Lionel Repons. Won 909,888 votes. Pierre Boucher. Won 23,524 votes.
Granma Nisette’s radio man calls them, the presidential election results for the département Nord, with such conviction. His voice sticks my family to these too-hard chairs around the dining table in a mute pact of queasy hope. I’m afraid he will keep calling the worst names first.
But I stay, try to stay tuned. Nisette is still sitting with us. While she attends to his voice, she circles “Niko” and “Du” throughout her word puzzle book with her pencil stub. I am plucking glass shards from her soles. Layers of aged skin web the bottoms of Nisette’s feet thick enough that the shards draw neither blood nor shivers of tears from her. They draw nothing more worrisome than the flutter of a page, as though the conviction of her radio man promises at least one real goodness: nothing else will come for her this night.
“You don’t feel them, Granma?” I ask her as her radio man takes a breath.
“Feel who?”
“No, the glass. Here.” Tilting her right foot, I tap a slim shard embedded near her arch. My mother told me to use something more run-down than her good tweezers, these being meant for her face. I can care better than my mother. I force my fingers.
“Aah. These.” Nisette flaps her weathered hand around my head. “They bite me a little. Not a lot.” She aims her words into her book’s cracked spine. She has quieted this week as election day neared, bearing her hankering for an able leader.
Only my father, recordkeeper, mimics her hushed faith. His pencil’s knife-scratch syncs in and out with hers, as her radio man pushes figures at the right pace for my father to chart everything—the polling departments, the names of these mostly repeat candidates, the weighted numbers they drew. Nisette’s and my father’s handwriting is minuscule, gained from years of strong (to use Nisette’s word) Haitian schooling, a schooling that skips no generations. And I don’t know how neither needs to squint. I don’t know whether yesterday’s steady electric flow into today softened or hardened us all with too much hope for the results. Too often, I tend to think hardness best keeps.
Beside Nisette, Daniel jiggles the osselets in his palm. He mimes throwing one at my nose.
“When you start having trouble, let me know,” he says, to rattle me. He knows I would never again. This plucking is divine. It is my amends. It calls me back to Grampa Niko’s touch long ago, as he taught me and Daniel to pick the tiny stones out of parboiled rice prior to cooking. I see again Niko and Nisette talking throughout his lesson like friends. Though they never touched each other in front of us, Nisette’s face held this sweet uncertainty each time she met his voice, a young girl again in her first flirtation, wanting to give the best response and wanting to savor his longer. They might never have felt old to each other; all the while Niko and I, in disparate spirits, jeered at Daniel’s overeager fingers for losing the stones to the grains again and again. I have not always been a caregiver, which Daniel has spied out the way older siblings do, yet he knows he could never clasp each shard like me, not without losing his grip or sinking the shard deeper into Nisette’s flesh. We have been trying to care for Nisette since an earthquake last year swallowed, to use Nisette’s word, Niko.
I prick Daniel’s leg with a shard to warn him off. He kicks my fist, but I hold onto the shard.
The more shards I pluck, the more I believe our world needs no more than rectangles and triangles and a spark to build what needs to be built again.To refill gaps in our sister neighborhoods where homes once stood, to stack cinder block on mortar, to marrow every void. With the right leader, restoration would not demand much of us. During the day, the mere thought of such a mission wears us ragged like fleeced bark. We grow useless, hopeless, furious.
And I wonder about that grief that freezes us and isolates Nisette. One by one, I drop each shard onto a napkin beside her heel until the plucking is finished. I run for Vaseline and lwil maskriti and socks. When I return, my father is twitching the volume button as though another loud conversation had struck the room in my absence and he means to discourage more. I rub the potent combination of the oils on Nisette’s soles, into the dry slashes. She points at the napkin. “Gade,” she says to me or her book or herself, “they were left here, and they almost got me again.” Then she smiles her beauty into my cheeks. This is what Nisette feels like. Like I hold her. Like I can. I pull the socks over her feet. “Mèsi, pitit mwen,” she says.
I grant that the task would feel less chore-like and infantilizing without her acknowledgment. Still, I still feed her small, proud flame. I’ve shown up Daniel and eased Nisette’s hurt. By the time the sunlight hauls up from the ground, the oils will have smoothed the slashes out of her soles as though nothing had hunted them to wound—not the lamp, not her old house in Carrefour Feuilles, not the earth.
I sit back on my heels to watch her soles mend. Then I can’t see them at all.
