A Girl Named Lovely

by Catherine Porter

  “Bonjou, Felicine,” she shouted, waving to one woman at her door. “Is Mama Sul still here?”

  Just like that, it was clear that Lalanne was telling the truth. Rosemene made the rounds, greeting her old neighbors and putting Lovely down to walk around by herself. I tried to imagine what Lovely’s life would be like if she were back in this slum. Both her parents were taking turns to sell their wares downtown, and Rosemene had often spoken about moving back to Port-au-Prince, where it was easier to make money. But, standing there, it seemed like such an oppressive place to live. I hoped they wouldn’t make the move. Where Lovely lived now was modest, but it was clean and safe.

  Rosemene thanked Lalanne and Chocholi. She was convinced of their legitimacy. As we made our way back to the car, I was relieved to hear that Rosemene shared the same thinking as me. “There is too much garbage, too much pee, too many mosquitoes,” she whispered. “I don’t like this area anymore.”

  As we pulled away from the slum, it seemed like a chapter had closed. We knew who had saved Lovely and we knew that her present life was infinitely better than it would have been. Now it was just a matter of finding out what the future would bring.

  Part 3

  Chapter 11

  Lyla and Lovely

  The idea of bringing Lyla to Haiti had been fermenting for at least half a year. It seemed only fair that she got to meet the little girl she had been sharing me with. And giving her a glimpse into the place I had disappeared to so often over the past two and a half years might make my future departures easier.

  I was interested in what Lyla would make of the place—its chaos and noise, its vibrancy and blistering poverty. It would be the first time she confronted the Third World, and the first time she would be a visible minority—a white person in a black world. She had just started grade one and was only six years old; I wondered how she would handle it.

  My husband, Graeme, cautiously supported the idea. He agreed that, in theory, it would be good for Lyla, but worried about what might happen to her. After every trip to Haiti, I had unpacked my stress late at night as we got ready for bed, describing how I’d seen life drain from people in cholera units and corpses literally pile up in the general hospital morgue. How could he willingly send our precious daughter there? It was hard enough for him to see me go repeatedly.

  In the end, his trust in me won over and I booked our tickets for a long weekend in October 2012. We would be on the ground in Haiti for just under three days—long enough for an introduction but short enough to skirt danger. In preparation, we visited my travel doctor in downtown Toronto. While Lyla sorted through the stamps on his desk, he rattled off the fruits she should avoid and the importance of handwashing. He jabbed her with a number of inoculations and gave her an oral vaccine for cholera, which I’d thought was unnecessary; after all, she’d be drinking only bottled water there. But Graeme had insisted.

  Before the doctor ushered us out, he gave Lyla some parting advice that rang in my head for days.

  “Lyla, you are going to a different world,” he said. “People don’t have shoes there, and if they do, they will be broken.” It wasn’t the physical illnesses she needed inoculation from, he seemed to be saying, but the existential and emotional ones.

  As the trip approached, Graeme drilled two cardinal rules into Lyla’s little brain, getting her to repeat them ad nauseam whenever we were all in the car together.

  “What won’t you do in Haiti, Lyla?” he’d ask, palming the steering wheel and looking at her in the rearview mirror.

  “I won’t put my fingers in my mouth,” she’d repeat from her booster seat in the back. “I won’t drink or eat anything unless I ask Mommy first.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Tell me one more time.”

  “I won’t put my fingers in my mouth. I won’t drink or eat anything unless I ask Mommy first.”

  We packed her bag carefully, putting in her colored markers and journal, her favorite book, and a doll. In my bag we loaded presents for Lovely and her family.

  Port-au-Prince isn’t that far away from Toronto—just a few minutes past Havana. But there are no direct flights. We endured thirteen hours of travel, two sterile airports, and two frigid planes before we stepped out into the welcoming Caribbean heat.

  Just as we pushed our luggage trollies outside, I asked Lyla to stop so I could take a photo of her first moment in Haiti. She pulled her pink sweatshirt off to reveal a gray Minnie Mouse T-shirt with lettering that read Genuine Love.

