Breath, Eyes, Memory (15 page)

Chapter 29

B
reakfast was plentiful: all the things that made me feel most guilty when I ate them—bacon and eggs and extremely sweet café au lait.

"I thought you would be hungry" she said, "on the road to recovery. How can you resist all this food?"

"It's not as simple as that."

I had a piece of toast while my mother gave my daughter her formula. She looked like she hadn't slept much. The eggplant shade came back to her skin, as it always did before she applied her skin bleaching creams.

"You didn't look very happy when you came home last night," I said.

"Someone like me, you see me happy, you know I'm

pretending," she said.

"Is something wrong?"

"Brace yourself. I know you are not going to believe what I have to tell you. Sophie, your mother is pregnant."

"Pregnant?" I stuttered.

"Marc and I, we have—"

"You sleep together?"

She nodded, looking ashamed.

"How far along are you?" I asked.

"A month or so."

"Are you going to marry him?"

"Jesus Marie Joseph. Am I going to do what?"

"Doesn't he want to marry you?"

"Of course he wants to marry me, but look at me. I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts. I don't know when this cancer will come back. I am not an ideal mother."

Brigitte wrapped her arms around my mother's neck as my mother burped her.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"That's what I don't know."

"What does Marc want?"

"It's my decision. Supremely, it's mine. I am very scared. I don't know. The nightmares, they're coming back."

"In Dame Marie, it didn't seem like you slept at all."

"Whenever I'm there, I feel like I sleep with ghosts. The first night I was there, I woke up pounding at my stomach."

"What are you going to do about the baby?"

"I don't know."

"You can marry Marc and have the baby."

"And repeat my great miracle of being a super mother with you? Some things one should not repeat."

"Think of it as a second chance."

"I've had the second chance of my life by being spared death from this cancer. I can't ask too much."

"Do you love Marc?"

"I think I love him. Since you left, he stays with me at night and wakes me up when I have the nightmares."

"You still won't go for help?"

"I know I should get help, but I am afraid. I am afraid it will become even more real if I see a psychiatrist and he starts telling me to face it. God help me, what if they want to hypnotize me and take me back to that day? I'll kill myself. Marc, he saves my life every night, but I am afraid he gave me this baby that's going to take that life away."

"You can't say that."

"The nightmares. I thought they would fade with age, but no, it's like getting raped every night. I can't keep this baby."

"It must have been much harder then but you kept me."

"When I was pregnant with you, Manman made me drink all kinds of herbs, vervain, quinine, and verbena, baby poisons. I tried beating my stomach with wooden spoons. I tried to destroy you, but you wouldn't go away."

She reached over and handed Brigitte back to me.

"When I was carrying you, you were brave," she said. "You wanted to live. You wanted to taste salt, as my mother would say. You were going to kill me before I killed you."

- "What are you going to do about this one?"

"She's a fighter too. She's already fighting me."

"Do you know that it's a girl?"

"I don't know. I never want to know. I think it's a girl because you ended up being a girl. I can't go through night after night of the next nine months living these nightmares that same way again."

"Are you going to take it out?"

She crossed herself.

"Jesus Marie Joseph. Every time I even think of that, the nightmares get worse. It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech. Last night after I talked to Marc about letting it go, I felt the skin getting tight on my belly and for a whole minute I couldn't breathe. I had to lie down and say I had changed my mind before I could breathe normally."

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"I know, these things, they sound crazy to me too, but maybe that's what it wants, to drive me crazy."

"You should talk to someone. Someone other than Marc, someone outside the whole situation."

"I am trying to keep one step ahead of a mental hospital. They would probably put me away thinking that I might hurt both myself and this child."

"When you and Marc are together, do you have the nightmares then?"

"I pretend; it is like eating grapefruit. I was tired of being alone. If that's what I had to do to have someone wake me up at night, I would do it. But never in my life did I think I could get pregnant."

"You didn't use birth control?"

She laughed through her tears.

"I would have never imagined we could be having this conversation. Maybe if I spend more time with you, I will want this baby. I would want this child if the nightmares weren't so bad. I can't take them. One morning, I will wake up dead."

"Don't say that."

"You will leave today," she said.

"I can stay longer if you need me."

"Your husband, I know he will be anxious to see you."

"I can ask him to drive down and he will stay with us for a couple of days."

