The daughter turned to her mother, as if to plead for her understanding and said, “Would it be so wrong, Manman, to ask his name?”
When it was their turn to greet the priest, her daughter and husband quickly slipped by him, leaving Anne to face him alone.
“It’s nice to see you, Anne,” the priest said. “I thought you were going to bring your family.”
“I did, Father,” she said.
From the church entrance, she looked out into the street, where most of the congregation had spilled onto the sidewalk. She pushed her head through the doorway until she spotted her husband and daughter crossing the street and moving toward a house with a plastic reindeer on the front lawn.
“There they are, Father,” she said, pointing as they reached the white metal fence bordering the house.
The priest turned to look, but couldn’t distinguish them from the others spread out now on both sidewalks.
Anne tried to imagine what her husband and daughter could be talking about out there, standing next to that light-drenched fence, their heads nearly touching, as if to shield each other from the cold. Were they discussing the Mass, the man, that house?
“Merry Christmas, Anne,” the priest said, trying to move her along. His gaze was already on the person behind her.
“Merry Christmas, Father,” Anne said. “It was a lovely Mass.”
Stepping outside, Anne joined the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the church, the faces still glowing from the enchantment of the Mass. She didn’t rush to cross the street to her husband and daughter, winding her way instead through clusters of families making plans for Christmas dinner, offering and accepting rides, and bundling up their children against the cold.
As she walked the length of the sidewalk, stopping to wish “Merry Christmas” to everyone in her path, she purposely chose families with little boys, stroking their hat-covered heads as she attempted to make small talk with the parents.
“Wasn’t it a lovely Mass?”
“Didn’t the choir sing well?”
“Papa’s ready to go.” Her daughter was suddenly at her side, looping her arm through hers. It was a lovely gesture on her daughter’s part, her fragile little girl, who’d grown so gruff and distant over the years.
Her husband was still standing across the street. His back was turned to the Christmas house; his hands were buried in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched against the cold.
“Wasn’t it a lovely Mass?” Anne asked her daughter to see whether she was still thinking about the man. If she was, she’d probably say something like, “Yeah, okay, Manman, it was a fine Mass, until that killer came.”
Instead, while waving to her father across the street to show that she’d found Anne, the daughter said, “Listen, Manman. About that guy. I’m sorry I overreacted. Papa thought I was going to hit him or trip him or something. But I wouldn’t do anything like that. I don’t really know what happened. I wasn’t there.”
But I was, Anne wanted to say, or almost.
It was always like this, her life a pendulum between forgiveness and regret, but when the anger dissipated she considered it a small miracle, the same way she thought of her emergence from her occasional epileptic seizures as a kind of resurrection.
Her daughter’s breath, mixed in with the cold, was forming an icy vapor in the air in front of them. Then, moving her lips close, her daughter pressed them against Anne’s cheek until Anne’s face felt warm, almost hot.
“I’m sorry to have to say this too, Manman,” the daughter added, moving away, smiling. “We come every year, but it’s always the same thing. Same choir. Same songs. Same Mass. It was only a Mass. Nothing more. It’s never as fabulous as one of your miracles.”
NIGHT TALKERS
He thought that the mountain would kill him, that he would never see the other side. He had been walking for two hours when suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his side. He tried some breathing exercises he remembered from medical shows on television, but it was hard to concentrate. All he could think of, besides the pain, was his roommate, Michel, who’d had an emergency appendectomy a few weeks before in New York. What if he was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, here on top of a mountain, deep in the Haitian countryside, where the closest village seemed like a grain of sand in the valley below?
Hugging his midsection, he left the narrow trail and took cover from the scorching midday sun under a tall, arched, wind-deformed tree. Avoiding a row of anthills, he slid down onto his back over a patch of grainy pebbled soil and closed his eyes, shutting out, along with the sapphire sky, the craggy hills that made up the rest of his journey.
He was on his way to visit his aunt Estina, his father’s older sister, whom he’d not seen since he moved to New York ten years before. He had lost his parents to the dictatorship twenty-five years before that, when he was a boy, and his aunt Estina had raised him in the capital. After he moved to New York, she returned to her home in the mountains where she’d always taken him during school holidays. This was the first time he was going to her village, as he’d come to think of it, without her. If she had been with him, she would have made him start his journey earlier in the day. They would have boarded a camion at the bus depot in Port-au-Prince before dawn and started climbing the mountain at sunrise to avoid sunstroke at high noon. If she had known he was coming, she would have hired him a mule and sent a child to meet him halfway, a child who would know all the shortcuts to her village. She also would have advised him to wear a sun hat and bring more than the two bottles of water he’d consumed hours ago.
But no, he’d wanted to surprise her; however, the only person he was surprising was himself, by getting lost and nearly passing out and possibly lying there long enough to draw a few mountain vultures to come pick his skeleton clean.
When he finally opened his eyes, the sun was beating down on his face in pretty, symmetrical designs. Filtered through the long, upturned branches of what he now recognized as a giant saguaro cactus, the sun rays had patterned themselves into hearts, starfishes, and circles looped around one another.
He reached over and touched the cactus’s thick trunk, which felt like a needle-filled pincushion or a field of dry grass. The roots were close to the soil, a design that his aunt Estina had once told him would allow the plant to collect as much rainwater as possible. Further up along the spine, on the stem, was a tiny cobalt flower. He wanted to pluck it and carry it with him the rest of the way, but his aunt would scold him. Most cactus flowers bloomed only for a few short days, then withered and died. He should let the cactus enjoy its flower for this brief time, his aunt would say.
The pain in his midsection had subsided, so he decided to get up and continue walking. There were many paths to his aunt’s house, and seeing the lone saguaro had convinced him that he was on one of them.
He soon found himself entering a village, where a girl was pounding a pestle in a mortar, forming a small crater in the ground beneath the mortar as a group of younger children watched.
The girl stopped her pounding as soon as she saw him, causing the other children to turn their almost identical brown faces toward him.
“Bonjou, cousins,” he said, remembering the childhood greeting his aunt had taught him. When he was a boy, in spite of the loss of his parents, he had thought himself part of a massive family, every child his cousin and every adult his aunt or uncle.
“Bonjou,” the children replied.
“Ki jan w ye?” the oldest girl added, distinguishing herself. How are you?
“Could I have some water, please?” he said to her, determining that she was indeed the one in charge.
The girl turned her pestle over to the next-oldest child and ran into the limestone house as he dropped his backpack on the ground and collapsed on the front gallery. The ground felt chilly against his bare legs, as though he’d stumbled into a cold stream with his shorts and T-shirt on.
As one of the younger boys ran off behind the house, the other children settled down on the ground next to