  As I looked at her little face through the frame of my phone, it hit me: I hadn’t just brought Lyla to Haiti; Lyla was in Haiti with me, her mother. How could I be her mom in Haiti?

  I still wasn’t a real person in Haiti, despite my resolve to change that fact. I was an eighteen-hour-a-day work machine. I didn’t exercise, I didn’t socialize, I didn’t break for lunch. And I smoked! How was I going to make it three days in Haiti without smoking?

  In all the hours of careful planning and packing, I had focused simply on Lyla and what she might experience on her first trip out of North America. It hadn’t dawned on me that I would have to carefully pack some other parts of myself and bring them here—not just the journalist who took notes and interviewed people and stayed up till 2:00 a.m. scratching at issues inside my brain, but the mother who played, read books aloud to her kids, packed lunches, and stroked her daughter’s hair as she fell asleep on my lap, which she did on the ride to the guesthouse.

  I roused Lyla when we arrived and led her upstairs into the building’s turret. The guesthouse dog, a small yellow mutt named Gracie, followed us excitedly and jumped around Lyla’s bed begging her to play. While they were getting acquainted, I dove into my normal routine of unpacking and preparing, plugging in my cell phone and computer, and ordering my files and books on a side table.

  Just as I had pulled out my digital recorder and headlamp, a strange rasping sound echoed out behind me. I spun around to find Lyla, bent over the sink, drinking from the water faucet.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked. “Remember the rule: you can’t drink or eat anything until I tell you it’s okay. That water is not okay.”

  Her little face collapsed and she began to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said between sobs. “I forgot.”

  • • •

  I barely slept, coiling my sheet around my legs and kicking through my mosquito blanket all night. It always took me a while to get accustomed to the night noises of Haiti—the dogs barking, roosters calling, and sounds of gunshots down in the bidonvil below us. But it was the noise inside my head that kept me awake that night. I was primed to spring into action the instant Lyla began to explode from both ends. Thanks to Graeme’s wisdom, I wasn’t worried about cholera. It was giardia that concerned me. I walked through the plan: I would yank up her mosquito net and hustle her to the bathroom. I would leave her on the toilet for two hours, so her system was flushed, before giving her some Ciprofloxacin. I would call Richard and cancel our plans. Instead of visiting Lovely, we would spend three days here, in this little turret, on and beside the toilet, all because of my own distracted mothering.

  Lyla had taught me this lesson many times. When I was pregnant with her, I envisioned my life as a motorcycle. I would simply attach a sidecar and do all the things I had always loved, but with her. I wasn’t going to be one of those mothers who lost interest in everything but her baby; I’d still go out for dinner with friends, see movies, go for runs pushing her in a jogging stroller.

  When she was fourteen days old, Lyla started to scream, and she didn’t stop for three months. The doctor said she had “extreme colic.” She screamed until her little face went deep purple. Already sleep-deprived, I became frantic, searching for ways to calm her. The only trick I found that worked was to tie her to my body with a long piece of fabric and head outside for a fast walk. The pounding of my heart put her to sleep, and then I would have two hours of quiet. Sometimes I would go to the park and climb on a swi
ng just to keep her from waking up.

  There would be no dinners with friends, no movies, no reading books, no sleep, no sidecar. Lyla and I were in a whole new mode of transportation, heading to places I hadn’t planned. Strangely, looking back, I enjoyed that time. All those walks through our neighborhood with her tied to me prompted me to start a residents’ association later that year around our dining room table. I lost some of the things I loved about my life, but gained new perspectives, thanks to Lyla.

  I could see what I’d lose in Haiti, but what new things would Lyla reveal? I wondered.

  As dawn leaked through the turret’s windows, I watched Lyla sleep on her tummy, completely naked, her little lips puckered. Her groggy morning voice rang out.

  “Hi, Gracie,” she said, shooting her hand out from under the mosquito net to stroke the dog, who had slept on the floor between our beds. “How are you?”

  With that, she was off, pulling a sundress out of her bag and running after Gracie down the stairs and into the garden outside to explore.

