Cross Current

by Christine Kling

  “Because it is so. Americans have so many things, and they are not happy. Haitians have nothing, and yet they still laugh and dance and sing.”

  “But you live here, not there.”

  “Ah, yes.” His eyes really did seem to twinkle. “I can have a full belly and still have Haiti in my heart.” He chuckled but said nothing more.

  “I just came to ask you some questions. About this little girl. I promised I would help her. There’s nothing for her back in Haiti, no family. She’s better off here.”

  “But of course. I will be pleased to help,” he said, scooting forward to sit on the edge of the chair.

  “Do either you or Racine know anything about the boat that sank a few days ago coming into the Hillsboro Inlet? You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, yes, I heard about that. Very tragic. Especially for the children, the little girls.” When he said those two words-— leettle gerls—he sounded just like Maurice Chevalier.

  I pointed to the card. “Do you have any idea why your wife’s card would have been on that boat? That’s where I found it.”

  He shrugged. “Madame Toussaint is very well known in the Haitian community. She is a force, as you say in America, for justice for the Haitian people.”

  “Are you saying she helps illegal immigrants?”

  “Non, not at all. Racine obeys all the lwas." He threw back his head and laughed.

  His accent was strange, and it grew heavier when he didn’t want me to fully understand him. I suspected that Max was not about to confide in me. “Yesterday, when I found this little girl, Solange—uh, I don’t know her last name. Anyway, she was floating out in the Gulf Stream in this half-sunk wood boat, and I think she might have come from the boat that sank, the Miss Agnes."

  “Yes, yes.” He nodded and flashed his teeth. “I heard about this also on the radio. The little Earth Angel girl.”

  “That’s right. I want to see if I can find her family, her father. There was a woman in the boat with her, but she was already dead. Solange says her name was Erzulie, or something like that.”

  When I said the name Erzulie his eyes grew big and round, but it was as though a shade had lowered. He leaned forward. “What did the child say the woman’s name was?”

  “Erzulie? Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right.”

  He got up then and began pacing back and forth in short, little mincing steps and then spun around. “You really must talk to Mambo Racine. Erzulie? Does the child know what she is saying? What will Racine think of this? She is with her initiates, though. Would she want me to disturb her?” He was talking to himself, not expecting any answers from me. He continued to mutter, then he stopped abruptly and faced me. “Can you return tomorrow? You must speak to Racine. Bring the child with you. In the evening, at, say, seven o’clock?”

  I understood only about half of what he was saying. I thought I might have better luck with his wife. “Yeah, I can try. And if you learn anything that would help Solange in the meantime, please, let me know. I don’t want to see this kid sent back to Haiti with no parents.”

  “Oui, it is a hard life there for a child.”

  “She said she doesn’t know her mother, but her father is an American. I’m trying to locate him, and I’m trying to find out if she and this Erzulie woman were on the boat that sank, the Miss Agnes. If you or your wife know any of the refugees who made it ashore off that boat, please, have them contact me.” I took one of my business cards out of my shoulder bag and handed it to him. “This is my card for my business, Sullivan Towing and Salvage. You can reach me at that number or just leave a message, and I’ll call you back. Could you ask around for me?”

  “Certainly.” He stood next to me and was obviously herding me toward the front door. “I will ask, and you will return tomorrow night, correct?”

  “Okay.” I smiled and turned and was almost out the door when I remembered one more thing. “The little girl, Solange, she said a word I don’t understand. Maybe you can help. She pointed to herself and said something that sounded like restavik What does that mean?”

  Again, a darkness flitted behind his eyes, but he covered it quickly with a gentle smile. “The word comes from the French words reste avec, which means ‘stay with.’ In Haiti, many families are very poor, and they send their children to stay with another family, to work as unpaid domestics. They are called restaveks. Some people think this is very bad, they call it child slavery, but in Haiti, it is the custom. Your little friend is how old?”

  “I’d say she’s nine or ten. She doesn’t know anything about her own mother.”

