Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

  The next morning the sun seemed to rise even earlier than usual, as if in defiance of all that had taken place the night before. Flore looked through a crack in the door and saw him and his father emerge from the orchid nursery by the gazebo in the middle of the garden. A hummingbird flew over the pummeled rosebushes, and Max Junior raised his fingers, as if to grab the minute wings. Both men looked solemn and stone-faced, their eyes focused on the hail-crushed flowers, as they inspected the storm damage.

  While they were in the garden, Flore walked out of the house and took a taxi to Cité Pendue. The traffic, detoured from flooded areas, crawled, her bones throbbing with every lurch and sway of the car.

  When she got to her mother’s house, her mother was not there.

  She opened the door and waited inside. She was feeling too dirty to sit on her mother’s plastic-covered chairs. Instead she sat on the cool cement floor.

  Her mother was a short but robust woman. When she finally walked in, she was carrying on top of her head a large wicker basket filled with aluminum bowls and cups that she used to sell breakfast foods at the market. As she approached Flore, her mother’s lips were rounded as though she were whistling.

  When her mother got close enough, Flore helped her mother lower the basket from her head and place it on the floor. Before Flore could say anything, her mother made her stoop down again and, looking at Flore’s tear-swollen face, she traced her fingers over Flore’s cheek.

  “If you’re home for good,” her mother said, “I don’t know how we’ll get by.”

  Flore pulled herself up, reached into her dress pocket, and handed her mother the month’s salary that she’d hoped to use for her escape. Then she returned to the Ardins that afternoon, in time to cook their supper.

  “You mean to tell me you went back there, back to the Ardins?” Louise finally interrupted Flore now as they taped her show.

  Louise was dressed that morning in one of her signature A-line mauve dresses, her hair pulled back tightly, her chin pointed, her eyes narrowed, focused. She was determined to extract the entire story from Flore, along with every detail that she considered necessary. “Di mwen,” she said. “Tell me, tell everyone why you went back to the Ardins that afternoon. But first, a commercial break.”

  There were no commercials played during the actual taping. They waited just a few minutes as Louise took a sip of water from one of the two glasses in front of them, then said to Flore, “Relax—you’re doing well.”

  Flore raised her eyes from her intertwined fingers and looked around the studio, a square room not unlike the one she had slept in at Max Senior’s. On the triangular table were two microphones and the water glasses, Louise’s now only half full. Louise had bypassed the headphones, offering the ones she usually used to Flore’s son.

  Pamaxime was sitting underneath the table at his mother’s feet, taking turns doodling with a pencil and pad Louise had given him and quietly playing a game on Flore’s cell phone. Flore’s eyes traveled between her son’s headphone-covered ears and the man sitting at the large control board on the other side of the glass, but she made every effort to avoid looking at Louise George, the fierce but tiny hostess of the program.

  Flore now picked up the glass of water that was meant for her and took a sip from it. She had called the station and asked for Louise George as soon as she’d learned from Max Senior that his son was coming home and that he wanted to meet the boy.

  This was the premise of these personal interviews, Louise had explained to her—you are talking about one moment that changed your life. A moment that made everything that had come before it seem meaningless. A moment that had transformed you inside and out. That night in the maid’s room with Max Junior on top of her had been that moment for Flore. Beyond that, Louise had explained, you had to name names, and in this particular case the names had to be repeated as often as possible. Those whose names were mentioned on the program, those who were accused, could always come on her show the following week to defend themselves.

  Flore initially had no trouble with the naming, but she was now finding it difficult to go on with the rest of her story. Even though Louise had allowed her to record the show early in the morning—to be aired later that evening and a few more times during the following week—Flore could not forget that her son was right there, sitting at both their feet, under the table, and although he was wearing headphones, Pamaxime might still be able to hear.

  “These commercial breaks take up a big chunk of the hour,” Louise said as she prepared to start again. “And they are long. But what can you do?”

  The man at the control board on the other side of the glass signaled to them to continue.

  “Go on, tell me.” Louise moved even closer now, their cheeks almost touching. “Tell me what happened next,” she urged.

  “I became pregnant with his baby,” Flore continued in a steely voice that had long replaced the girlish voice she’d once had, the sound of which she could no longer remember.

  This interview was good preparation for what was coming, Flore thought, for seeing Max Junior later that same morning. She wanted her son to see him too, if only this one time. Flore was curious to experience for herself how she would hold up in front of Max Junior. There would be no more tears, though. If anything, she would now do everything possible to drive him and his father to tears, with this show. Thankfully, she and Louise seemed to have similar goals.

  “By his baby, you mean Maxime Ardin, Jr.’s baby?” Louise pressed her.

  Flore nodded.

  “This is not television,” Louise said. “You have to speak.”

  These little remarks in the middle of a painful story always made people in the listening audience laugh. Sometimes, while sitting in her house writing, on those nights that her show aired, Louise could hear laughter erupt from an entire row of houses. She never even had to turn on her own radio. She could hear the show blasting simultaneously from dozens of houses, and during those moments she felt she was the most powerful person in town. Her only regret was that due to the station’s limited capacities, the show aired only in Ville Rose and a few surrounding towns, not all over the country.

