Claire of the Sea Light (17 page)

She moved slowly, not wanting the pleasure of her approach to end. She had played the wonn as a child, during recess, and at night in her parents’ yard, with visiting friends.
What she remembered most about it, though, was how less lonely she felt holding someone else’s hand.

It would have sounded odd—people have been accused of sorcery for less—if she told someone how much she wanted to take all those little girls home, set them up in the many empty rooms of her house, and, whenever she was sad, ask them to play with her. There were many days when she wanted to grab a little girl and hold her in her arms, just to inhale her smell, the smell that these men lacked. Their smells were musty: they smelled of roads and dust and cologne that never quite covered their musk. They smelled of work, of sweat, of other women. But little girls smelled of roses and wet leaves, of talcum powder, and the dew.

In spite of what Inès and nearly everyone else had told her after her daughter died, longings like this had never subsided. And her losses had not made her stronger; they had made her weak. They had given others control and power over her. She didn’t want to continue being weak, but she didn’t want to die either. She was too eager to see what would come next, what her husband and daughter had missed. She was both hungry for life and terrified of it. Her evenings with these men let the rage and confusion disappear for a while and allowed her to make it through her days. They allowed her to sell thread and cloth and remain close to the graves of the people she really loved.

There were times, as she’d told Max Senior, that she wanted to take off, leave Ville Rose, leave the country, and
never come back. But she’d heard too much about the difficulties of starting a new life in another land to want to try. She’d heard about people who had been infantilized while learning a new language, people who’d ended up cleaning houses or wiping the asses of other people’s children. She saw these people return to Ville Rose at Christmas or in the summertime, with extravagant hairstyles and expensive-looking clothes, but their eyes always betrayed them. All the humiliation they had endured could be detected there. Their skins betrayed them too, the burns from the dry cleaner’s steamer or the car wash or the restaurant kitchens, as visible as brands on animals. Non, none of that was for her. Her ancestors on both sides were buried at the town cemetery, among the town’s oldest families. She could not be dyaspora. She liked her ghosts nearby. She could never live in a foreign land, then return only a few times a year. She could not ever risk dying and being buried in a cold place. She would always be here, she thought, like the boulder that stopped her feet when at last she reached the little girls.

One of the girls, Claire, realized that she was being watched and occasionally glanced her way. Like her mother, Claire was beautiful. She moved more gracefully, more purposefully, than the rest of the girls, even the ones who were older. Gaëlle walked over to the girls, and immediately her presence stopped the game.

“Do you remember my daughter?” the girl’s father, Nozias, often asked Gaëlle when they saw each other.

How could Gaëlle forget a child whom she had nursed as
a baby on the very night that she was born, a child who was so gentle, so docile, even on that first day, and had grown so lovely, so radiant, with each passing year?

“Is your papa here?” Gaëlle asked Claire.

The girl nodded; she was looking down at her hands, then at her sand-coated feet. Impatient, the other girls lost interest and drifted away.

Gaëlle motioned for the girl to follow her. Claire sat down next to her and from behind one of the boulders pulled out a pair of rubber sandals. Gaëlle waited for her to finish placing the sandals on her feet, then said, “I knew your mother.”

Claire’s eyes seemed to light up the way children’s eyes do when they’re hungry for stories.

“I knew her longer than you’ve been alive,” Gaëlle said. “Your mother was my friend.”

It was not altogether a lie.

The girl’s head was arched toward her, her mouth wide open, as though to inhale Gaëlle’s words, which came out so fast that Gaëlle could barely stop. Gaëlle was not sure what she was thinking and what she was saying out loud. “When your mother was pregnant with you, your mother gave up washing and dressing the dead. Then she had all the time to do nothing but go out on the water with your father and sew. She waited so long to have you, your mother. I wouldn’t even say wait. She tried. She tried. She tried to pull you out of the sky, pry you out of God’s hands. Yes, God’s hands, I’d say. I don’t go to church every Sunday. I don’t go to church at all, but she wanted you so bad. I know she pulled you out of
God’s hands. That’s the only way I can put it. She was well the whole time you were inside her body. Never even seemed tired when she came into the shop, except the last week, when she didn’t come. Then the midwife was sent for. No one knows what happened while you were being born. I hear the midwife thought all was going well. You should not blame yourself. That revenan talk is superstition. Nobody
returns
. That is not real. You’re gone. You’re gone. Back in God’s hands, and no one can pull you back. Not you. Not you, Claire. I hope you understand. Not you back in God’s hands, but your mother and my Lòl and my Rosie and your mother too and everyone else who has died who didn’t deserve to die. Though who deserves to die? Too many people die here, and why do the rest of us get to live?

