Two women cramp a shed.
You are aware you are asking a lot of your host. You wonder if you are doing the same thing you despise your husband’s father for, just more politely. Sometimes, you wonder if she wishes it was she with the belly full of babies under the smock. She never looks at your body. She lets her eyes drift over it.
You find it awkward to sit in silence with her in the shed, so you try to draw her out. You talk to her in her own language, but she laughs at all the words you don’t know. So sometimes you both speak in English, and sometimes you alone speak Kreyòl, and she answers that with a crack of her knuckles.
It is not a real answer.
A body cannot answer a question.
You take to making pronouncements to her. “I will never step back in that house,” you tell her, “as long as the bishop lives there.”
And, “I don’t think he ever loved me.”
And, “I think I am the silliest pickaninny who ever lived.”
And, “How is it possible to become free when you do not even know who you are?”
These questions make you reckless and queasy. Saying them aloud is like sucking on the grayest gristle of fat on a stewing chicken bone. It is like smelling oxtails boiling. You feel how you used to feel when you wrote to the woman in the water, that telling the truth of what you feel is a dangerous thing, that it could invalidate your very self. Then you think of that woman in the water, and how she led this man to you. He called you one of her devotees. This man who fundamentally misunderstood you, and who you fundamentally misunderstood. You thought he was braver than he was. You thought he had a bigger imagination. His imagination was a cooking pot with the lid on, boiling.
All this takes your breath away, which is already short, because two expanding baby skulls are lovingly pressed on your lungs, making you lose your capacity for air. You are running out of air. You are not sure your husband understands this.
Gasping, you try to make yourself useful. Cooking is very much like making medicine, you think at first. There is a certain amount of drudgery in mixing and chopping and measuring, though Ti Me measures by handfuls and pinches, which makes more sense than how your mother measured, you thought bitterly. Your mother with her scales and her pipettes, and you, as a child, having to wash them each night for her. You try to do the same here, telling yourself you are useful. Ti Me looks skeptical.
You offer to gather eggs in the morning for Ti Me, and she says she supposes that you could. Sometimes, the eggs are malformed, the tops folded over onto themselves. You look at the nests, at the brooding hens, and you feel … nothing. You’d imagined that you would feel a great kinship with the world of mothers, now that you will shortly be one. But you do not. The pregnant nanny goat with its red swollen belly still disgusts you, and when you see another woman with child waddle past the back of the courtyard, you only feel embarrassed of how little you yourself have become a mother. Of how much you are still lacking.
Getting the eggs is tricky, because you are avoiding your husband and his family. You try to either get up before any of them or stay in the shed until your husband and his father, at least, are gone. But at night, when you lay on the worktable, you still lie as if Emmanuel was beside you. You curl to the edge and make space for this boy, as if the two of you were still in bed.
You lose count of your nights in the shed. Eventually, your husband leads his sister to the door, leads her by the hand like a child, and has her stand and call, “Libertie, Libertie, I have something to tell you.”
You do not come out of the shed. You sit in the dark and call back, “You can say whatever you wish from there.”
You hear them scuffle, as if someone is about to leave. Then Ella yelps. Had your husband pinched her? Ti Me, later, will confirm that he had. Just like when they were small. But after the yelp, you hear Ella, in her grudging singsong, say, “I did not mean to frighten you, sister dear. Please forgive us.”
You do not shout anything back to that. You can feel the two of them out there, waiting. You will not respond. Eventually, one of them shuffles away.
A few minutes later, your husband comes into your shed and says, “Ti Me, may we have a moment.”
When she is gone, you say to him, “You’ve forced Ti Me out of her home.”
“You have,” he says back, and it shocks you a bit, his willingness to do battle. You have always known him as a lover. You have always felt that power over him. You did not expect him to be willing to fight. If you do not know yourself as his lover, as the one who makes his eyes turn soft and makes his voice weak and makes him bow his head to please you:
What are you?
What power do you have here?
You are frightened then that you’ve lost him. That maybe he was lost to you already.
So you square your shoulders and decide, no matter. If he’s lost, then maybe you are ready to be something else.
“You are a liar,” you say.
“I have never lied to you,” he says in a sob, and all your resolve nearly leaves you. And it is maddening that he is right. You want to go to him and hold him, to hold him as you did