……
“Woy. They took the light.” I hear my father breathe out in a crushed way. “Just when I was enjoying it.”
“They were always going to take it,” Uncle Benito murmurs. He and his new wife are in La Plaine for two days to convince Nisette to live in New York with them. Whatever he says, though he confirms my suspicions, the blackouts follow no schedule or rhythm here. There’s no using them to gauge this election tide, which seems to me to hold too many variables for our living. “They are no use for anything,” Benito said the day before, when we picked him and Gabby up from the airport, “but as good reasons for my mother to leave Haiti.”
I am the first one up. Outside, the blackout threads our night. It molds La Plaine from bare geometry into an unholy dark. I can’t trace our mountains. But I reach our generator, the hulking engine set on cement blocks. I feel for her key and twist it, and the generator grumbles, sputters her heart out, stills. She ran out of gas before this recent wave of kouran. No one remembered to find more.
I blink fast, smell salt and smoke. If this is living, it does make sense for Nisette to go where her spirit can thrive. I know no chants to stay her, but I can’t lose her. I rev the generator over and over.
……
Inside, the napkin of shards has disappeared.
“Who moved my work?” I ask.
My mother hushes me. “Calm down, Kemlie. It’s me who told Daniel to move them.”
I drop into the chair beside Nisette. Across the table, Daniel blows his nose with what I’m sure is the same dangerous napkin. Our last oil lamp has been lit and centered, and the light is wan. The kerosene in the glass font sits low, lower than in the oil lamp that had slipped out of Nisette’s hands that afternoon as she was bearing it from the bathroom to the kitchen to refill. The shards glinted against the mosaic floor like morning dew on grass as I swept them into a corner and swept again (glass is never cleared in one sweep, Niko taught us). How Nisette stepped on them while ignoring my mother’s requests for her to stop: stop walking barefoot, stop carrying heavy things, let us know when to carry them for her. She is almost a hundred, Nisette. Fixed in her ways. She repeated only “Padon” through pursed lips, as though she knew my mother insisted more out of duty than desire. As though my mother, and we by proxy, had failed her.
“We’ll take care of you,” Benito broke in with his cannon voice. He gestured at us timoun to help her, as Haitians do to timoun, and Daniel, choosing violence, shoved me into a wall to jam my fingers so he could guide Nisette around the unswept shards like he was the pillar of fire. Benito went to the mache in a spirit he would name generosity, what my mother calls his pride, to buy Café du Monde, Nisette’s substitute for cremas, what she now tries to sip early evenings. On his return, he spilled the coffee grounds—Nisette’s son for sure—as he struggled to slide open our dented gate, banging on the wrought iron, his clangors startling Nisette’s heart afresh. I ran to the gate, trailed back far behind Benito, and returned to catch the tail end of a final outburst from my mother. That she had just bought that lamp and can’t bear the messes Nisette makes, the trauma Nisette always calls up. That my mother may as well be talking to herself. “If you won’t listen to us, you might as well go live with Benito and leave us in peace,” my mother was saying. A year ago, she would not have spoken that way to anyone without fear folding her like the mimosa leaf, with one slim touch. But she had formed the same suspicion as me, that Nisette was protesting the ground that possessed Niko, protesting the house which now claimed her. Nisette settled onto a dining room chair that Daniel pulled out for her, and we waited for her eyes to open. My mother told me to find Nisette’s sandals, and when I returned to the dining room and bent down, I noticed her soles, the sharp remnants and ash, and I felt nothing hotter in my mind than the thought of relieving her, more so tonight than I ever had.
No doing homework in this thin flame, so I try to join Daniel in his game of osselets, but he punches at my hands.
The umber odor of the spilled coffee prowls the dining room, mixing with the spilled kerosene, unsettling us anew. I almost can’t breathe. My father hovers his hand near the antenna without touching it, as though to power it with his body heat. Beside him, my mother has scooted close and is checking his chart. Benito sits across from her, his arm circling Gabby’s waist as she sits on his lap and crunches the ice she fished out of his glass of gold liquid. I make it my job to keep everyone in my eye. What hurts is, I have said goodbye to enough relatives and neighbors and friends who have died or moved willingly or were sent to other countries, only some of whom could hear me.
The radio announces the results for Ouest, and my mother snaps her fingers down the table to silence even the little clatters of the osselets. There are so many candidates and so many voters who gassed them up. These feinters, alleged fortune-tellers, lived in silence all last year while the quake forced out the earth’s bristling heart. I want to mock them for bothering to run.
