An Untamed State (41 page)

When I finally felt empty enough, I stood and smoothed my shirt, my hair, and turned to face him, rolled my eyes. “They probably think I’m a freak.”

He handed me a bottle of water, and I eagerly wet my mouth. He stepped closer, lifted my sunglasses, and perched them on the top of my head. He smiled.

“You’re okay,” he said. “Who cares what they think? You are not a freak, at least, not
that
kind of freak.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I slapped his chest. “You are such a pig.”

Michael held my chin and kissed me. “I am.”

“I’m never coming back here.”

“I know,” Michael said.

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and I let him and we walked slowly toward my parents. My mother beamed and even my father allowed himself a small smile. He opened his arms and I stopped, stiffened.

Michael shook his head, moved in front of me. “She doesn’t want that,” he said.

A shadow flickered across my father’s face but he stepped aside. I leaned into my mother and kissed her once on each cheek. Her perfume filled the air around us. Michael and I walked between my parents and into the house. The four of us stood in the foyer with the gleaming marble floors, the walls bearing beautiful art, a stand with a mahogany sculpture. We stood for a long time. We no longer knew who we were to each other.

“You look very thin,” my mother said.

“This is my body. I’m a runner,” I snapped. I hated people commenting on my body, stating the obvious. In the after, it was strangely difficult for me to gain weight but I wasn’t abnormally thin anymore.

My mother squeezed my arm and sucked her teeth, making her disapproval clear. “Are you eating?”

“I am eating,” I muttered, shoving my hands in my pockets, pulling away.

She drew her fingers along the wide streak of silver that refused to go away. “Why don’t you color this?”

Michael pushed my mother’s hand away. “My wife is happy with the way she looks.”

“Let us sit in the living room,” my mother said, finally done with her assessment of my appearance.

Michael and I sat on the couch while my parents sat across from us on another.

“Can I offer you a drink?” my father asked.

We both nodded.

“Something strong,” I said.

Nadine brought us rums and Coke. As she handed me my glass, she touched my shoulder, gently, and I took her hand, squeezed. I said, “Thank you very much.”

I drank my rum quickly, letting the warmth of the sweet liquor spread across my chest. Between the Valium and the drink, I was almost numb. I reached for Michael’s glass and drank his too. I dared my parents to say something.

My father cleared his throat. “It’s good to see you, Mireille. You have been missed.”

“I’m here because Mona asked.”

My mother reached for my father’s hand. There are no limits to her compassion for that man.

“I want you to understand I thought I was making the best decision for this family, because I love my family so much.”

I closed my eyes. Three SUVs surrounded my family and me on a hot afternoon. We wanted to go to the beach and lie in the sand and play with our son in the ocean for the first time. That is all we wanted. It didn’t seem like too much.

I twisted my glass against the palm of my hand. “I’m glad we’re not wasting time with small talk.”

My father shifted. “It would seem we have passed that point.”

“You left me to die and that’s exactly what happened.” I looked up. “I died.”

My father leaned forward. “If I paid, I had no way of knowing if they would return you. I had to think about your mother, your sister, my sisters, the rest of our family. Paying for you would sacrifice them too. It killed me to imagine what you were going through but I am responsible for many lives.”

He slowly told us the story of his best friend Antoine Deus and how they came for his daughter-in-law and sister and cousin and son and even his wife, how Antoine Deus paid each ransom asked of him until there was nothing left and he was left destitute, his family nothing more than ghosts of the people they once had been. My father sat across from me and explained that he could not see everything he worked for given over to animals, how he believed that if he took the right stand, he might do more good than harm. “I truly believed that when the kidnappers realized there was no money to be had, they would set you free,” he said. “I believed you would come back to us whole.”

Michael tensed. His arm muscles practically bulged through his shirt and he said, “You are unbelievable.”

“You sacrificed me,” I said. I slammed my glass on the coffee table and the sharp sound echoed through the room. “You were willing to rob my son of his mother.” I pointed at him, my pulse racing. “Your grandson. My husband. Do you have any idea what it has taken for me to pull myself back together? How could you?”

My mother turned to look at my father. Her expression was inscrutable.

He didn’t even look away. My father looked into my eyes, and held his hands open, the strength of his conviction hovering between them. “In impossible circumstances one is faced with impossible choices.”

I understand impossible choices; there were so many I had to make when I tried to forget everything I loved because the memories made surviving that much harder. There are moments even now when I am laughing with my husband and children. A phrase or a smell or a sound makes me forget where I am and who I am and how I belong to the people around me. I sit, frozen and lost, until someone helps me find my way back.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for telling the truth.”

I returned to Port-au-Prince for one reason—to tell my father everything that happened to me, the whole, filthy truth of my kidnapping, even the parts I hadn’t told Michael. I wanted my father to know how for months after my release, I starved myself so I could feel empty, so I could forget the brutal ways the men who held me filled my body. I wanted my father to know about the nights I still wake screaming because it is so hard to escape that cage and the men who trapped me there. I wanted my father to know I died and had only just started to feel alive again. I needed him to know what his sacrifice cost me most of all, but also my husband, our children.

When my father’s eyes started to water, I shook my head. “You do not get to cry, not in front of me.”

