Claire of the Sea Light (15 page)

Odile now gently took Henri’s hand and moved him aside. Freed, he buried his face behind one of the chairs. Stepping back, Odile took a deep breath, then aimed for Louise.

The slap landed on Louise’s cheek before she could see it coming. Her head swung so fast that each of her ears tapped against each of her shoulders for a moment. Her cheek throbbed. It felt hot, then warm, then deadened, so that if Odile slapped her again, she probably wouldn’t feel a thing. Yet the most painful thing about it was that it felt as though the slap had come from Max Senior. It was as if he had hit her.

“Finished now,” Odile said to both her and Max Senior. “No more hitting talk. Just teach my child. And remember, correction, not humiliation.”

Odile grabbed Henri’s hand and yanked him toward the door. On his way out, with the contented look of the vindicated, Henri turned to face Louise, opened his mouth, and flashed her the gap between his front teeth: his version of a celebratory smile.

Louise heard herself breathing loudly as she tried to massage some sensation back into her cheekbone. The old office
door squeaked behind Odile and Henri as they moved into the yard.

Max Senior slipped back into the ancient chair behind his desk and motioned for Louise to also sit down. His gaze was fixed on her as though, she imagined, he was thinking of the two of them alone in one of those dark rooms of his childhood on those “Ki moun sa a?” nights, those “Who are you?” nights, and was trying to figure out who she really was.

She was Louise George. That’s who she was. She had always done her best to protect herself from insults and injuries like this. Only for him had she let her guard down with these children, and look where it had led her, into a pitch-black moment of her own.

A droning sound was ringing in her ears, but she thought she heard him ask, “T’es bien? Are you okay?”

“Why did you let her do that?” She pressed her palm against her cheek and massaged it in a gentle circular motion.

“After so many years of friendship,” he said, “you think I would tell her to do that to you?” Still, he seemed neither shocked nor outraged, and he did not get up from his chair and walk over to console her.

No matter what he said, she found it hard to believe that he did not approve of that woman slapping her. Odile must have sensed it too. Otherwise she would have never taken the chance. She would have never risked her child getting kicked out of the school, or worse.

Louise was feeling a bit dizzy now. The sound of Max Senior’s creaking chair echoed inside her head, his voice
drifting in and out of her ears. Why didn’t he slap her himself? she wondered.

He no longer wanted her in his life or at the school. She had felt it for some time, but she hadn’t been absolutely certain of it. He now turned to look at one of his old wooden cabinets, bursting with years of student dossiers and records. “The school is my whole life now,” he said, “and it has to be done right.”

She had heard him go on about all of this before. Here, at the school, he could still nurse and guide childhoods without taking full responsibility for their outcomes. The children were not his children. He could not fully blame himself for their lack of self-possession, their selfishness and failures, their willingness to ruin their lives and the lives of others. But he could at least shield them while they were still young and in his care.

“Even though this is my school,” he said, “my son, when he was this boy Henri’s age, was often misunderstood by the teachers here. And though they never slapped him physically, they often slapped him with words. This is why I would never allow something like you’ve done here.”

“We are not talking about your son!” she shouted.

“There is such a thing as a social contract then,” he said.

“I did not deserve to be slapped,” she said.

“Neither did that boy.” He pushed his chair forward in her direction, increasing the screeching noise coming from it.

“You didn’t even explain to his mother,” she said. “You didn’t even try to help her see my side.”

“You have no side here,” he said. “Besides, you were not there every moment I was with her.”

“So why was the other man there last night, that man Faustin?”

“Because,” he said, “as I heard it from the other children, Henri struck his daughter. I was hoping you would be brave enough to reassure both of those people that their children were still safe with us.”

“Then you should have had the whole class there last night,” she said, “because that boy has hit every one of those children.”

“That may be,” he said. “But—”

“So this was a konplo,” she said, cutting him off. “A plot to humiliate
me
?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Louise,” he said. “We are not on your show here.” And the way he twisted his mouth and curled his lips reminded her how much he hated her show.

