Asante had only imagined how itchy Lucien had been while waiting for Nihla to settle down. He had not touched any of them since the pregnancy. He’d needed someone he could violate without being reminded of babies, his daughters, and the family he’d lost. He’d needed someone whose condition and very being would not interrupt his pleasure seeking. He’d wanted no reminder of his past life except for his Farrah Fawcett fantasies that still flickered against his closed eyelids when he’d fall asleep penis in hand. She’d deduced that he had to be as hungry for Nihla as the girl had been for a hit. Both of them had been on a hunt for different prey. Both had been starved enough to kill for their next piece.
Tuesday.
Asante had been able to tell that Nihla still had a little bit of a buzz when Lucien had come to check the back room. Asante pleaded with her eyes, begging him to get rid of the malodorous new prisoner whose scent rose above that of the slop bucket. She’d known better than to ask outright. Only Cocoa had been able do that, batting eyelashes he could barely see but remembered from the times he’d watched her on junior high school stages. Asante shrunk back listening to Nihla beg. He dragged her out to keep the others from hearing the dirty talk but didn’t shut the door completely. Asante couldn’t stand hearing Nihla plead with him to fuck her any way he wanted in exchange for a hit, a smoke, a sip, anything to keep her from sweating, scratching, thinking. Nihla told him how terrible it was to feel her cellmates judging her like the brown and black girls had in middle school.
Asante heard the despair in Nihla’s voice as the girl begged him not to take her back to the safe room. She heard her hope as she explained how willing she was to go to whatever room he took her to as long as it wasn’t that place. She understood Nihla’s optimism that she would soon be numbed out, if not high. She heard Lucien quickly throw the girl into the skinny shower, forcing her down so her bottom could soak while the water rained down on her. Nihla yelped when he poured the cold bodywash directly onto her head. Asante sighed as loudly as Nihla when she heard him walk out and slam the bathroom door behind him. He had gone upstairs to host an oblivious Leona. Asante could hear Nihla fighting the shower’s sobering effect, thrashing about as much as the cramped space would allow. The others continued to ignore Nihla’s antics.
Somehow, Asante had known that she would end up responsible for whatever happened to Nihla, so she remained alert, even attentive, to the white girl’s mumblings. She heard Lucien come back to the bathroom to turn off the water that had run ice cold. Nihla banged her fists on the walls of the shower stall as he slapped her with a clean but damp towel. Asante knew that he had to have been repulsed by the girl’s naked body. She’d seen the beginnings of the blue bruises, red scratches, and skin that was as gray as white underwear washed without bleach. Asante knew him best. He wouldn’t want to see the battered nakedness that would destroy his fantasy of having a white girl. When he threw Nihla into the back room, she figured that, despite Nihla’s clean state, he still could not touch her.
Wednesday.
Asante watched as Nihla rose high and came down low, from mountain peak to base camp, hurting nobody but herself. Sol pulled Chiqui closer. Cocoa followed uninvited. Asante stayed in her spot, daring Nihla to touch her.
“You know, he’s really nice.” Nihla tried to befriend the only one who would look at her. “He bought me all kinds of things. He always fed me. Gave me rides. He’s a good guy.”
Asante stared but did not respond.
“I won’t tell nobody about this when he lets me go. Where are we? Any buses run through here?”
Silence.
“Bet y’all just ain’t tried to get out. I used to dance. Bet I could kick down this door.” Nihla paused to scratch. “My boyfriend’s black, you know. So I ain’t no racist. Y’all ain’t gotta look at me like that. I listen to hip-hop. I can shake it for a white girl. They called me ‘wigger’ at the private school. But them snobs did more hard drugs…I’m gonna get clean after this. Damn, it smells back here. That bucket. What the hell? How long y’all be down here?”
Crickets, if any outside sounds could have penetrated.
