The Dew Breaker

by Edwidge Danticat

  The sun is setting and my mother has called more than a dozen times when my father finally appears in the hotel room doorway. He looks like a much younger man and appears calm and rested, as if bronzed after a long day at the beach.

  “Too smoky in here,” he says.

  I point to my makeshift ashtray, a Dixie cup filled with tobacco-dyed water and cigarette butts.

  “Ka, let your father talk to you.” He fans the smoky air with his hands, walks over to the bed, and bends down to unlace his sneakers. “Yon ti koze, a little chat.”

  “Where were you?” I feel my eyelids twitching, a nervous reaction I inherited from my epileptic mother. “Why didn’t you leave a note? And Papa, where is the sculpture?”

  “That is why we must chat,” he says, pulling off his sandfilled sneakers and rubbing the soles of his large, calloused feet each in turn. “I have objections.”

  He’s silent for a long time, concentrating on his foot massage, as though he’d been looking forward to it all day.

  “I’d prefer you not sell that statue,” he says at last. Then he turns away, picks up the phone, and calls my mother.

  “I know she called you,” he says to her in Creole. “She panicked. I was just walking, thinking.”

  I hear my mother loudly scolding him, telling him not to leave me again. When he hangs up, he grabs his sneakers and puts them back on.

  “Where’s the sculpture?” My eyes are twitching so badly now I can barely see.

  “We go,” he says. “I take you to it.”

  We walk out to the parking lot, where the hotel sprinkler is once more at work, spouting water onto the grass and hedges like centrifugal rain. The streetlights are on now, looking brighter and brighter as the dusk deepens around them. New hotel guests are arriving. Others are leaving for dinner, talking loudly as they walk to their cars.

  As my father maneuvers our car out of the parking lot, I tell myself that he might be ill, mentally ill, even though I’d never detected any signs of it before, beyond his prison nightmares.

  When I was eight years old and my father had the measles for the first time in his life, I overheard him say to a customer on the phone, “Maybe serious. Doctor tell me, at my age, measles can kill.”

  This was the first time I realized that my father could die. I looked up the word “kill” in every dictionary and encyclopedia at school, trying to understand what it really meant, that my father could be eradicated from my life.

  My father stops the car on the side of the highway near a man-made lake, one of those marvels of the modern tropical city, with curved stone benches surrounding a stagnant body of water. There’s scant light to see by except a half-moon. Stomping the well-manicured grass, my father heads toward one of the benches. I sit down next to him, letting my hands dangle between my legs.

  Here I am a little girl again, on some outing with my father, like his trips to the botanic garden or the zoo or the Egyptian statues at the museum. Again, I’m there simply because he wants me to be. I knew I was supposed to learn something from these childhood outings, but it took me years to realize that ultimately my father was doing his best to be like other fathers, to share as much of himself with me as he could.

  I glance over at the lake. It’s muddy and dark, and there are some very large pink fishes bobbing back and forth near the surface, looking as though they want to leap out and trade places with us.

  “Is this where the sculpture is?” I ask.

  “In the water,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say calmly. But I know I’m already defeated. I know the piece is already lost. The cracks have probably taken in so much water that the wood has split into several chunks and plunged to the bottom. All I can think of saying is something glib, something I’m not even sure my father will understand.

  “Please know this about yourself,” I say. “You’re a very harsh critic.”

  My father attempts to smother a smile. He scratches his chin and the scar on the side of his face, but says nothing. In this light the usually chiseled and embossed-looking scar appears deeper than usual, yet somehow less threatening, like a dimple that’s spread out too far.

  Anger is a wasted emotion, I’ve always thought. My parents would complain to each other about unjust politics in New York, but they never got angry at my grades, at all the Cs I got in everything but art classes, at my not eating my vegetables or occasionally vomiting my daily spoonful of cod-liver oil. Ordinary anger, I’ve always thought, is useless. But now I’m deeply angry. I want to hit my father, beat the craziness out of his head.

  “Ka,” he says, “I tell you why I named you Ka.”

  Yes, he’d told me, many, many times before. Now does not seem like a good time to remind me, but maybe he’s hoping it will calm me, keep me from hating him for the rest of my life.

  “Your mother not like the name at all,” he says. “She say everybody tease you, people take pleasure repeating your name, calling you Kaka, Kaka, Kaka.”

  This too I had heard before.

  “Okay,” I interrupt him with a quick wave of my hands. “I’ve got it.”

  “I call you Ka,” he says, “because in Egyptian world—”

  A ka is a double of the body, I want to complete the sentence for him—the body’s companion through life and after life. It guides the body through the kingdom of the dead. That’s what I tell my students when I overhear them referring to me as Teacher Kaka.

  “You see, ka is like soul,” my father now says. “In Haiti is what we call good angel, ti bon anj. When you born, I look at your face, I think, here is my ka, my good angel.”

  I’m softening a bit. Hearing my father call me his good angel is the point at which I often stop being apathetic.

  “I say rest in Creole,” he prefaces, “because my tongue too heavy in English to say things like this, especially older things.”