His skin took on a gray pallor. I wanted to tell him I would never forgive him, that his
impossible
choice had killed all my love for him, but when I looked into his face, all I saw was an old man who made a terrible, weak choice and had to live with it for what remained of his life. He did not deserve the truth of how I died.

I looked at my father, the man who had been the uncompromising measure for all things in my life for so long. There was still good in me. He did not need to know the truth for me to feel more alive.

“I came here to tell you I forgive you,” I said, as firmly and clearly as I could.

Michael and I exchanged looks; I squeezed his hand.

I thought, “I am free,” and for the first time, believed it.

My father’s eyes widened and his hands trembled. He quickly folded them in his lap. He shook his head. “I don’t dare ask for your forgiveness.”

“I do not need your permission. I forgive you nonetheless.”

Sebastien Duval crossed the room and I stood, my arms hanging limply as he pulled me into a loose, awkward hug. I gritted my teeth, counted to five, all I could handle, pulled away. I would never let him touch me again. When I shrugged out of his embrace, my mother held my father and kissed his cheek. She studied me, her eyebrow slightly arched, until I looked away.

After dinner, my mother motioned for me to follow her into the courtyard. We sat, alone. It was warm, quiet. Her blooming roses filled the air fragrantly. I lit a cigarette and released a thin stream of smoke, my chin tilted upward.

“You told your father a kind lie,” she said. “I thank you for that, I truly do. You have always been a good daughter.”

That night in bed, I couldn’t sleep. Every sound made me jump. Every shadow was an angry, righteous man coming for me, taking from me, hurting me, punishing me for all our fathers’ sins. I remembered how the Commander would stare at me, into me. I sat up and leaned against the headboard, turned on the light. I reminded myself of everything I knew to be true, something Lorraine taught me to do, years earlier, in those moments when I couldn’t be sure about when and where I was.

My name was Mireille Jameson née Duval.

I was married to Michael Jameson.

I was a lawyer.

We had a son, Christophe, and a daughter, Emma, the still points in my turning world.

I was loved.

I was safe.

I was safe.

Michael slept soundly. I shook him but he kept on sleeping. I shook him harder and he slowly opened his eyes.

“Are you awake?”

He rolled onto his side and faced me. “Of course. Come here.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and slid closer to him, rested my cheek against his chest. He sleepily rubbed my back in slow circles the way he usually does when I wake up from a nightmare. I kissed the bone of his jaw and his neck and the base of his throat. We were so frantic and fevered together the first time we visited my parents. We were so young then. We had somehow stumbled back to that same place.

Over these years, Michael waited for me. He showed me how to be touched again when I could hardly handle being touched. He showed me how to be loved again. We showed each other how to be loved again.

I slid my hands beneath his T-shirt and traced the thick muscles of his shoulders with my tongue, quickly shimmied out of my pajamas. I grabbed at his earlobe with my teeth and pulled him over me as I rolled onto my back. I said, “Make me forget, baby.” Michael traced the edges of my face, touched me so softly everywhere, made me shiver and arch into him and want him fiercely, feverishly. And then we were not quiet or gentle. We were true.

After we were sated, I lay with my head on his chest, our bodies fitting damply. Michael asked me why I forgave my father.

I didn’t forgive my father. I lied because that lie cost me less than the truth would have cost him.

There once was a king who met a miller, a vain man prone to deceit. The miller told the king his daughter could spin straw into gold and so the king locked the daughter in a room full of hay even though the only thing the daughter could do with hay was hold it in the palms of her hands. She had to make a deal with a devil in order to satisfy the king, make promises she could not keep. No one ever says what happened to the father who was willing to trade a daughter for the favor of a king. I know what happened to the daughter. I know.

I said, “I didn’t want to lose whatever was left of the good in me.”

“You’re better than he deserves,” Michael said.

Early the next morning I kissed Michael’s forehead as he slept, then dressed and walked down the steep driveway to the street. There was a light fog slowly lifting. The steel gates were open. It was quiet, so many high walls holding the wolves and their bloody, bared teeth, at bay.

A dark SUV drove by, the windows tinted. I didn’t shrink away. I thought,
you have no idea what I can take
. There was so much wildness just beneath the surface of my skin. I was not afraid to show it. The car kept driving and disappeared around the bend.

When I heard footsteps I knew it was Michael. His arms were open and waiting for me when I turned around.

He cupped my face with his hands. “Are you okay? What are you doing?”

I pressed my hand over his heart. “I still love this place but my roots don’t reach here, not anymore. It can never be home again. I hate that he took that from me.”

“The Commander?” Michael asked.

I shook my head. “He would be much easier to forgive.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

It was all that needed to be said.

A
few weeks after we returned from Port-au-Prince, Michael and I went to brunch with Mona and Carlito. We sat on a sunny patio of a popular restaurant at one in the afternoon, slightly hungover from drinking and dancing the night before. We all drink a little more in the after, just enough to dull the constant reminders of how our fairy tales have been rewritten. The restaurant was crowded, loud. The day was sunny and warm, a perfect Miami moment. I wore sunglasses. I always wear sunglasses when I am not at home. I am always hiding in plain sight. I do it out of respect for the living. I wore a long summer dress, bared my arms, finally felt comfortable enough to do something other than shroud my body in layers of dark, heavy clothing. The bruises have long faded but scars remain. In certain outfits, people stare but I pretend they cannot see me or these truths, so written on my body.