“When are you due? I ain’t got no kids. My boyfriend fixed me the last time. Do I look like somebody’s mama? Meth rotted out my teeth. But I’m only…let me see, twenty-one. You know, it’s already Wednesday? He said he’d let me go this weekend. I’m just gonna do my time. I did six months a while back for shoplifting a Debbie’s crumb cake. Can you believe it? My lawyer made me take it or I’d go down for possession too. Now y’all gotta know I’m black. I’m one of y’all.”
As much as she’d wanted to, Asante had held back from slapping the last bit of lingering high out of Nihla. She knew that the others were waiting for her to completely lose it and slam the girl’s head against the stone side of the room. The steel side wouldn’t have drawn blood. Although she doubted Nihla’s fantasy that Lucien was going to let her go, Sunday couldn’t come fast enough.
* * *
—
ASANTE HAD been grateful that no child had been born while Nihla was there. No innocent deserved to have that as part of its first encounter with the world. The back room was bad enough. Knowing the child who’d come to them, she thought of how My would have offered their desperate visitor a twig or a rock, something to remind her that there was life outside. My would have brought in snow. Asante curled up on the floor, not sure what year it was, if My was alive and Nihla was gone or if Nihla was there and My was still inside his mother’s womb. Neither was better than the other because both had been devastating for her to witness. She found herself by smelling her way through. There was the piquant odor of burned things, the cool, delicious scent of freshly fallen snow. The fragrance of the outside world, no matter how cold it had made the back room, gave her comfort. Not hope. She didn’t dare hope. But she felt like she could die there without regret because, after all this time, she could taste the outside on her desperate tongue. She fell asleep feeling the icy air nibbling the tips of her toes, tinting them a blue no one could see by candlelight.
LA KAY
La Kay lay flat on Its back. It was conscious, listening to Lucien snoring on Its stairs. At least he’d accepted the fact that no one would rescue him and ceased his histrionics. Up until the fire It hadn’t felt any movement in the basement besides his in more than twenty years. But that didn’t mean there hadn’t been anyone there. It knew well enough that there were secrets folks didn’t even tell themselves. Hurtful secrets stashed in the back rooms of minds and hearts, held as closely as an infant marsupial in its mother’s pouch. Things folks dared not even acknowledge lest they burst into tears at inopportune moments over evils seen or done. Although It didn’t want to know, It decided to search Itself if just to assuage Its guilt. It didn’t want to be accountable for having killed innocents scratching at Its sealed doors.
It had ignored the strange sensations coming from the basement for so long, believing that they had been insects or rodents or Lucien. But Its near-death stillness now forced It to feel. It was afraid of the four muffled voices and the occasional whisper of a child. It wanted to believe that the sounds were just auditory hallucinations. But what if they were real? What if they had been real all this time and It hadn’t searched out the source? It wanted to turn up the volume, so It could find them now. But It could only lie prostrate with a chest still burning with embers. If It could get up on Its knees, It would pray. Unable to do so, It remained still and played Its favorite game—counting the number of times It heard Its name in a single day.
It could only guess the time because Its eyes had been boarded shut. Now blind, It could hear better. But no sound came, not even a whisper. The only thing left to do was to go back and remember the times It had heard Its name spoken or sung several times a day. Lucien and Marie-Ange had said it most frequently. “Nou la kay lan” or “Nou pap la kay lan.” “We are at the house” or “We won�
��t be home.” They’d made no distinction between “house” and “home” because there was none in Kreyòl. It hadn’t thought of Itself as a home at all after their daughters moved out. After Marie-Ange died, It hadn’t thought of Itself as much of anything at all. It had merely listened to Lucien letting Leona or Dieuseul know when he’d be in or out.
