Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

  My old bed no longer creaked when I sat on it. My mother had fixed the noisy springs that had made it so much fun, so musical.

  Her messages still echoed from downstairs. A final declaration of love from Marc and then one of her friends, asking where she was.

  I opened my old closet. It too was empty. I went to the guest room, where she had a desk and a cot to do her reading and sewing. She had said that she would make it more homelike if ever my grandmother or Tante Atie decided to come for a visit.

  The bed in her reading and sewing room squealed when I sat on it. My daughter liked the sound and laughed as we bounced up and down on it.

  "Some things never change," my mother said, watching us from the doorway.

  "I think we'll sleep here," I said.

  "And your room?"

  "The mattress there is too stiff."

  "You can have my room," she said.

  "Don't worry. It is only for one night."

  "What about the baby?"

  "She'll be okay with me."

  "You're wondering what I've done with your things, aren't you?" she asked.

  "I don't need those things anymore."

  I am sorry.

  "Please don't be so sorry. I can always get others."

  "I was passionately mad," she said.

  "And you burnt them?"

  "In a very frustrated moment, yes. I was having an anxiety attack and I took it out on those clothes."

  "Better on the clothes than on yourself," I said.

  "In spite of what I have done to you, you've really become an understanding woman," she said. "What do you want for dinner? We'll have no more of that bulimia. I'll cure it with some good food."

  "It's not that simple."

  "Then what are you supposed to do?"

  "For now, I eat only when I'm hungry."

  "Are you hungry now?" she asked.

  "Not now."

  "You didn't eat on the flight."

  "Okay," I gave in. "I'll eat whatever you make."

  "I need to go out after dinner," she said. "It's very important, otherwise I wouldn't lose this time with my daughter and granddaughter."

  "We'll be fine."

  I gave Brigitte a bath in the tub while my mother cooked spaghetti for dinner. The cooking smells of the house had changed.

  We ate at the kitchen table, watching through the low windows as a little girl skipped rope under a hanging light in a neighbor's yard.

  Brigitte tried to dig her pacifier into my plate. I cut off a strand of spaghetti and put it in her mouth.

  "After you left home," she said, "the only thing I ate was spaghetti. I would boil it and eat it quickly before I completely lost my appetite. Everything Haitian reminded me of you."

  "It didn't have to be that way."

  "I didn't realize you would call my bluff. I thought you would come back to me, humiliated."

  She got up and cleared the table, leaving my full plate of spaghetti in front of me.

  "I have to go now," she said.

  "Are you still seeing Marc?" I asked.

  "I want him to have dinner with you and your husband soon."

  "So you're still seeing him."

  "Very much seeing him."

  "Are you going to marry him?"

  "I have not even told Monman and Atie about him. At this point in my life, wouldn't it be senseless for me to marry?"

  She grabbed her purse and started for the door.

  "The sooner I go out, the sooner I can come back. I won't be long. If my phone rings, you can pick it up."

  I dialed my home number from the living room phone. The answering machine picked up after the third ring. I heard my own voice, joyfully announcing that "You've reached the Woods residence. For Joseph, Sophie, or Brigitte, please leave a message."

  I hung up quickly, not sure what to say to myself. I called again a few minutes later and left a message.

  "Joseph, I'm back from Haiti. I'm in Brooklyn at my mother's. Please call me."

  I left her number.

  He called back a few minutes later.

  "What's up?" he asked, as though we were just having a casual conversation.

  "I'm okay and you?"

  "Fine, except my wife left me."

  "I am back. I'm at my mother's," I said.

  "Is Brigitte okay?" he asked. "Can I speak to her?"

  Brigitte grabbed the phone with both hands when I put it against her face.

  "Is she okay?" he asked.

  "She's fine."

  "And you?"

  "Good."

  "Sophie, what were you thinking?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "Is this how we're going to handle all our problems? I was afraid something awful had happened to you. I call at all hours and you're never there. When I rush back to Providence all I get is a note. 'Sorry I needed to go somewhere and empty out my head.'"

  "I wasn't away very long."

  "What if your mother hadn't gone back for you? Wouldn't you have stayed longer?"

  "I am back now, aren't I?"

  "And what if you feel like leaving again?" he asked.

  "Can we please talk about that later?"

  "Are you coming home?"

  Yes.

  "To stay?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I don't really know," he said. "What is it? What did I do, Sophie?"

  "You know my problems."

  "The therapy, that's helping you."

  "I don't think it is."

  "You'll have to start over, but you're okay."

  "I don't feel okay."

  "You're a beautiful woman. It's natural. You're desirable. Nothing is wrong with that."

  "But we can't even be together."

  "That's all right. I told you after the baby was born. As long as it takes, I will wait."

