to do the right thing even though I don’t think he wants to. I can’t live with that, knowing he’s staying with me out of some sense of obligation.”

“That simply isn’t true,” Lorraine said.

I hunched forward, pressing my forehead against the kitchen table, my shoulders shaking as the tears came. “I’m no one, Lorraine. I’m nothing. I don’t know how to be in a marriage like this.”

Lorraine stood and came around the table, sat down on the chair next to me. “Maybe you don’t know who just yet but you are someone. Stop saying you aren’t. And you don’t need to know how to be in a marriage. Hell, I’ve been with Glen for forty-five years and I don’t know how to be married to him from one day to the next.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and sat up, rubbing my face. “Glen never talks. That would drive me crazy. Michael never shuts up. At first I wasn’t sure about all that talking but it grew on me.”

“Listen here. The night after he met you, that fool son of mine called Glen and me at midnight. It nearly gave me a heart attack, the phone ringing so late like that. He talked a mile a minute, said he met the most amazing woman. I knew right then he was far gone. He’s not doing the right thing because it’s the right thing. He’s doing the right thing because it’s what he wants to do. The real question is, will you let him?”

I looked at Lorraine, hiccupping a bit. “He really called you the day we met? I wasn’t very nice to him.”

Lorraine laughed. “He told us that too.”

I looked out the window again. The moon was high and bright. I traced a constellation against the glass pane. “I will never forget how you’ve opened up your home to me.”

“Oh hush,” Lorraine groused. “Just hush.”

We talked quietly until we both began to yawn and then we walked up the creaky stairs to the men we didn’t know how to be married to.

Michael was sitting up in bed, staring at his phone. He looked up. “I thought you had run away again until I heard you and my mom talking.”

I shook my head and climbed onto the bed, straddling his lap. He looked at me, arching an eyebrow. I ran my hands along his shoulders, down his arms, tucked his arms behind his back.

“Don’t touch me,” I whispered.

Michael nodded.

I kissed his chin and drew my lips along the line of his jaw. “Please don’t touch me,” I whispered again.

“You’re safe with me,” he said. “I will not touch you.”

“I need to tell you what happened before you decide if you will stay. Do you want to know?”

“I do,” Michael whispered.

I ran my fingers through his hair, trying to memorize each strand. I kissed him, reminded my mouth of his taste. At first our lips were soft together and then they weren’t and I wanted to fall into him as much as I wanted to pull away. I needed Michael to know I still belonged to him and only him, no one else, not ever.

I pressed my chest against his, my cheek against his neck, my lips barely brushing his ear. There were many truths to share. Softly, softly, I told Michael the best truth I could, the one we could both live with so he could someday be freed of whatever he imagined about those thirteen days, so I might someday be freed of the truest truth.

I
spent nearly six months with Lorraine and Glen, who watched over me the way my own parents should have watched over me. Michael visited when he could. Mona sometimes came with him and chattered endlessly about how quaint it was in the country, about Carlito and what he was up to, about all the things we would do when I returned to Miami. She and Lorraine got along famously. Mona never tried to make me talk about what happened. She did not push. She was just there. Sometimes, Michael left Christophe with me; sometimes, he didn’t—it depended on if I was closer to dead or alive. I spent a lot of time alone, locked inside myself, while the people who loved me most tried to reach me.

I did only one interview, for an evening news program, with a journalist I hoped would not ask me stupid questions. She mostly didn’t. There were no other interviews, no books, though someone made an unauthorized movie that airs regularly on a cable network. People love a real tragedy when they think it cannot happen to them. At the end of the movie, in white block letters, the epilogue reads, “Mireille Jameson practices law and lives in Miami, Florida, with her husband and son.” I have seen the movie more times than anyone knows. It comforts me to imagine my kidnapping had been that neatly endured and resolved.

Five years later, I had seen several therapists. Some sent me to psychiatrists who tried to fix me with complex cocktails of drugs with very long names I cannot pronounce, drugs that made me listless and tired, always so tired, unable to think or work or be a wife or mother. Others told me I simply needed to talk, as if all it would take was the recitation of my horrors for my anger and my grief and my terror to disappear. Only one therapist told me the truth. She sat in one of those expensive, uncomfortable chairs you see in modern design magazines. She set her leather-bound notebook on her desk and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “I am going to come clean with you, Mireille. You will get better but you will never be okay, not in the way you once were. There is no being okay after what you’ve been through.”

That truth freed me. I said, “Thank you,” and I meant it. I was lighter and cleaner and calm. I still see her once a week, sometimes twice. Sometimes Michael and I go together. I never say much but I show up.

We tried, unsuccessfully, to have another child. We spent a shocking amount of money and saw specialists across two continents but carrying a child was something my body was no longer capable of. No amount of reconstructive surgery or time or money or hope would fix what was damaged. The sorrows piled themselves silently around us, nearly choking us, choking me. But. We eventually found a surrogate to carry our baby, a little girl. She is a beautiful creature with wide eyes and scrawny, bowed legs. Lorraine says, with so much pride, that our daughter is
advanced
even though she’s not yet two. We named the baby Emma Lorraine and like Christophe, I rarely let her out of my sight but not in a way that would make her helpless or weak. Girl children are not safe in a world where there are men. They need to learn to be strong.

