My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  “A nurse’s aide!” Lucien hollered hoarsely. “Not a real nurse!” Only the fire marshal heard his comment.

  “Listen, sir, no one’s going back in there. We checked as much as we could without endangering the lives of my men and there’s no one inside. Anyone who may have been, I’m sorry to tell ya, is probably gone. As is protocol, we’ll examine the debris for any remains. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

  Lucien chirped and then realized that the marshal, who was Italian, would not get the meaning of sucking teeth. “Let me go and see!”

  “I’m afraid we can’t let you do that. There’s no way in. Even if there was, there would be no way out, and I can’t risk lives trying to get to you.”

  On the verge of tears, Lucien dug his claw deeper into the marshal’s shoulder.

  The marshal did not recoil. “I understand. I’m sorry. I know this is tough. We have support. Some folks from the Red Cross should be here any minute. I’m really sorry for your loss, sir.”

  Lucien’s neighbors came to where he stood.

  “Man, I’m sorry. I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine.” The husband hung and shook his head.

  “Is someone coming to get you? We can call…” The wife sounded as if she might cry.

  “No, no. My girls are in there.”

  “How old are your girls now, Mr. Lucien? They’re grown.” The husband turned and spoke directly to the fire marshal. “His kids have been out of the house for more than twenty years. His wife’s been dead for about as long,” he added. “We’ve lived up the block since his girls were little.”

  “He’s in shock. This is normal,” the wife insisted.

  “You ready?” The husband checked his watch, a too-shiny fake-gold timepiece that was out of place for his line of work.

  The couple walked away but stopped to chat with other neighbors as the morning bloomed brighter, pushing everyone toward their respective bus stops.

  Lucien did not lift his head to observe the morning exodus. It had been decades since his wife had had to make the Queens to Manhattan commute that required taking at least one bus and one train. Most commuters hadn’t bothered with the bus in years. Instead, they boarded dollar vans, leaving the buses for those with time on their hands—patient students with school bus passes and elderly riders who paid discounted fares. He didn’t remember the last time he’d ridden in anything besides his gray minivan or his yellow taxicab.

  None of his neighbors had taken the two-time stroke survivor seriously, no matter how strong he’d tried to look without his walker or cane. With only a dry whisper to protest the refusals of the emergency crews, he crawled into the back of his cluttered van. His neighbors had added diagnoses of shock and dementia to his physical impediments, making him want to vomit and scream into their faces. He sat down in the ice-cold vehicle planning his next move. But before he could even recline, a car pulled up and screeched to a stop.

  A woman hopped out in a huff. She was on a mission. Leona LaMerci, his girlfriend and caregiver, was as elegant as she was frustrated. She was dressed for work, where she’d been headed when a neighbor did what Lucien had not thought to do: call. With leather-gloved hands, she pulled her belt tighter around her thick coat, as if that would keep more heat in. She was fully covered, skirt over pants over tights, socks inside shearling-lined boots, coat over scarf over sweater over turtleneck, hat over kerchief over thick silken hair. What the necessary insulation could not hide was the prettiness of her youthful face, the watering of her chestnut eyes, her kissable ChapStick-laced lips. She turned the heads of onlookers from the smoldering house to the curvy girlish lover Lucien did not deserve. With worry and cold creasing her skin and quickening her step, Leona looked like a well-heeled and -groomed Christian mother who had come to beg her derelict prodigal son to come home one more time.

  A concerned and lucid someone had called her to drag him from the front of his burned-down house, throw a coat over his shoulders, and drive him away. Lucien refused to get out of his van and into Leona’s car. When he finally did, he didn’t say a word. To shield himself from the onslaught of pelting pain, he retreated into his mind like a bullet reversing into its gun barrel. She wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t believe that his girls were trapped in the basement. She was probably secretly glad that all of what she regarded as his distractions had perished in the fire. Maybe if he’d kept things clean or at least in order, she would think, he could have saved some.