La Kay tried to roll over on Its side but could not move. Its aluminum siding had partially buckled during the fire and was now stiff from the freezing cold. It didn’t want to remember the number of times It had heard Lucien coming and going, descending to and climbing up from the basement. It had heard him say “Men kay lan” to a newcomer, usually a woman he’d picked up for sex. Sometimes he’d said it in English, “This is the house.” La Kay had ignored him because It didn’t want to witness his private business with women half his age. It hadn’t paid attention to their departures because It had always assumed that they would leave whenever he was finished with them. It now hurt with the realization that some of them had not come willingly and, worse yet, had not left at all. It regretted having been consumed by the distractions of the outside world. It lamented Its deliberate ignorance and wished that one of the unknown ones might say or sing Its name.
It needed to reach far back, to the summers before Lucien had committed his first worst deed, to hear Its name in a song. It could see two drunken men sitting in Its backyard. Their personal bottles of Barbancourt and their shared six-pack of Miller beer warming by the legs of their chairs in the sun. Each man had caressed his own guitar, serenading their instruments and their homeland at the same time.
M’prale la kay mwen
M’prale la kay mwen
Wou, wou, woy, woy, woy
M’prale la kay mwen.
The House had been convinced that they’d been singing to It. But these forlorn visitors to KAM had wanted to go back home. KAM be damned, they wanted the real thing. The true Ayiti Cherie. The red and blue with no white. No cookie-cutter houses, no basement peristyles, no stove-cooked meals. They wanted wood and charcoal fires burning outdoors, blackening wide pots of cornmeal with red beans and coconut milk. They wanted year-round summers, not seasons. They wanted unscheduled leisure, not hours of factory labor. They wanted to be the majority with no white people turning them into minorities within a minority. They wanted their familiar brand of oppression, an unambiguous dictatorship that made them cower in corners in their often wet pants, sometimes bloody shirts, and always tear-streaked and sweat-stained faces. They wanted an invisible but well-known occupation by foreign soldiers that had made them territorial and nationalistic, while inspiring fantasies of greener grass and money growing on trees. They wanted and sang about going back home, not just home, not just a house they wouldn’t own for thirty years, not some solitary apartment that kept them caged.
La Kay had tried to understand the curious nature of these human beings. It had wanted to know who these people were who’d sung to It about It without knowing that It had feelings. But It had had no way of knowing that It had been the furthest thing from their minds when they’d sung about la kay. Its feelings would have been hurt, so It had opted to believe that It had been serenaded. It had swayed and stepped, mimicking the bolero It had seen Lucien dance with any willing partner in public. It had waited for the drunken duo’s sad ballad to end, so It could dance to one of Lucien’s favorite records that had told It to watch and learn how to properly dance to kompas.
It had marveled that what had started as a sweet afternoon lamentation had broken into a full bal by sunset. Lucien had played a full two-hour set of vinyl albums from start to finish. There had been no home-based DJs to slide from one artist to another. So It had simply relaxed and waited to hear Its name in a familiar or favorite song.
La Kay returned to Itself, lying half-dead, eyes boarded up, breath shallow, listening for the sounds of unknown inhabitants. It wanted to hear Its name spoken by one of the muffled voices, whispered by the smallest, sung by the vibrating songstress It now acknowledged had been there all along. It told Itself the things It had long hidden, suppressed things that had forced It to take action and attempt to kill Itself and Lucien. It wanted to know who they were, when they’d been taken, how he’d locked them up. It wanted to match up the times It had turned Its attention to the unnatural outside violence with the horrific moments when girls, now grown women, had been dragged into Its darkest place.
It laughed at Lucien’s pitiful cries echoing from the basement stairs. Although It now hoped that the demolition crew would halt its work, It didn’t want him to be rescued. It wanted him to shut up so It could finally hear Its name and rescue these as yet unknown women. It needed one of them to call out “La Kay” to resurrect Its rage, kill Lucien, and get them out.
