Ayiti

by Roxane Gay

  I ran to the bathroom and as I heaved into the toilet, I knew and it was the worst kind of knowing. I had taken the pills. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I pounded my fists against the toilet seat.

  Campbell stood over me, worried. I couldn’t look at him. “I need a pregnancy test.”

  I looked up and saw how his features brightened, a wide smile stretching across his face. And then his smile became something else. I went to our room and changed. I left. I ignored my phone until the battery died. When it grew dark, I pulled into a Walmart parking lot and made sure my doors were locked. I tried to sleep. I wanted to quiet the screaming in my head.

  In the morning, the screaming was louder, sharper, more singular. My head throbbed. I walked into the Walmart, bought a test, and went into the bathroom, where it was humid and dirty. I squatted in the last stall and held the stick between my thighs. I gritted my teeth and pissed. I didn’t need to look at the readout to know it would read Yes.

  I find my coat and thank Maria for the dinner. It has been a long, strange evening. She is nervous as she unlocks her front door. “Please don’t tell your family about this.”

  I brush my fingers across her knuckles. “I don’t tell my family anything.”

  It is much colder outside but I walk slowly. The streets are empty which scares me. In the four years since our honeymoon, I have always been scared. I have felt a spiraling terror lodged in my throat. I have tried to cut that terror out.

  I found my husband sitting in the hall entrance of our loft. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were wild with anger and something else. He looked up at me and when he spoke his voice was uncomfortably calm. “After what happened, I would think you would be considerate enough to call if you aren’t coming home.”

  I stepped toward him then stopped. “I didn’t realize,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

  “Your pancakes are cold.”

  I handed him the pregnancy test. “It could be yours.”

  He patted the floor next to him and I slowly lowered myself to the floor. “Tell me what happened. If I know, I can help you. I can try.”

  “Do you want to know or do you need to know?”

  Campbell cracked his knuckles. “I want. Because it’s what’s best for you.”

  Once again, my throat locked. I shook my head.

  I sit on the cold concrete steps of my aunt’s stoop and call Campbell. I am very drunk.

  “Can you come out here?” I ask, my words slurring.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice is dry and hoarse.

  “I have a son, Campbell.” It feels good to release those words from my chest again.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “That is the perfect thing to say.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I had too much to drink and a woman hit on me and tried to kiss me. It was weird.”

  “And I didn’t get to watch?” His voice is clearer now.

  I laugh. “You’re a pig.”

  “Are you okay? Did you kiss her back?”

  “Yes. A little, no tongue. I really drank a lot.”

  “You are so LA now.”

  “I miss our son every time I breathe. I miss you.”

  I can hear Campbell moving now.

  “I’m ready to make another baby.”

  I close my eyes. The phone grows warmer against my cheek.

  “Are you there? I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  “I’m ready, too,” I say, softly.

  The paternity test confirmed my worst fears. I couldn’t get rid of it, old country ways, and knew I couldn’t keep it. It was easy to find a family looking for a baby. I started to show so I quit my job at the hospital even though I had just finished my residency. It would have been too much to explain why Campbell and I, who did want children, couldn’t keep this child, to answer questions, to pretend to be joyful, to talk about a life I would never know. I hid in our loft. Campbell brought me screeners. I realized movies had gotten much worse since I started medical school.

  When she was in town, Melinda spent hours with me, trying to get me to talk, regaling me with stories of this or that event, the latest gossip from the set of her film and how things were going with her costar, a man she described as violently committed to dullness. My stomach swelled. The baby was active, always swimming around, kicking me, tearing my heart apart. Early on I told Campbell I would move out until the baby was born. He did not appreciate the gesture, refused. He tried to reach me but I kept him out. We were living together but we weren’t. I refused to look at myself in mirrors. My body was the worst kind of prison, utterly inescapable. One day, toward the end, Campbell found me in the study, holding my belly, talking softly. It was the first time I really touched the baby.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

  I quickly let my arms fall to the side. “This doesn’t mean anything.” I shuffled out of the room as quickly as I could, leaving him stammering in my wake.

