The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  The first afternoon that they found themselves alone in the apartment, Amélie allowed Marie to try on her shoes.

  “How you know Jean-Alexi so good?” Amélie asked.

  “From home. We shared time together.”

  “You sweet on him?”

  Marie ignored the question by looking at the shoes. She had never before worn such things—thin, shiny straps that cut across the toe, a strap that choked the ankle, and a four-inch heel as thin and sharp as a dagger. She walked around the living room feeling like a giant, tripping forward as if she were on stilts.

  The front door rattled, and Jean-Alexi walked in, followed by the two from the van, Zac and Lolo, carrying pizza boxes. When Jean-Alexi saw Marie, his eyebrows shot up.

  “What you think, brothers? She take to them shoes like fish to water.”

  Quickly, Marie sat to take them off, but he stopped her. “Keep walking. Get a hang of those things.”

  Amélie made a face and went to the bedroom, slamming the door.

  Jean-Alexi moved around the room on his toes, like a dancer, giving her advice on how to swing out her legs from the hip so that her stride would be like that of Amélie, who moved smooth as a cat. Starved, Marie basked in his attention.

  “Tomorrow I take you shopping for some of your own girl stuff.”

  “I don’t have money.”

  “Don’t you worry. Jean-Alexi will take care.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, he came back from his business appointments early and took her downtown, buying her lunch at a Jamaican restaurant in an alley. She ate jerked pork and dirty rice and drank cold beer, and she thought that her American life had finally started.

  “Why don’t we eat at Haitian restaurant?” she asked.

  “They all in bad neighborhoods. Too, the owner here owes me monies.”

  He watched her lips as she wiped them with a napkin, then leaned in quick and gave her a kiss. He tasted of cigarettes, but she didn’t care because it was a kiss she wanted, not one she was paid for.

  “So you remember our time together?” she asked.

  “I know I had a sweet night with you.”

  “But you don’t remember me on the beach. I was a little thing, and you said I was too young and small.”

  He leaned over and squeezed her breast as if it were a peach. “You tête just right for me now.”

  Marie swallowed her disappointment.

  Jean-Alexi shook his leg as if it were on fire. “That years ago now. I’m a whole other person now.”

  She cleared her throat for the speech she had been practicing: Maman’s dream for her to work someplace quiet, someplace filled with books. She had decided on a library, although she wasn’t sure what one did there. Maman’s idea of success was doing something that didn’t give you calluses on your hands. “I need to find a job. I want to go to school.”

  “All in good times. You don’t need that now. Soon I going to have good businesses. You work in family place.”

  “I’m not family.”

  Now he slung his arm across her shoulders as they walked and nibbled on her ear. “Might be, nuh? You liked being with me, didn’t you?”

  Jean-Alexi took her to a clothing store that played loud music, the fast, thumping kind foreigners danced to in nightclubs in Pétionville, and a girl with a round mahogany face framed by long platinum hair came up to Jean-Alexi and gave him a wet kiss on the mouth. She kept her wolf eyes on him, and Marie guessed they’d been lovers, but now he was all business and told her to find Marie something real pretty.

  “One of your new girls?” the women asked.

  “I’m his girlfriend,” Marie said, and they both laughed at her.

  * * *

  When they got back home, Lolo and Zac were eating ribs out of an aluminum tray and watching basketball on the TV in the living room.

  “What should we call her?” Jean-Alexi asked.

  “Why call me anything but my name?”

  The Two Fools, which name Amélie and Marie used behind their backs, were stoned. They threw their dirty dishes in the sink for the girls to clean as if they were slaves. Now the fools giggled and smirked while Jean-Alexi framed Marie between his fingers as if he were going to star her in a picture.

  “You rename something to give it power,” he said, but Marie knew from her Maman one renamed to take power. “You are my lead lady. How about Maleva?” he said, plucking a rib from the tray.

  “I don’t want my name changed,” she said, but he didn’t bother to hear. When she reached for a rib, he slapped her hand away.