“Mezanmi,” Benito says, “there is no end of them in sight.”
My mother reminds him that traveling gangs, much like traveling circuses but more inhumane, bullied votes out of our people while stuffing the ballot boxes themselves, then goes, “Shhht,” though she was talking the loudest.
“Janus-Depuis Latortue. Won 517,490 votes,” the radio man says. A new name for the first time tonight. Benito slaps the table.
“I don’t know him, but I ask the Lord on this turtle’s behalf to forgive his ancestors for that name,” Benito says. Daniel loses it. He clutches his stomach, stomps the bare heels of his feet on the mosaic, and knocks his boulder of a textbook to the floor with a boom that shakes the house. Three osselets tumble after it. The lamp chimney trembles on its collar. Nisette drops her word puzzle book.
Now she looks ready to cry. Her face emits oil as though to protect her from such an act. Her body becomes a pendulum. She starts rocking back and forth in her seat and stretching down. She pushes any cry down into her chest.
“SHHHT,” my mother goes, freezing us all. Daniel breaks, bounds forward for Nisette’s book before I can grab it, places the book on her lap. To keep her in the present with us, he slides his palm along the back of her puffed neck, where her trauma has hunkered down, jelled into a knot.
……
Unlike her house, our house in La Plaine felt little more than a tremble. The TVs tumbled off their stands. Vases splashed the tiles. The gate grew dents. Nisette wobbled into our still-standing house like a conqueror, rolling a walker, surrounded by her posse of survivors, old ladies with hair black-dyed or white and spilled with blue who had followed my father from where he’d collected Nisette in Carrefour Feuilles so they could see her off proper. Who chattered for some time, left, returned the next day, the following day, and each day, as often as three times per day for months, to this day, to hear Nisette’s earthquake story. Unlike their stories, hers evokes a time unseamed so that the terror of that day lasts to this one. A photo of her even made it into People magazine, though no one recalls seeing a photographer outside her house. “That slick man,” Nisette named him. She hated the photo for showing her with her dress half-open in the front and hiked to the tops of her thighs. “Look how he caught me.” She would continue in that stern way after she unfolded the page-length photo from her word puzzle book and passed it around to her listeners. She dropped weight quickly, not from shedding burdens, but as though through each showing and telling she dipped more into herself.
She kept pointing out things to us. “Gade, they make mistakes, too,” she assured my parents when her doctors told her that she should consider leaving Haiti. Hospitals in the States are more equipped, better stocked, they said. You have a son in New York? The doctors gloried in him. What fortune. Nisette would not hear them. “Doctors in New York are just as human as doctors here,” she said. “They lie and shit like everyone else.”
“Gade nou la,” she would tell me and Daniel, pointing at a framed photo she had managed to save from the rubble, of her and fifteen other women graduating from the Lycée Marie Jeanne in the forties, taken by her then fiancé Niko decades before all but Nisette died in the quake. “You looked so young,” Daniel said once, and I added that Nisette looked exactly the same now as then, her beauty unrelenting, and later Daniel and I argued over which of us in that moment Nisette had valued more, the two of us hallowing her as the beloved who was expected to lose her life and, in a surprising twist, did not.
“Gade—” at the mess of clothes around us, the sheafs of papers that cluttered our living room floor, the smelly dishes. “You should be ashamed to keep such a mess. I have seen real messes. This is one you can fix.” Then, in a reversal, she would scoff. “This mess is nothing. If you saw the streets that day!” She would add: “Niko would have nothing disordered.”
She would prop open the front door of the gate with her walker and talk about the passing people to herself and anyone around her. “Gade tout moun,” she would say as tears wedged her voice closer to the throat, into a sound more guttural, the tears hiding from her. “So many people lying in the rocks. People with beautiful hair and beautiful outfits, who had just come from work. Look at them across the street. They look like they’re on their way to a party. Ou jwenn yon fét?” she would shout to the pedestrians who moved as though still dazed, their faces numb with unease as they looked upon this old woman lodged in a multistoried strangeness.
“I have him forever in my mind,” she’d add. “When I think of him, I want to cry. I never cry at anything, not even when I birthed my children. Crying never does anything for me. Only, Niko was the most beautiful. You remember your Granpa.”