  I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Montezuma had spared us his revenge. We were very lucky.

  In fact, Lyla had second helpings of breakfast and then announced she wanted to swim in the pool, so we both tugged on our bathing suits and jumped into the cold water. I was determined to be attentive to my daughter, and threw coins for her to retrieve from the watery depths until I was so cold I began to shiver.

  When we arrived before the maroon gate of Lovely’s school, it was recess: Hundreds of kids in red-checkered shirts and red shorts and skirts swirled around the small courtyard. There was no room to play soccer or do handstands, so the kids just ran around in small knots, dodging one another.

  Lyla gripped my hand firmly as I scanned faces, looking for Lovely. There she was, over by the pillar, squatting on the ground. Her hard brown eyes twinkled mischievously, and her mouth was knotted to the side. I felt like we were her secret and that she was watching to see what we would do.

  I called out to her and she walked slowly toward us, offered up her cheek for me to kiss, then melted back into the crowd. It was not what you’d call an auspicious first meeting between the two girls in my life.

  Dozens of other little girls had taken great interest in us, hovering around Lyla in a circle. Their hands darted out to touch her arms and hair. She was an oddity to them—an exotic pet that had been brought in for show-and-tell. I remember Rosemene telling me that I was the first blan she has ever known, and about a year after we’d met I’d let her pick through my fine hair, her fingers and eyes burrowing in to quench a curiosity.

  Lyla found it intimidating.

  “Why are they all staring at me?” she asked.

  Jenanine came to Lyla’s rescue, taking her hand authoritatively and leading her up the concrete stairs at the corner of the courtyard. I assumed they led to a playground. A few minutes later they were back and Lyla was in tears. She’d tripped and skinned her knee.

  “I want to go back to the car,” she said.

  I convinced her to sit in the back of Lovely’s class, just for a few minutes, and then we’d go. When recess was over, we got in line behind Lovely’s teacher Madame Violet, a kind-faced woman with glasses, who led us up the concrete steps. Instead of a playground, we were greeted by a small construction zone on the second story: stacks of cinder blocks and long wooden beams leaning against an unfinished wall. At the back were two classrooms.

  Lovely’s small classroom was crammed with desks of different shapes and colors, so close together that there was barely room to move between them. Lovely sat down at a desk in the front row, sharing a single bench with five other girls. Lyla and I squeezed into chairs in the back and Madame Violet launched into her lesson from the front of the room. She was teaching the children how to make polite introductions in French.

  As she called on students to stand in twos and role-play, I counted heads and recounted them, to be sure. There were forty-two kids in Lovely’s class—double the number in Lyla’s back home. How could a teacher command that many five-year-olds?

  The answer was soon obvious: she didn’t. Little boys promptly fell asleep in the row ahead of us, their heads side by side on the table. Nearby, I watched two girls share a lollipop, hiding it behind the backpacks propped up on their desks like a screen.

  A little troublemaker near me hit the boy beside her with her ruler until it broke. Backpacks were hurled, children were pushed, and the classroom door repeatedly burst open as Madame Violet’s three-year-old niece wandered in and out. It didn’t help that the wall separating the class from the one next door was plywood and offered no soundproofing, so the chaos of that class washed into the room.

  “This the loudest class I’ve ever been in,” said Lyla, looking up from her journal, in which she’d been drawing a picture.

  I assumed the noise would die down, but it didn’t. After an hour Madame Violet got the children to repeat a list of random words written on the blackboard, under the title “Dictation”:

  Le bebe. Tire. Le moto. Vole. Vomi.

  The children screamed them out in unison until my head began to throb. How Lovely had learned to read in this environment was a testament to her iron will.

  I had assumed this school was good because middle-class parents sent their kids here and the teachers could speak fluent French. It took a trip with my daughter to understand this formula was too simplistic. That day, it seemed like expensive babysitting.

  I had to get out of there. I stood up, thanked Madame Violet, and left with Lyla. Lovely grabbed her bag and followed us.

