There is a Land (A Libète Limyè Mystery) (17 page)

Stephanie hates secrets.

She hates keeping them and hates having them kept from her. They are her avowed enemy.

Their drive continues. Before long, Port-au-Prince gives way to verdant Gressier, Léogâne, and the winding mountain pass that takes them through trees and crops and rock before reaching the downward slope of the bluff’s opposite side.

At least we’re getting closer,
she thinks.

Checking her mirrors again–she hadn’t been able to stop since key met ignition–she saw Jak’s long-faced reflection in the window and that Libète was still asleep. His eyes were dull, ignoring the strength of the Sun as it reached its zenith.

Memory returns her to the day she first met the girl.

Live radio was a thrill, one of the most ecstatic things Stephanie had experienced. Every visit was drenched in adrenaline. She had just turned off the microphone that day, removed her headphones, and let her heart return to its regular patter before stepping outside to find the bony girl in her ratty clothes, hiding in the wall’s shade. This girl, whispered a guard, she asked for the poet
.

If I only knew then what she brought with her . . .

It was a horrible thought. Stephanie chastises herself for her invisible crime. Libète was a herald of profound good–and ill. Coming on the scene to forever burst any sense of comfort and order and regularity.
Like a child,
Stephanie supposed
. Like a daughter.

Flattered, intrigued, and basking in the radio show’s afterglow, Stephanie stepped forward. I am the poet, she said.

Poetry
. Her chosen trade was taking what was naught and turning it into what was. Lines of unexpected beauty, lightness, and depth, conjured from the nothingness of an empty page. She could make ink dance into any form: a caressing feather or a deadly bullet. She wrote. She wrote.

With her upbringing, it was impossible for the poetic not to become the prophetic. Gerry, an old school friend and current host of one of Haiti’s most prominent talk shows, had given her some of her most-treasured gifts: a platform and a megaphone. She summoned lines of verse for his show like she never had before. Such lofty ideas passed from her head, transmuted in her heart, before escaping through her fingertips or mouth.

The girl
. That bony girl was a paradox. Timid, but with hard eyes. Named Libète–
liberty
–but so clearly enslaved by some idea or obligation.

At first the girl spoke only in questions:

Do you have a father?

Do you know your true father?

Do you want to know him?

And Stephanie answered.

—
Yes, I have a father.

After her mother was killed and her father Elize fled, she had been taken in by Moïse and Cecilia Martinette. In Moïse’s home, no societal ill escaped labeling, registration, or cataloging. He had seen too much speech stifled, too many generations wiped away by poverty, too many friends killed. Privilege has to be spent, Moïse would say, a favorite aphorism. He was a beloved professor, a public intellectual. When the military junta had finally laid down its power in the late 1980s–really just scattering for a bit before a quick return, like vultures around roadkill as a car approaches–Moïse was quick to speak out. After the wave of democratic revolution ridden by President Aristide, Moïse had considered entering into politics–many encouraged him–but Aristide’s first ouster, only a year after, spoiled any appetite to become a cog in
le système
, as he derisively dismissed the powers that be.

Cecilia died in a car accident when Steffi was ten, twenty-one years ago. Her second mother was warm and loving and far too young to perish.

Stephanie’s relationships with her adoptive siblings were hardly conventional. Laurent was always an enigma to her. When she was taken in and adopted at age five, he was already fifteen. He was a recluse even then, and spoke to her very little. Moïse had another daughter, Ingrid, even older than the boy. She had traveled to the US for university and become an entrenched member of the
dyaspora.
As far as Ingrid was concerned, planes traveled one direction only: Port-au-Prince to Brooklyn. Stephanie and Ingrid had never even met face to face, as she was at university in New York when Stephanie entered the Martinette home. There remained only enmity between them. No one enjoyed being replaced by a prettier orphan–a do-over for her parents to raise. Only when Stephanie was a graduate herself, little-known but already well regarded by Haitian society, particularly the progressive segment, did Laurent begin to interact with her. Laurent traveled to the US, to the University of Wisconsin, to obtain his doctorate in sociology. Despite an offered teaching fellowship in the US, he returned to Haiti. A spot at the university opened up, as Moïse always explained it, and so Laurent filled it. Moïse would never admit to nepotism in the arrangement. When asked why he returned from the US, Laurent always answered the same way: too cold.

As in public, Moïse loomed large at home. Too large, maybe. His convictions about every facet of life came with a temper: the same one that could righteously rage against social ills could not be bottled and capped so easily. Attempts to do so saw him retreat into hardness and depression. Cecilia had learned to leave him be, until some coup at work or in national politics could rouse him. It was a terrible cycle, only worsened after Cecilia’s premature death. And so he took much pleasure in Stephanie, at her growth, her keen mind, and her inquisitive spirit. He called her his
Ti Bon Anj
, his good little angel. She lived to lift his spirits, probably the reason why she had chosen a life of letters herself. Moïse’s support–financial and parental–sustained Steffi and made that life of abstraction possible. In his advancing years, he needed further care too. How could the daughter–with all of her needs assumed through adoption–not take on the responsibility of caring for the adopted father?

The bony girl asked her second question, and Stephanie answered: I do not know my true father.