Sometimes I let Daniel reassure her, which, given his showmanship, he is quick to do. Sometimes I tell her I do remember, though I don’t want to. She will point out tragedies that no one wants to keep remembering—much less us, her family, who too have seen and suffered what she suffered—Nisette pointing them out as if we had never been in the quake. In that way, her presence can bruise us. I have forgotten parts of my own earthquake story. For instance, that at the time of the earthquake I was extremely concerned about the state of my iPod, which had fallen to the floor when our car began to buck and cracked its screen, until Daniel brought it up tonight while we were dining on soup joumou. I believe he did so to remind everyone that my initial concern was not for my family.
……
I feel my mother’s energy before her shoulder nudges mine. “Go get some water for your Granma.”
Nisette says, “I would much prefer coffee.”
“Benito just dropped it outside, Manman. You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember. I was thinking you had a little left over somewhere. Maybe you hid it for yourself.”
Benito clears his throat, then says, “Manman, let Gabby make some te jenjanm for you. She’s been practicing.” Gabby lightly hits Benito’s hand resting on her stomach, and he kisses her shoulder.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Nisette replies. “Kemlie is up.” And she catches my sleeve. “Kemlie, my little one, go brew some for me.”
This is more work than I would offer to do, as I can never get it right. I watch Gabby twist to whisper in Benito’s ear. He chuckles and nods. I know Daniel, with his head start, would love to make me look bad. “OK, Granma.”
Nisette wiggles my sleeve like a flag. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Nothing is too much trouble.” My mother’s words end in a sigh. “I hate it when you speak like that when I already apologized.”
“I say what I see. Kemlie, don’t leave the cinnamon in too long. Ah, what am I saying?” She strokes my arm. “Your Granpa taught you well.”
“Go on,” my father tells me. He is sitting at the head of the table like a calm volcano. He tilts the radio toward him to circumvent our static. “I lost it. What did he say? Did you catch it, cheri?”
“Oh, twenty thousand and five, around there,” my mother replies. “Write it quick before the next name is called. Pay attention.”
“You’re wasting paper,” Benito tells him, like my father doesn’t know for himself. “You’re wasting heart, for that matter. It’s no secret who will win now.”
My father fiddles with the antenna until the crackling clears. I feel tired, as I always do when someone tells me to do more than I anticipated. But I want Nisette to know she’s cared for here. I don’t ever want her to feel like I don’t care. I am always fighting that. As I open the cabinet for the small pot, Niko’s voice flows through my ears. Fill it halfway with water. Wash the grit out of the ginger roots. As I peel, I hear the rattle of our osselets on the tabletop again. Some are new, retrieved from the soup joumou. Benito nearly cracked his tooth on a huge one when he chomped down on the goat thinking it was all meat, all deboned like in the States. He spat it into his napkin; Daniel snatched it up before I could, cleaned it with lime first, then soap, and now holds it as his stable piece—the bone he throws straight into the air while he turns the grounded osselets onto one of four sides: do, kre, i, s. Each time you sit to eat, look for bones for your collection, Niko taught us. I chop the ginger roots into cubes and catch glimpses of Niko as Daniel tosses the huge osselet.
With a match, I carefully light the stove, but as always, the flames jump to catch me, and I flinch. Soon, little bubbles begin to form at the bottom of the pot. Gabby asks Nisette why she likes coffee so much that she would want to drink it at night. Nisette says she finds coffee keeps her just warm enough now. Since the earthquake, she doesn’t want to feel too soothed, like she would feel after drinking cremas.
“Do you know cremas?” she asks Gabby, who is Dutch. Blond, statuesque, earnest. Who smiles a lot.
“Yes, but I can’t, you know, since I’m pregnant,” Gabby replies.
“Gade,” Nisette says, “did Benito tell you about the daughter I lost to the earthquake? She was supposed to come drink cremas with your grandfather and me that day. She did not come on time.” She is speaking of her friend. Like Jesus, Nisette claims kin with anyone who helps her. Her radio man is back, sounding gaudy, yet Nisette continues without hearing him or Gabby’s reply.
Fill the pot with the ginger cubes, a cinnamon stick, star anise. Watch the smells break upon one another. Let them mix. Hold your breath, ti demwazèl. Once everything reduces, I pour myself a cup and find it’s too strong, but I drink it all to still myself. I was left with things that still shake inside. “She was called Du,” Nisette is telling Gabby. “Hardheaded as her name. Du was big-headed too, and thin everywhere else, this frail thread of a girl no one could catch. But she was more needle than thread, sharp and quick to disappear into another. She looked so dusty that day. Dustier even than me—I thought that she had also been buried. You know, the earthquake had waves that hit and hit. So maybe the first wave had buried Du in rubble, too, and she had to push up out of it, push out of the new fault lines. I say new because nobody could have known we lived on top of chasms. You know what is even more beautiful? Before that day, each time a tremor passed, the neighborhood became excited. We gossiped. We asked each other, ‘Did you feel the world shake last night?’ One person was eating, someone else was feeding grackles, another one was playing with her baby. The tremors made for light stories. When the big one fell, of course our hearts stopped. Maybe it made Du ache to return below. Not for me, but for herself. To become a seed again. It would explain why I have never seen her since.”