"Non non. I'll deal with this. Marc will come and stay here with me."

"Why don't you just marry him?"

"Because you don't marry someone to escape something that's inside your head. One night, I woke up and found myself choking Marc. This is before I knew I was pregnant. One day he'll get tired of it and leave me."

"What about the baby?"

"You've asked the same question a million ways; you have a camaraderie with this child. I'll have it. That's what you want to hear."

"At least this child will know its father."

"I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next."

She lent me her new car for the trip to Providence, a guarantee that I would come back to visit her. She tugged at Brigitte's hat and kissed her forehead as I strapped Brigitte into the back seat.

"You forgive me, don't you?" she asked.

I leaned over and kissed her stomach.

"It will be a beautiful baby," I said.

"Don't call it a baby."

I kept seeing her face as I drove into the New England landscape. I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.

After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother's anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had "caught" from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn't both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl.

I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot, perhaps a bit more than other children. The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.

Chapter 30

I
pulled into the driveway of our house shortly after noon. Joseph nearly fell down the steps as he rushed towards the car. I screeched to a halt, a few inches shy of crashing into him.

He tapped on the back window, trying to get Brigitte's attention. She looked a bit disoriented when he raised her out of the seat.

"And the child's mother, does she get a hug?"

He pressed his lips down on mine.

"Bienvenue," he said, "Welcome back."

He ran up the steps with Brigitte, leaving me to carry my own bag.

The sun shining through the window colored our wooden floors the hue of Haitian dirt. Joseph threw Brigitte up in the air, both of them laughing as he caught her.

"Tell Daddy all about Haiti," he said.

Brigitte pursed her wet lips as though she wanted to.

"Are you glad to see Daddy?" He propped her up on the sofa.

"Are you glad to see her mommy?" I asked, sitting next to him.

"It's nice to see you, but I want to kill you."

His free hand traveled up and down my blouse.

"Did you miss me?" I asked.

"Sometimes."

The bedroom was messy. There were sheets piled on top of one another and pillows thrown randomly about. I held the sheets up to my face and sniffed them for another woman's scent. The mattress smelled like his socks.

"You see I need you to put some order in my life," he said.

"You need a maid," I said.

He twirled the duck mobile on the baby's crib, which we kept next to our bed.

"How was your trip?" he asked.

"My grandmother was preparing her funeral," I said. "It's a thing at home. Death is journey. My grandmother thinks she's at the end of hers."

"You called it home?" he said. "Haiti."

"What else would I call it?

"You have never called it that since we've been together. Home has always been your mother's house, that you could never go back to."

I searched through the pile of dishes in the kitchen sink, trying to find a clean glass for a drink of water. In the nursery were the large drums he sometimes used in performance.

"I was calling the ancestral spirits, asking them to make you come back to me," he said.

"Your prayers were answered."

I went to the living room and crashed on the sofa. It suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by my own life, my own four walls, my own husband and child. Here I was Sophie—mâitresse de la maison. Not a guest or visiting daughter, but the mother and sometimes, more painfully, the wife.

"We'll deal with this, won't we?" asked Joseph, pushing his tongue in my left ear. "I need to know that we can get through all this."

In the living room was a fuzzy picture of a very fat me lying naked with a newborn on my stomach. Joseph had been too excited to focus when we brought the baby home that first night. All I kept thinking was, Thank God it was a Caesarean section. The tearing from a natural birth would have totally destroyed me.

I reached over and tapped Brigitte's nose.

"I need to know. Did you leave on impulse or had you been planning to go for a long time?" he asked.

"We weren't connecting physically."

"Did you find an aphrodisiac?"

"I don't need an aphrodisiac. I need a little more understanding."

"I do understand. You are usually reluctant to start, but after a while you give in. You seem to enjoy it."

I called Brigitte's pediatrician to make an appointment. I gave Brigitte her bath, and laid her down while Joseph tapped a few keys on his saxophone.

I called my mother, but she did not pick up the phone. Her answering machine did not pick up either. I changed into a sweatsuit to go to bed. Joseph came to bed in a thick terry-cloth robe.

"If our skins touch," he said, "I won't be able to resist you."

We held each other while trying to make out the plot of an old black-and-white movie. It was about lovers, a young girl and her painting instructor.

At midnight, I called my mother.

She sounded anxious when she answered.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Marc is here with me," she said.

