When I get up the next morning, my father’s already dressed. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bowed, his face buried in his palms, his forehead shadowed by his fingers. If I were sculpting him at this moment, I would carve a praying mantis, crouching motionless, seeming to pray, while actually waiting to strike.
With his back to me now, my father says, “Will you call that actress and tell her we have it no more, the statue?”
“We were invited to lunch there,” I say. “I believe we should go and tell her in person.”
He raises his shoulders and shrugs.
“Up to you,” he says.
We start out for Gabrielle Fonteneau’s house after breakfast. It’s not quite as hot as the previous morning, but it’s getting there. I crank up the AC at full blast, making it almost impossible for us to have a conversation, even if we wanted to.
The drive seems longer than the twenty-four hours it took to get to Lakeland from New York. I quickly grow tired of the fake lakes, the fenced-in canals, the citrus groves, the fan-shaped travelers’ palms, the highway so imposingly neat. My father turns his face away from me and takes in the tropical landscape, as though he will never see it again. I know he’s enjoying the live oaks with Spanish moss and bromeliads growing in their shade, the yellow trumpet flowers and flame vines, the tamarinds and jacaranda trees we speed by, because he expressed his admiration for them before, on the first half of our journey.
As we approach Gabrielle Fonteneau’s house, my father breaks the silence in the car by saying, “Now you see, Ka, why your mother and me, we have never returned home.”
The Fonteneaus’ house is made of bricks and white coral, on a cul-de-sac with a row of banyans separating the two sides of the street.
My father and I get out of the car and follow a concrete path to the front door. Before we can knock, an older woman appears in the doorway. It’s Gabrielle Fonteneau’s mother. She resembles Gabrielle Fonteneau, or the way Gabrielle looks on television, with stunning almond eyes, skin the color of sorrel and spiraling curls brushing the sides of her face.
“We’ve been looking out for you,” she says with a broad smile.
When Gabrielle’s father joins her in the doorway, I realize where Gabrielle Fonteneau gets her height. He’s more than six feet tall.
Mr. Fonteneau extends his hands, first to my father and then to me. They’re relatively small, half the size of my father’s.
We move slowly through the living room, which has a cathedral ceiling and walls covered with Haitian paintings with subjects ranging from market scenes and first communions to weddings and wakes. Most remarkable is a life- size portrait of Gabrielle Fonteneau sitting on a canopy-covered bench in what seems like her parents’ garden.
Out on the back terrace, which towers over a nursery of azaleas, hibiscus, dracaenas, and lemongrass, a table is set for lunch.
Mr. Fonteneau asks my father where he is from in Haiti, and my father lies. In the past, I thought he always said he was from a different province each time because he’d really lived in all of those places, but I realize now that he says this to reduce the possibility of anyone identifying him, even though thirty-seven years and a thinning head of widow-peaked salt-and-pepper hair shield him from the threat of immediate recognition.
When Gabrielle Fonteneau makes her entrance, in an off-the-shoulder ruby dress, my father and I both rise from our seats.
“Gabrielle,” she coos, extending her hand to my father, who leans forward and kisses it before spontaneously blurting out, “My dear, you are one of the most splendid flowers of Haiti.”
Gabrielle Fonteneau looks a bit flustered. She tilts her head coyly and turns toward me.
“Welcome,” she says.
During the meal of conch, fried plantains, and mushroom rice, Mr. Fonteneau tries to draw my father into conversation by asking him, in Creole, when he was last in Haiti.
“Thirty-seven years,” my father answers with a mouthful of food.
“No going back for you?” asks Mrs. Fonteneau.
“I have not yet had the opportunity,” my father replies.
“We go back every year,” says Mrs. Fonteneau, “to a beautiful place overlooking the ocean, in the mountains of Jacmel.”
“Have you ever been to Jacmel?” Gabrielle Fonteneau asks me.
I shake my head no.
“We’re fortunate,” Mrs. Fonteneau says, “that we have a place to go where we can say the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter, our beaches prettier.”
“So now we are tasting rain and weighing dust?” Mr. Fonteneau says and laughs.
“There’s nothing like drinking the sweet juice from a coconut fetched from your own tree.” Mrs. Fonteneau’s eyes are lit up now as she puts her fork down to better paint the picture for us. She’s giddy; her voice grows louder and higher, and even her daughter is absorbed, smiling and recollecting with her mother.
“There’s nothing like sinking your hand in sand from the beach in your own country,” Mrs. Fonteneau is saying. “It’s a wonderful feeling, wonderful.”
I imagine my father’s nightmares. Maybe he dreams of dipping his hands in the sand on a beach in his own country and finding that what he comes up with is a fistful of blood.
After lunch, my father asks if he can have a closer look at the Fonteneaus’ garden. While he’s taking the tour, I make my confession about the sculpture to Gabrielle Fonteneau.
She frowns as she listens, fidgeting, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as though she’s greatly annoyed that so much of her valuable time had been so carelessly squandered on me. Perhaps she’s wondering if this was just an elaborate scheme to meet her, perhaps she wants us out of her house as quickly as possible.
“I don’t usually have people come into my house like this,” she says, “I promise you.”
“I appreciate it,” I say. “I’m grateful for your trust and I didn’t mean to violate it.”
“I guess if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it,” she says. “But I’m very disappointed. I really wanted to give that piece to my father.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I should have known something was off,” she says, looking around the room, as if for something more interesting to concentrate on. “Usually when people come here to sell us art, first of all they’re always carrying it with them and they always show it to us right away. But since you know Celine, I overlooked that.”
“There was a sculpture,” I say, aware of how stupid my excuse was going to sound. “My father didn’t like it, and he threw it away.”
She raises her perfectly arched eyebrows, as if out of concern for my father’s sanity, or for my own. Or maybe it’s another indirect signal that she now wants us out of her sight.
“We’re done, then,” she says, looking directly at my face. “I have to make a call. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
Gabrielle Fonteneau excuses herself, disappearing behind a closed door. Through the terrace overlooking the garden, I see her parents guiding my father along rows of lemongrass. I want to call Gabrielle Fonteneau back and promise her that I will make her another sculpture, but I can’t. I don’t know that I will be able to work on anything for some time. I have lost my subject, the prisoner father I loved as well as pitied.
In the garden Mr. Fonteneau snaps a few sprigs of lemongrass from one of the plants, puts them in a plastic bag that Mrs. Fonteneau is holding. Mrs. Fonteneau hands the bag of lemongrass to my father.
Watching my father accept with a nod of thanks, I remember the chapter “Driving Back Slaughters” from
I wave to my father in the garden to signal that we should leave now, and he slowly comes toward me, the Fonteneaus trailing behind him.
With each step forward, he rubs the scar on the side of his face, and out of a strange reflex I scratch my face in the same spot.
Maybe the last person my father harmed had dreamed moments like this into my father’s future, strangers