I turn on the faucet. Though Niko reminds me that I’m wasting water, I wash the pot before filling it again. But I think of how Nisette learned the next part of the story from the rock shifters that day. They told her only when my father had arrived to pick her up that they saw Du, but no one noticed Du, when she joined the other shifters gathered at Nisette’s two-story house, now torn down. Du bent with them to lift the rocks and dirt, to clear a space for the old woman she hoped was merely stunned beneath the rubble, to shift the larger stones over the pebbles from one side of her feet to the other. Her movements, they said, were automatic. Just a job to get through. As she worked, she herself maybe missed where the rocks landed and burst, maybe didn’t even know what to lift away and what to keep steady for balance. She did not know—nobody knew—who they would unearth. The other shifters said they were collecting bodies to bury properly and expected nothing more. At some crucial juncture in Du’s shifting, she stumbled into a cracked column that had framed Nisette’s patio and knocked it down, which made the rest of the roof begin to break apart, slowly and then all at once, and the crevice the rock shifters had been widening became clogged again with rubble. They heard a great vroosh. It got them scared again. They had to scramble back from being buried anew themselves.
Nisette fans her neck with her hand. She addresses her actual daughter. “Your father had just retiled the patio. It was practically new. You should have seen how pretty it looked.”
“Oh, Manman. I already know this,” my mother says. “Because it was yours, I know it was very chic and beautiful. And well-decorated, right? With big plants? A gorgeous, big rug?” My mother shimmies her shoulders. This is how I most love her, spoiling Nisette with compliments. I peek over my shoulder again as Nisette laughs. Her whole face crinkles close, and she rears back as though she cannot handle such good fortune. At the other end of the table, my father pulls the radio closer to his face. He may kiss it, keen for peace.
“We should get some nice plants for the house,” Gabby says. “Would you like that, Manman Nisette?”
“You can if you want. They are good for you. They help you breathe better. Let me tell you.”
……
January in Port-au-Prince is the driest month. If you drove down Route Delmas all the way to Carrefour Feuilles, you would see the shop owners directing their workers to wipe the dust off each display window. On the twelfth, the day of the earthquake, gusts of hot wind filled everyone’s nose and eyes with ash, staining sight. It felt as though water, in this world, would no longer center us. The big telecom building, one of the few buildings that was many stories high, was split longways. The green-capped boys’ college collapsed along the ravine. Bodies in dusty uniforms were trapped between parts of the cracked road.Why must I remember? The ancient homes up and down the street flattened, owners spread on their cobblestones as if in the throes of sleep—or as if they had insisted, against this awful force of nature, on crawling out of their crumbled homes to die on their roofs, in some sun. On top of their bodies, on top of their clothes, yet more clothes, Nisette realized later. Emptied clothes, loosed from laundry lines that had snapped off their poles and tumbled.
While Nisette waited, Du and the other shifters looked down at Nisette’s corrugated roof. They wanted to let things settle. To see if old Nisette would emerge from those rock piles on her own. She was the oldest woman in the neighborhood, though she did not look as ancient as all that. Then, she looked plump with distinction. She knew each shifter’s name and their parents’ names, which family lines were all Haitian and which had Cuban or Dominican or French. She knew Du’s parents. Before that day, she would report to them that she had seen Du at such a place with such a man, but Du would manage to run away to another hovel so that her parents never found her. Du was a born runner. Often, Nisette would find her at the corner store she visited for her cremas, after completing her weekly ritual of dispelling with Niko’s offer to accompany her—“You finish your sudoku while I enjoy my small autonomy,” she would order him—and she would criticize Du, which she thought was the best way to save the young people. “What are you out in the street all day for? Why do you run from parents who want you home? That’s a bad heart you carry, Du. That’s not being a good girl.” Du would reply, “Why are you still alive, old woman? Just to knock on me? Why don’t you give me some money, then, if all you’re going to do is knock on me?” “You don’t listen to me, so watch what happens,” Nisette would say after purchasing her cremas. She would hand Du the change, plus the bills in her purse—several five-hundred-gourdes bills that Du would press in a fist against her mouth like she might gulp them for safekeeping. From anyone else who gave her something, whether money, food, or varied loves, Du fled. But she was slow to leave my Granma and would walk almost by her side until they crossed the intersection to the main road, or until a man on a balcony spotted her and tried to lure her up. Du would waver away from Nisette’s side to dip into her lengthened shadow like a moth, silent and quivering, and then walk back the way she’d come, rubbing her fingers in her palm to check that the money had not vanished, not yet trusting her eyes to watch it. The last time they met, Nisette told Du to come over later for cremas.