  “Got to watch that figure, girl.”

  The fools laughed and stamped their feet. “Wi, wi. Yes, yes.”

  * * *

  Marie took her shopping bags and went into the bedroom, intending to lie down for a nap and wait for Amélie to come home for dinner. She worried about this given name, worried Jean-Alexi might try obeah, try to take her soul away. When he came in and insisted she dress in the new clothes and they go out, she told him she was tired.

  His face grew mean with displeasure. “How you going to get a job and go to school when you’re so lazy? How are you going to be my lady?”

  So she put on the white halter dress and the shoes as tipsy high as Amélie’s. Jean-Alexi looked at her critically and made her put on more mascara and lipstick, then handed her some silver hoop earrings that belonged to another girl.

  “That’s not mine.”

  “None of this belongs to any of you tifi, get it? Jean-Alexi’s property.”

  Marie did not ask him questions because she didn’t want someone who held her future to think that she didn’t trust him. Gossip among the girls was Jean-Alexi wanted her to be his partner. When young ones were brought in, he took Marie to the kitchen and showed her how to grind up little white pills and mix them in juice to calm the girls down. Best way to ease them into the business with the least fuss. Too, she felt sorry for these girls, not introduced to the life before like she was. She cooked up big pots of spaghetti, trays of chicken and rice, the way Maman had taught her, so that they might feel some comfort.

  Surely he didn’t see her like the other girls. They had a bond from the island. Maybe he was only an island cousin, which meant nothing more than someone you knew from the island, but he knew she was Leta’s child. Maybe he was wanting to settle down with just one, and she could be that for him. He told her over and over she was his bijou, treasure.

  * * *

  He said he wanted to celebrate, and they pulled into a hotel parking lot by the airport. Marie did not take the bait of asking, celebrate what? Getting out, she felt the hot wash of a plane’s wind as it passed low overhead to land. The bar was dark after coming in from the blinding afternoon sun. The blue lights overhead made soothing pools along the tables. Maybe this was not such a bad place after all. But the air had a sour, refrigerated smell—she shivered in the thin, new dress. Would it be so bad to be the girl behind the counter, all cool and dressed pretty, serving rainbow-colored drinks to people?

  Jean-Alexi broke into a large smile—a perfect row of white, snapping teeth—and put his hand on the small of Marie’s back as he steered her through empty tables toward one occupied by a middle-aged man. Under his breath, Jean-Alexi said this man was going to help him get a liquor license. The man seemed squeezed into the suit he wore, rolls of fat overflowing the collar of his shirt. His baldness and full cheeks gave him the look of a baby, but when he looked up at her, there was no smile, no kindness. The shadows around his eyes were cruel, and Marie stepped back as if he’d growled.

  “Don’t be afraid of César.” Jean-Alexi laughed. He jived and bobbed back and forth, and she saw that he was deferential and weak in front of this man. The transformation of Jean-Alexi from a minor prince of the slums to this depressed her.

  Perhaps César was the owner of the hotel, or the manager of the bar. Maybe Jean-Alexi would get her work as a maid, a waitress, a bartender? But the table in front of Césa
r was empty except for a glass that held a thumb’s worth of amber liquid. No, probably she was César’s business that day.

  “This is fresh Maleva that I promised you,” Jean-Alexi said, bending to give him a handshake and private words.

  Marie turned and ran. She heard a name called out, but kept running, only later recognizing it was her newly christened one. A name she would not be using. She stood by the van until her breath came steady again, her heartbeat slowed. Goose bumps gave way to sweat in the heat. No one chased after her. After a while her feet hurt from standing in the heels, and she pulled off her shoes and stood barefoot on the hot asphalt.

  After half an hour, Jean-Alexi, all bull confidence, strolled out as if he had enjoyed the visit with his friend as intended. He smiled at her and waved at the passenger door.

  “Get in, get in.”

