Claire of the Sea Light (21 page)

He had wondered then whether he was in shock, or overtired, or hallucinating. But now he believed that he had neither dreamed nor imagined all this, that it had actually happened.

He was remembering this, he knew, as a way of avoiding
thinking about his son. He imagined the
O
face drawing melting, coming apart, even now in his pants pocket. A drawing made by his son, whom he’d just met, his son, whom he might never see again. Would meeting him today have meant anything at all to his son? How long would it take the boy to forget him? Would his son grow up calling another man “Papa”? And if he did, would there ever be some hesitation, a hint of doubt in the back of the boy’s mind, something that would ring false in the sound of his voice? The worst possible case of unrequited love, Jessamine had told him, was feeling rejected by a parent. Was the second worst being rejected by your child? He knew quite a bit about unrequited love, unreciprocated love. Until he’d met his son, he’d felt as if every other love were a phantom version, a shadow of the one he’d once had.

People like to say of the sea that lanmè pa kenbe kras, the sea does not hide dirt. It does not keep secrets. The sea was both hostile and docile, the ultimate trickster. It was as large as it was small, as long as you could claim a portion of it for yourself. You could scatter both ashes and flowers in it. You could take as much as you wanted from it. But it too could take back. You could make love in it and you could surrender to it, and oddly enough, surrendering at sea felt somewhat like surrendering on land, taking a deep breath and simply letting go. You could just as easily lie down in the sea as you might in the woods, and simply fall asleep.

•  •  •

Nozias’s eyes had been closed for only a few minutes when he was awakened by a strange sound in the water, echoes of a person crying. Or was it laughter?

He felt a chill, shuddering as he made his way to the edge of the water. A few of his friends, the other fishermen who’d left their own shacks to surround him in support, were still fast asleep, their bodies strewn in fetal positions around him on the sand. Others, he knew, were in town or up by the lighthouse, looking for his daughter.

Was it Claire Limyè Lanmè he had just heard in this water, though? he wondered. Was that what had awakened him, the draft of her spirit drifting past, the gust of her final breaths? He’d felt something similar the day his wife died. It was hard to explain, but in his wife’s case, it was a momentary stillness, as though the entire world had grown completely silent.

He was feeling this now, but not as strongly. Could it be Claire sinking in? Or Caleb settling at the bottom of the sea?

He peered out into the water, and the seaweed mixed with the reflection of the night sky made it seem as though there were stardust on its surface. He squeezed his arms around his body as if to hold himself in one piece while he waited for the girl’s voice to surface from the waves.

“Papa, se ou?”

Some mornings when he would walk into their shack from the sea, Claire would ask in a half-sleeping voice, “Papa, is that you?”

“Ki yès ankò?” he would ask. “Who else would it be?”

Now, he hurried back to the shack, remembering midstep that he’d left Madame Gaëlle there. And when he walked in, the lamp was still burning.

Madame Gaëlle and her shiny dress hadn’t moved from the edge of his bed. She was watching the lamp wick’s shadows flicker across the newspaper-covered walls when he cried out, “Daughter, was that you?”

The midwife had told him that his wife’s last words before she died had been to Claire’s crowning head and shoulders. Though feeble and weak, she had still managed to say, “Vini.” Come. But she was gone before Claire came.

He closed the door and pressed his back against it, again not knowing what to say.

“Did you find her?” Madame Gaëlle asked.

He shook his head no.

The day before Claire Limyè Lanmè’s seventh birthday, he had gone to his friend Caleb to request a special favor. Caleb was one of a handful of his fisherman friends who could read and write, so Caleb acted as his and some of the other fishermen’s document checker and letter writer. The fact that Caleb’s wife was a deaf mute—she was always present during his letter writing—also guaranteed that the words dictated in her presence would not spread through the town’s teledyòl gossip mill.

Nozias had gone to Caleb to have him look over the documents that would be required should Madame Gaëlle adopt Claire. There was Claire’s birth certificate and school
report cards, which showed her to be excelling at everything, including good behavior. But sitting in Caleb’s shack, which was twice as big as his, he decided at the very last minute to dictate a letter to Claire.

At sixty-nine, Caleb was older than most of the men who were still going out on the water. Unlike most of the fishermen, whose hands looked as though they had been sliced many times over and patched back together, Caleb’s hands were the smoothest, and the smallest, that Nozias had ever seen on a grown man. The way Caleb copied the words that spilled out of his mouth seemed magical to him. Nozias was astonished when Caleb read his words back to him. The phrases, as few and as banal as they were, seemed gentler, neater, as if Caleb had entered his head and reorganized everything.

Madame Gaëlle now watched as he walked to his cot and raised the pillow where his head usually lay. They were close enough that she could reach over and touch the back of his smooth, bald head with her hands. He pulled out the black plastic bag in which Claire Limyè Lanmè’s papers and his letter were carefully wrapped. He untied the bag, taking special care not to tear any holes in it. He pulled out the letter and handed it to her.

Madame Gaëlle squinted as though she were having trouble seeing the words, then she slid down to be closer to the lamp, leaving even less space between them.

She began reading the letter to herself, then raised her voice:

Madame Gaëlle refolded the letter and returned it to the bag. She pressed her lips against the back of his neck, letting them linger there in a kiss.

He hadn’t been kissed by a woman in that way since his wife died, a kiss so pure that it felt like it was polishing him. He felt as though his body had turned to gold. A stream of light was coursing through him, and when he reached up to touch her face, he felt both their bodies expand beyond the size of his room.

“What will we do when Claire returns?” she asked,
removing her lips from the back of his neck, sliding, slipping away from his side of the cot, away from him. Yet she had said “nou,” we, and he was glad that she had said it.

What will
we
do when Claire returns?

