Brother, I'm Dying

“Him too.”

She didn’t have the heart to wake them, she said, because they’d been through so much and had slept so little these past few days, plus they had to get up early the next morning to catch their flight.

“Please tell them to call me in the morning,” I said. “Tell them my husband and I want to know what flight they’re on so we can pick them up.”

One of my uncle’s minister friends was picking them up, she said. My uncle had already arranged it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’ll call you when they get there.”

No Greater Shame

The next day, Friday, my father’s health took a turn for the worse. Worried about my uncle, he hadn’t slept the night before. His voice was so hoarse from coughing that he could barely speak when I called. His eczema and psoriasis had returned and he’d completely lost what little appetite he had.

My daughter had just begun to kick at night and her fetal acrobatics left me totally exhausted in the morning. I was in bed fighting a fainting spell when Bob called to tell me about Papa.

“Maybe you should take him to the hospital,” I told Bob.

“He doesn’t want to go,” Bob said. “He says they’ll just send him home like all the other times.”

As Bob spoke, I could hear my father coughing and moaning loudly in the background.

“He’s getting worse,” Bob added. “And this thing with Uncle’s not helping.”

I wanted very much to be in New York with my father, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself there. I am sitting on the edge of his bed and we’re watching my father’s favorite game show, The Price Is Right, on television. Unsure of the answers, we guess wildly but still get all of them right anyway. This makes my father so happy that he rises out of bed and starts to dance. At first he dances like a ballerina in slow motion, but then he increases his pace, until he’s jumping up and down, bouncing on and off his bed.

When I woke up, I wasn’t sure whether this was reverie or dream. However, when I looked at the digital clock on my bedside table, it was after three p.m.

The phone was ringing, which is why I’d woken up in the first place. I picked it up, expecting my uncle and Maxo. Instead it was Tante Zi.

“Are they with you?” she asked.

“Non,” I said.

Perhaps they’d called and I’d missed them. I looked for the flashing message button on the phone. The call log also registered no calls.

“Their plane should have landed by now,” Tante Zi said. They’d gone to the airport very early, but their plane had left sometime after noon.

“I took them to the airport myself.” She was speaking loud and fast. There was an edginess to her voice, a strain of anxiety. “I took them in a camionette.

“I sent you tablet,” she added, “the kind I know you like. “Uncle has them for you.”

That she remembered to send me some peanut confections at such a stressful time amazed me.

“I thought you might have some cravings,” she said. “Unsatisfied cravings can lead to birthmarks on the baby.”

She was quiet for a moment, then started again in the same quick and loud voice.

“Listen, take good care of your uncle,” she said. “He’s lost everything.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said.

“I don’t think he should come back to Haiti for a long time,” she continued. “It’s crazy here now. No peace.”

I attributed the fact that I didn’t hear from my uncle and Maxo to a plane delay. Then I called the airline, American Airlines, and found out that the plane my uncle and Maxo had meant to be on had left and landed. Because of privacy laws, they couldn’t tell me whether my uncle and Maxo had been on it or not. As it got later and my husband returned from work, I grew increasingly nervous. Maybe they’d missed their plane altogether, my husband said, and were bumped to the next day.

The early evening went by with no news. Then more calls, first from Uncle Franck in New York, then from my father. Worrying me even more, my uncle’s pastor friend also called. His wife had waited three hours at Miami International Airport and had seen no sign of either my uncle or Maxo.

Around nine p.m., the calls suddenly stopped. Cell phones in tow, Fedo and I went for what we’d come to call our daily pregnancy walk on the boardwalk on Miami Beach. It was a balmy night, but a cool breeze was coming off the ocean. We didn’t walk long. Worried that my uncle might remember only the house telephone number, we hurried home to wait by the phone. Intermittently, I called Tante Zi on her cell phone, but I got no reply.

Fedo and I lay down and tried to brainstorm some possibilities. I wanted to have at least one likely explanation for my father.

“They’re probably coming tomorrow,” I told my father when he called.

My father had merely called to check on my uncle and Maxo. He was too weak to continue talking. I fell into a deep, sad sleep.

My phone rang at one thirty the next morning. Ever since my father had become ill, late-night and early-morning phone calls sent my now very large body leaping straight out of bed. Still, I missed the call.

On the voice mail was a message from a female U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer. She could have read from a Contact Advisory of CBP Detention form, which contains a script provided by Customs and Border Protection that would have had her say, “I am Officer So-and-so of U.S Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport. Your uncle, who has arrived in the United States on American Airlines flight 822, has asked that we contact you…” However, what she said instead was “Ms. Danticat, we have your uncle here.”

She then paused, and it sounded as though she moved her mouth slightly away from the phone to ask my uncle, “What is your name, sir?”

My uncle’s voice box came through clearly as he replied, “Joseph Dantica.” He pronounced his name in the French way, putting the most emphasis on the last syllable. Though an error on my father’s birth certificate had made him a Danticat, giving us a singular variation of the family name, we still pronounced our surnames the same. In French and Creole our t was silent, though I often joked with my uncle that in English we were “cats” and he was not.

“We have him here,” the female officer continued on the message, “at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He’s requested asylum and we’re completing his paperwork.”

There was hope, kindness in her voice, a matter-of-fact impression of normalcy and routine. But her number had not registered on my phone, and she hadn’t left it for me to call back.

My husband searched the Internet while I leafed through the Yellow