There was an earthquake. Haiti split open and all that remained were gray piles of rubble and hundreds of thousands of people with nothing to hold them to the world, living in tents hungry, hungering and somehow, still faithful, holding their hands to the sky, praising God for their salvation. It was a new sorrow, a fresh break in an already broken place. The tents are still there, providing no shelter. Women are in even more danger. There is no water. There is no hope. My parents survived and for that I was grateful, in spite of myself. My father’s buildings stood strong while the rest of the country fell. I imagine he is proud of his work, these standing monuments of his resolve.

In the weeks after, Michael gently suggested we go to Port-au-Prince even though that was the last place either of us wanted to be. There were so many funerals. So much mourning was demanded of us all. I could not return to the motherland, land of my mother and my mother’s mother. I tried. We bought tickets and he packed our suitcases and we went to the airport but as we stood in the frantic, mournful throng at the ticket counter, the familiar shaking returned. I could smell my kidnappers and feel how they used me over and over. The memories in my body were too fresh. I wanted to go, to mourn, to help in some small way, to see if enough time had passed that I might enjoy that native sun on my skin, but I could not. My body would not let me. We sent money instead and it was then I felt like a true American.

My sister finally convinced me to return to Port-au-Prince. “At least once,” she said. “You need to see our father. He has changed. He always asks for you. He wants to make amends.”

I did not believe Mona. A man who would sacrifice a daughter was not a man capable of change. I agreed to return to the place where I died because my sister had done so much for me, for my family, when we needed her most. She was a mother to my son when I could not be and a friend to my husband when I could not be and my best friend, always. At first, Michael objected, reminded me of the last time we tried but he relented after my therapist assured him
I could handle it
. The night before we left I reminded him too. I said, “There’s nothing I cannot survive,” and he said, “That’s what terrifies me.”

We bought our tickets, packed a small bag, and left the children with Mona and Carlito after a great deal of kissing their little faces and promising we would be back in two or three days. I hate to travel without them but I hated the thought of them with us, in a lawless place, even more.

As we descended into the capital I took two Valium so I could hold myself together, so I could breathe, so I could feel a little less. Michael shifted uncomfortably, his leg shaking wildly. I offered him a Valium and grabbed his thigh to calm him down. I said, “I’m not going to fall apart.” He covered my hand with his. While the plane taxied, I stared out the window at the tarmac, the ever-present waves of heat rolling across the concrete. I felt nothing and I felt everything. I remembered the Haiti of my childhood, the complex but unadulterated joy of feeling like I had a second place to call home. I remembered the country Haiti became for me, the sorrow.

“If I am cursed enough to be kidnapped again, don’t bother trying to save me.” I feigned a laugh. We both knew I wasn’t joking.

“Oh baby,” is all Michael said.

The airport looked the same. The city looked the same. The city looked completely different. I saw no part of myself in the country I once called home. Everywhere, even two years after the earthquake, there was rubble, and broken buildings, bent at their knees, yearning for mercy. The presidential palace had collapsed in on itself—a fallen man, unable to rise. We drove past a tent city, teeming with people walking down the long corridors between tents, sitting in front of their canvas homes, staring at the cars driving by. Heat rose through my neck as I looked away. Still, I was shamed by how little I truly understood or could ever understand about this country.

I closed my eyes and said, “I really do not want to be here.” I said, “Michael, please, please don’t let anything happen to me,” and he said, “I swear to you, I won’t.” I needed to believe him to keep breathing.

I was nauseous as we drove up to my parents’ house, the familiar rolling sensation in my stomach making me dizzy. Even with the air-conditioning blasting, our bodies were practically sticking to the leather seats. Michael’s face was red as it always is when he gets too hot. The walls surrounding their home were higher, the tops of those walls covered in barbed wire and thick shards of broken glass that glinted in the sun. I donned my sunglasses. We waited while the gates opened. The nausea grew stronger. My chest tightened. Two cars sped past us. We waited.

Michael tried to hold my hand but I shook my head. He nodded and looked straight ahead. “This goddamned place.”

Finally the gates opened and we lurched forward and slowly up the steep hill. My chest loosened.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said calmly as the car stopped at the top of the driveway. My parents stood on the front steps. They leaned into each other. They were smaller, older, but still, together they painted a distinguished portrait. I opened my door and steadied myself as I stepped onto the pavement. A blanket of heat wrapped around me. The air was heavy with salt. Sweat trickled along my spine. I walked to the edge of the driveway and leaned against a tall palm tree with a thick trunk, breathed deeply, and then I hunched over and vomited.

Michael stood behind and held my hair. I was grateful. In the after, we were different people but we still worked; we were good together, lock and key.