  “She probably left home around age six or seven and now doesn’t even know where she used to live. The life of a restavek is not good.” He lowered his eyes, and all of the jolliness seemed to drain out of him. “Some say there are over three hundred thousand restaveks in Haiti today. That is not an aspect of my country that makes me proud.” He shook his head and shoulders, as if to throw off a weight, then sat up very straight. “You are right, Miss Sullivan. Certainement. She has no home to go back to in Haiti.”

  When I pulled Lightnin’ into the parking lot at Broward General Hospital, it was past noon. Jeannie’s van was there in the visitors’ parking, as I knew it would be. I was glad to see a uniformed Fort Lauderdale police officer at the nurses’ station across from Solange’s room, even if he was in deep conversation with Jenna. I would have to thank Collazo.

  Solange was sitting up in bed, cross-legged. Spread across the sheets in front of her were what looked like hundreds of colorful Lego blocks. She was so engrossed in her play, she didn’t notice me until Jeannie spoke.

  “Nice of you to pay us a visit this afternoon.” Jeannie was, I assumed, sitting on the same yellow chair, but her bulk hid all evidence of it. Her reading glasses were perched down her nose, and a flowery-covered novel lay on her lap.

  “It took me a little longer than I thought.” Solange looked up and attempted a shy smile. On the floor, I saw the basket of toys Jeannie had evidently brought from her boys’ room. In addition to the Legos, there were trucks, a couple of stuffed animals, and a few picture books. I thought of how nice it would have been if I had thought to bring the girl a toy, too, but it hadn’t even occurred to me.

  “Collazo’s already been here,” Jeannie said. Then she chuckled. “He was really pissed off that she still wouldn’t say anything to him or his translator. He gave up after about twenty minutes. Said I should tell you he wants to talk to you, wants to know if she’s said anything.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I didn’t know if she was talking to you or not.” Solange watched Jeannie’s face, then turned to wait for my reply.

  “That’s good.”

  “Hey, it’s also true. And I did pass on the message that he wants to see you, so I’ve done my part.” She reached across and threatened to tickle Solange. “Right, kiddo?”

  Solange grinned and covered her sides in self-defense. Evidently she and Jeannie had played this game before.

  She looked like an entirely different child from the one I had plucked from the sea just twenty-four hours earlier.

  “Have you talked to a doctor? Know anything about how she’s doing?”

  Jeannie shook her head. “Aside from someone bringing her lunch and taking the tray away, I haven’t seen anybody. And, by the way, Solange did eat this morning, and kept it down, even though it was some kind of pukey-looking mystery meat. For what they charge, they could provide better food.”

  “They probably wouldn’t tell us anything anyway. We’re not next of kin.”

  “Ha! You want me to find out?” Not waiting for an answer, she heaved herself up from the chair. “I’ll be right back.”

  I set my shoulder bag down on the rolling table that held a water pitcher, cleared aside some Legos, and sat on the foot of the bed. “Are you feeling better?”

  She nodded slowly, her head lowered. She twirled one of her braids and played with the
beads on the rubber bands at the ends. Someone had rebraided her hair and added the pretty beads. Everyone else seemed to know what to do for a little girl.

  “I want to help you, Solange, but I need you to help me. Do you understand?”

  She nodded again.

  “What is your last name?”

  Her eyebrows came together and her forehead wrinkled. Her lower lip jutted out.

  “My name is Seychelle Sullivan. You are Solange ...” I motioned with my hand for her to fill in the silence.

  She shook her head. “Seulement Solange.” She imitated my motion. “Solange ... non.”

  “You don’t know your last name?”

  Her shoulders lifted, but she kept her eyes lowered.

  I switched tacks. “Can you tell me about the trip to America? Start with Haiti. Do you know the name of the town you lived in?”

  “Cap Haitien.”

  “Good. And you told me you lived with a family there, as a restavek.”

  She lowered her eyes at the word restavek. It seemed to make her ashamed.

  “Did you go to school in Cap Haitien?”

