Here Manman broke off, her mouth working until she could continue. “This will hurt you, but I promised not to lie to you anymore, so I won’t. She said ‘I didn’t think about whether he would feel it.’ She said that to me, can you believe it? I wanted to reach past that glass and slap her face, but I couldn’t. Even if I’d been physically able to, I needed her to sign the papers.”
Sullivan’s knee knocked his under the table again and Tobias sucked in a breath. He could feel Sullivan watching him and didn’t want to make him worry, but he needed a second. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of someone blind to the idea of an infant feeling pain. As Sullivan would’ve said, it didn’t translate into a language he could understand. Finally he nudged Sullivan back and nodded, only then realizing that Manman had paused to give him a moment.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Go on.”
Manman continued, “So I pretended that I understood her selfishness, and eventually she agreed to give you up, but only on two conditions—that you keep the name she’d given you, and that we keep her updated with our current address so she could contact you in the future if she chose to. We’ve kept our word about those things, but we made no promises about passing her letters along, and so we haven’t. But you’re right. We were wrong to do as we did, even if we meant no harm. If you want to see her, we will—”
“I don’t want to see her,” Tobias interrupted, startled. “I’ve never wanted to, not since Tante Esther told me. I know you think I’m too weak to say no—”
“Too kind,” Papa interjected. “Too willing to give. Not too weak.”
“Oh.” Tobias’s cheeks grew hot. “Thank you. But it was never about that. I wanted the choice. Not her.” He frowned, wondering how they’d managed to miss each other so completely for so long. It had never occurred to him that she might also be afraid of being left behind. “You’re my Manman.”
She made a soft gasping noise and came around the table to his side, pulling him into her arms and sniffling. When she let him go, he gave Sullivan an embarrassed smile, only to find those brown eyes tender as he pressed a napkin into Tobias’s hand. He wiped his face self-consciously.
Papa said, “I also thought...a son should be proud of his family. I never wanted you to feel as we did, that we came from badness.”
Tobias frowned. “What do you mean?”
In slow, careful words that grew more confident as he went on, he explained about their emigration from Haiti. Tobias knew bits and parts, but he’d never gotten the full story of the way Nadège and Andre Alcide had traveled to the States during the breakdown of the Baby Doc Duvalier regime, sent to the States by their upper-class parents, who had benefitted from the worst of that regime. There had been two classes back then, he said, and their family belonged to the one that had money and power—well, as much power as you could have when your success hinged on the good favor of a dictator. Their parents had turned a blind eye to the abuses of the man who’d set up a system that afforded them a comfortable life, and they had spoken out publicly only when the horrors became impossible to ignore, only when it seemed that the tides of the country would turn on them too. Tobias’s parents had barely entered adulthood at that time, and were sheltered by their privilege, but they’d learned the nature of their upbringing when the protests and violence began. Particularly once they came to the States and were exposed to immigrants from poorer families and witnessed the devastation.
“It is important to take care of your community,” Papa said. “That is part of what it means to be Haitian, you know this. But our parents did not think this way, and they did things that were very hard to respect. I have tried to be better than my own papa, but it is a heavy burden and I have felt very ashamed of my family at times. I did not want you to wonder if that blindness to the suffering of others could run in your veins. I hope you can understand, Tobias, or at least forgive.”
“Of course I forgive you,” Tobias said, a little bewildered, because that wasn’t even a question. He already had. “You weren’t wrong to think I might make a choice that was bad for me. Sullivan made a good point when we were talking about it before—I haven’t always been honest with you about what I need and what I can handle. So it’s partially my fault that you thought it was the right thing to do. I want to be more honest with you. I should’ve told you I didn’t want to be a doctor, but I... I wanted you to be proud of me.”
“I can be proud of you no matter what you do,” his papa said. “It is about the kind of man you are, not the job you do. And I have never wondered about the goodness in your heart, Tobias. Lost you might have been, but never bad.”
“This is good,” Manman said, and pulled him back in. “We will do better, all of us.”
He pressed his face against her shoulder and breathed, catching the scent of her rose cream and closing his eyes.
When they heard the stirrings upstairs of Tobias’s siblings getting up for school, Manman glanced at the clock and climbed to her feet. “With that solved, it’s time to get on with things, I suppose. You’ll stay for breakfast, Sullivan.” Talking to herself about what to prepare, she vanished into the kitchen. On school mornings they rarely got fancy, but Tobias strongly doubted his mother would allow a