“Happy birthday, Claire,” Gaëlle said, both her thoughts and her voice now slowing down.

There was still so much more she wanted to tell the girl, though. She wanted to tell her about seeing her mother at her husband’s gravesite service, but this part might be impossible for the girl to grasp. Claire’s mother might have even been at the cathedral for her husband’s funeral Mass—the whole town, it seemed, was there—but Gaëlle hadn’t noticed if she was. But she remembered well seeing Claire’s mother at the burial ground, standing near the cemetery gate.

In the normal course of life as a new mother, Gaëlle, according to custom, shouldn’t have been outside in the open air at all, for fear that her nouris body—weakened by childbirth—might be too frail. But against everyone’s advice,
the morning of her husband’s funeral Mass and burial service she’d left her infant daughter at home with Inès and attended both. During the gravesite prayers, her breasts ached and swelled, wetting the front of her white dress. She looked beyond the deep hole in the ground, beyond the bronzed coffin, beyond Pè Marignan and the large crowd of townspeople around her, toward the cemetery gate, eager to be at home with her baby. This was when she saw Claire Narcis standing alone under a flame-colored weeping willow by the cemetery gate. Claire Narcis was wearing the same plain black dress she wore to the funerals of all the townspeople whose bodies she had washed and dressed for burial.

That morning, it seemed that Claire Narcis and the weeping willow had become one. Claire’s body seemed indistinguishable from the small part of the willow’s trunk that was not covered by its drooping branches. Claire’s head was topped by the willow’s golden crown. Claire Narcis had seemed that morning to be a dazzling mirage, a veil between the dirt being piled on her husband’s coffin and the wailing baby waiting at home. And Claire’s presence at the cemetery gate, and the surprising way it had both jolted and comforted her, was one of the reasons she’d agreed to nurse Claire’s daughter when she was newly born, and one of the many reasons she could honestly call the girl’s mother her friend.

Nozias was now standing over Gaëlle and the girl. He plopped himself down next to them, nearly falling over his daughter.

Fòk nou voye je youn sou lòt, Claire Narcis had often told her. Gaëlle put her hands on the girl’s back and felt the child’s body shaking. She had finally made up her mind. Yes, she would take her.

“Tonight,” she said.

Immediately she began to worry. Maybe she had said too much. Maybe she had upset the child with all that talk. Maybe things were moving too fast.

“Now?” her father asked. “Tonight?”

He immediately shifted his total attention to Claire, almost as if Gaëlle were no longer there. This surprised her. Hadn’t he been trying to give the girl to her for years?

He mentioned something about not changing her name and his having a letter for her, then Claire raised her arms. “Bagay mwen yo,” she said.

What about her things? Gaëlle wondered.

But the girl did not wait for them to give her permission; she simply turned and started toward their place.

Gaëlle wasn’t sure how long it had been, but people were slipping away and heading home, and the girl had not returned.

“I’ll get her,” Nozias said.

Gaëlle watched him head for the shack. He was doing his best to stay upright under the weight of his sadness about seeing his daughter go. He too disappeared inside the shack. Then he walked out, shouting the girl’s name.

Gaëlle rushed to his side. She followed him through the alleys between the shacks, then down toward the water,
all the while calling the girl’s name along with him and his neighbors.

“We should take my car and look for her in town,” she finally said, when it seemed to her that Claire might have left the beach.

“Non,” he replied firmly, as if to put himself back in control. “She’s just hiding. She will come back.” She understood his need to remain in control. Even though he had just given her to him, she was still his child.