  Lucien found it disconcerting, even offensive, that Leona kept her vehicle and her house so pristine. He’d never been able to spend a lot of time at her place because of its cleanliness. He was repelled by her neatness. He let her believe that it was her good housekeeping that had led him to hire her as Marie-Ange’s in-home hospice nurse. But it had been Leona’s early tolerance of his junk that had earned her the job. That was one of the few times he’d been beguiled by a woman. And it had only been because he was already grieving Marie-Ange’s impending death that came years later than the doctors had said it would.

  The first time he’d met Leona, she’d been wearing a light spring coat, camel colored with a hint of peach, a shade darker than her skin. She was tall, two inches taller than him in her chunky nurses’ orthopedic loafers. Her button-down A-line dress was cinched at the waist and held tighter by a wide, manly leather belt. Slivers of her camisole poked out of the gaps between the buttons of her dress that struggled to stay fastened all the way up to her collar. She wore a sky-blue silk scarf dotted with clouds on her head and tied loosely under her chin. Beneath it, her wavy hair showed like a poorly guarded secret. This would be the last time he would see her hair that way outside of her home. Thereafter she wore it parted down the middle and plaited in two childlike cornrows. He was fortunate to catch her blow-drying it after her weekly wash. On Saturdays, he saw nothing but her hair. It flowed over her clavicle, stopping at her breasts if she was wearing a bra or at her breastbone if she wasn’t. The rest of it slapped her shoulder blades in the back. He remembered her face that first time. Her shiny black brows and lashes drawing her hairline into her face, leaving a two-finger sliver of a forehead. Her powdered face was all one shade including her lips. The cream of her teeth provided contrast. Her reddish-brown irises changed shapes and colors like a kaleidoscope.

  She preferred to wear clothes that were one size too small than to accept her weight gain. Her clothes were of a good quality but modest. She wore mostly dresses and skirts even in the winter. Every so often, on days when the ice-sliced wind found its way into the space where her thighs met, she would wear pants under her skirt like the immigrant women from whom she tried to distance herself. Otherwise, when the wind was tolerable, when it fondled like the hands of a lover coming in from the cold, she wore thick tights that she changed out of immediately upon arrival at her destination. Although she usually wore pajamas to sleep, she’d started wearing nightgowns that were convenient for him.

  If Leona’s outfits were contrived, her speech was not. She started out speaking French, which excited him. As his charm overcame her formality, they slipped into the intimacy of Kreyòl. She had a mellifluous voice as if she should have been able to sing, but she couldn’t. Her eloquence announced her education. She was as well-read and well-bred as Marie-Ange had been. But Leona, having had no doting father to inspire arrogance, was desperate for affection.

  Leona had a fluid feminine walk and an aristocratic carriage. She stood like both the strict mistress of the house waiting to be served and the servant at attention waiting to be called. She’d sat comfortably among his clutter and entertained the cautious vulgarity he’d used to test her tolerance.

  He’d come to regret allowing Leona to squeeze past his instincts during her interview. He’d been fooled by her willingness to sit amid his collection of junk, feigning tolerance of his mess. As his comfort with her had increased, she’d begun strategically hiding
the spoils of his hoarding, secreting his stuff out of immediate view as best she could. At least she hadn’t thrown it away. As he sat in her new-looking old car with lickable leather seats, he sensed what she was thinking. Leave them. Leave them. How many? Tell me, who, and how many? She might indulge his delusion and let him enumerate who and what he’d left behind in the ruins of the fire. But, more than a decade into their relationship, he still refused to let her hear him count. And he never dared acknowledge, let alone whispered out loud to himself, the depth of the zero as the first number in his counting. I am nothing.