It was fact. She hardly remembered his name; this may have been willful. Moïse at first had spoken of Elize and his wife, Fleur, often, always with great affection. That was when Moïse believed Elize, reeling from the murder of his wife, would soon return from his travels.

After one week away: “Your father needs some time.”

After one month: “He says he’ll return once it’s safe for him.”

After one year:

Nothing. A gap. The man called Elize and all he represented became a fiction. He hovered in streaks of memory, like a character encountered in a novel read in one’s youth: a musk here, the glint of his cufflinks, a brow furrowed as he labored over his words. Her mother was the same way. Memories of her touch and a few salvaged photographs kept her more than just a wisp of a name.

—
Do I
want
to know him? Stephanie echoed back the young girl’s third question. Categorically, definitively, unequivocally–
no.
She thought her answer was clearly stated.

And yet, the girl pleaded. It’s not what you think, Libète had said. Elize regretted it all. He wanted to be good, but bad dwelt in his body. He wanted to find her, but guilt kept him away. And now, his body was failing. He was dying.

And yet, Stephanie ignored the pleas. Despite an invitation to visit Elize in a hospital bed in Cité Soleil, Stephanie left the radio station under the girl-named-Liberty’s watchful eyes, never expecting to see her again.

It took her a night and a day and a night to decide. She did not tell Moïse about Libète, nor asked him about whether to abandon the father who abandoned her. Meanwhile, news broke in the run-up to national elections about the arrest of senatorial candidate and man of industry Jean-Pierre Benoit. The dramatic video from the arrest ran on a loop over those few days, and there, on the margins of the scene, was the bony girl who accused him. The same girl who had met her at the radio station two days before. It then came as a throwaway line in the news coverage: the small girl was in the hospital, cut down by a bullet after intervening in a shoot-out. Such stories of injured innocents poured out of Cité Soleil all the time. But this one had a face and a name that stuck.

Libète.

Stephanie followed the rainwater’s paths down, down, down. She drove to the hospital in her Land Rover the next day, leaving her paradisiacal home in the green hills of Boutilier. She slid down the winding roads, leaving safety and peace and security to enter the dusty, Sun-drenched buzzing of Cité Soleil.

She had passed through Cité Soleil before, but always with four tires and a foot and a half of air between her and it, never putting sole to earth. The hypocrisy of her words–Solidarity! Justice!–so publicly broadcast while she lived a relatively sheltered life made her cringe.

Her true father. And the girl named Liberty.

Her mind about God was never settled. But Fate? Fate was something she was certain of, found incontrovertible. Original sin chipped away at some sense of justice of hers, like she and all of the human family were set up to fail from the start. She was more comfortable with the small
g
type, or with no deity at all. Life’s drama unfolding as a narrative, however, made sense to her writer’s mind, and her encounter with Elize changed her. Reconciliation did that. He passed away two days later.

He was gone, but with his passing she was left with not one, but two new relationships.

Two abandoned children. Two adrift children. Two remarkable children.

And now Stephanie, with the example of Moïse and Cecilia and the monumental burden Fate had placed on her, had to take a gamble of her own. To leap from a life of letters to one of flesh and blood.

Guardianship.
At age thirty-two. Of two near-teenagers. She could almost see Fate’s cosmic pen as it inked the bonds meant to tie them together.

Over three years had passed since that day.

She looks again on the girl in her backseat, held in the safety of slumber.

If I could go back and do things differently . . .

If I could prevent what is coming to you and Jak, what has already arrived, I would.

I hope you can see this. What I’m giving
–
willing to give
–
for you both.

I hope you can see.

— Is that the ocean? the girl asks. Libète is awake.

— It is, my dear. It is.

Libète sat in quiet the rest of the way.

The others did not trespass against the silence. There was no need. Libète now knew where they were going. She held her tongue as an act of protest. Answers could come later.

When Tòti went off the main road through a seaside city, it passed down a small lane lined with private residences perched along the water. Libète took in its lazy airs, its color, and sunny disposition. They had entered Jacmel, and its beauty made Libète feel sick.

Every other retreat to the Martinettes’ home here had been joyous. Time to wade in the water, play table tennis, watch films, enjoy fast Internet access, sip sodas, slip out in the evenings to eat griot and fried plantains and ice cream at the restaurant just down the road. She already had memories from the place to fill stacks of photo albums.

As they idled outside the home’s compound, Jak hopped out with a key given by Stephanie and drew back the entry gate. He walked up to the villa’s front door as Stephanie pulled Tòti inside. It rocked to a stop on the chunky white gravel laid in a loop in front of the home. Stephanie and Jak unpacked the vehicle as Libète stayed in her seat, belt still buckled, as if nothing had changed. They went inside.

That’s it.
She finally relented after a few minutes. Without air conditioning, the SUV was an oven.

She rubbed her eyes and wiped her brow. What would her approach be?

Stay silent?
She sighed. That wasn’t sustainable. Besides, there was too much she wanted to know. Remonstrations couldn’t be made and apologies accepted if she bit her tongue.

Start talking again?
But that would be too premature; simply too soon.

Only speak in single words?
That was good. A happy medium.

She cast off her sandals in the cavernous entryway by habit, rounding the corner into the main living room.

— Shit! she shouted. What’s
he
doing here?

It helped nothing that at the dining table sat Stephanie, Jak, and the object of her new dismay, Laurent.