  Melinda is the only person I allowed in the delivery room. Campbell was furious but I told him I wanted him in the delivery room when I gave birth to our child. I wanted to save that moment for him. My best friend held my hand and pressed cold cloths to my forehead. She didn’t fill the air with useless chatter.

  There are no words to describe how it feels to push a baby out of your body. Before the kidnapping, I would have thought it was the most inconceivable pain a woman can experience but I knew better. When you give birth, you willingly break yourself. You allow your body to come apart. Each time I pushed, even though I was so miserable and exhausted, I held on to the promise of soon being free. I needed to rid myself of the terrible thing inside me.

  The nurse who laid the slick, squealing child on my chest didn’t realize I had written in my birth plan that I didn’t want to look upon him. I forced myself to look at him. His head was covered with a sticky matte of dark hair. His arms were so skinny but his hands were what splintered the hard shell around me, so tiny, fingers splayed as he reached for my face. I cupped his tiny head and kissed his forehead. He quieted, his lips quivering. I wanted to pull him into my rib cage and hold him inside my body once more. I was staggered by him, my beautiful boy.

  “I need time with him,” I whispered, to no one in particular. I prayed they would grant me this one wish.

  Everyone in the room exchanged looks, but after the baby was cleaned and swaddled, he was placed in my arms once more. He stared at me with wide eyes. I kissed his cheeks, soft and the warmest shade of brown with a hint of red. “I didn’t know,” I said, holding him as tightly as I dared. “I didn’t know I would love you.” I saw nothing of his father in the boy, not one single thing. It was a mercy.

  Melinda slipped out of the room. When the door opened again, it was Campbell, who ran to my side. He looked at the baby, his eyes watery and wide open. He covered my hand with his.

  “I don’t think I can let him go,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m sorry. I did not expect this. I didn’t know. I don’t know what to do.” I started to cry and then I was sobbing from somewhere deep, sobbing for the woman who had spent the past nine months on a sticky floor in a hot sugar warehouse with strange, violent men.

  Campbell pushed the railing down and climbed into bed with me. His shoes fell loudly to the floor as he kicked them off. He wiped my tears as quickly as they fell. “You don’t have to let him go,” he said.

  I brushed my fingers across the baby’s forehead. “I didn’t know.”

  The baby yawned and closed his eyes. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

  It was dark outside when I awoke. I was alone in my hospital room. I remembered the soft, warm weight of the baby against my chest. The absence was unbearable. I panicked, shot up, then winced. I pressed the call button and a few minutes later, a tired-looking nurse padded into my room. “My baby,” I croaked. “Did they take him? Is it too late?”

  The nurse smiled. “He’s in the nursery. His father is with him—wanted you to get some
rest. They’ll be back soon. New mothers can sleep with their babies if they want.”

  The tight pain in my chest slowly began to unravel. “I want,” I said.

  I sat up and stared at the door, the waiting interminable. When he returned, Campbell was pushing a bassinet, the baby swaddled in a blue blanket, wearing a little blue hat, fast asleep.

  “He was fussy,” Campbell said, “We went to the nursery to hang out.” He waved his wrist, showing off a hospital bracelet matching the baby’s and mine. “They gave me one of these. I got to feed him with a tiny bottle the size of two of my fingers.” My husband looked different, softer. His face couldn’t contain his smile. He was giddy.

  “What about …?”

  “I notified the lawyer. They’re disappointed, of course, but this was always a possibility. People in their situation know that.”

  “I have done a terrible thing.”

  “No, you haven’t. I explained what I could.” He pressed his fingers against the baby’s forehead. “I know people,” he said. “I’m going to do everything in my power to help them.”

  The baby shifted slightly and made an adorable, wet sound.

  “We’re not ready for this. We have no idea what we’re doing. We don’t even have a car seat. We drive ridiculous cars. I’m sorry. You didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Stop apologizing. This is exactly what I signed up for.”

  I began fiddling with my hospital bracelet. “You don’t know.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  I pointed to the baby. “He can never know, Campbell. Never. Do you understand?”

