pressed it against my father’s forehead. He then recited the Lord’s Prayer, encouraging me to join with a nod of his head.
“So you’re going?” my father said when we were done.
Maybe I should have convinced my uncle to stay. Maybe it would have helped, done my father some good, helped them both.
“I must go,” my uncle said.
“Okay,” my father said, “but don’t frighten the others in Haiti. Don’t tell them about the hospital and the oxygen. Don’t make it sound like I’m on my deathbed.”
“I won’t,” my uncle promised. Then, stroking my father’s prednisone- rounded face, my uncle said, “I will keep praying for you.”
A hush came over them, just long enough to make me think that if he stayed even a minute longer Uncle Joseph might miss his plane. The silence was broken by the youngest of my uncles, Franck, who lived not too far from my father in Brooklyn, honking his car horn downstairs.
“Brother, I’m going, but I’m leaving you with a heavy heart,” Uncle Joseph told my father. “I really am.”
Reaching up to shake my uncle’s hand, my father said, “I know you are.”
“I don’t know if or when we’ll see each other again,” my uncle said.
“God knows,” my father said.
Then my uncle slapped his forehead the way he did when he remembered something that had previously slipped his mind.
“I’ll be coming to Miami in October to visit some churches,” he said. “I’ll come up and see you then.”
My uncle was aiming for my father’s forehead, but fell short, his mouth landing on the bridge of his nose. Still it ended up being a gentle kiss, like a grown man kissing a sick child, partly with love, but mostly out of fear.
“Why don’t you walk Uncle out,” my father said to me, to avoid, I am certain now, having me see him cry.
I followed Uncle Joseph down the steps and to the door of my uncle Franck’s car. That morning the tilt of his body seemed a little more pronounced.
“You know we can’t all stay together all the time,” he said.
Knowing how much my father would not only miss but worry about him, I stood there on my parents’ tree-lined street and waited until the car had turned the corner and was completely out of sight.
In mid-October, my husband and I learned our child’s gender from our midwife, Colleen, at the Miami maternity center where we’d chosen to have our baby. Based on how quickly my belly had grown in a few weeks, I was sure I was carrying twins, while my husband was convinced it was a boy. So during the sonogram, rather than marvel at the crescent-shaped bubble that was our daughter, my husband was looking for a penis and I for a sibling.
My daughter’s sex, however, was not what we discussed most that afternoon. Colleen pointed out that I had a low-lying placenta, which was usually self-correcting but could complicate the delivery if it remained unchanged. Statistically three out of four such cases resolved themselves, she said, and the placenta drifted upward as the pregnancy progressed; however, it was something we’d need to keep an eye on.
“If you’re going to have a problem, that’s the one you want,” Colleen added in a gentle, comforting voice. “It’s not a huge deal.”
Still I worried, imagining mine being the one out of the four placentas that never budged. I called my parents to tell them.
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “The body knows what it’s doing.”
Even though it seemed that was no longer the case for my father.
“You’re just like us,” my father added, now ignoring the placenta matter altogether. “Your mother and I had our girl first. You’ll have to follow us further with three boys.”
“No way,” I said. “I think I’m just having this one.”
“God didn’t make us with one eye,” he said. “You don’t want to parent an only child.”
My father was having a good day. The night before, he’d slept more than six hours and in the morning had experienced fewer coughing spells than usual. I could always tell when he was having a good day because our conversation would slowly drift beyond his health and my pregnancy to broader topics, mostly Haitian news items he’d heard about on the radio or seen on television.
That night we discussed Tropical Storm Jeanne, which had struck Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth-largest city, the week Uncle Joseph had left New York. Jeanne had displaced more than a quarter of a million people and left five thousand dead.
During his illness, whenever my father would bring up news-related deaths such as the ones from Jeanne, I’d try to steer him away from the subject. Knowing that he was often, if not always, thinking about his own death, I feared that other deaths might further demoralize him.
Still pondering Tropical Storm Jeanne, my father said, “Gonaives is still underwater. I’ve seen the pictures. In one of the hospitals, patients drowned in their beds. Children were washed away.” His wheezing made him sound like a hasty witness. He’d watched the images so many times that he’d dreamed he was there.
Did these dreams make him grateful to be dying the way he was, at home? Or maybe he envied the others their mutual sinking, their communal vanishing. But isn’t death, no matter how or when it takes place, always solitary?
“I’ve been trying to call Uncle in Haiti this week,” he said, “but his phone isn’t working.”
I too had been trying to reach my uncle with no success. However, it wasn’t unusual for his phone to be out of service for weeks, even months.
The last time my father had heard from Uncle Joseph, seven days before, Uncle Joseph had called to give him the telephone number of the doctor who was the head of the sanatorium in Port-au-Prince.
“It can’t hurt to speak to him,” my father recalled him saying.
“I’m worried,” my father added now. “He’s called nearly every other day since he left to ask how I’m doing. All of a sudden seven days go by and I don’t hear from him.”
“I’m sure he’s okay,” I said. “Otherwise we would have heard something.”
Tropical Storm Jeanne had caused relatively little damage in Bel Air. Instead, another kind of storm was brewing there. After September 30, 2004, thirteen years since President Jean- Bertrand Aristide was removed from power the first time and six months since the second time, the protests became a daily event in Bel Air. They usually started outside the small square in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a crumbling, bullet-riddled Catholic church down the street from my uncle’s apartment and church. After Aristide’s second ouster, in February 2004, the UN Security Council had passed Resolution 1542 establishing the Brazil-led MINUSTAH, Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti, a stabilization mission. More than eighty people had died when the Haitian national police, operating in collaboration with MINUSTAH soldiers, had clashed with neighborhood gangs during the demonstrations. Headless bodies, including those of two policemen, had been found in different parts of the capital.
That night, along with the newspaper articles that reported these events, I searched the Internet for images of Bel Air. Above a cloud of smoke rising from a burning tire, I saw the