“You keep looking,” she said. “And I will wait at your place for her.”

She followed him to his doorstep. He rushed ahead of her and lit up the small shack, which was the size of one of her terraces. It did not smell like the sea, like it had the last time she was there. It smelled like the long matchstick he had just pounded against the side of the matchbox and the kerosene wick on the hourglass lamp he had just lit. Part of the room was now filled with a flaxen glow, the rest full of shadows. He reached above his cot and unclasped, then pushed open, the flaps of a small window, letting some air in and some smoke out. Then he closed the flaps just as quickly. He seemed nervous, scared even, but was doing his best not to let her see it.

Gaëlle tried very hard to not, once again, confuse her heartache with desire. Still, she thought she’d give him a hint of her temptation by sitting on his cot.

He walked out.

He left anyway.

“Tell me, Flore Voltaire,” Louise George was saying, her gaunt body erect, her spine ruler straight, behind the studio microphone. “We are ready to hear your story.”

“There was a hailstorm …,” Flore began, closing her eyes to avoid looking directly at Louise’s bony face.

There was a hailstorm the night Max Ardin, Jr., came to Flore Voltaire’s bed. The ice balls, tiny at first, were pounding the roof of the first-floor room attached to the kitchen. It was a narrow room, the smallest one in Max Senior’s house, perhaps built for someone who was spending the night but not staying for long, as Flore and her aunt, the previous maid, had.

Exhausted from a long day of cleaning and preparing dinner, Flore was flipping through a beauty magazine that she’d found lying around in the living room when the thumping on the roof grew louder. The sequined dresses, long legs and necks, and high-heeled shoes she was idly studying made her beige polyester night slip feel even flimsier, older, and uglier, but she kept flipping the pages anyway.

She had been in hailstorms before, in Cité Pendue. Sometimes
during these storms, a house not as sturdy as this one would be pummeled so badly that it would be blown over by the winds that followed.

The lights were out all over Max Senior’s house, and Max Junior seemed to be just wandering around with a flashlight when he came into her room. At first she thought he’d come for the magazine, so she quickly handed it to him, ashamed of her stargazing at long hair and made-up faces. He took the magazine from her without saying a word—not even hello—and he left. She pulled the door closed behind her, turning the small lock. It was not the first time he’d been in her room. It was his father’s house, after all. Those times, he would come to ask her where something was, or to put something together, a sandwich or some tea, for him or his father. But that night, she sensed, was different. He seemed lost.

She walked back to her bed and lay down on her side, raising the blanket over her body, all the way up to her neck, as she’d slept most of her life. She could then hear the footsteps approaching. He was returning. The lock was no use. The door, it seemed, was made to be opened easily. He walked over and sat on the edge of her bed. The sound of the hail seemed to grow more and more distant until it stopped entirely, giving way to the patter of rain and the occasional sparks of thunder and lightning.

He said nothing. She closed her eyes and tried to pretend he wasn’t there. Then she opened her eyes again and looked around, her gaze settling on the flashlight illuminating his blank, vacant face. Underneath his shave coat, he was naked.

At first she thought he was asleep, sleepwalking, dreaming on his feet. Or that she was. She was too frightened to speak. The lightning and thunder did not seem to trouble him, and he moved his face toward hers until her body was pinned beneath his on the bed. He was heavy, twice the size of most nineteen-year-olds. She thought this had something to do with his having done his secondary and university schooling locked up in his father’s office at École Ardin, getting lessons from his old man. He had never, as her mother liked to say, even been sprinkled by the rain.

As he pulled her night slip up toward her chest, she thought she saw a few drops of rain in a corner of the room, sliding down the walls from the ceiling. Maybe the roof had been damaged in the hailstorm. And if the roof were damaged, then she was no safer inside than she would be outside.

When he left the room—was it some minutes or hours or days later?—the rain was still falling, though not as heavily as before. She walked out into the courtyard rose garden, next to the pool, raising her face to the sky. The wind rattled her, her body soaked.