Du was afraid. I feel her. She feared that the habits she had formed with Nisette, meeting to exchange these rough words, had not been without consequence, that maybe her disrespect had added up to the earthquake. The shifters told Nisette that they noticed Du only when they watched Nisette’s roof fall in. I can see Du crying, saying she had sealed the old woman’s fate, but also that Nisette was too old to die now, like this, sans ceremony. Du did not even think of her own parents as she stood apart from the shifters, abiding by some unbroken law of the day, the sun still present, the shifters still nailed to their shadows. Du tried to help again, but one shifter took hold of her upper arm and told her to watch her step. “OK, it’s OK,” the shifter kept saying, walking Du away until satisfied by their distance from the ruined house.
“Kemlie!” my mother yells, and the pot almost topples Nisette’s mug. Hot tea leaps onto my legs. The stove seethes. “You’re not done yet?”
I turn away from the stove to breathe and bend forward to cage in my scream. Everyone knows how much I don’t like te jenjanm. Now I’m afraid that my dislike for te jenjanm is what made me incapable of brewing Nisette a good cup.
“Almost,” I gasp.
Daniel says, “Gade! Would you be careful?” As I straighten, the showoff squeezes Nisette’s hand.
I tell him, “Don’t get up,” and, slowly, slide open the matchbox to face it all over again.
……
Nisette and Niko had sat down to their afternoon cremas when the table and their chairs began to shake as if they could not tolerate their weight. Nisette was wide and filled out like a brown egg, Niko was not quite as wide but was still expansive, being Niko, and both had shrunken in height as they had aged. Immediately, she knew they would fall. She landed smack on her butt, still clutching her small glass. One leg crumbled beneath her. As bad as that felt, the shaking, to her surprise, did not stop. She kept falling. She covered her head and felt a scraping on her arms. When she removed her arms, she was in darkness. The ceiling brushed her hair.
Nisette groped around herself and touched something warm and damp. It was her foot or her thin arm—Nisette groped further—no, not hers, not arms. Legs. Knees like steel balls. Thin cloth—Niko? She called her husband’s name, hearing her own voice like a whisper encased in something else that roared in her ears. At the same time, all was silence. As she felt the body next to her, the roar in her ears dipped and stretched into a low moan. Then a teeming quiet. A groan. Niko, in shadow, yet covered in dust so thick it coated Nisette’s palms when she touched his bare calf. Nisette understood that it had been Niko moaning, not the wind.
“Will you lift yourself and help me up?” Nisette asked.
He moaned again. “The house fell on me.”
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.” Nisette felt the sides of a pillar. It was lying on Niko’s lap.
“The house is breaking me.”
She tried to find Niko’s face in the dark. Her Niko carried gallons of water from the well outside and up the stairs, keeping up with the water women. Swept into his bare hands the broken pieces of glasses and lamps Nisette routinely dropped even then, without the use of a cloth or dustpan, his skin so tough the shards balked at piercing him. Nisette did not like asking for help from anyone, but Niko was her exception. She needed him to be him.
Nisette said, “If you can talk, that means you don’t really hurt. Good. Help me move.” She groped in the tiny space between the pillar and the ground until she touched his fingers. She placed them against the pillar, thinking they could try to heave it off, and placed her hand over it. She wondered what ground held them now. Were they still on the second floor, or had they fallen through to the first? The floor they’d rented out to another family, a younger, serious couple with equally serious daughters? Was the family OK down there?
A long time passed. Then something crashed again. Her leg began to slip out from under her, and the space around them widened. Shafts of dusty light squeezed through the ceiling. Nisette kept touching him. “Give me your other hand,” she said, and she butt-scooted closer without waiting for his response. She saw a well in Niko’s face where his right eye should be and the width of the pillar that pinned him to the ground.