  "But, what if I never get over it? What if I never get fixed?"

  "You're not a machine. You can't go to a shop and get fixed. It will happen slowly. I've always told you this, haven't I? I will be there for you."

  "Why didn't you answer the phone the first time?" I asked.

  "I was practicing," he said. "Should I drive down and get you?"

  "I told my mother I'd spend the night here with her. I'll rent a car and drive home tomorrow."

  "All this traveling, isn't it rough on Brigitte?"

  "She's got Caco blood. She's a strong one; she'll be fine."

  "I want you to have the pediatrician check her out the minute you get home."

  "I will."

  "How's your mother?"

  "She wants us all to have dinner with her male friend soon."

  "You mean her boyfriend?"

  "I suppose."

  "I wouldn't have guessed that you went to Haiti. I wouldn't have known at all if it weren't for her. I was going to fly down to get you, but she wanted to find you herself."

  "She didn't find me. I wasn't lost."

  "You know what I mean."

  "I know. My mother can be very overwhelming sometimes."

  "She wanted to see you very badly. Did you work things out?"

  "We talked," I said.

  "Is she home? I'd like to thank her."

  "You can thank her when you see her."

  "And when will I see you?" he asked.

  "Tomorrow."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes."

  "There will be no pressure or anything," he said. "I promise you."

  He wanted to hear Brigitte one more time. I tickled her feet and she laughed on cue.

  "Does she speak Creole?" he asked.

  "She didn't speak very much."

  "She might have said Daddy and I missed it."

  "She didn't."

  "Is she walking on her own?"

  "We've only been away a few days."

  "It seems like ages. Does she still reach for people's food?"

  "She does that."

  "Can I come for you? I'll drive down there right now."

 
; "It's better for me if I find my own way back. I am the one who left. I should come back myself."

  I laid out a comforter in the guest room. I put the baby down on the guest bed, surrounded by four large pillows.

  My mother walked in to check on us when she came home.

  "Is everything all right?" she asked.

  "Fine," I said. "How was your visit?"

  "I went to see Marc." Her voice cracked. "I had something to tell him."

  "Was it good? Was it bad?"

  "Depends on how you look at it. Did you call your husband?"

  "Yes."

  "He will be happy to see you." She cradled the door as though she wasn't sure what to say next. "The baby, she's okay?"

  "Fine," I said.

  "Well, good night."

  Chapter 29

  Breakfast was plentiful: all the things that made me feel most guilty when I ate them—bacon and eggs and extremely sweet café au lait.

  "I thought you would be hungry" she said, "on the road to recovery. How can you resist all this food?"

  "It's not as simple as that."

  I had a piece of toast while my mother gave my daughter her formula. She looked like she hadn't slept much. The eggplant shade came back to her skin, as it always did before she applied her skin bleaching creams.

  "You didn't look very happy when you came home last night," I said.

  "Someone like me, you see me happy, you know I'm

  pretending," she said.

  "Is something wrong?"

  "Brace yourself. I know you are not going to believe what I have to tell you. Sophie, your mother is pregnant."

  "Pregnant?" I stuttered.

  "Marc and I, we have—"

  "You sleep together?"

  She nodded, looking ashamed.

  "How far along are you?" I asked.

  "A month or so."

  "Are you going to marry him?"

  "Jesus Marie Joseph. Am I going to do what?"

  "Doesn't he want to marry you?"

  "Of course he wants to marry me, but look at me. I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts. I don't know when this cancer will come back. I am not an ideal mother."

  Brigitte wrapped her arms around my mother's neck as my mother burped her.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked.

  "That's what I don't know."

  "What does Marc want?"

  "It's my decision. Supremely, it's mine. I am very scared. I don't know. The nightmares, they're coming back."

  "In Dame Marie, it didn't seem like you slept at all."

  "Whenever I'm there, I feel like I sleep with ghosts. The first night I was there, I woke up pounding at my stomach."

  "What are you going to do about the baby?"

  "I don't know."

  "You can marry Marc and have the baby."

  "And repeat my great miracle of being a super mother with you? Some things one should not repeat."

  "Think of it as a second chance."

  "I've had the second chance of my life by being spared death from this cancer. I can't ask too much."

  "Do you love Marc?"

  "I think I love him. Since you left, he stays with me at night and wakes me up when I have the nightmares."

  "You still won't go for help?"

  "I know I should get help, but I am afraid. I am afraid it will become even more real if I see a psychiatrist and he starts telling me to face it. God help me, what if they want to hypnotize me and take me back to that day? I'll kill myself. Marc, he saves my life every night, but I am afraid he gave me this baby that's going to take that life away."

  "You can't say that."