Six
LUCIEN
Although Lucien had been hoping that Leona would come and find him, he didn’t want her to contact any of his neighbors, not even the ones who’d called her the morning after the fire. Anyone who came would be looking for an exploitable opportunity. His neighbors passed the house not knowing that he was stuck on the stairs to the basement. He knew that none of them would have cared anyway. They certainly weren’t sad that his house was going to be torn down. Some were waiting for him to put it up for sale. He knew what they were thinking. One or two were wishing he would eventually pull them aside to offer them first dibs. The more merciful ones were hoping he’d rebuild and augment rather than diminish their property values. He had enough land with the second lot to build an additional house, if he wanted. Some who’d always been covetous of his insultingly extravagant garden were thinking that the same next to a new house would be a blessing. An in-ground swimming pool would be lovely but out of place in their neighborhood and expensive to put in. The excavation for a pool with what was required to rebuild the house’s crumbling foundation would not be covered by the insurance money. He knew that they were talking, could almost hear them from where he sat freezing to death, unable to move anything, including his mind. It drifted between thoughts of Leona coming for him and the vultures with whom he’d shared the neighborhood for decades. They were waiting for him to make a move. They could easily get fifty to a hundred thousand more above asking price for their own homes in the post-recession market. But the digging out required before any construction could start would bankrupt a buyer. He knew that selling was not an option, not to any of them, not to anyone at all. No one but him knew about the safe room. Even that didn’t matter since he was never going to get back there. He was going to die on the stairs. The house would be torn down on top of him. He would be crushed and scooped up with the rest of the debris. But the back room would likely remain intact. It would take months to break down the postwar bomb shelter because it could not be blown up.
Lucien had also been hoping that Leona had not gone to the police. But, being as naïve as she was, she had gone in and reported him missing. He could imagine how her request to find him had been received. The officers had probably all but laughed at her even after she’d explained his partial paralysis and possible dementia. No one cared that she didn’t want him to die in the eight-degree temperatures made colder by two feet of snow. No, it had not been seventy-two hours since she’d last seen him. Yes, he still drives. Yes, his vehicle was also missing.
He could see her in her too-tight coat with the buttons hanging on for dear life. She was shapely for sure but had gained weight. She walked out of the precinct dejected but not hopeless. She drove around the neighborhood trying to find his van. But it was nowhere to be found. Neither was Dieuseul or the taxi they had driven for the break-in. Leona had already tried to call. Lucien knew that Dieuseul, feeling guilty for having ignored his cries, would not have answered the phone. He tried to warm his claw while praying to who knows what that Leona would find him before his frostbite required hospitalization. He perked up when he heard the soft thud of footsteps in snow, knowing that it could only be her walking
down the snow-packed driveway. She made the first footprints leading to the back door. Lucien heard her calling, but the vibration of sound funneled painfully into his frostbitten ears, the canals of which had become miniature bobsledding tunnels.
He could hear her calling to him loudly enough for the latchkey kids of his immediate neighbor to hear and peek outside to once again rejoice in the twenty-six inches that had given them a snow day. Leona spotted the sawdust board hanging by a single screw. The door itself was off its hinges but mostly, miraculously, still in place. She rallied the strength of her youth to pull it toward her, revealing Lucien, half-conscious, slumped down in the crack between the basement door and the slanted steps. He stirred but could not lift his hands to shield his eyes from the brightness of snow reflecting sunlight. Her shadow mercifully blocked it as she struggled down the stairs. She spread her arms like airplane wings and placed her palms on either wall to keep from sliding down. She sat on the step behind him and tried to wrap her arms around him. Failing at that, she dug out her flip phone and called for an ambulance.
He didn’t want to think about Leona’s assessment of where she’d found him. He hoped she’d assumed that the four and a half gallons of water and the loaves of bread were a function of his hoarding. She understood his condition well, not because she was a hoarder herself or because he’d explained it to her, but because she knew the things immigrants from the poorest countries did out of a perpetual, irrational fear of scarcity. She empathized with this profound sense of lack in the presence of excess, because she’d taken him as a lover while surrounded by a loving and appreciative child and grandchild. She wanted a companion. Loneliness was hell too. To her, it was a hunger of the worst sort.
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