My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  It felt a little bit of relief when the backhoe scooped out decades of Lucien’s junk. It could feel the excavation of souvenirs from Lucien’s twilight pickups from the street-side trash from well-to-do New Jersey neighborhoods. On the exposed main floor, It felt the weight of Marie-Ange’s stove, which stood staring defiantly at the workmen, reminding them to shut off the gas from its source before digging down into the boiler room. It could have blown Itself and them into pieces as delicate as snowflakes, but It had a final mission to complete. It hugged Itself to keep Its invaluable bowels from being gutted. It knew that It would have to surrender Its shell to save Its core and the survivors in Its back room. It let go of Its pain-ridden exterior and held on to the parts of Itself that It started to realize were true and timeless—Its spirit, Its heart, and Its mind—that It would have to employ to outmaneuver the demolition team. It knew that It could not remain intact and also release the prisoners Lucien had locked up in Its back room for decades. It resigned Itself to Its own death to save lives.

  It was old, older than Lucien. They’d been born the same month and the same day years apart. It had wanted them to die together too. It had to keep him away from his son to keep him from harming the boy. A tower of TVs had already fallen on top of the child, leaving him bruised but with no broken limbs. Worse yet, Lucien had been trying to turn the boy into his replica. He had already reopened his peepholes that La Kay had sealed up and made defunct years before. He had shown the boy how to spy with stealth, how to count the fingers, toes, limbs, eyes, and breasts of future victims. He had introduced the child to the sweet box from which a beautiful voice had emerged. La Kay now realized that that voice had been coming from the back room, not some miraculously repaired stereo from Lucien’s junk pile. It had missed so many clues about the women imprisoned in the bomb shelter that It had scarcely known existed.

  La Kay tried to peek into the safe room, but It could not open the door. It tried to break one of the walls with a heavy kick, but it would not give. It decided to shake Its body in the hope of dislodging part of Its foundation. It felt a fault open, and then the seam that joined two walls cracked enough for a cold breeze to pass through. It wanted to vomit from the smell seeping out of the place. It still could not see who or how many were inside. It was hopeful that with a few strong quivers It might split the walls open. But It had to be cautious not to bring down the second floor on top of them. It remained still for a while to feel any movement that It could. It breathed deeply and felt Its chest loosen with the knowledge that It would not die in vain.

  It listened closely, but It did not count the number of voices, the hands and feet touching the dirt floor. It did not want to be like him. It would not eavesdrop. It had already let them know that It was alive and willing to help. It had created an aperture for them to work through to save themselves. It remained still so It could feel their activity to determine how else It could help. They were quiet except for the little boy, who torturously counted to one hundred in whispered tones. La Kay became frightened because he reminded It of Lucien. It shook a little to get the child to stop. No one could bear the counting.

  A whisper colder than the outside air ran through It and It knew the women heard and felt it too. As cold as the ice crystals dripping from the tips of tree branches, as thin as cotton stretched between delicate fingers, the breath spoke: I am nothing.

  Eight

  LUCIEN

  Lucien’s legs took their time thawing out as if his very blood had congealed inside. He was accustomed to paralysis, but not of this sort. He didn’t want to look at his feet. He just wanted them to move on his command. He looked around the room and saw that the bed across from his was now occupied. He knew that he had to keep from waking the man or alerting the slow but watchful and willing nurses. He was grateful that his claw was still functional. It always did its job. He used it to poke the buttons on the remote to turn on the television. The volume was already turned down close to mute. Static flickered on the old set as he changed the channels to see just how deeply his neighbor was sleeping. His neighbor did not stir. He tried to divine how old the man was. He was in his sixties himself, but still agile even with partially functional limbs.

  He had been frozen before, long before the strokes, long before coming to America. He’d believed that he’d recovered from his first paralysis as a youngster. He hadn’t even had his aunt La Belle to rub his legs back to life, to scream him out of a reverie, to direct his steps. He had managed all on his own with no guidance from caring adults. Despite that, he still couldn’t help remembering La Belle as his first love, if he had ever felt love.