  My husband nodded.

  I carefully got out of bed and went to the window. A dull ache throbbed between my thighs.

  “Don’t look away,” Campbell said.

  I ignored him. “I thought I would never be able to love him right. I thought he would always be a reminder. I will never know who made him. I don’t want to.”

  I was taken to a sugar warehouse and thrown into a room with no furniture, the floor sticky with sweet grime. I couldn’t think. I was terrified. It was unspeakably hot. I could hardly breathe. Hours later, a fat man with a shiny, bald, head appeared. He said the wife of a rich American was worth a lot of money. He told me to undress. I didn’t know what to do. The man backhanded me. I looked into his eyes to try and make sense of the kind of man he was. I took too long. He backhanded me again and drove his fist into my stomach. My gut wrenched. I told him my husband would pay for me. He tore my clothes from my body and dragged me by my hair into a large room filled with a mountain of raw sugar that reached to the ceiling. He threw me down and the sugar scratched my bare skin. He unbuckled his pants. I begged. There was nowhere to run, men everywhere.

  He climbed on top of me, so heavy. I have never stopped feeling his wet skin against mine. Our bodies sank into that mountain of sugar. Grains of sugar floated in the air as he thrust. In the shafts of sunlight filling the warehouse, the sugar looked beautiful so that’s what I looked at. I couldn’t close my eyes no matter how hard I tried. Grains of sugar fell on my tongue as I screamed. The sugar beneath me hardened with my blood. And then there was another man and another and another, each crueler. When it was over, I balled myself into a corner to wait. By the end, I was wild and vicious, scratching and clawing at anything that came near me. After, they drove me to my father’s house. Fabien sat in the back of the truck with me. He said, “If only you had given me a little kiss,” smiling like a spurned child. He tried to kiss me, fumbling at my body with his foolish hands. I snapped, screaming hoarsely as I clawed at his face, felt his skin come away. They had to stop the truck to pull us apart. As he got into the cab, he cursed me. I looked at my hands, red and raw, holding a piece of his skin. I slapped it against the cab window. He held his face as he turned around to stare at me. I never looked away.

  When I finished speaking, I turned back to Campbell. “I did not want to look at my child and be forced to remember that. I did not want to love him less than he deserved. I did not want to hate him, which he did not deserve.”

  Campbell knelt by the side of the bed. He took my hands, kissing them over and over. He didn’t say anything useless. He didn’t try to change what could not be changed.

  Campbell flies out to meet me. I wait on the sidewalk as a town car pulls up. Campbell Jr., C.J., bounds out of the car first, his arms thrust high in the air. I still don’t see the men who forced their way into me when I look at my son. I hope I never will. C.J. jumps into my arms and I clasp the back of his head. The curved bone fits perfectly in my palm. I can breathe again. I cover his face in kisses and he giggles. He says, “Mommy, mommy, mommy.” Campbell tips the driver. I grab his shirt and pull him in. When he kisses me, I am home.

  “I never thought this day would come,” Campbell says.

  I slide my hand into the pocket of his jeans, pulling him closer still. “I am ready.”

  Maria is startled when we walk into my aunt’s house. “You have a son,” she says, stuttering.

  Campbell is holding him now, our son drowsy from the long flight, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  “I told you I did.”

  She clears her throat. I don’t know what she wants from me, who she wants me to be. She studies Campbell. In my mother tongue, she says, “You married an old man.” I want to claw her eyes out. I hold Campbell’s arm possessively. Finally, she says, “I must attend to your grandmother.”

  As she walks away, Campbell elbows me. “I’m not that old. She has a big ass.”

  That evening, I sit with my grandmother, holding C.J. in my lap, surrounded by the smell and joy of him.

  “Such a beautiful boy,” she says. Her eyes are milky. I hold her hand, can feel the fragility of that network of bones.

  “I wanted you to know him.”

  C.J. claps his hands and sings a song I don’t recognize. He loves to sing. Sometimes, Campbell and I hear him on the baby monitor, singing in his room. We laugh and laugh and laugh.