  He listed for himself what and how many he could remember having in the basement. The decades-old thirteen-inch television sets with channel knobs were stacked, wobbling, nineteen sets high. The eight-track tape decks nearly toppling at thirty-two levels. The oblong first-generation Macintosh personal computers in towers of twelve. Speakers of every dimension rose inseparable from the basement floor like stalks of sugarcane. The boxy relics bolstered one another to form a wall on either side of the narrow walkway he had created so he could use the bathroom in the back of his basement while sorting and taking inventory. The turntables, cassette decks, VCRs, DVD players, tape recorders, compact Walkmans, and CD players filled in the cracks like cement between bricks to keep his junk walls from toppling.

  Still counting, Lucien moved his mind to itemize the cans of food he had last brought to the safe room. In his head he saw the candles, the gallons of spring water, the canned meat and fish, the preserved vegetables and fruit from his summer garden, and the backup blankets. He recounted these things two, three, four times, and then moved forward to the important things. He lost his place counting his women. He wanted to cry as he had done many times before when he hadn’t been able to name the place from which he told himself, I am nothing.

  Lucien sat in the back seat and reluctantly closed his eyes to nap in Leona’s 1987 Toyota Corolla that looked as perfect on the inside thirty years later as it did the day she’d bought it. “New, brand-new,” she liked to tell people about her purchase. Lucien swallowed the tears that threatened to breach his façade in Leona’s presence. He had never cried in front of her, not even when they visited Marie-Ange’s grave, not even when they’d attended Marie-Ange’s funeral as co-caregivers, not lovers. He was not about to start now.

  “Lulou, why?” Leona insisted. “I’m sorry. I know. I can’t believe it either. But it’s okay. We have our lives. And at least Marie-Ange isn’t here to see this. I’m so sorry.”

  Lucien didn’t bother to answer. He barely heard her.

  Leona was no substitute for Marie-Ange or even one of his girls. She was a good imitation of his wife—grateful to do his accounting with his Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits so he wouldn’t end up penniless. But she refused to ride with him in what she insultingly referred to as his “smelly, piece-of-crap minivan.” He went alone on his trips collecting empty cans and bottles and other malodorous trash in the city. Leona wouldn’t hold her nose and suck it up for him like Marie-Ange had. She wouldn’t allow gambling in her house either, nor was she a good enough cook or a patient enough hostess to turn her kitchen and dining room into a restaurant to feed comrades from back home and any needy associates they brought with them. As much as he referred to her as the second Madame Lucien, she would not allow him to turn her house into the second KAM. Lucien was disgusted at the thought of having to live with Leona, at least until he could repair or rebuild his scorched house.

  He knew that his daughters would never visit him at Leona’s, although it was clean. They would never visit him anywhere. The only thing that had brought them home had been Marie-Ange’s funeral.

  He’d wanted to hold them, three grown women who’d looked like little princesses memorializing their fallen queen at the church. His youngest daughter, Dor, had sung lead with her older sisters backing her up. Counter to her character, she’d even spoken up at the repast at the house, chiming in when Veille and Clair complained about the evidence of Lucien’s hoarding that Leona had failed to hide well enough.

  The girls had searched for and found Lucien’s strays as well, sycophantic hang-abouts he’d taken in for days, weeks, or months in exchange for the sound of people talking, leisurely card games, and light petting when they were willing. The girls wailed at him over how he had tortured their mother with his collections of discarded junk and unworthy, usurious people up to her final living days. Why Marie-Ange had tolerated him at all was beyond words or tears. He could not argue.

  He had dethroned Marie-Ange, the hardworking self-promoted queen who’d plunged them into debt to secure her throne in America. She’d dressed herself up and surrounded herself with three regally groomed princesses. She’d never imagined that she would die so young, at forty, in a hoarder’s house. He had always known that he was beneath her, as she’d frequently reminded him by telling him stories about her father. He could still hear her favorite rant that, had her father been alive, he never would have permitted their courtship and eventual marriage. If not for the chaos of the failed coup that had separated her from her king, her doting general and de facto husband, she never would have fallen prey to Lucien’s charming rescue. She’d known that it was only a matter of time before the baker and the spies gave up details of her clandestine flirtation with a barman. Only a matter of days before her father would pistol-whip it out of them and then beat Lucien down with his baton, cat-o’-nine-tails, fists, and kicks. This beating would have been personally executed in the presence of his lieutenants as a lesson about what happened to those who crossed him by even thinking about his prized daughter. That day, that discovery, and that beating never came, so Marie-Ange had been carried from the city that had disappeared her father straight to Nen-nen’s place, where she’d given birth to Veille, married Lucien, and then given him Clair and Dor to round out the threesome who would deliver their final performance at her funeral. How low—how low!—he had brought their mother. They would not allow him to do it to them again.