  Watching the cars flying by on the interstate, the lights from the city beyond, the glowing windows of the hotel above, Marie understood she did not know another human being there besides him. She had no choice but to climb inside.

  “You’re not fou, mad, at me?” she asked.

  “Surprise, surprise. He liked that little act. Makes it more believable that you’re some virgin off the island. He say rest up a few days, and he’ll pay double.”

  “You do this to me!” she screamed. “Yon fanmi! Leta’s girl.”

  “Enouf.”

  “I’ll tell Uncle Thibant what you do.”

  “From what I hear, this is better than spreading your legs in chicken coops the way you did back home. Thibant sent you over on credit. You work off that boat ride, roof, and eats on your back.”

  “Non!”

  “Listen to me, we’re all ‘cousins’ over here. Just ’cause you and me bed don’t mean nothing if you can’t earn food in your mouth.”

  They drove in silence.

  Gentle Thibant cheated her after all. Sent her to a different corner of hell, collect. Marie looked out the window at the miles of city that she didn’t know. “I thought you liked me.”

  He said nothing.

  “I can clean for you.”

  “Don’t need no maid.”

  “I take care of the girls, dope them up for you. They trust me. I run drugs—no one expect a pretty little thing like me, right? Work off the debt slow.”

  “Don’t need mules,” he said.

  “I want to work in library.”

  Jean-Alexi reached his arm so that Marie thought he was going to hit her, but he grabbed behind at a scrap of newspaper. “Read this,” he said, a dare, jabbing his finger on the print. When she began to read aloud, he slapped it out of her hand. “Reading a dime a dozen here.”

  Marie dragged up the stairs behind him, went alone to the bathroom. She took off the dress and shoes, careful because they were not hers, and sat on the edge of the bathtub in her underwear.

  The tub and the sink were ringed in filth. Trash overflowed with women’s personal. Maman had taught her cleanliness and modesty. Even in the worst times, she always turned away to dress, even if a man had ripped the clothes off so that the buttons scattered across the floor like teeth. She stared at the makeup piled on the shelves, the lotions and curlers and other fake the girls used to be beautiful. This was the life offered to her, the same life she’d tried to escape. Look at what Jean-Alexi had become. If she took it, how long before a better one offered itself? When would what she did finally become who she was?

  She walked out of the bathroom wearing the clothes she had arrived in. She handed Jean-Alexi the dress and shoes. “I’m going.”

  His chin went up and down rapidly, biting down on something nasty. He nodded. “Then.”

  She took her bag of possessions to the front door, but now he shot up and followed her.

  “I didn’t even fuck you to get mwen lajan, my money, back. Just suck me off then. At least there’s no chance of a idiot coming out nine months from now.”

  “Non.”

  “Don’t want to hurt you.” He banged his fist on the wall behind her head.

  She looked at him then, but no longer saw him. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  He howled but let her walk away, down the stairs. They both knew that she had reached the point where she had nothing left to lose, and he had no chance bargaining that.

  “You think you’re something special, but you’ll find out. It’s bad out there, fi. You’ll come back soon, unless you mouri,” he yelled out the window.

  “Coming back won’t happen.”

  “I be here when you’re begging. Price go way up then,” he screamed down the block at her retreating back. Did he sense he might be losing someone true? Non.

  When she could no longer hear his shouts, she sat on the ground and shook, as if she had just scraped by with her life. She wasn’t brave enough for her own actions.

  After a time, Marie heard footsteps. If it had been Jean-Alexi, she might have gone back, but it was Amélie with another girl.

  “Jean-Alexi kick you out?”

  She nodded. The whole story in her eyes.

  “I work at this place before here.” Amélie scratched around in her purse, then grabbed a piece of newspaper off the ground. “It’s bad, but they don’t ask questions. My sister, Coca, worked there. I don’t know anymore. Go early. Early bird gets the poison. You have someplace to sleep?”

  Marie shook her head.