  Desperate for maternal affection, he’d followed her commands and stood guard at her door as she’d entertained the husbands of neighborhood wives. He’d waited as she’d bedded a few male in-laws. When he’d get tired of looking out for angry wives who never showed up, he’d peek to see the goings-on in the room. He’d told himself that he was just examining the figurines in the curio that had been directly in his line of sight. In fact, he’d been watching the awkward movements of middle-aged lovers twisting themselves into failed acrobatics.

  He’d always felt as if she’d known that he’d been watching. He’d interpreted her reprimands for stroking her porcelain Lladrós as admonishment for his voyeurism. But he’d also felt that she’d excused his inevitable leering because she had placed him in a position of keeping watch. He had been trained.

  As he’d entered double-digit ages, La Belle had started closing her doors completely to show him that she no longer required his services. He hadn’t known where to go after that. He’d been curious about the small watering hole in town that he’d passed after school. He’d seen genuinely beautiful women of every age calling forth suitors. He’d endeared himself to a few of them and ran errands when they were indisposed. In exchange, they’d allowed him to watch them undress themselves and their suitors, about whom they would make jokes later. He’d found his place at Bar Caimite.

  Absent the early intimacy with La Belle, he’d sought out women who might coddle, even stroke him with quasi-maternal adoration. He’d been the perfect specimen, a true pouchon with his mulatto looks and new gait that was evolving from childlike to manly with every minute he spent at Caimite. There he’d learned that watching was more gratifying than performing and that directing the movements of women aroused him more than sex itself. Soon his favorite worker, a woman who’d frequently allowed him to watch, asked if he wanted to join her for a bath. He’d willingly accepted the offer and filled the tub. He’d climbed in with her, trying to avoid her toes that searched him out under the water. He rose from the water, turning away from her stare. Naked and nervous, he waited for her to finish. As he dried himself, he caught a glimpse of someone watching him through a crack in the door.

  Lucien lowered his eyes as a shirtless figure crept into the room. He fixed his eyes on the man’s crisply pressed khaki pants, the ones he’d seen on the soldiers who frequented the bar. A similar gun was holstered in the man’s belt loop. He did not want to look above the waist at the man’s bare chest, let alone meet his eyes. His heartbeat threatened to break through his rib cage. To calm himself he counted the toes on the soldier’s bare feet. He counted the fingers on each hand that hung below the man’s pant pockets. When he felt the oiled fingers of his hostess on his shoulders, he counted those too. But limbs and digits were finite, so he counted every beat of his heart. He didn’t stop counting even when he felt himself being pushed toward the soldier. He told himself not to look up at the man, to focus on his gun, to watch where his hands went.

  Although time had frozen as stiff as his immovable legs, his heartbeat had not. He had reached the limits of his fear. There was no fight, no flight. He closed his eyes and saw a glass wall. He saw two possibilities: madness or death. He would not allow himself to be pushed to either irreversible option. He pressed his nose against the transparent wall and saw his own imag
e staring back at him. He stood toe-to-toe with his reflection. He saw himself mad. He saw himself dead. Tears ran down his face and then abruptly retreated into his closed eyes. He opened them and made the choice to become what he feared.

  Lucien lunged for the soldier’s gun and managed to wrestle it out of its holster. He heard the soldier laugh. But he wasn’t deterred. Without a word, Lucien pointed the gun at the man, gesturing for him to move to the bed. The slippery woman followed without being told.

  He’d turned the table on the couple and forced them to stare at their own reflections, their own madness, their own deaths. He did not know how or when he’d learned to handle a gun, but his grasp convinced him that he could pull the trigger and shoot them with ease. Aroused by their fear, he stood stiff as they collapsed onto the sheets. He felt himself become the monster they had made.

  Lucien’s fear had calcified into an incomprehensible evil. He tried to keep his newly made victims from reading his remaining discomfort with his new self. Like a small child, he closed his eyes to make himself invisible, as if he could turn into a spirit before them. He searched inside himself and did not recognize any of the thoughts or feelings there. He could not reach his true self, an entity he had never really known, awaiting its death. He became nothing. Just a body subject to occupation by whatever survivalist spirit wanted to take over the pretty boy standing in a room that reeked of sex and terror. When he’d finally spoken, his voice had transformed from the shakiness of a boy into that of a hoarse man. He was possessed.