  “Yes,” Flore continued, as if having paused for the expected laughter from the television remark.

  Louise turned dead serious again. “I still don’t understand why you went back. Why would you go back there after something like this had been done to you?”

  The words had not come out as clearly as Flore had hoped. She wanted to explain how her mind had been all mixed up that night after he had appeared in her room, how she hadn’t been quite sure whether or not she was dreaming.

  “Why would you go back?” Louise insisted.

  “I could not lose my job” was all that came out now.

  “Are those the only choices you had?” Louise asked her. “Couldn’t you have gone to the commissariat and filed a complaint?”

  Somewhere in the audience, Louise knew, someone would chuckle. Probably many would. What good would it have done to have filed a police complaint against Max Senior’s son? A few dollars to some low- or high-level police official would get Max Junior off. Case in point, one of Max Senior’s best friends was the current mayor.

  The audience would be aware that Louise was playing devil’s advocate, and when Louise played devil’s advocate the listeners enjoyed the show even more.

  Flore answered the question anyway. “Tell me, how many people in my situation get justice?”

  Louise scratched her gaunt chin and paused to ponder this. She moaned so that the audience might hear and take part in her contemplation.

  “Couldn’t you have found another job?”

  “I am—was—paying,” Flore said, “the rent for my mother’s house.”

  “I’m sure your mother understood that you were in a bad situation and would have liked for you to get out,” Louise countered.

  Flore’s feet jerked so fast that the sound of her knees hitting the table could be heard w
hen the show aired. “If that is the way you want to see it,” she said.

  Just then her son’s hands brushed against her calf. When she looked down, she saw the back of his neck and his hands as he placed his pencil to the pad Louise had given him to start his drawing.

  “When did you realize that you had become pregnant?” Louise continued.

  “I realized I was pregnant a few weeks later, when I started vomiting,” Flore said. She looked down and made sure the headphones were tightly wrapped around her son’s ears, then added, “The vomiting was so bad that I sometimes vomited in the food I was preparing for them.”

  Louise would be able to feel that question pulse through her listeners’ minds later on. She anticipated the collective gasp that would rise all over town. Has my servant been vomiting in my dinners? some would ask themselves.

  They paused for another commercial break. Louise was smiling, the dark lines between her teeth showing. Flore looked down to check on her son, who seemed actively engaged in both doodling on Louise’s pad and tapping the keys on the cell phone very softly, as he had been admonished not to do. Flore couldn’t see what her son had drawn on the page because the phone and his hands were covering it.

  When they started again, Louise asked, “Who did you first tell that you were pregnant?”

  “I told the father first,” Flore continued.

  “You mean not your son’s father. You mean Maxime Ardin, Sr?” Louise asked.

  “Yes,” Flore answered.

  “The owner and headmaster of École Ardin?”

  “Li menm.”

  “You told him first?”

  “Wi.”

  “And tell me, what did Maxime Ardin, Sr., say when you told him?”

  “He said he couldn’t know that this was his son’s child. Then he gave me two thousand dollars American from him and his wife, to disappear, to go away.”

  “Two thousand dollars U.S., which converts into sixteen thousand dollars Haitian or eighty thousand gourdes, from the father who’s here and the mother who’s in Miami, to disappear. Is that the going rate?” Louise let out a purposefully forceful laugh to make her point.

  So much for Max Senior’s righteous indignation. It was just like him to make up his own rules for everything. She should have slapped him back after he’d made that woman slap her.

  Louise imagined heads nodding all over town when her audience heard about the two thousand American dollars. That wasn’t so bad, some might mutter. Another family might have just thrown her out and not given her anything at all.

  “I took that money and I did leave,” Flore went on. “I went to Port-au-Prince to live with one of my mother’s cousins, and while waiting for my son to be born, I started a business.”

  Beauty had always fascinated Flore. She found it as resilient as wozo, the colorful weeds and wildflowers that grew, despite being regularly trampled, in the muck beside rivers and back roads. She liked to see women perfectly coiffed and garbed in elegant-looking, even if cheap, dresses. She believed that even the poorest and unhappiest of women could fight heartache with beauty, with bright or muted kerchiefs, head wraps, or hats, relaxed or braided hair, wigs, and talcum-powdered necks. Even while sitting across from Louise, Flore thought that Louise could look prettier if she did more than pull back her hair, which made her face look so severe. She thought that Louise could use some lipstick in a pale shade and a black dot from an eyeliner pencil as a beauty mark.

  “What kind of business did you start?” Louise asked.

  “A beauty parlor,” Flore said.

  Louise imagined cheers erupting all over town. “Even in their misery,” Louise purred into the microphone, “our women try to be beautiful.”

