the wall, watching as my mother ladled more food onto Bob’s plate. It wasn’t so much that Bob was hungry, I knew. He wanted to please them. He frankly wanted them to be happy and feeding him was making them happy.
I stuffed my mouth, but didn’t swallow right away. I didn’t want them to ask me any questions. I didn’t want to have to answer anything.
Once we were done eating, Bob ran all over the apartment, with Kelly showing him where everything was. Eventually Karl slipped away and joined them. My father followed. My mother showed me where we were sleeping, in the second bedroom, the one overlooking the train tracks. Aside from the wall with a line of ribbon windows, every other wall had a bed pressed against it. I had inherited a full-size bed from my mother’s sister, Tante Grace, who had been living with my parents before we came. Kelly and Karl shared a metal bunk bed with Kelly sleeping on top and Karl at the bottom. Bob’s bed was a twin-sized cot, but had the advantage of being closest to the twelve-inch television set that stood on top of a wooden dresser.
“Do you want to go to sleep?” my mother asked.
I nodded, adding “wi.” Yes.
She had already placed a flannel nightgown on the bed for me. When I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, my brothers were there.
“I’m so glad you guys speak Creole,” Bob was saying to them. They were already a trio, a team.
My bed smelled of citronella and vetiver, of getting dressed and going out, rather than of falling asleep. (The scent, I would later learn, was of a brand of fabric softener.) Liline was probably sleeping on my mattress that night, I thought, taking a break from her own smelly one. How could this vetiver-and-citronella-scented bed, I wondered, ever really be mine?
My parents turned off the lights and left the four of us in the dark. A few minutes later, I heard their muffled laughter coming from the next room, as well as the occasional sound of our names. They were already telling each other stories about us.
“Do you see how much Bob can eat?” asked my mother.
“Did you see how Karl wouldn’t let Edwidge go?” asked my father.
“I don’t think Kelly’s quite sure what’s going on.”
Somewhere below us, the train would clatter by, drowning their voices, and then there would be only silence again.
In the dark, Kelly, whose Creole was a bit halting but clear, whispered, “Are you guys adopted?”
“No,” answered Bob.
“They say you two are older than me,” he continued, “but it’s not true. I’m the oldest.”
Kelly’s words reminded me of a puzzling, until now, story that Granme Melina used to tell about a young mischievous billy goat who came across an old decrepit and hairless horse on a narrow trail one day.
Blocking the ancient horse’s path, the youthful goat said, “You should let me go first, because I’m older than you.”
“You should let me go first,” replied the old horse, “because I’m truly older.”
“Can’t you see I have a beard and you don’t?” replied the bouncy goat, laughing. “Aren’t beards a sign of old age?”
Kelly’s time with our parents was his beard. Indeed, he had spent much more time with them than Bob and I had combined. How much had he and Karl been prepared? I wondered. Had my parents ever spoken to them about us? Had they even told them we were coming until today?
Later they would both tell me that it was as though we’d dropped out of the sky. They had no memories of their trip to Haiti and my parents had told them nothing. (A fear perhaps, as in the letters, of shattering all the hearts involved.)
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Bob whispered back to Kelly in the dark. “We’re really spies from space. We have spy stuff inserted in our heads.”
I was continually amazed by Bob’s pool of knowledge. Where had he learned this? From comic books that only he and Nick had read? Tales that only the two of them had told each other?
The next morning, before our parents woke up, Karl got out of his bed and crawled into mine. His fire-engine-covered pajamas also smelled like citronella and vetiver. I was beginning to think that all of America would.
Karl was kneeling and had to press his hands against the wall to keep his balance as he leaned down to kiss my forehead.
“It must hurt where you have the spy stuff in your head,” he said, raising himself up again.
“It does,” I said, feeling myself on the verge of tears.
Soon after he got up, Kelly climbed up on the kitchen counter and found a butter knife, which he carried back to the room.
“I can get the spy stuff out for you guys,” he said, smirking as though to prove that he was not only the oldest but the smartest.
“You can’t do it,” Bob said, closing his eyes to slowly massage the sides of his face. “No one can. What I can do to make us really brothers and sisters is to ask my friends from space to put one in your heads too while you’re sleeping tonight. Then we can talk more easily with each other without even speaking. Do you agree?”
Kelly lowered the butter knife and pursed his lips. Karl looked up at my head as if searching for some clue, some sign of disfiguration, which he might also have to carry for the rest of his life.
“Okay then,” Kelly said.
“Okay,” echoed Karl.
From that day on, we considered ourselves full brothers and sister.
I still marvel now how Bob, then only ten years old, thought of all this, but as strange as it seems, it truly gelled us, started us on our way to becoming a family.
That morning, while our new blood and spy brothers were introducing us to Saturday-morning cartoons, my father, still in his pajamas, carried in what looked like a large black handbag with a small silver latch and laid it carefully on my bed. And though his face was crumpled and there was sleep in his eyes, he seemed eager for me to open it.
Grabbing the latch, I forced it apart, nearly smashing it. My brothers turned their eyes away from the television to watch me run my fingers over my welcome gift.
It was a typewriter, a Smith-Corona Corsair portable manual. Once more, tears gathered in my eyes before I even had time to think of something to say. I remembered asking my father in one of my letters to send me a typewriter. The tellers at my uncle’s bank had them. The clerks at the Education Ministry had them. I’d asked my father for one because I thought my uncle should have one too. Not only for his school and church work, but to write back to my father.
Looking down at the perfect beige keys, lined up like big ivory teeth, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d received the typewriter too late. What would I do with a typewriter all to myself?
Then in a flash it occurred to me that I could write to my uncle, hundreds and hundreds of letters to impress him with my new skills, my new knowledge, my new life.
“This will help you measure your words,” my father said, tapping the keys with his fingers for emphasis, “to line them up neatly.”
He meant this literally. He and I both had slightly crooked cursive handwriting. Unlike him, however, I would often line up my pens against a ruler to keep a straight line. Still, they feel like such prescient gifts now, this typewriter and his desire, very early on, to see me properly assemble my