This might just be an elaborate send-off, she thought. She herself might have chosen a simpler way to say good-bye. But this was Maxime Ardin we were talking about here. Maxime Ardin père, le premier, senior. The son was fils, deux, junior. Maxime Ardin, Sr., did not know of any simple ways to say good-bye. And when he couldn’t divorce or banish you, unless you were one of his students, he apparently had you smacked.

“If I did what you did,” he said, while looking so on edge that his teeth were nibbling on his bottom lip, “I would remove myself from my position. I couldn’t continue here.”

He got up, sat down, got up, then sat down again, but did not make an approach toward her. That dreaded feeling of loneliness she felt so often returned.

“Now you can have more time for your show,” he said. Again she noticed his scowl of disdain, for the show and now also for her. He had told her many times that she could have been a great teacher and that the show had kept her from it. But now he knew that she could never be that kind of teacher, and there was no longer much to admire.

“You can also keep writing your book,” he was saying. The slap he’d assigned to another woman was also meant to propel her toward this other redeemable talent, the writing of her book.

One of his favorite things to say to her was that she was like a starfish, that she constantly needed to have a piece of her break off and walk away in order for her to become something new. Of course this had always been truer of him than of her.

As she turned around to leave his office, she saw what he thought he was trying to slap back to life, a stronger and freer woman, one he could both salvage and admire. This slap, she knew, he perversely considered a gift to her, a convoluted act of kindness.

The night Gaëlle Lavaud’s husband died, she thought that everyone should die. After Laurent’s murder outside Radio Zòrèy, she’d sold their house in town and moved into her grandparents’ house on Anthère Hill. She had turned the fabric shop over to her employees, then had lain in bed for months, also waiting to die. Although everyone said that her milk would be tainted by her sadness and would fill her daughter, Rose, with sadness, Inès, her housekeeper, insisted that Gaëlle nurse her daughter as a way of saving both the child and herself. Gaëlle got out of her bed only when she could no longer keep her daughter in it, when the child began to crawl. And when her daughter started to walk, Gaëlle walked again. And when Rose began to talk, Gaëlle talked again.

She was tempted to close the fabric shop, but she returned to it, because it had meant so much to her husband and, unlike the house, was in a part of town that was less prone to floods, mudslides, and other potential disasters. Business had slowed anyway. People were buying less fabric and more ready-made used clothes, pèpè, from abroad. She was now mostly selling
fabric for school uniforms and even that was dwindling. Besides, during her time of mourning, many of her friendships had dissolved. She no longer attended baptisms, communions, or wedding receptions in the best houses in town. She even refused to listen to broadcasts from the radio station, where her husband had spent so much of his time.

Her husband’s murder was never going to be solved. That she knew. There would never be a proper trial. Bribes and corruption would keep anyone from being brought to justice. So she accepted the offer of two Special Forces policemen—childhood friends of both hers and her husband’s—to seek another type of justice. And when they had returned from their missions, they’d provided even more details than she had sought. They had walked into a young man’s red bedroom, crossed themselves, then shot him dead as he lay in his bed, a young man who used to work at the radio station where her husband had been killed. Later they had returned and set fire to the warehouse the neighborhood gang called home, by spreading gasoline at the entrance, and killed their leader, Tiye, and his second in command. The blaze had spread through the warehouse, then the restaurant next door.

She had not felt the kind of relief she’d expected when she’d heard all this. She hadn’t thought that the deaths would bring her husband back, but she’d expected a hole to feel plugged that never was. She likened it to making prints. No matter how long you soaked the cloth in the dye, as long as the fabric was waxed, the color wouldn’t change. Little had changed for her. Nothing had been returned to her. A few
high-level friendships had made her judge, jury, and executioner. Yet she still felt powerless, incapacitated, cursed.