  “Fine,” I reply defiantly in English.

  “Ka,” he continues in Creole, “when I first saw your statue, I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me into the other world.”

  “Like the Ancient Egyptians,” I continue in English.

  He smiles, grateful, I think, that in spite of everything, I can still appreciate his passions.

  “Ka,” he says, “when I read to you, with my very bad accent, from The Book of the Dead, do you remember how I made you read some chapters to me too?”

  But this recollection is harder for me to embrace. I had been terribly bored by The Book of the Dead. The images of dead hearts being placed on scales and souls traveling aimlessly down fiery underground rivers had given me my own nightmares. It had seemed selfish of him not to ask me what I wanted to listen to before going to bed, what I wanted to read and have read to me. But since he’d recovered from the measles and hadn’t died as we’d both feared, I’d vowed to myself to always tolerate, even indulge him, letting him take me places I didn’t enjoy and read me things I cared nothing about, simply to witness the joy they gave him, the kind of bliss that might keep a dying person alive. But maybe he wasn’t going to be alive for long. Maybe this is what this outing is about. Perhaps my “statue,” as he called it, is a sacrificial offering, the final one that he and I would make together before he was gone.

  “Are you dying?” I ask my father. It’s the one explanation that would make what he’s done seem insignificant or even logical. “Are you ill? Are you going to die?”

  What would I do now, if this were true? I’d find him the best doctor, move back home with him and my mother. I’d get a serious job, find a boyfriend, and get married, and I’d never complain again about his having dumped my sculpture in the lake.

  Like me, my father tends to be silent a moment too long during an important conversation and then say too much when less should be said. I listen to the wailing of crickets and cicadas, though I can’t tell where they’re coming from. There’s the highway, and the cars racing by, the half-moon, the lake dug up from the depths of the ground—with my sculpture now
at the bottom of it, the allée of royal palms whose shadows intermingle with the giant fishes on the surface of that lake, and there is me and my father.

  “Do you recall the judgment of the dead,” my father speaks up at last, “when the heart of a person is put on a scale? If it’s heavy, the heart, then this person cannot enter the other world.”

  It is a testament to my upbringing, and perhaps the Kaka and good angel story has something to do with this as well, that I remain silent now, at this particular time.

  “I don’t deserve a statue,” my father says. But at this very instant he does look like one, like the Madonna of humility, contemplating her losses in the dust, or an Ancient Egyptian funerary priest, kneeling with his hands prayer-fully folded on his lap.

  “Ka,” he says, “when I took you to the Brooklyn Museum, I would stand there for hours admiring them. But all you noticed was how there were pieces missing from them, eyes, noses, legs, sometimes even heads. You always noticed more what was not there than what was.”

  Of course, this way of looking at things was why I ultimately began sculpting in the first place, to make statues that would amaze my father even more than these ancient relics.

  “Ka, I am like one of those statues,” he says.

  “An Ancient Egyptian?” I hear echoes of my loud, derisive laugh only after I’ve been laughing for a while. It’s the only weapon I have now, the only way I know to take my revenge on my father.

  “Don’t do that,” he says, frowning, irritated, almost shouting over my laughter. “Why do that? If you are mad, let yourself be mad. Why do you always laugh like a clown when you are angry?”

  I tend to wave my hands about wildly when I laugh, but I don’t notice I’m doing that now until he reaches over to grab them. I quickly move them away, but he ends up catching my right wrist, the same wrist Officer Bo had stroked earlier to make me shut up. My father holds on to it so tightly now that I feel his fingers crushing the bone, almost splitting it apart, and I can’t laugh anymore.

  “Let go,” I say, and he releases my wrist quickly. He looks down at his own fingers, then lowers his hand to his lap.

  My wrist is still throbbing. I keep stroking it to relieve some of the pain. It’s the ache there that makes me want to cry more than anything, not so much this sudden, uncharacteristic flash of anger from my father.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I did not want to hurt you. I did not want to hurt anyone.”

  I keep rubbing my wrist, hoping he’ll feel even sorrier, even guiltier for grabbing me so hard, but even more for throwing away my work.

  “Ka, I don’t deserve a statue,” he says again, this time much more slowly, “not a whole one, at least. You see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.”

  I stop stroking my wrist, sensing something coming that might hurt much more. He’s silent again. I don’t want to prod him, feed him any cues, urge him to speak, but finally I get tired of the silence and feel I have no choice but to ask, “What are you talking about?”

  I immediately regret the question. Is he going to explain why he and my mother have no close friends, why they’ve never had anyone over to the house, why they never speak of any relatives in Haiti or anywhere else, or have never returned there or, even after I learned Creole from them, have never taught me anything else about the country beyond what I could find out on my own, on the television, in newspapers, in books? Is he about to tell me why Manman is so pious? Why she goes to daily Mass? I am not sure I want to know anything more than the little they’ve chosen to share with me all these years, but it is clear to me that he needs to tell me, has been trying to for a long time.