  This was Louise’s favorite part of the show, the part where the horrible story began to take a positive turn. It was the equivalent of a first goal during an impossible soccer match, the moment where everything changes, if only for one side. This is why she was glad that this story had been plucked from the town rumor mill and landed on her lap, why she was thrilled, overjoyed, that this young woman had sought her out. That and to return Max Senior’s slap to him. No, she was not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of gal, and in that moment in his office, Max Senior had forced her to be. She believed in an eye for an eye, and though she had never used the show for revenge in the past, she was not above doing it.

  “The beauty parlor grew fast.” Flore was catching her stride now, stammering and hesitating less. “We made a lot of women beautiful,” she said.

  “And you?” Louise asked. “How were you changed?”

  This is what had kept Di Mwen on the air all these years. This is why people loved the show. She always looked for the pot of gold at the end of her guests’ rainbows.

  “Well, I’m still here,” Flore said, relieved that the program seemed to be drawing to a close. “Nou la.”

  Finally, the closing question, which Louise asked of every guest, in part to cover herself, to show that these people had sought her out and not the other way around. The question showed, or at least made it appear, that all she did was offer them a platform, to tell their stories themselves, that there was no ill intent on her part, nothing in it for her.

  “Why did you come on Di Mwen?” she asked Flore. “Why did you want to get this off your chest?”

  “With all their money, even after the way he came to be, they could take my son away from me,” Flore said in her most defiant voice yet. “As if they could say I am not worthy of him.”

  “The Ardins. Father and son, you mean?”

  “Yes, them.”

  “They want to take your child from you?”

  “I won’t let them.”

  “So what do you do now?” Louise asked.

  “I am going far away,” Flore said, pausing to further consider the possibility.

  “I suppose you can’t tell me where.”

  “Non.”

  “You told me that Maxime Ardin, Sr., and his wife had given you money for the child.”

  “Wi.”

  “And you have put that money into your beauty business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be hard to live without that money?”

  “It will be harder to live without my son.”

  “So, just to be clear, you are taking your son with you?”

  “My mother and my son are coming with me, yes,” Flore said. “They will never see us again. I am here to tell them to never look for us again, because they will never find us. Even when I am dead and my son is a grown man, I will be sure they never find him. He will have a different name. He will be a different kind of man—”

  This seemed a good place for Louise to close, without forcing her guest to compromise her plans and offer hints as to where she would end up. They had only a few seconds left anyway, so Louise had to interrupt her to have the final word.

  “Thank you, Flore Voltaire, for sharing your story with us,” she said. Then, in a dramatically grave voice, she added, “I hope you achieve your goal and find the right place for you and your child.”

  Soon after the recorder was turned off, Flore removed the headphones from her son’s ears, but it turned out that the boy had been—as nearly everyone in town would later be—glued to every word. He looked up at her and smiled a toothy smile of both confusion and pride at what he’d understood: that he was now going to meet his father, before going someplace far away.

  Louise took the headphones from Flore, then held out her hand for the child to return the pad he’d been drawing on.

  “Let’s see.” Louise looked at the stick figure on the pad. It was obviously meant to be a person, possibly a man, since the boy had not drawn hair or a skirt. The man had no eyes, nose, or mouth, the outline of his face a simple O. Searching for some hint of what the boy meant by his drawing, Louise smiled at him and guessed out loud. “A goat?” she asked, teasing the boy.

  He laughed, covering his mouth with his hands, then answered, “Non.”

>   “A cow?”

  “Non.”

  “Me?” Louise ventured.

  “Papa mwen,” the boy said. “My father.”

  “Write ‘Papa,’ ” Louise recommended.

  The boy wrote the word papa, the tiny letters spread wide apart. Louise took the pad and tore out the page and handed the drawing back to the boy along with a large grape lollipop that seemed to appear in her hands like magic.

  Turning to Flore, she said, “The child’s father should see this picture.”

  Max Senior was sitting on his wooden bench on his front gallery with Jessamine when his cell phone began to ring and ring again.

  “You won’t believe who’s on Di Mwen,” he kept hearing from each person who was calling him.

  But he refused to turn on the radio. He didn’t want to hear it. Besides, he had never cared for that mawkish program, even when he and Louise had been on speaking terms. Out of spite—or would it be to humiliate him?—the maid in the house next door turned her radio to the loudest possible volume so that the entire neighborhood could hear.

  It was hard to pretend to the lovely young woman sitting next to him that the program did not concern them, since his name was being called out nearly as often as his son’s. The girl mercifully said nothing, following him into the house as he showed her his bookshelves and the abstract paintings on his living room walls, the rose garden and the swimming pool, the gazebo (the one, he realized with chagrin, that was just now being mentioned on the program). At least his cook and his gardener were not listening, he thought. Or they could be listening, like he was, catching the juicy snippets from the radio next door.

  His son’s friend seemed strangely unaffected. She already knew everything, he realized. Otherwise how could she not be incensed, outraged?

  She was a stunning girl with an African mask of a face, all high forehead and high cheekbones, giant loop earrings, and one gold stud on either side of her cheeks. She was obviously one of those modern girls, the kind of girl whom frankly he didn’t think he would be able to welcome with open arms into this family, with her cheek studs and hippie tunic and the word POP tattooed in red-ink calligraphy across the insides of both her wrists.