“Gade, Niko.” She stretched to pat his elbow, the farthest part of him she could reach. “If this is how bad things are—but we can still move and talk to each other—think how much worse things must be outside.”
Like people caught in tragedies, they laughed.
……
Gabby sighs from her seat on Benito’s lap. “My heart. He laughed with you?”
“Right beside me, this brightness opened up. Who did I see?” Nisette asks her. “She was the first person who came for me, that Du. She was on her knees. She crawled through the opening to me. She buttoned up my dress. I didn’t even know how I looked. I couldn’t feel it. She wrapped her arms around my waist and tugged on me, little by little. Niko was telling me to stay. His voice was so light. But she pulled me out. She asked me, ‘Where’s your husband?’ She crawled into the hole again. After that, I don’t know. There’s a man from the neighborhood holding my arms, someone I think I should know, who has tied a shirt around his head like a bird’s nest, who calls me Madan Niko.” Nisette stirs her tea and still does not taste it, though it has long stopped steaming. Where at first she was using Gabby’s new presence to tell her story again, now she is talking to herself. And as she speaks, I can see what Nisette faced that day: the distinct shapes of women and men climbing each other, crowding my gaze. Benito removes his arm from Gabby’s and scratches Daniel’s bent head.
“Those two.” Nisette sucks her teeth. “They loved me a lot, those two.”
My mother says. “Everyone in the neighborhood loved you.”
“Gade. I can feel when someone likes to love. They were like that. And for you to tell me to flee to New York, to leave them again, tells me you do not understand this.”
“That’s why you don’t want to leave?” My mother taps my father’s paper, though he does not look up from his writing. “Manman, it happened. We lose them, we remember them, but we don’t stay with them. Do you ever hear us go on about them like you? No. We press through.”
“Oh, cheri. I’m not saying you can’t do that. How can I now, when you’re grown? But me, I’m waiting until their bodies are found.” Nisette runs her hands along her thighs. “Either I see their bodies, or I hear their names as those listed dead. That’s all I ask. After that, I don’t need to stay here anymore.”
My father speaks in a slow, pained way, as though he is being plucked. “They will never make such a list. I would know. It’s just impossible.” At this, something breaks in me, and I want to sit again at Nisette’s feet. Earlier I lifted them, and it was as though I held the infinitude of her. Yet she didn’t weigh me down.
“I’m not waiting on the government, no,” Nisette says, sounding surprised. She sniffs hard. I imagine the toxins in the air filling her lungs and blocking out her voice. She roots us here, in the only lit room in this house, where no one is ready to leave. “That’s your job. It’s for you to go look for them. They are deep down, waiting for us to find them.” She looks at each of us in turn. “I don’t know how you forgot them. But now I understand that it’s for me to keep them in mind.”
“Of course not,” my mother answers, too quickly. “We think of them too.”
“You never told me that. None of you talk to me except to say, ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do this.’ Mezanmi, I’m not your child. Was it not me and Niko who made you?”
“But Manman, it hurts me too,” my mother cries out. “Why is it for you to say that people can only grieve in one way? Can remember in one way? You can’t dictate that. You say you’re not my child. OK, but I’m not a child either.”
“Cheri, I’m not mad at you.” Nisette pats her book. “You can do what you like. I thought you would know to look for them without me telling you. That’s all. Gade. I am not trying to heal. I don’t want to give. You have time. You don’t need to rush. Don’t mind me.” Nisette sips the tea. “It’s good, but you’ve made it better,” she says, and sets it aside.
My mother replies, “There is nothing and no one out there. What can be done?” Her plump, pained face, normally hard as a chrysalis, has opened into something less crystallized. She looks ashamed of not being named one of the people who likes to love Nisette. Her shame is all of ours. I’m seeing that so many of us need care.
The radio man is taking another drink to soothe his throat. A low murmur streams into our hush, a static, like a beginning. Maybe a spell of good news. It likely won’t come, but I brace myself for it. May a cheer boost us. Then I hear something like rocks quivering, and Daniel is stretching out his fist for my turn.
My chest warms. I can return his kindness. I whisper, “You can go again. If you can.”