  * * *

  —

  LUCIEN WOULD have never found the words to explain how his fear had crystalized into wickedness. He had never acquired the language to explain that his fear had reached the interior limit before madness, before death. He could not unveil the sculpture carved by hands so full of terror they no longer knew how to hold or hug or hope. He’d become a statue come alive with the ghost of an inexplicable malevolence. Fear had killed the hopeful soul of the child he had been. It was that child’s stolen breath that snuck out as a poison mist to lay waste to the souls of future victims. How could he explain what he’d never acknowledged? How could he examine what he’d never allowed himself to know? How could he tell anyone when, where, why, or how he’d learned to watch, stalk, hunt, and seize? How he managed to mirror the pain of others to lull them into the belief that he was an empathic being? Who could he have told? Certainly not Marie-Ange. Leona? Never. Dieuseul? He’d been too far gone by then to have a true friend.

  Lucien swallowed secrets like saliva. He was still crying as he tried to lift limbs that would not listen to his commands.

  I don’t know why or what I remember from back then in Caimite. The tears stop when I think of my place. And then my house. I am like fire; I am nothing until I am. Difé. And I am crying again.

  Lucien wiped his face and shrugged off the memories to focus on his impossible plan. He struggled to untie the hospital gown with his functional claw. He nearly fell trying to reach the drawer where his clothes were stored. He dressed himself the only way he could, slowly, painfully, laboriously. He kept the pliant but functional hospital slippers on his feet. He pulled himself up on the three-footed cane at his bedside. Most of his journey would be indoors. He would need to wait outside only long enough to get a taxi. He was too numb to feel the cold.

  He was grateful that the halls were empty. He counted every belabored step to the elevator and then each footfall to the sliding glass doors. He counted every second until a taxi came. He counted the coins in his pocket. He counted the eight single dollar bills that he paid the driver. He counted his keys to find the right one to open his van. He counted the stuttering of the failing engine. He counted the number of times he pressed on the gas pedal to egg it on. He turned the heat on as high as it would go. He switched on the radio and was comforted by the sound of static. He tuned it to the only station he ever listened to since age fifty, 1010 WINS. Then he slumped down to rest. It was only minutes before he bolted straight up in his seat.

  Lucien heard his name mispronounced by the newscaster. He decided that he wanted to go home. Not the house where he’d lived with Marie-Ange and reared his daughters. Not the home where he’d imprisoned four, sometimes five women and his own son across two decades. Not there. He wanted to go to his real home. Home home. Back home. The place he had not been since 1975, when he’d reveled at the sight of his set of four girls for the first time—Marie-Ange, his first and favorite, Veille, and his newborn matching pair, Clair and Dor.

  He formed his delusional plan. He would go to the airport. Never mind that he had no plane ticket. He would drive up and down the ramps. He knew just where, having driven his cab through the airport for decades. Never mind a passport. He would crash through the fence. Never mind that this was sixteen years after 9/11. He would make it. Van versus chain-link fence. Van wins. He would drive right onto the tarmac. He would get on a plane. Never mind which. He would go to Port au Prince. He would walk to Bar Caimite. Never mind that it had been closed since 1980. He would make his journey. Never mind that it was impossible. Never mind that he’d get shot before he made it onto the tarmac at JFK. Never mind that he would be crushed to death under the wheels of a landing plane, if by some miracle he made it past the counterterrorism firing squad. He would make it home. Somehow.

  SOL

  Sol listened as the others crawled around searching for anything dry enough to start and sustain a fire. The outside air seeped in, dampening every scrap of filthy bedding. Even the gifts of twigs My had brought back from his outings with Lucien strained to snap. She could hear sticks cracking and splintering between frostbitten fingers. She dug her own into the dirt beneath her and pushed her body into the farthest corner to make room for the work. She heard a few empty votives fall over and, soon after, felt them touch a part of her back that the torn sheets could never cover. Although she knew the answer, she still wondered why she had not made better use of the weapons in the room to wound or cripple Lucien.