  She shook her head and still did not lift her head to look at me.

  “Who put you on the boat to America?”

  “The bad man.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “The bad man who killed Erzulie?”

  She nodded.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Water. I bring water to house. Bad man talk to Madame Maillot.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I work in Madame house.”

  “Had you ever seen this man there before?”

  “No.”

  “So you came back with the water and he was there talking to Madame Mayo. Then what happened?”

  “I wash baby Christophe. Madame say no. She send me away with the bad man.”

  “He took you to the boat?”

  Her head bobbed once. “Erzulie was there,” she said.

  “Anyone else?”

  “Bad man. Le Capitaine.”

  “The bad man, he was the captain of the big boat?”

  Her beads bounced as her head bobbed up and down.

  I picked my shoulder bag off the table and reached inside to retrieve the sunglasses I’d found on the Miss Agnes. “Have you ever seen these glasses before?” I knew before I’d finished speaking that she recognized the glasses from the look in her eyes. “Solange?” She continued to stare at the little white skulls.

  “Capitaine bawon samdi." She scrambled to the head of her bed, up on her pillows, trying to distance herself from the sunglasses and began making little squeaky, whining noises. She grabbed one of the pillows and tried to hide under it.

  I put the glasses back in my shoulder bag. “Shhh. It’s okay. I don’t understand when you speak Creole, Solange. Did these belong to the captain of the big boat you were on with Erzulie?”

  The curved black lashes fluttered several times and a fat tear slid from the corner of her eye, coursing a wet trail down her cheek. She nodded. “He say he take me to Papa, he say Papa want me—” Her rounded shoulders hitched up as she sucked in a quick breath. Her body looked like it was trying to curl into itself.

  I slid up the bed, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, pressed her head against the curve of my neck, and rested my chin on her head. Her tiny body trembled with tight, convulsive sobs. As quickly as it had started, it stopped, and her breathing quieted back to a regular rhythm.

  “Solange, I promise you, I will find your papa,” I whispered into the dark braids, knowing full well that in order to find her father, I would have to find a murderer first.

  IX

  When Jeannie returned, she opened her mouth to speak, but I raised my finger to my lips. I’d just finished tucking the sheet under Solange’s chin, and I was standing there admiring her eyelashes, so long that each one formed a perfect letter C. I motioned Jeannie to go out into the corridor, and it wasn’t until we were both outside the door that I saw what she had been about to tell me. She had a federal escort.

  “Nice to see you again, Seychelle,” Rusty said, smiling so broadly that the creases at the corners of his eyes looked like the spokes of a wire wheel.

  “Can’t really say the same, Rusty.” He was in civilian clothes today, faded jeans and black T-shirt, sockless, raggedy-looking boat shoes. It was difficult not to notice the way the T-shirt tapered down from those broad shoulders to his trim waist and how those weathered jeans wrapped his hips neatly in denim. It could have been really nice to see him if he wasn’t employed by U.S. Immigration.

  “How’s our patient?” he asked, inclining his shaggy head toward the door to Solange’s room.

  “Our patient? No, no, no, my friend. You have no claim on her.” I turned to Jeannie. “Were you able to find a doctor?”

  “Finally, yes, after walking through miles of hospital corridors and continually getting directions that had me following yellow lines and blue lines all over this friggin’ hospital. But yes, eventually I found this lovely woman doctor, a little bit of a thing. She said the kid is doing great. Much better than should be expected, the doc said, because Solange was malnourished long before this whole boat trip even started. But there’s no need to keep her in the hospital, as long as she is eating and drinking on her own. Doc said she’d be willing to cut her loose this evening.”

  “Good,” Rusty said. “We’ll take her into custody. Cases like this we usually send down to Miami to the Girls and Boys Town facility there.”

  “No way.” I turned to Jeannie, my mouth open, but she was talking before I could even ask.