Daniel, born competitive, doesn’t question me. He tosses the huge osselet skyward. While it hovers, he scrambles to turn the grounded osselets to their convex sides before catching the falling one. Again and again he tosses it, each time grabbing an osselet while the stable piece is high and out of reach. Each time he rattles those haunted osselets together in his palm and the sound twinges my nerves, I wonder anew if they were torn out of the same reluctant body, one not cherished, or out of many. When I can’t take more of these dead thoughts, I take instead my brother’s outstretched fingers and twist. For earlier, for his lack of respect, his imbecile laugh that brought these rebukes from Nisette. I want Daniel to rush me. His guilt, like his grace, is light. The osselets in his palms and the one twisting near the ceiling all fall to the floor again, and the room brightens.
“Ay ay ay!” Gabby and Benito raise their arms like they have scored a goal, and the anger on Daniel’s face melts in the renewed light. My parents whoosh in relief.
“Shhht,” I say, but softly.
Gabby is looking around the room in wild wonder.
“Look how nice and bright everything is. I think if only we had the coffee now, this moment would be perfect. Eh, Manman? Now I’m in the mood for it.”
Nisette says, “It would be very beautiful.” Her soft, drained face turns toward the window bars as though she wants to catch the night. She lays her head on Daniel’s shoulder.
Even so, I pull my chair closer to her. The huge osselet tries to gouge my foot. I flex my toes along its marbled face until, like a snake’s belly, they widen enough to clasp my new possession. For a quick moment I think of the times we visited the old, less-pretty patio, and Niko pointed out the white bead of the National Palace in the distance as the sun wilted behind it, and just before vanishing the sun would flame a final red before the blue seeped in, and Niko, flame director, would set his cool hands on our brows to shade our eyes. To help us see.
Daniel is sitting closest to her. But I am the first answer to her wish. “I’ll find them for you, Granma.”
Nisette lifts her head again. “We’ll see. If I don’t die.”
She wrings her fingers and takes up her word puzzle book but does not open it. She only holds it in her lap. At each call of numbers, the dining room swells, grows tight with the pull of our attention. An ill sweetness. I imagine—so hard it might flow from my own gut, soft at first, stark, watery—the birth of a roar. A vision of everyone in our La Plaine cheering loud enough to shake down the mangoes.
If we could stay gathered this way, then, in the pink-clear morning, we might all marvel at one another because of what beauties the sun would make of us.
……
I want to ask her to forgive me. A possession is also a sort of family member—I would start there—a sort of living sacrifice. I saved my allowance for months to buy that iPod. While we were riding home from our American school, having just pulled out of the gas station and onto the half-packed Route Delmas, I was replaying a song I can’t recall now. I felt the quake hit, first as a rocking, and then as a bomb above my head. Once Route Delmas stopped bucking us, my father told us to get out of the car. No one questioned him, our bodies calling for the same thing: Get out and get away from whatever tried to throw you. I was afraid that if I left my iPod in the car, someone would steal it. My family screamed, and I wouldn’t leave until I found it hiding beneath the front seat. Then I was standing beside the car, my mother and Daniel hanging on to each other, my father and I not touching, looking in the direction of the gas station we had just left, now aflame. It had exploded moments after the quake, but I had missed its boom. My father raised his phone and began to record the flames. I watched him zoom in, pan out, sweep his arm through the mottled air. I saw why fire is associated with the mouth. Many tongues engulfed the station and its attendees, flicked out charred metal, licked a writhing girl’s face like mine off. I cried to switch places.
“Get back inside,” my father said. We drove a long, wrecked route home, skirting crashed kinfolk.
That night and for the many nights that chased it, my father slept in a thatch hammock by our gate with a machete for the vandals, while we slept in the car for the aftershocks, tense in our seats like the dragonflies who perched alert on their cane stalks for any hint of violence, as though compound eyes and compound ears overlaid our feet, our thighs, our necks, our teeth. Nisette, when she joined us, slept on a mattress in the doorway so we could pull her outside quickly when tremors hit. In the beginning, nightmares tore at Nisette’s sleep, nightmares my dying iPod couldn’t bury because she spoke with them. Forgive me. She carried so much.
We dashed in and out for hurried meals, bathroom visits that had us squeezing our pelvises, our first races. We sacrificed living inside for just as long as we could endure. Until living outside began to hurt more than the thought of future terrors. Timbral winds began to make wings of the francique leaves again. Trogons, those left, would not stay stifled; their caws pealed, full-bodied, no longer accommodating our timidity, reminding us that their glory rules, and that the atoms of their earth still vibrated and would always vibrate from strength to strength, far lapping ours, never fading.
So we crept, like thieves, back into our house. When the gate’s rattles made us duck, we yelled to one another. Nou la. Nou la. Nou la.
