Before things were finalized, however, they had to file the paperwork at the consulate in Port-au-Prince; only then could they petition for Bob and me to join them in New York.
“Any granmoun here?” my father asked, gently patting my shoulder with his hand.
It was late afternoon, the near-dinner hour. The water women had just filled up their buckets at the municipal tap near the Lycee Petion and were calling out in a singsong that we sometimes listened for when our supply was low.
Dlo, dlo, dlo pou vann.
I have water for sale!
At the turn where the alley curved toward the street, Boniface, the blacksmith, was hammering an oil drum into a thin sheet of metal that he would then mold into a metal wreath to sell at the cemetery. Two of the Pradel brothers were taking turns reciting their lessons out loud in a unified refrain. Two others were playing an impromptu soccer game on their parents’ front porch with an empty Carnation milk can. Their maid, a girl younger than all of them, began burning her weekly accumulation of trash, suddenly filling the alley with rank white smoke.
My parents walked inside the house to avoid the smoke. Guided by Bob and Nick, my father shut the jalousies and piled his suitcases next to the few living room chairs.
Tante Denise was cooking supper and Uncle Joseph lying down for a nap. I told Bob to go and get her, then I rushed to the room where my uncle lay curled on his side, bare-chested. He was startled when I shook him and thrust at him a shirt that was laid out on his night table.
“My father and mother are here,” I said.
He looked at me as though I’d grown two heads. Still, he quickly got dressed and followed me.
“Fre m.” My father ran into my uncle’s arms.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” my uncle said.
They remained attached for a while, intertwined, as if one might never release the other. Stepping away first, my father left an imprint of his wet face on the front of my uncle’s shirt.
“Mesi fre m,” my father said. “Thank you for looking after my children.”
“Mira,” my uncle said, laughing. Mira was my father’s nickname, short for Miracin, his middle name. It was, I learned, what everyone called him. “These children almost look after themselves.”
Tante Denise ran out of the kitchen, and though uncharacteristically joyful, she still scolded my mother with a wagging finger for not having warned her they were coming. My father asked Bob and Nick to go buy him a pack of cigarettes, and they hurried off to a street stand, happy to have so big a job to do.
“Come,” my mother said, patting the chair next to hers. She smelled like coconut, which I eventually figured out came from her hair pomade. Her voice, clipped, quick, had slowly been fading from my memory. I wanted to lean over and place my head on her arm, just as I had in the back of the car the day she was leaving, but I was too shy to do it.
The baby had woken up, his round face creased and crumpled.
“His name is Karl,” she said, “and he’s two months old.”
Looking down at Karl, snugly cradled in our mother’s arms, I couldn’t help but feel envious. If she could bring him here from New York, why hadn’t she been able to take Bob and me with her when she left? At the same time, I could tell from the way she stopped now and then to run her fingers over both his face and mine that she meant him to be a link between us.
“Can I hold him a little?” I asked.
Not used to holding babies then, I was shocked when she leaned over and actually placed his doughy wriggling little body in my arms.
Our extended family gathered quickly as news of my parents’ arrival spread. Crowding the living room were my father’s sisters, Tante Zi and Tante Tina, Tante Denise’s brothers George and Bosi, Marie Micheline and two-year-old Ruth, who along with Kelly skipped and hopped and crawled between our legs. Dragging on a cigarette, my father sprinted around and beamed at everyone. Family members, including my aunts, and even strangers who saw my father during that visit tell me they’d found his charm magnetic and contagious, almost like a movie star or a politician. But then again, my father would later tell me, it was easy to be charming when you returned home on a trip that you’d been dreaming about, practicing and rehearsing in your mind for years. Even the cigarette was like a prop in a play. He was an actor playing the part of someone who wished he wasn’t a factory worker or a taxi driver.
That night, between cigarettes, my father recounted New York to us.
“What does snow feel like?” Tante Denise’s oldest brother, George, asked.
My father didn’t talk about how cold and damp snow could be or how slippery and dangerous it could become when gelled and frozen. He didn’t talk about the beauty of the individual flakes or how a few feet of them could look like a pasty rug over a lumpy bed. The only thing we have to compare it to, he simply said, was hail.
“I hear it can be just as dangerous in New York,” Tante Denise’s other brother, Bosi, said. “As dangerous as it can be with the macoutes here.”
This led my father into two urban legends from New York’s Haitian community. A woman was robbed weekly by a masked young man in the elevator of her apartment building. One day she carried a kitchen knife, which she used to stab her robber. When she removed the thief’s mask, she realized it was her son. In the other story, a young man had led some school pals to five thousand dollars that his mother was hiding in her mattress and in a struggle for the money the mother had been shot.
My father told these stories as though he had seen them happen, in the elevator, in the bedroom. As he spoke, his audience gasped, in awe, in fear, in admiration of his pluck.
“New York, like today’s Haiti,” he said, while bouncing a tired-looking Kelly on his lap, “is a place where only the brave survive.”
My father yawned, reminding us that he, my mother and Kelly and Karl had an appointment at the American consulate early the next morning. Dressing for bed, I wondered whether Bob and I would be excused from our usual sleeping arrangements-he with Nick and me with Liline-to bunk with our prodigal family. But there wasn’t enough space. In one of the spare rooms, my father and Kelly were already sharing a cot so my mother and Karl could have a bed to themselves.
I waited until everyone else in the house was in bed before going in to say good night. Walking on the tips of my toes, I rapped softly on the door so I wouldn’t wake the baby. My mother was already asleep with Karl at her side. Before my mother had left us, one night she and Bob had dozed off together in bed tucked tightly against each other, just as she and Karl were now. This was my first experience of nearly heart-shattering jealousy.
There was only my father to say good night to now, and Kelly, whose eyes were barely open, his super-long eyelashes batting between wakefulness and sleep. Fearing the wiry hairs on my father’s prickly beard, I closed my eyes when I kissed his cheek. And even as he pulled me into his arms and poked at my ribs and tried to make me laugh, I was still certain that I would open my eyes and he’d be gone.
The next morning my parents left for the consulate at dawn. As Bob, Nick and I ate our breakfast, the house seemed strangely empty, void of their sudden, but now vital presences.
Fidgeting on the edge of his seat, Bob said, “Manman and Papa had an appointment. They’ll be back.”
“Be quiet,” I ordered. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know,” he said. His mouth curled up and he looked like he was going to cry.