  She had scalded him with hot candle wax on more than one occasion before he’d brought Chiqui to keep her in check. She’d cracked the faces of many of the Virgin Marys and stabbed him with shards. But her injurious deeds and words had cost her and the others. They’d all paid with bruises from deep pinches that he’d later counted. She’d paid with hair grabs, twisted wrists, and extended trips to the rape room. He’d stopped only when he had been sure that she’d learned the lessons he’d tried to drill into her mind. After his stroke, he’d armed himself with a fire poker and his loaded pistol. Even when he’d only been able to stroke the goose bumps on her bare arm, to pull his claw through her hair, to lick his good fingers and run them across her bruised, trembling lips, the threat of worse had throbbed. She’d squeezed shut her eyes that no longer cried. She’d tamed her aggression and crept around the rim of his temper like a spoon scooping the edges of hot porridge.

  She thought that, if he came now, she would find the strength to scuttle to the door, attack his Achilles tendons with a single slice and bring him to his knees. Except for the crawling, it would not be hard to bring him down. The others could manage. Fueled by years of rage, she would take the chance. Especially now. Even she was rediscovering her will to live inside of her weakened body. She was reimagining ways to overcome him and more so to do what he had done to her.

  She saw the pile of rags in the corner. The others had finished building their pyre and had been striking matches that would not ignite. She heard the clicking of defunct lighters that had run dry of fuel. She heard their voices but didn’t assign them to anyone in particular.

  “Put a stick in the candle.”

  “What if it goes out? We won’t be able to see.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “Just go do it.”

  “Be careful!”

  “Just put the fucking stick in the goddamned flame already!”

  S
he heard their collective sigh and saw the room light up a little brighter.

  “These rags had better catch.”

  “Cocoa already told us that she ain’t dying in here.”

  “Damn right!”

  She heard their coughing before the smoke reached her.

  “Make sure you cover up his mouth and his nose!”

  “Bring him to me,” Sol found the strength to whisper. “Bring him here.”

  “Look who’s alive.”

  “Never die.”

  Sol could remember saying those words only one other time in her life. It was after she’d given birth to My.

  I am not dead. I am not dying. I am One. Inside I hear two beats. They both mine. Heart in heart. I feel pain. I cry. I retch. I don’t want to. I can’t. Push! Stand! I crawl. I am the crying. I am the retching, groaning, growling. I roar. Rest. Breathe. Breathe! Make him breathe, Zero. Cut, suck. Water. Blood. I am wet. Suck. “Again! Please, make him breathe!” I beg. Never die. I beg and beg God. Make him breathe for me. He is crying. He is clean in my arms. I am wet. I am bleeding. I say to me, “Never die.” I am not One. Now I am two.

  LA KAY

  La Kay panted then gasped. On Its tongue, the very air tasted like salt, like love, like light, like blood. It took a deep breath and sat up and out of Its own dream only to realize that they had truly left. At once happy and lonely, It lay longing, silence sliding down Its molten walls. Only Its front steps remained erect. A row of brick teeth with slivers of cement in the gaps. A shit-stained smile of dirty dentures to be spat out by a final cough.

  La Kay separated Itself from the body in which It had been housed for more than seventy years. It circled overhead observing closely, as police, firefighters, and construction workers held back news crews that had gathered to report an unfolding drama. It had neither wanted nor expected Its demise to be broadcast across the city and then on national and global television and radio stations. But there It was, a hacked-apart mess in the foreground of video and still camera shots. It could only take comfort that It was not and had never been the corporeal collection of walls, rooms, and hallways that everyone believed It to be. It was so much more—a spirit with the largesse to help Its involuntary inhabitants save themselves. It had also surrendered any remnants of fear to liberate Its own soul. It had earned Its place in the open air, above the clamor of stories breaking over unbreakable spirits.