Claire of the Sea Light (20 page)

“He will,” Max Senior said, fully certain of this, if nothing else. “He always does.” The girl shook her studded face and grimaced, now allowing her frustration to show. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse and dialed it. She was trying to call his son, Max Senior assumed. But hadn’t she just told him that her phone wasn’t working? He wanted to remind her of this, but said nothing. She held the phone up to her ear for a while and when there was no answer, she threw it back in her purse. She kept watching the front gate, the road, leaning forward as if to better see each passerby. She remained sitting there next to him, long after the show ended and the station switched to a music program, and the neighbor’s maid finally lowered the volume.

“We’re not going to take it sitting down,” Max Senior
said, then he realized how ridiculous that sounded because they were actually sitting down.

“I’ll find Flore and Pamaxime again,” he continued, “and I will go to the radio station myself and denounce Louise on her own airwaves.” He was rambling now, he realized. “Nothing will change, not with the school, not with my son. All of this will be forgotten.” But what about Pamaxime? he wondered. What would become of Pamaxime?

“Byen. Okay,” the girl said.

He thought of her few words, in her heavy English accent, as banalities of the kind people say when they are feeling the opposite. He had been young once and might have said something like this, but never to one of his friends’ parents. But this girl was saying this to him now, because in some way she considered herself equal to him. She might even consider herself wiser than him, her apparent lack of condemnation, her friendship with his son a sign—or so she probably thought—that she possessed a kind of compassion that surpassed everyone else’s, that even surpassed his.

Just then, thankfully, his friend Albert walked through the front gate and on the path toward them. Jessamine jumped up as if she thought it was his son returning, or maybe she was just grateful to have someone else there.

“I’m not dead, am I?” Max Senior shouted to his friend.

Albert laughed, then walked faster, shifting his hat from one hand to the other when he reached them. Albert bowed his head in Jessamine’s direction while tapping his hat against his thigh. Jessamine looked up at him and returned his greeting
with a nod. Then, as if she could restrain herself no longer, she reached into her bag and pulled out a lighter and a cigarette. Walking to the end of the gallery, she sat on the edge of the railing and lit it. Max Senior was curious to see if smoke would come out of the side of her face through the studs in her dimples. (It didn’t.) He was also horrified to see her dropping her cigarette ashes, then the cigarette butt itself, on the African violets around the porch. Some of the flowers were already withering from the increasingly hot temperatures. He had planted them around the front gallery in corners where there was neither too much light nor too much shade. He had made sure that there was the right balance of perlite and soil, and now she was using his flowers as an ashtray. He wanted to shout at her to move away from them, but before he could say anything, she started walking back toward him and his friend. She walked, he realized, as though she were doing an upright backstroke, rotating her arms with every step.

Albert was watching her too, as he had sat in her place on the bench, leaving her with no choice but either to squeeze in next to them or to remain standing. She chose to remain standing.

Had she not been there, Max Senior would have gone inside and picked up his dominoes and card table, and he and Albert would have talked nonsense and played a long game late into the night. But she was standing there looking at them, and they could not ignore her.

Max Senior could see that his friend was doing his best to
take a break now and then from staring at her face. Because of his work as an undertaker, Albert was naturally intrigued by body modifications, amputations as well as embellishments, especially rare markings or piercings. His friend had probably never seen piercings like the ones on the girl’s cheeks. What would one call them, Max Senior wondered, earrings, but not on ears, zanno machwa, cheek rings? His friend, he was certain, was probably imagining his own son and daughter in the United States with these cheek rings, or worse.

“Are you here because of that program?” Max Senior asked Albert, in part to divert his friend’s attention from the young lady.

“Am I only allowed to come here when you have parties?” he asked.

“You can also come when we have tragedies,” Max Senior said.

“I can’t stay long,” Albert said, his eyes returning to Jessamine. She wrapped her arms around one of the porch’s pillars while looking at the trees on the road.

Max Senior could imagine how much his friend would taunt him at the next marathon domino game about having a girl like this—striking, as slender as a dancer, studded, tattooed—as his daughter-in-law.

“Where is your wife?” Max Senior asked his friend.

“She’s already left,” he said.