This is what he wanted more than anything for his daughter: a lack of cruelty, a feeling of safety, but also love. Benevolence and sympathy too, but mostly love.

He wasn’t sure what he would do when Claire returned. He didn’t know. Maybe he would still have Claire go live with her. Or maybe he would postpone again for another year. Then another. Then another. And soon he would see for himself whether what people said about children growing up so fast was true for more than seven years. Avan w bat zye w. In the flicker of an eyelid. Before you know it, they’re living their own lives. Maybe Claire would be old enough by then to be the one leaving him behind. Or maybe something terrible would happen to him before she was grown. Or maybe, like Caleb, he would be lost at sea and Madame Gaëlle would remember that tonight a promise had been extracted from her. She had said yes. She had said “nou.” She had agreed to take Claire. But first Claire had to come back. And when she did, would she come back to live with him? Would they have another year together, on the beach? This is what he hoped his wife might have said, if she’d found herself in his position, giving their child away: better a child cry for a parent now then for everything later on. But would she, could she—she his wife, she his daughter, and she Madame Gaëlle—could they even see it like that?

Madame Gaëlle got up and moved to Claire’s cot so that she was now across from him, facing him.

“I want to ask you again,” she said, “why you want to give her away. And to me.”

“I am not the first,” he said, trying to remain calm, to stay composed, “nor am I the only one to ever give up a child.”

“I used to see you,” she said, “walking by the fabric store, on your way to visit her at the funeral parlor. You loved that woman, her mother, so much …”

And with those words still in the air, Nozias abruptly got up and walked out of the shack once again, hoping to avoid this part of the exchange, to avoid thinking how much even the idea of giving away their daughter would have devastated his wife. And what if both Claires were now gone for good? What if he never saw his daughter again?

After he’d stepped outside, Gaëlle thought she heard him scream. She grabbed the kerosene lamp and rushed out the door, and to the sea, to the edge of the water, where he was standing with the waves lapping at his feet.

Nozias Faustin had indeed loved his wife. And one way he liked to show it was by visiting her at the funeral parlor where she worked, whenever he wasn’t out at sea. One afternoon when he got to the funeral parlor, she was scrubbing the waist-high cement table where she washed and dressed the dead. The table was attached to the floor and was wide
enough for two or three people to be laid out comfortably. But only his wife was there when he arrived.

During his visits, he would often find her in the middle of her work, her small frame swimming in her sand-colored plastic work coat, her long, gloved fingers wiping beads of water off a naked corpse. Sometimes it was someone he recognized and he would wonder how she could touch so intimately in death someone she had spoken to in life. Sometimes, if they had drowned, the bodies would be bloated, unrecognizable. On those occasions, she would hand him a cloth mouth-and-nose cover, just like hers, and would then seem to forget that he was there. She would talk to the dead instead. Moving her masked face close to their ears, she would recount everything that had happened in town since they had died.

Most of the time, she would, he knew, have other company than him. Family members would come and help wash and dress. She would tell him later that she had watched them for hints of tenderness that she’d then apply to those whose family members preferred not to come. Sometimes she would apply special perfumes, sneak in a pair of socks or stockings of her own choosing, though the dead were never to have shoes. Shoes could only weigh a person down in the afterlife.

She would sew some of the clothes for the dead, especially the babies, for whom it was too heartbreaking to buy burial clothes, but whenever necessary, she would adjust the clothes that were brought in, which were often either too large or too small. She would also tell him about families who would bury the dead in a secret place, ahead of the cement-filled closed
coffin at the funeral service, for fear that their dead might be snatched from the cemetery and turned into zombies. She often marveled how so many of the photographs brought in for the funeral programs were from decades ago; a centenarian’s funeral program cover photo was usually a wedding portrait or a special-occasion likeness from when the person was barely out of adolescence.

Every now and then, she would be asked by the family to extract gold crowns from the dead’s mouth, but that she would never dare to do herself. She would ask Msye Albert to do that.

She was glad, she sometimes told Nozias, that she never had to go into the walk-in freezer to take a corpse off the shelf by herself, not even a baby corpse, which she could have easily lifted and carried. Whenever she had to wash and dress the bodies, she would find them already on the table waiting.

Nozias was there once when she was putting a final dab of powder on a young man’s face, and both the man’s eyes abruptly popped open. Nozias had jumped back, terrified, but she hadn’t even flinched.

“I just have to tell Msye Albert to sele, or set, the eyes again,” she said as she went on with her work.

Setting the eyes, he learned that day, did not mean placing one’s fingers over the eyelids and sliding them downward, as he had seen laypeople do. Rather, it meant putting thumbprint-size pieces of rubber under the eyelids, then gluing them to the insides of the eyes so they would remain closed.

Some of the corpses would break wind as if they were alive, except it was a fouler, stinkier wind. But there was no such smell that day, just the lingering fragrance of the lemon-scented disinfectant she scrubbed the cement table with after she washed each body.

As he walked toward her in the washroom that afternoon, she did not rush to greet him. The plastic coat she was wearing was weighing her down, he thought, or maybe it was something else.

He could hear above him, around him, the creaking and echoes coming from other parts of the house, the loud footsteps and muffled conversations from the offices upstairs. Next to the room they were in was the showroom, with the sample coffins lined against the wall. Next to that was the chapel with a stained-glass window of the Last Supper, made locally, with brown faces, by a Ville Rose artist.

His wife removed her work coat, letting it fall at her feet. Underneath she was wearing her favorite dress, a bell-shaped parrot-green dress that she had sewn herself. Her hair was neatly brushed, the cornrows lined up like roads on a map to some mysterious land. Her hands were folded over her breasts and she closed her eyes, looking as though she were sleeping on her feet. He wondered if this was what she’d been doing before he’d come in, listening with her eyes closed to everything around her.