  “Be careful. Careful out here. Not like back home.” Amélie took her aside. “If you see Coca, tell her I work as a model in a department store downtown, okay? This is just temporary, don’t want them to worry.” She emptied a few crumpled bills from her wallet into Marie’s hand. “What do you have?” Amélie barked at the other girl, who made a face, but added a few more. “It’s all I can.” With that, they walked away.

  * * *

  Marie found the building when the sky was still dark. Many hours from Jean-Alexi’s apartment, and she had spent the whole night in slow movement toward it, like a ship tacking in the ocean, asking for directions that were more often than not wrong. Nobody in this city of foreigners seemed to know where they were. That night they were all lost. Under the sickly orange glow of streetlights, the concrete building appeared squat and defeated and did not seem promising of any kind of future.

  She sat against the chain-link fence, her bag in her lap, and fell asleep. She woke to a gentle kick on her thigh and looked up into the not-unkind face of a young Hispanic man. Marie showed him the address and said, “Amélie,” but when she got no look of recognition, she said, “Coca,” and he nodded.

  Inside was a jail, small cages packed tight with dogs. The dogs barked and howled, their noises echoing and amplified against the concrete floor and walls until she felt a humming inside her head as if it would split open. The overwhelming smell of urine and kaka gagged her.

  The man, Jorge, handed her earplugs and a stained plastic apron. The job was to shovel out the cages, then hose down the floor and the dogs. Afterward, she filled the metal bowls with dry food. The dogs cowered in their cages, the muscles in their hind legs twitching with fear, but when she unlocked the doors, they bared their teeth and growled.

  By noon Marie finished and was handed a twenty-dollar bill and a stale sandwich. As she stood eating in the shade of a coral tree because it reminded her of home, a pretty girl walked in. She hung on the arm of a short white man with tattoos down both arms. His teeth, brown and crooked, were ringed in gold. Marie saw the girl’s resemblance to Amélie, except this girl did not have the fine bones and clear skin of her sister.

  “Coca?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and Marie saw the polite island ways were not followed here.

  “I am zanmi of Amélie.”

  Now she smiled. It was only this place that made her wary. “How is Amie?”

  “She told me to come here.”

  Her boyfriend ignored them. He picked his teeth, then swatted Coca on the behind. “Come on. You have a paycheck to earn.”

  When h
e had gone inside, Coca bent her head to Marie. “You in trouble?”

  “What is this place?”

  Coca lit a cigarette, and Marie admired her red-painted nails. “They steal dogs, pick them off the street. Even pretend to adopt them, but the shelters are starting to catch on. They sell them to the clinics. Cram lipstick in their eyes.” She laughed.

  Marie looked back into the cages.

  “It’s travay, work.” Coca shrugged.

  “You find me somewhere to sleep?”

  “Our family is close by. Go introduce yourself to Papa. Use Amélie’s bed.”

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, Marie worked the morning shift from five till noon. Coca worked in the front office, but Marie was buried in the back. After a while, she got to know the dogs individually: this one would calm down once she entered his cage and another could be coaxed with a bit of food. She took out her earplugs now because she recognized the different barks, they were distinct voices, and she knew their cause and no longer found the noise frightening.

  A reddish-gold pit bull mix wagged her tail each time Marie came into her cage, and she stole an extra half cup of food for the dog every morning so that her ribs wouldn’t poke out so sharply against her skin. After the first week, the dog let Marie rub her ears, one ear shorter and frayed, probably from a dogfight. Under her breath she took to calling her Rolex, the most precious thing she could think of in this new country.

  The workers were forbidden to interact with the dogs and were supposed to treat them as things. Jorge said they were no different from cattle in the stockyards, but Marie did not see the point of it. It seemed to her that especially the condemned were entitled to any little kindness so maybe their last memory of this earth and their jailers was not so damning. Why else did the executioner allow a last meal, or a cigarette? The man in the pink house, if he had stayed kind and loyal, he could have used Marie for life; she didn’t know better. Sweet with salt; the smallest bit of love with hate. That’s the way one made a true slave.