  “We have a proverb,” he continues. “One day for the hunter, one day for the prey. Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.”

  Each word is now hard-won as it leaves my father’s mouth, balanced like those hearts on the Ancient Egyptian scales.

  “Ka, I was never in prison,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say, sounding like I am fourteen again, chanting from what my mother used to call the meaningless adolescent chorus, just to sound like everyone else my age.

  “I was working in the prison,” my father says. And I decide not to interrupt him again until he’s done.

  Stranded in the middle of this speech now, he has to go on. “It was one of the prisoners inside the prison who cut my face in this way,” he says.

  My father now points to the long, pitted scar on his right cheek. I am so used to his hands covering it up that this new purposeful motion toward it seems dramatic and extreme, almost like raising a veil.

  “This man who cut my face,” he continues, “I shot and killed him, like I killed many people.”

  I’m amazed that he managed to say all of this in one breath, like a monologue. I wish I too had had some rehearsal time, a chance to have learned what to say in response.

  There is no time yet, no space in my brain to allow for whatever my mother might have to confess. Was she huntress or prey? A thirty-year-plus disciple of my father’s coercive persuasion? She’d kept to herself even more than he had, like someone who was nurturing a great pain that she could never speak about. Yet she had done her best to be a good mother to me, taking charge of feeding and clothing me and making sure my hair was always combed, leaving only what she must have considered my intellectual development to my father.

  When I was younger, she’d taken me to Mass with her on Sundays. Was I supposed to have been praying for my father all that time, the father who was the hunter and not the prey?

  I think back to “The Negative Confession” ritual from The Book of the Dead, a ceremony that was supposed to take place before the weighing of hearts, giving the dead a chance to affirm that they’d done only good things in their lifetime. It was one of the chapters my father read to me most often. Now he was telling me I should have heard something beyond what he was reading. I should have removed the negatives.

  “I am not a violent man,” he had read. “I have made no one weep. I have never been angry without cause. I have never uttered any lies. I have never slain any men or women. I have done no evil.”

  And just so I will be absolutely certain of what I’d heard, I ask my father, “And those nightmares you were always having, what were they?”

  “Of what I,” he says, “your father, did to others.” Another image of my mother now fills my head, of her as a young woman, a woman my age, taking my father in her arms. At what point did she decide that she loved him? When did she know that she was supposed to have despised him?

  “Does Manman know?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. “I explained, after you were born.”

  I am the one who drives the short distance back to the hotel. The ride seems drawn out; the cars in front of us appear to be dawdling. I honk impatiently, even when everyone except me is driving at a normal speed. My father is silent, not even telling me, as he has always done whenever he’s been my passenger, to calm down, to be careful, to take my time.

  As we are pulling into the hotel parking lot, I realize that I haven’t notified Officer Bo and Manager Salinas that my father has been found. I decide that I will call them from my room. Then, before we leave the car, my father says, “Ka, no matter what, I’m still your father, still your mother’s husband. I would never do these things now.”

  And this to me is as meaningful a declaration as his other confession. It was my first inkling that maybe my father was wrong in his own representation of his former life, that maybe his past offered more choices than being either hunter or prey.

  When we get back to the hotel room, I find messages from both Officer Bo and Manager Salinas. Their shifts are over, but I leave word informing them that my father has returned.

  While I’m on the phone, my father slips into the bathroom and runs the shower at full force. He is not humming.

  When it seems he’s never coming out, I call my mother at home in Brooklyn.

  “Manman, how do yo
u love him?” I whisper into the phone.

  My mother is clicking her tongue and tapping her fingers against the mouthpiece again. Her soft tone makes me think I have awakened her from her sleep.

  “He tell you?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Everything?”

  “Is there more?”

  “What he told you he want to tell you for long time,” she says, “you, his good angel.”

  It has always amazed me how much my mother and father echo each other, in their speech, their actions, even in their businesses. I wonder how much more alike they could possibly be. But why shouldn’t they be alike? Like all parents, they were a society of two, sharing a series of private codes and associations, a past that even if I’d been born in the country of their birth, I still wouldn’t have known, couldn’t have known, thoroughly. I was a part of them. Some might say I belonged to them. But I wasn’t them.

  “I don’t know, Ka.” My mother is whispering now, as though there’s a chance she might also be overheard by my father. “You and me, we save him. When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root.”

  As my mother is speaking, this feeling comes over me that I sometimes have when I’m carving, this sensation that my hands don’t belong to me at all, that something else besides my brain and muscles is moving my fingers, something bigger and stronger than myself, an invisible puppetmaster over whom I have no control. I feel as though it’s this same puppetmaster that now forces me to lower the phone and hang up, in mid conversation, on my mother.

  As soon as I put the phone down, I tell myself that I could continue this particular conversation at will, in a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, even a few years. Whenever I’m ready.

  My father walks back into the room, his thinning hair wet, his pajamas on. My mother does not call me back. Somehow she must know that she has betrayed me by not sharing my confusion and, on some level, my feeling that my life could have gone on fine without my knowing these types of things about my father.