She told me she loved me and hung up the phone.

Joseph rocked me in his arms while we listened to the cooing sounds Brigitte made in her sleep.

"My mother is pregnant," I said.

"You will finally have a sibling, a kindred spirit."

It felt better when I thought of it that way.

"Brigitte will be older than her aunt," he said. "Isn't that nice?"

Our pediatrician, Karen, was happy to see Brigitte.

She was an middle-aged Indian woman who had sewn me up in the emergency room at the Providence hospital and had subsequendy seen me through my pregnancy.

"Looks like you've lost weight," she said.

I held Brigitte's feet while she examined her.

I nearly dropped to my knees with gratitude when she told me that Brigitte was okay.

"We'll follow the regular schedule for checkups," she said, filling out her chart.

"Only a mountain can crush a Haitian woman," I said.

"In that case, your daughter has proven herself a real Haitian woman," Karen said.

"Tell me how it was," she asked as I dressed Brigitte after the physical. "You were going to the provinces, weren't you? There are warnings against all kinds of things in places like that."

"It is somewhat dry where I went. There are not a lot of swamps for malaria or any of those things you warned me about. I was careful about the baby's water. We always boiled it for a long time."

"She looks good so far, but keep an eye on her and call me if anything unusual happens. If you go to Haiti again anytime soon, leave your angel behind. I am not sure there's enough Haitian in her to survive another mountain."

I called Joseph from the hospital to tell him that everything was all right. When Brigitte and I came home, there was a large dinner waiting for us. Fried chicken, glazed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Everything came frozen out of a box, but still managed to retain some flavor.

We decided to start giving Brigitte a few more adventurous solids. I pureed some sweet potatoes and boiled some carrots and fed her small spoonfuls. I ate everything on my plate, forcing myself to resist the urge to purge my body.

After dinner, I called my mother.

"When are you going to come and have dinner with Marc and me?"

"We'll come as soon as we can," I said.

"How's the baby?"

"Good," I said, "How's yours?"

"Don't call it that," she said. "I haven't decided if I will follow through. It's fighting me though. More and more of a fighter every day."

"Is Marc there?"

"Yes, but he can sleep and I can't. I am watching television. I don't know. It's really hard. You know what happens now. I look at every man and I see him."

"Marc?"

"Non non," she whispered. "Him. Le rioleur, the rapist. I see him everywhere."

"Have you told Marc?"

"He thinks my body is in shock from getting pregnant after all the cancer treatment."

"You should tell someone."

"You cannot report a ghost to the police."

Joseph's hands were creeping up my arm and going through the top of my nightgown.

"I tried to get rid of it," she said, "Today. But they wanted me to think about it for twenty-four hours. When I thought of taking it out, it got more horrifying. That's when I began seeing him. Over and over. That man who raped me."

"We'll come and visit you this weekend," I said.

"I want Joseph to meet Marc."

I felt his other hand creeping up my thighs, his hair smelling like aftershave as his face approached mine.

"Manman, I have to go," I said. "We'll visit with you on the weekend. Maybe Saturday."

"Saturday will be a wonderful day then," she said.

He reached over and pulled my body towards his. I closed my eyes and thought of the
Marassa,
the doubling. I was lying there on that bed and my clothes were being peeled off my body, but really I was somewhere else. Finally, as an adult, I had a chance to console my mother again. I was lying in bed with my mother. I was holding her and fighting off that man, keeping those images out of her head. I was telling her that it was all right. That it was not a demon in her stomach, that it was a child, like I was once a child in her body. I was telling her that I would never let anyone put her away in a mental hospital, that I would take care of her. I would visit her every night in my doubling and, from my place as a shadow on the wall, I would look after her and wake her up as soon as the nightmares started, just like I did when I was home.

I kept thinking of my mother, who now wanted to be my friend. Finally I had her approval. I was okay. I was safe. We were both safe. The past was gone. Even though she had forced it on me, of her sudden will, we were now even more than friends. We were twins, in spirit. Marassas.

"Can we visit my mother this weekend?" I asked Joseph.

"Whatever you want." He was panting.

"You were very good," he said.

"I kept my eyes closed so the tears wouldn't slip out."

I waited for him to fall asleep, then went to the kitchen. I ate every scrap of the dinner leftovers, then went to the bathroom, locked the door, and purged all the food out of my body.