For a long time, she hadn’t ever allowed herself to think about all this, that is, until the day her daughter died. Perhaps it had been no accident, but some terrible cosmic design engulfing everyone involved. Maybe she was not worthy of growing old with the man she had loved most of her life. Or of seeing her daughter grow up. Could it be that there was a puppet master somewhere who despised her and had decided that she was to be made an example of? Had she doomed herself further when she’d turned her rage over to her Special Forces friends? Maybe that’s when it was also decided that her daughter’s obituary in
La Rosette
would not say that she died after a valiant battle with a long illness.

The driver whose car had struck the motorcycle her daughter was traveling on, sending her only child hurtling into the air to her death, was someone she knew, a young hotelier from a prominent family in town. He was a Moulin.

She had not wanted her daughter to grow up like the Moulins or those other rich kids, who seemed even richer because they lived in a poor town. But she blamed herself every day for not picking Rose up from school that afternoon in her own car.

After Rose died, she would often think back to the first time she had to leave her for a few hours. It was to attend her husband’s funeral. Do you know that feeling when you are about to leave your child and she cries like she will never see
you again and you fear that her intense sadness might be some terrible omen? She wished she had never stopped feeling that. She wished she’d seen every simple good-bye as a curse for what she’d done. She wished she’d never let her daughter, not even for one minute, out of her sight.

A few months after Rose died, Inès’s eyesight began failing. There were younger people to do the job that she was not doing, Inès had told her, and Inès wanted to spend her last days in her ancestral village in the mountains. Although Inès had been gone for years now, Gaëlle sometimes still craved her company so much that she would wake up in the morning and wait for Inès to come and serve her breakfast, just as she would sometimes wait for her daughter to skip through the doorway and bounce into her bed. At night, after a whole day of watching little girls stream in and out of the fabric shop with their mothers, Gaëlle would imagine Rose as an eight-, then a nine-, now a ten-year-old girl. Her baby teeth would be gone, her baby fat yielding to early prepubescent brawn. Her voice would be more defined, more confident. She would be dressing herself too, picking out her own clothes and combing her own hair. She would be riding a bicycle, swimming in the sea. Her childhood passion for pressing wildflowers into her notebooks would most likely continue. Next to them she might now be pasting cutout magazine photos of film and music stars. Rose would still be getting excellent grades in school—Gaëlle would have seen to that—but would she still want to play with the dozen or so cloth dolls that, ignoring her fancier toys, the two of them had made together? Would
she still want to climb up the lighthouse steps and look down at the sea? Would she still want to dance, along with her friends, in their school’s maypole dance at Carnival time, or wear the same feathered hat with her Taino costume for the children’s parade? Would she still want to fly kites on Saturday afternoons, then go down and watch the fishermen’s children launch their miniature boats on the water and run along the beach behind them, chasing the plastic bucket covers they used as Frisbees? Would she still want to know what heaven was and what her father was doing there? Would she still push her head back now and then and shout “Papa!” to the clouds, then ask if everyone was in heaven, why there was any need for cemeteries? Why didn’t the dead just float up and drift away like balloons?

Gaëlle had filled some of the years since her daughter’s death with these types of unanswered questions and with the company of men who were interested in either money or sex or both. Couldn’t they tell, she often wondered, that she was a shell, a zombie, just as she had been when she was pregnant with her daughter and was sure that her daughter would be born damaged or dead, just as she had been too during those early days after her husband had died? Couldn’t they tell that wherever her husband’s and daughter’s spirits were was where she longed to be? Only Max Senior had understood this, because he had listened intently to her story about hiring the Special Forces avengers, while holding her hand.

•  •  •

The night of the vigil for the lost fisherman, Caleb, Gaëlle had been expecting Max Senior and his son for dinner. She had skipped Max Junior’s welcome-home party the night before and had chosen instead to invite the younger Ardin, through his father, to her home. But earlier that evening Max Senior had called to cancel, offering no explanation.