“They say they are bringing a man who plays a horn,” Ti Me said, her voice swooping up in glee. “And another man who has trained the birds to talk to him, and can talk back to them. He can tell us their stories.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“And there will be a carnival, and people will dance.”
“Yes,” I said. I reached for the bowl of rice Ti Me was now washing.
“And they are coming all the way from where you did.”
Every evening, when Ti Me left our shed to serve dinner, I sat on the floor near the door and looked out across the yard, at the main house. Sometimes, when she returned from her duties, Emmanuel followed her. I would sit by the door, and he would tell me, again, how much I loved him, how he loved the children inside me, how I needed to only step out of the door and into the world he was building for us.
My resolve broke a bit more each time he came—because I was furious with him, with his father, but I still loved him. I still wished for him by my side, to run my hand over his pale back in the moonlight, to feel his hands underneath me, holding me up in the water. With Mama, I had held on to the anger and let the love burn away. But with Emmanuel, there was no satisfaction in this burnt space between us. It only made me lonelier, and the loneliness made me long for him more. I would be weak, I knew it, and return to him. But not yet, I hoped.
The night that word came about our visitors, I stayed for a bit longer while Emmanuel whispered all his love for me.
“I would like to see the players,” I said finally.
“I do not think that is a good idea, in your condition.”
“I am not so far along that I can’t go.”
“You are too far gone. There will surely be a crowd, and if anything were to happen to you, we would not be able to get you help in the crush of people.”
“Maybe I could go but stand apart.”
“You would probably,” he said slyly, “be able to hear them from our bedroom window.”
So that is how I found myself sitting again in my husband’s room, a chair drawn up to the sill and the shutters open, straining to hear what I could past the crowd.
Ella and Bishop Chase had left to listen. Ti Me had gone, as well. It was only me and Emmanuel in the house. I sat to one side of the window; he stood to the other.
“I do not think I will be able to hear—”
“You will. They are performing on the Rue de Commerce. We can usually hear what happens there.”
Outside the window, the sun was bending deeper into the sky, and we could see, just over the roofs of the trading offices, the water of the harbor moving back and forth.
I am here, far away from my mother and my father’s bones, I thought, and I am looking at a sight they will never see.
“Do they move?” Emmanuel said.
“What?”
“Do they move, the babies? Do they move a lot? Is it painful?”
“They are sleeping at the moment,” I said.
He smiled at that, his face so eager. I took a breath. Stopped. Took a breath again.
“They move the most when Ti Me speaks.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. You know, she does not speak often, but when she begins to talk about something, it is almost as if they swim towards her.”
“Then they know her as the rest of us know her.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Do not say that.”
He blushed. “I did not mean it that way.”
“Your father took advantage of a girl who acted as mother to you. Who was only a few years older than you.”
“Everything is not as simple as you think it is, Libertie.”
“But it seems very simple. You say you want a different world than your father’s. This is a chance to start making it.”
He looked out the window.
“If everything you do is for the good of our people,” I said, “for the country yet to come, I wonder if what he did to Ti Me, if that was part of making a nation, too.”
“You are grotesque,” he said.
“I am only asking questions. I want to know.”
“You cannot know everything,” he said. Then, “Aren’t you tired of fighting, Libertie?”
I felt a heaviness in my bones that took my breath away. I felt the hang of my belly, pulling on my back, and the crook of my spine from sleeping on a wooden table. I felt the swell of my feet, the itch at the back of my knees that I could not reach. The waves, just over the horizon, moved over and over again, and even that sight exhausted me.
“You must be tired,” he said again. “I know that I am. You ask me to do something that I have tried to do since I was a boy, and I tell you I will do it. When the time is right. But we have to plan, to build new things. And while we build, it would not be so bad to lie down here, in our marriage bed, which belongs half to you, after all.”
He was at my elbow then, pulling it gently, and I settled into the cup of his hand. I was ready to follow him—I would have followed him, and we would have lain down, curved into each other like two rib bones in the same breathing chest. But then I heard it.
I had almost forgotten that their voices were real. I had not heard them