  • • •

  The instant we arrived in the parking spot before Lovely’s one-room house, Lovely grabbed Lyla’s hand and the pair disappeared behind the banana trees. I pushed through the gate and reconnected with Rosemene while Lyla and Lovely darted in and out of the room, racing after each other. I zipped open the duffel bag of rad kenedi and toys Lyla and I had packed, and Lovely immediately grabbed Lyla’s doll. She and Lyla took turns brushing its white hair.

  A while later, Lyla kicked off her shoes and climbed up on top of the room’s single bed, asking for her sketch pad and markers. Lovely followed her, and they began to draw on the same page, their two heads pressed together.

  “Bonne fête, Lovely,” sang Lyla.

  “Bonne fête, La-La,” Lovely sang back.

  I was amazed. I had expected the two of them to be awkward with one another at first, like strangers on a blind date. Their inauspicious first meeting at the school had seemed to confirm that: the two parts of my life were like mismatched pieces of a puzzle. They would take some forceful jamming to fit together. Yet, here they were, instant friends without any input from me.

  “How do you say, ‘Let’s play tag’?” Lyla asked. Richard translated, and Lyla raced after Lovely. When she caught her, they collapsed in a giggling heap on the ground like puppies.

  Mostly they spoke to one another without any translation. Lovely spoke to Lyla in Kreyòl and Lyla responded in pidgin French, making up words as she went and using a lot of exaggerated hand gestures. She talked in a baby voice, as though she had become suddenly younger than her six-year-old self.

  It reminded me of the summer my husband and I spent in northern India, before we were married. We lived with separate families in a small village on a glacier-fed stream, surrounded by desert mountains, where we learned how to harvest barley. It was there that I saw how, without language, your personality changes. In English, I have an off-the-wall sense of humor. But clearly, my basic Ladakhi skills couldn’t convey sarcasm or irony. So I used physical humor, of the Laurel-and-Hardy kind: pretending to trip through the door, or poke my eye out with the handle of a broom. It was strange and liberating, like I was trying on a new persona.

  Lovely led Lyla up a field edged with blooming peas, their delicate white and purple flowers glimmering in the hot afternoon light. Two cows were tethered to trees, and I watched Lyla walk around them as if they were parked cars. She lea
pt over their giant fresh patties, utterly at home.

  I noticed for the first time that although Lyla was just one year older, she was a full head taller than Lovely was. No wonder her hand-me-down clothes were years too big for Lovely.

  Halfway up the path, Lypse and Sophonie appeared, still dressed in their blue uniforms from the Baptist mission school. Word had gotten to them that the blans were here. They reached for Lyla’s hands, and Lovely yelled at them to back off. Lyla was her friend and she was holding her hand!

  Elistin’s home was just as I had left it last, except coils of rebar and gravel mounds dotted the edges of the dirt yard. A big, solid, rectangular house—the size of my own in Toronto—had sprouted in the small farm field below. By Haitian standards, it was enormous: three or four rooms had gone up in the past two months since I was last there. That meant the owner was either upper-class Haitian or part of the diaspora, with a full bank account in Canada or the United States that permitted a big construction push.

  Most Haitians built their homes little by little as they came into money. Elistin had been tucking bills into a wooden lockbox for fourteen years to buy cement, rebar, and gravel for the two-room house he was building just down the hill. So far, all he had finished was the foundation and one wall. It had been so many years, weeds were growing between the cement blocks.

  He’d even presented me with a handwritten budget of necessary supplies and their corresponding estimated costs, looking for some èd. But it had seemed a shaky investment, since Elistin didn’t own the land he was building on. While he said his landlady had agreed to let him build a small house there, he didn’t have it in writing.

  So, for now, Elistin’s house remained a dream and a playground for the kids, who led Lyla there to explore it. Meanwhile, Elistin and Rosita pulled their wooden chairs into the yard for us to sit and catch up. After about twenty minutes I went to check on Lyla. I found her and Lovely squatting next to the wall. They were peeing. I watched Lyla help Lovely pull up her underwear.