  "The nightmares. I thought they would fade with age, but no, it's like getting raped every night. I can't keep this baby."

  "It must have been much harder then but you kept me."

  "When I was pregnant with you, Manman made me drink all kinds of herbs, vervain, quinine, and verbena, baby poisons. I tried beating my stomach with wooden spoons. I tried to destroy you, but you wouldn't go away."

  She reached over and handed Brigitte back to me.

  "When I was carrying you, you were brave," she said. "You wanted to live. You wanted to taste salt, as my mother would say. You were going to kill me before I killed you."

  - "What are you going to do about this one?"

  "She's a fighter too. She's already fighting me."

  "Do you know that it's a girl?"

  "I don't know. I never want to know. I think it's a girl because you ended up being a girl. I can't go through night after night of the next nine months living these nightmares that same way again."

  "Are you going to take it out?"

  She crossed herself.

  "Jesus Marie Joseph. Every time I even think of that, the nightmares get worse. It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech. Last night after I talked to Marc about letting it go, I felt the skin getting tight on my belly and for a whole minute I couldn't breathe. I had to lie down and say I had changed my mind before I could breathe normally."

  "Have you seen a doctor?"

  "I know, these things, they sound crazy to me too, but maybe that's what it wants, to drive me crazy."

  "You should talk to someone. Someone other than Marc, someone outside the whole situation."

  "I am trying to keep one step ahead of a mental hospital. They would probably put me away thinking that I might hurt both myself and this child."

  "When you and Marc are together, do you have the nightmares then?"

  "I pretend; it is like eating grapefruit. I was tired of being alone. If that's what I had to do to have someone wake me up at night, I would do it. But never in my life did I think I could get pregnant."

  "You didn't use birth control?"

  She laughed through her tears.

  "I would have never imagined we could be having this conversation. Maybe if I spend more time with you, I will want this baby. I would want this child if the nightmares weren't so bad. I can't take them. One morning, I will wake up dead."

  "Don't say that."

  "You will leave today," she said.

  "I can stay longer if you need me."

  "Your husband, I know he will be anxious to see you."

  "I can ask him to drive down and he will stay with us for a couple of days."

  "Non non. I'll deal with this. Marc will come and stay here with me."

  "Why don't you just marry him?"

  "Because you don't marry someone to escape something that's inside your head. One night, I woke up and found myself choking Marc. This is before I knew I was pregnant. One day he'll get tired of it and leave me."

  "What about the baby?"

  "You've asked the same question a million ways; you have a camaraderie with this child. I'll have it. That's what you want to hear."

  "At least this child will know its father."

  "I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next."

  She lent me her new car for the trip to Providence, a guarantee that I would come back to visit her. She tugged at Brigitte's hat and kissed her forehead as I strapped Brigitte into the back seat.

  "You forgive me, don't you?" she asked.

  I leaned over and kissed her stomach.

  "It will be a beautiful baby," I said.

  "Don't call it a baby."

  I kept seeing her face as I drove into the New England landscape. I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.

  After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother's anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it
was something that I had "caught" from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn't both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl.

  I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot, perhaps a bit more than other children. The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.

  Chapter 30

  I pulled into the driveway of our house shortly after noon. Joseph nearly fell down the steps as he rushed towards the car. I screeched to a halt, a few inches shy of crashing into him.

  He tapped on the back window, trying to get Brigitte's attention. She looked a bit disoriented when he raised her out of the seat.

  "And the child's mother, does she get a hug?"

  He pressed his lips down on mine.

  "Bienvenue," he said, "Welcome back."

  He ran up the steps with Brigitte, leaving me to carry my own bag.

  The sun shining through the window colored our wooden floors the hue of Haitian dirt. Joseph threw Brigitte up in the air, both of them laughing as he caught her.

  "Tell Daddy all about Haiti," he said.

  Brigitte pursed her wet lips as though she wanted to.

  "Are you glad to see Daddy?" He propped her up on the sofa.

  "Are you glad to see her mommy?" I asked, sitting next to him.

  "It's nice to see you, but I want to kill you."

  His free hand traveled up and down my blouse.

  "Did you miss me?" I asked.

  "Sometimes."

  The bedroom was messy. There were sheets piled on top of one another and pillows thrown randomly about. I held the sheets up to my face and sniffed them for another woman's scent. The mattress smelled like his socks.

  "You see I need you to put some order in my life," he said.

  "You need a maid," I said.

  He twirled the duck mobile on the baby's crib, which we kept next to our bed.

  "How was your trip?" he asked.

  "My grandmother was preparing her funeral," I said. "It's a thing at home. Death is journey. My grandmother thinks she's at the end of hers."

  "You called it home?" he said. "Haiti."