  Lucien ignored Leona as she opened the car door, lifted her thin legs, and planted her feet on the icy pavement. She slammed the door as hard as she could to get his attention, but he pretended not to notice. He sat in the car in front of her house until dusk, refusing to go into what he knew would be his jail for months to come. He searched his pockets for her spare car keys, crawled into the driver’s seat, and took off for home.

  As he drove, he started his counting, hearing his daughters in the back of his mind. He counted the carcasses of decrepit electronics. Ten, twenty, thirty. What? Television sets? Turntables? Space heaters? Empty barrels to send stuff to Haiti for one of his customers? He could hear the demolition machinery from several blocks away. He sped up and arrived just as a backhoe was driving into the empty parcel next to his house. He jumped out of the car as if he’d never had one, let alone two strokes, limping like a three-legged cat that had mastered its handicap. Still hoarse, he shouted at the driver not to knock down the apple tree. He rushed to the tree and looked around. He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to revive some of his bushes. The ground would be flattened by the trucks and harder to hoe by hand in the spring.

  “Get out of here, man!” the driver shouted.

  Two members of the demolition team held each of Lucien’s arms, trying to drag him away from the base of his precious tree.

  “Come on, man! Don’t make us hurt you.”

  “Can I get some things out of the house?”

  “Sure. As soon as we’re done tearing it down.” The men did not laugh, but their sarcasm was insulting.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll move.” Lucien snatched his arms out of the clutches of the men who may as well have been his jailers. He walked around the house, staying as low as he could, trying to peer into the basement windows, looking for a way in.

  “You are not getting into this damned house, man! Not on our watch.”

  L
ucien was incensed that the man had damned his house like any old structure. He tried not to cry out loud. This isn’t just a house! It is a life! My life! My dream! I am nothing. I am nothing without it, without them.

  But was he just dreaming now? Of his girls trapped in the basement? Of a family long gone? Was he having a nightmare of his house burning down? Had his life really caught fire? Was it really about to be leveled flat? Was this him or was it his house thinking, speaking? Did his house want to die? Did he? Was this a dream about his overburdened house? A house that had taken his girls and maybe even his wife prisoner? He counted: Zero, One, Two, Three, and stopped before Four.

  The house creaked a little while Lucien squatted by the farthest basement window, the one closest to the safe room. He got stuck trying to get back up and had to call for help.

  “We told you!”

  Lucien did not thank the hard-hatted worker for helping him up. As he walked back to Leona’s repulsively clean car, he heard it. The house buckled then chuckled: Your family is gone, man.

  LA KAY

  The House settled into a coma and waited to die. Something was holding It back. Something was holding It up. Its slumping aluminum siding, Its weakened steel frame, the crushed remnants of Lucien’s hoarding: junk appliances stacked from the basement floor to Its ceiling, the same on the ground floor, more in the upstairs bedrooms all the way to the roof. Something wouldn’t let La Kay die. Something inside wanted to survive Its suicide attempt. There were only two things It loved enough to live for—children and music—and It hadn’t heard a whisper of either in a very long time. As far as It could feel, neither was present after the fire. It hurt so badly to think of life after. It knew that It was now uninhabitable. It also knew that Lucien’s standards were low. He’d regularly slept in his trash dump of a van. But the smell of burned things, the wetness of fabrics turning musty and moldy, the crumbling floors and ceilings, would surely keep him away, unless he was being drawn in by someone or something inside.