Max Senior thought how sad it had been that his friend’s wife and children had not even come home for his swearing-in
as mayor, because the twins were in some kind of swimming tournament. That day Max Senior had been grateful for his own divorce. How can some people not fully understand their ability to shatter hearts?

Jessamine walked back over to the far end of the porch and stared down at the same African violets she’d doubtless singed with her cigarette.

“What are these flowers?” she called out.

“Violets,” he told her.

“They grow here?” she asked.

They are growing, aren’t they? he wanted to say. At least they were trying to, before your cigarette.

“Everything can grow here,” he replied instead.

Max Senior then wished that his friend had not come so soon, that it was still just him and the girl talking in this new way about things, about his son being okay and about African violets. Max Senior then realized that he hadn’t properly introduced her to his friend.

“Albert, this is Jessamine,” he said. “Remember, we were waiting for her last night. Jessamine, this is Albert Vincent, an old friend.”

“Old only in the length of my friendship with Max,” Albert said.

“I see.” The girl did smile this time.

“And where is Junior now?” Albert asked.

Max Senior shrugged. “Most likely at the beach. Or at the lighthouse,” he added.

“Let him be,” Albert advised. “He’ll come back when he’s ready. Let’s just let him be.”

“That’s what I told Jessamine here,” Max Senior said.

It was getting dark, and Max Senior’s hope that his son would return grew stronger. Otherwise, it would be up to him to decide where to put the girl for the night. She had somehow reached his house on a camion that her relatives had put her in from the capital. The driver had been kind enough to drop her off at the gate, but she had no sure way of going back to Port-au-Prince, at least not tonight.

“I suppose you heard the program,” Max Senior said, keeping his eyes on the few people walking by on the road, looking, he thought, with new interest at his house.

“Part of it,” Albert said, resting his head on the wall behind him. “I heard it after meeting with the mother of a young man who got a machete in his gut from a land dispute, so I had some perspective.”

Jessamine raised an eyebrow, looking curious in a way that seemed to flatter his friend.

“You’re Oncle Albert,” she said. “Maxime told me about you.”

“Did he?” Albert said. “I thought he had forgotten about all of us.”

“Seems like no one here forgot him, though,” the girl said.

“Did he want us to forget him?” Max Senior asked, ashamed when he heard how forlorn his own voice sounded.

“Of course, as Louise constantly reminds us, there are things we should never forget,” Albert said, as though lecturing his friend.

“Kolangèt manman Louise, screw her!” Max Senior shouted, finally allowing himself to blurt out the full extent of his anger: at himself, at his son, at Flore, but most especially at Louise George.

Jessamine shrank back a little, hugging the porch pillar tighter, as if to give him room. Looking at her face, her high brow, her tattoo, and her pierced cheeks, Max could sense some deeper story there, some story he would probably never know. Albert said nothing, letting his friend stew for a moment. Instead he placed his hat on his lap, allowing his hands to shake openly for her to see.

It was growing even darker now, so dark that on Max Senior’s street one could already see lights through the windows of a few houses. The silence among the three of them now bothered Max Senior so much that he did not feel as timid as he might have asking what he did next.

“Are you and my son in love?” he asked. “Nou renmen?”

Once the words crossed his lips, he realized that they sounded more like a plea than a question. Please, please, love my son was really what he was saying. And for once he was grateful that Albert restrained himself from jumping in and facetiously asking, for example, “Who, me? Am I in love with your son?” Instead it was the girl who asked, “Me?” and Max Senior said, “Since we’re neither on the radio nor on television, I’m going to both nod and say yes.”

Max Senior nodded and Jessamine frowned her disapproval at his poking fun at the show and at Flore.

“Your son is my friend,” she said, her eyes following the fireflies lighting up, then disappearing around them. “He is my very terrible and imperfect and dear friend.”

Max Senior thought this an accurate description, one of many he might have used himself.

“I fell in love with your son when I met him and knew nothing about him,” she continued.

“And he?” Max Senior interrupted her to ask. “Did he fall in love with you?”

“What do you think?” she asked brazenly.

“Obviously he doesn’t know what to think,” Albert interjected. “That’s why he’s asking you.”