  “Do you want to give your great-grandmother a kiss?” I whisper into C.J.’s ear.

  He nods politely, and leans in, leaving a loud, wet kiss on her cheek. He squirms out of my arms and runs away.

  “Campbell,” I say, loudly. “He’s on his way to you.” I hold my breath until I hear Campbell growl and C.J. growls back—it’s this thing they do I don’t pretend to understand. I can still feel my son in the room. Some part of him is always with me.

  My grandmother leans in to me, says my aunt is stealing her money. I listen carefully. I take her seriously. She’s not allowed to have money. She’ll use it to bribe Maria to bring her cakes and other confections. She has always had a sweet tooth and Maria is corruptible. My grandmother’s tongue, like my son’s, is awfully fond of sugar.

  Cheap, Fast, Filling

  When Lucien arrives in the United States by way of Canada, an illegal but uneventful border crossing, and hitching rides down to Miami, his cousin Christophe, who made his own way to Miami years earlier, hands him a fifty-dollar bill and tells Lucien to eat Hot Pockets until he gets a job because they are cheap, filling, and taste good. Lucien sleeps on the floor in an apartment he shares with five other men like him, all of them pretending this life is better than that which came before. There is a small kitchen with an electric stove that has two burners and a microwave that is rarely cleaned. Christophe tells Lucien that Hot Pockets are easy to prepare.

  Lucien is in the United States because he loves Miami Vice. He loves the shiny suits Tubbs and Crockett wear. He loves their swagger. He loves the idea of Miami as a perfect place where problems are always solved and there are beautiful women as far as a man can see. In secondaire, Lucien would daydream about Miami while the French nuns frowned and slapped his desk with their rulers. He has not yet seen that Miami but he knows it is there. It has to be.

  Lucien’s apartment is in Pembroke Pines—a world away from Little Haiti and everything that might be familiar in an unfamiliar place
. Every morning, he wakes up at five, showers, gets dressed. He walks four miles to the Home Depot on Pines Boulevard where he waits for contractors to cruise through the parking lot looking for cheap, fast labor. He stands in the immigrant bazaar with the Mexicans and Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, sometimes a few Chinese. They stand tall, try to look strong, hope that a long white finger will curl in their direction. Three or four times a week, he is lucky. He grabs his tool belt, hauls himself into the truck bed, and enjoys the humid morning air as he is driven to big houses owned by white people locked behind gates to keep their things safe from people like him even though he has never stolen a thing in his life.

  Once a week, Lucien buys a calling card for twenty-five dollars. It will allow him to talk for twenty-eight minutes. He calls home and talks to his mother, his uncle, his wife, his four children. He tells elaborate fables about his new life—how he’s found them a new home with a bedroom for each child, and air-conditioning so they can breathe cool, dry air. There is a lawn with green grass and a swimming pool in the backyard by which his wife can lie in the sun. His children, two boys and two girls all under the age of ten, clamor for his attention. He strains to understand them through the static on the line. They tell him about school and their friends and the UN soldier who is renting a room in the house, how he’s teaching them Brazilian curse words. When there are only a few minutes left, his wife chases the children into the bedroom they all share. They are alone. There is no time for anything tender. She whispers that she needs Lucien to send more money, there’s no food, there’s no water. She wants to know when he will send for them. He lies. He tells her he’s doing all he can. He says soon.

  On the weekends, Christophe picks Lucien up in the truck his boss lets him take home and they go to house parties in Little Haiti. They listen to konpa and drink rum, as all Haitians are wont to do. They philosophize about how to solve their country’s problems. “Haiti,” his father would always tell Lucien while he was growing up, “is a country with seven million dictators.” Sometimes, when it is very late at night, Lucien will find comfort in the arms of a woman who is not his wife. He will go home with her and in the darkness, as he cups her breasts with his hands and listens to her breathing against him, as he presses his lips against her neck and her shoulder, then licks the salt from her skin, he will imagine she tastes like home.