  “Listen, Elliot, I am both a court-approved guardian ad litem and a registered foster parent. She can stay in my home. Any judge would see that it would be in the best interests of a child who has been through this kind of trauma to be in a single-family home environment instead of some group home.”

  Rusty shook his head. “I don’t know about that. The police will want to talk to her.”

  “Exactly. They can talk to her at my home if they need to—and she’ll be closer. Don’t block this just to be pissy, Elliot. Think of the child.”

  Rusty raised his hands in submission. “Okay, okay, I don’t have a problem with it, as long as she stays where we can see her, and”—he turned and looked straight at me—“you work with me on this. I’m not your enemy, so don’t try anything stupid.”

  I tried my hardest to look innocent, to give him a “Who me?” look, but as usual, I felt guilty already. Whenever someone suspected me of something, even if I hadn’t even thought of it yet, I felt guilty.

  “Also,” he continued, “I need to interview her officially, and I’d like your cooperation with that. I can’t get her to talk to me.”

  Now I knew why I’d felt guilty. “It’s possible I could help you out there.”

  “Go on,” Rusty said.

  “It’s just possible she has talked a little bit to me.”

  Jeannie looked at her watch. “Listen, Sey, I need to take care of some paperwork and buy a few extra things if I’m inheriting a little girl this afternoon. I don’t think she’d be thrilled with Spider-Man jockey shorts. You okay here?”

  “Not a problem, Jeannie. You go on. I’ll see you later.” After Jeannie collected her things and left, I turned to go back into the girl’s hospital room.

  Rusty touched my arm. “You hungry?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Rusty returned with burgers, fries, and Cokes. I had been watching Solange sleep and wondering how I was going to keep this promise to find her father, wondering what my next step would be. I forgot about all of it when the room filled with the odor of french fries.

  “Lunch is served,” he announced.

  I held my finger to my lips and pointed at the sleeping child, then said in a whisper, “You’re going to drive the rest of the inmates mad with that smell. All they ever get is sugar-free Jell-O and low-fat mystery meat.”

  Rusty dropped the paper bags onto th
e vacant bed close to the door, and he motioned for me to climb onto it. “I’ll take care of that.”

  I kicked off my sneakers and snuggled my butt into the covers near the head of the bed as he grabbed the edge of the privacy curtain and drew it closed around us. He smiled and climbed onto the foot of the bed and settled himself, sitting Indian style, not looking nearly as comfortable in that position as B.J. did.

  “They’ll never know we’re here,” he whispered as he emptied a mountain of fries onto a paper bag.

  I attempted to raise one eyebrow, to give him a look that said “Yeah, right.” With the scent of french fries wafting down the hall? I said, “I can’t quite figure you out, Elliot. One minute you’re ‘the man,’ and the next minute you’re acting like a kid hiding from the nurses.”

  From another bag, Rusty poured out some two dozen little pouches of catsup. “I like that. I like being complex.” He started ripping the catsup pouches open with his teeth and emptying them into a puddle on a waxy burger wrapper. “I hope you don’t like catsup. I need every one of these.”

  When I ventured to dip a fry in his catsup lake, we ended up in a french fry sword fight.

  Too bad he was the enemy. He was kind of fun.

  After we’d finished off all but the little burnt stubs of fries, I leaned back against the headboard and laced my fingers behind my head. A feeling of contentment settled into my shoulders, relaxing muscles that had been tense for over twenty-four hours.

  “How long you been running that tug?” he whispered.

  “Full-time for a little more than two years. As a part-timer, all my life.”

  “Must be nice, working on the water.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Looking at you, I’d say fisherman, light tackle, fresh and marine, got about an eighteen-foot Dusky on a trailer you don’t get to take out often enough.”

  He smiled. “You’ve sure got me pegged. Only the boat isn’t on a trailer at the moment, and it’s not a Dusky.”

  I raised both brows this time. “Go on.”

  “She’s in the water at a place I’ve got in Hollywood on the Intracoastal, and she’s a twenty-five-foot Anacapri, built in 1976. Still got the original engines. A classic.”