'Of course he wants to marry me, but look at me. I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts. I don't know when this cancer will come back. I am not an ideal mother.'
Brigitte wrapped her arms around my mother's neck as my mother burped her.
'What are you going to do?' I asked.
'That's what I don't know.'
'What does Marc want?'
'It's my decision. Supremely, it's mine. I am very scared. I don't know. The nightmares, they're coming back.'
'In Dame Marie, it didn't seem like you slept at all.'
'Whenever I'm there, I feel like I sleep with ghosts. The first night I was there, I woke up pounding at my stomach.'
'What are you going to do about the baby?'
'I don't know.'
'You can marry Marc and have the baby.'
'And repeat my great miracle of being a super mother with you? Some things one should not repeat.'
'Think of it as a second chance.'
'I've had the second chance of my life by being spared death from this cancer. I can't ask too much.'
'Do you love Marc?'
'I think I love him. Since you left, he stays with me at night and wakes me up when I have the nightmares.'
'You still won't go for help?'
'I know I should get help, but I am afraid. I am afraid it will become even more real if I see a psychiatrist and he starts telling me to face it. God help me, what if they want to hypnotize me and take me back to that day? I'll kill myself. Marc, he saves my life every night, but I am afraid he gave me this baby that's going to take that life away.'
'You can't say that.'
'The nightmares. I thought they would fade with age, but no, it's like getting raped every night. I can't keep this baby.'
'It must have been much harder then but you kept me.'
'When I was pregnant with you, Manman made me drink all kinds of herbs, vervain, quinine, and verbena, baby poisons. I tried beating my stomach with wooden spoons. I tried to destroy you, but you wouldn't go away.'
She reached over and handed Brigitte back to me.
'When I was carrying you, you were brave,' she said. 'You wanted to live. You wanted to taste salt, as my mother would say. You were going to kill me before I killed you.'
– 'What are you going to do about this one?'
'She's a fighter too. She's already fighting me.'
'Do you know that it's a girl?'
'I don't know. I never want to know. I think it's a girl because you ended up being a girl. I can't go through night after night of the next nine months living these nightmares that same way again.'
'Are you going to take it out?'
She crossed herself.
'Jesus Marie Joseph. Every time I even think of that, the nightmares get worse. It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech. Last night after I talked to Marc about letting it go, I felt the skin getting tight on my belly and for a whole minute I couldn't breathe. I had to lie down and say I had changed my mind before I could breathe normally.'
'Have you seen a doctor?'
'I know, these things, they sound crazy to me too, but maybe that's what it wants, to drive me crazy.'
'You should talk to someone. Someone other than Marc, someone outside the whole situation.'
'I am trying to keep one step ahead of a mental hospital. They would probably put me away thinking that I might hurt both myself and this child.'
'When you and Marc are together, do you have the nightmares then?'
'I pretend; it is like eating grapefruit. I was tired of being alone. If that's what I had to do to have someone wake me up at night, I would do it. But never in my life did I think I could get pregnant.'
'You didn't use birth control?'
She laughed through her tears.
'I would have never imagined we could be having this conversation. Maybe if I spend more time with you, I will want this baby. I would want this child if the nightmares weren't so bad. I can't take them. One morning, I will wake up dead.'
'Don't say that.'
'You will leave today,' she said.
'I can stay longer if you need me.'
'Your husband, I know he will be anxious to see you.'
'I can ask him to drive down and he will stay with us for a couple of days.'
'Non non. I'll deal with this. Marc will come and stay here with me.'
'Why don't you just marry him?'
'Because you don't marry someone to escape something that's inside your head. One night, I woke up and found myself choking Marc. This is before I knew I was pregnant. One day he'll get tired of it and leave me.'
'What about the baby?'
'You've asked the same question a million ways; you have a camaraderie with this child. I'll have it. That's what you want to hear.'
'At least this child will know its father.'
'I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next.'
She lent me her new car for the trip to Providence, a guarantee that I would come back to visit her. She tugged at Brigitte's hat and kissed her forehead as I strapped Brigitte into the back seat.
'You forgive me, don't you?' she asked.
I leaned over and kissed her stomach.
'It will be a beautiful baby,' I said.
'Don't call it a baby.'
I kept seeing her face as I drove into the New England landscape. I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.
After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother's anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had 'caught' from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn't both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl.
I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot, perhaps a bit more than other children. The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.
Chapter 30
I pulled into the driveway of our house shortly after noon. Joseph nearly fell down the steps as he rushed towards the car. I screeched to a halt, a few inches shy of crashing into him.
He tapped on the back window, trying to get Brigitte's attention. She looked a bit disoriented when he raised