“As lovable as I am,” she said, now waving her hands as though to reach for the fireflies, “he is not capable of being in love with me.”

“How’s that?” asked Max Senior.

“I thought you would already know this,” the girl said to Max Senior as plainly as she had said everything else. “Your son has been in love only once in his life, and the person he was in love with is dead.”

Max Junior was lying on his back, under the palms that inclined as though to touch the sea. He tucked his hands under his head and stared up at the dark clouds, which were blocking, then fleeing the moon. That everyone could and
should despise him, there was no question, and they had good reason. Flore most of all.

He remembered the hailstorm that seemed like it might pummel the world to pieces. He remembered her flailing arms. He had foolishly wanted to prove something to his father that night, that he could be with Flore. He wanted his father to hear her screams.

To this day, he had never been with any man but Bernard. He and Bernard would come to the beach on nights like this and would remove their shirts, then plunge into the water. Initially, Bernard had been afraid of the sea. He was a strong swimmer, but was always worried that he would be caught in a current and towed away. That he would disappear forever.

Now, as he walked fully clothed to the water, Max Junior thought of his father’s version of a Cornish folktale, one the old man had told him when he was little.

A boy is lured into the woods by music. The deeper the boy walks into the woods, the denser the woods become and the more beautiful the music. The boy follows this music until he gets so lost that he no longer knows where he is. He becomes so scared that he wants to return home, but he also wants to follow the music to see where it leads. After he walks so far that the woods become impassable, he begins to cry for help. And that’s when a spirit emerges and makes a path for him. The path leads to the sea, where suddenly the music stops and the boy is now so tired that he lies down and falls asleep. When he wakes up, the boy finds himself back home, safely
in his own bed, with his head full of music and mermaids and crystal palaces under the sea. The spirit in the woods saved this boy, his father said, because the spirit wanted the boy to remain innocent and good and that innocence and goodness was as precious as the dreams she’d placed in his head. And because of that innocence and goodness, she would watch over him forever.

Max Junior now slipped into the water, feeling the cool waves rise and fall around him as the water ballooned his red shirt, the one Jessamine had given him for his return trip home. In the sea, he thought of music, the rap-filled kind he had once played on his radio show, the kind Bernard had liked. He also thought of flowers and birds. He thought of the birdhouses he and his father had built together, after hours of schoolwork and judo practice, when he was a boy. He thought of the somber plumage of some petrels and storm-signaling seagulls. He thought of the pigeons, alive and dead, in Bernard’s stories. He thought of the orchids and roses in his father’s garden, the dragonflies that buzzed around after a heavy rain and the fireflies that bombarded them at night. He thought of how the roses had been pummeled the night of the hailstorm but had still had enough nectar to attract a hummingbird the next morning. He thought of yellow jasmine, his mother’s favorite flowers. She would tie a bouquet to the bell on the front of her bicycle, then the two of them would ride next to each other through town. They would ride to the kleren factory and his mother, sniffing the air, would become
giddy from the raw liquor smell. He thought of his mother’s history lessons about the ruins of Abitasyon Pauline. He remembered the talk they’d had in the middle of the ruins shortly before she left town. You are who you love, she’d told him. You try to mend what you’ve torn. But remember that love is like kerosene. The more you have, the more you burn.

He liked his mother’s blunt aphorisms. He also liked how she tried to explain the rogue waves. Lasirèn, she said, made her presence known by swelling a wave several feet, whenever she craved human company.

One night ten years ago, after he’d learned that Flore was pregnant, he was sitting alone on the gallery of the old Anthère lighthouse when he thought he saw a supernova exploding above the sea. It was so dazzling that he could make out the uneven edges and emission line, even after closing his eyes. That’s when he also thought he saw the night sea swirl into a massive funnel, as if a mid-ocean whirlpool had come near the shore. Then the same waters quietly retreated—a tsunami in reverse—the waves turning into liquid mountains. He stood up, pressing his ribs into the lighthouse railing until he saw what he believed was part of the seafloor, a mountain-size ridge with reefs and sandbanks stripped bare for miles. Then just as quickly, the waves buckled and the water collapsed, hastily covering the ocean floor, as if nothing had taken place.