her out of the seat.
'And the child's mother, does she get a hug?'
He pressed his lips down on mine.
'Bienvenue,' he said, 'Welcome back.'
He ran up the steps with Brigitte, leaving me to carry my own bag.
The sun shining through the window colored our wooden floors the hue of Haitian dirt. Joseph threw Brigitte up in the air, both of them laughing as he caught her.
'Tell Daddy all about Haiti,' he said.
Brigitte pursed her wet lips as though she wanted to.
'Are you glad to see Daddy?' He propped her up on the sofa.
'Are you glad to see her mommy?' I asked, sitting next to him.
'It's nice to see you, but I want to kill you.'
His free hand traveled up and down my blouse.
'Did you miss me?' I asked.
'Sometimes.'
The bedroom was messy. There were sheets piled on top of one another and pillows thrown randomly about. I held the sheets up to my face and sniffed them for another woman's scent. The mattress smelled like his socks.
'You see I need you to put some order in my life,' he said.
'You need a maid,' I said.
He twirled the duck mobile on the baby's crib, which we kept next to our bed.
'How was your trip?' he asked.
'My grandmother was preparing her funeral,' I said. 'It's a thing at home. Death is journey. My grandmother thinks she's at the end of hers.'
'You called it home?' he said. 'Haiti.'
'What else would I call it?
'You have never called it that since we've been together. Home has always been your mother's house, that you could never go back to.'
I searched through the pile of dishes in the kitchen sink, trying to find a clean glass for a drink of water. In the nursery were the large drums he sometimes used in performance.
'I was calling the ancestral spirits, asking them to make you come back to me,' he said.
'Your prayers were answered.'
I went to the living room and crashed on the sofa. It suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by my own life, my own four walls, my own husband and child. Here I was Sophie-maitresse de la maison. Not a guest or visiting daughter, but the mother and sometimes, more painfully, the wife.
'We'll deal with this, won't we?' asked Joseph, pushing his tongue in my left ear. 'I need to know that we can get through all this.'
In the living room was a fuzzy picture of a very fat me lying naked with a newborn on my stomach. Joseph had been too excited to focus when we brought the baby home that first night. All I kept thinking was, Thank God it was a Caesarean section. The tearing from a natural birth would have totally destroyed me.
I reached over and tapped Brigitte's nose.
'I need to know. Did you leave on impulse or had you been planning to go for a long time?' he asked.
'We weren't connecting physically.'
'Did you find an aphrodisiac?'
'I don't need an aphrodisiac. I need a little more understanding.'
'I do understand. You are usually reluctant to start, but after a while you give in. You seem to enjoy it.'
I called Brigitte's pediatrician to make an appointment. I gave Brigitte her bath, and laid her down while Joseph tapped a few keys on his saxophone.
I called my mother, but she did not pick up the phone. Her answering machine did not pick up either. I changed into a sweatsuit to go to bed. Joseph came to bed in a thick terry-cloth robe.
'If our skins touch,' he said, 'I won't be able to resist you.'
We held each other while trying to make out the plot of an old black-and-white movie. It was about lovers, a young girl and her painting instructor.
At midnight, I called my mother.
She sounded anxious when she answered.
'What are you doing?' I asked.
'Marc is here with me,' she said.
She told me she loved me and hung up the phone.
Joseph rocked me in his arms while we listened to the cooing sounds Brigitte made in her sleep.
'My mother is pregnant,' I said.
'You will finally have a sibling, a kindred spirit.'
It felt better when I thought of it that way.
'Brigitte will be older than her aunt,' he said. 'Isn't that nice?'
Our pediatrician, Karen, was happy to see Brigitte.
She was an middle-aged Indian woman who had sewn me up in the emergency room at the Providence hospital and had subsequendy seen me through my pregnancy.
'Looks like you've lost weight,' she said.
I held Brigitte's feet while she examined her.
I nearly dropped to my knees with gratitude when she told me that Brigitte was okay.
'We'll follow the regular schedule for checkups,' she said, filling out her chart.
'Only a mountain can crush a Haitian woman,' I said.
'In that case, your daughter has proven herself a real Haitian woman,' Karen said.
'Tell me how it was,' she asked as I dressed Brigitte after the physical. 'You were going to the provinces, weren't you? There are warnings against all kinds of things in places like that.'
'It is somewhat dry where I went. There are not a lot of swamps for malaria or any of those things you warned me about. I was careful about the baby's water. We always boiled it for a long time.'
'She looks good so far, but keep an eye on her and call me if anything unusual happens. If you go to Haiti again anytime soon, leave your angel behind. I am not sure there's enough Haitian in her to survive another mountain.'
I called Joseph from the hospital to tell him that everything was all right. When Brigitte and I came home, there was a large dinner waiting for us. Fried chicken, glazed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Everything came frozen out of a box, but still managed to retain some flavor.
We decided to start giving Brigitte a few more adventurous solids. I pureed some sweet potatoes and boiled some carrots and fed her small spoonfuls. I ate everything on my plate, forcing myself to resist the urge to purge my body.
After dinner, I called my mother.
'When are you going to come and have dinner with Marc and me?'
'We'll come as soon as we can,' I said.
'How's the baby?'
'Good,' I said, 'How's yours?'
'Don't call it that,' she said. 'I haven't decided if I will follow through. It's fighting me though. More and more of a fighter every day.'
'Is Marc there?'
'Yes, but he can sleep and I can't. I am watching television. I don't know. It's really hard. You know what happens now. I look at every man and I see him.'
'Marc?'
'Non non,' she whispered. 'Him. Le rioleur, the rapist. I see him everywhere.'
'Have you told Marc?'
'He thinks my body is in shock from getting pregnant after all the cancer treatment.'
