Tales of Two Americas Read online

  ■ ■

  “I have five thousand in the bank,” Elsie told Blaise when he called again that afternoon. She actually had sixty-seven hundred, but she couldn’t part with all her savings at once, in case another type of emergency came up in either Haiti or Miami. Somehow she felt he already knew about the five thousand, though. It was roughly the same amount she’d had saved when they’d been together. She’d hoped to double her savings but had been unable to after moving to a one-bedroom efficiency in North Miami, plus sending a monthly allowance to her parents, and paying school fees for her younger sister in Les Cayes. This is what Blaise had been trying to tell her all along. He desperately needed that money to save Olivia’s life.

  ■ ■

  Sometimes Elsie was sure she could make out the approximate time Olivia and Blaise began seeing each other without her. Olivia started pairing up with someone else for the group home jobs and turned Elsie down when she asked her to join the usual outings with Elsie and Blaise.

  The night Blaise left their apartment for good, Olivia sat outside Elsie’s first-floor window, in the front passenger seat of Blaise’s red four-door pickup, which he often used to carry speakers and instruments to his gigs. The pickup was parked under a streetlamp, and for most of the time that Elsie was staring through a crack in her drawn bedroom shades, Olivia’s disk-shaped face was flooded in a harsh bright light. At some point Olivia got out of the car then disappeared behind it and Elsie suspected that she’d crouched down in the shadows to pee before getting back in the front passenger seat, what Elsie had always called the “wife seat” during a few of their previous outings when Olivia would sit in the back. Only when the pickup, packed with Blaise’s belongings, was pulling away did Olivia finally look over at the apartment window, where Elsie quickly sank into the darkness. Sitting on the floor of her nearly empty apartment, Elsie realized she had to move. She couldn’t stay there anymore.

  ■ ■

  The next evening Gaspard fell out of bed while reaching over to his bedside table for the book his daughter had been reading to him. Elsie heard the thump from her bedroom, and by the time she dashed down the hall, his daughter was already there, her bottom spiked up in the air, her face pressed against her father’s. With one arm under her father’s bulbous legs and the other wrapped around his back, she dragged him off the floor and raised him onto the edge of the bed.

  Elsie paused in the doorway to watch the daughter lower her father into bed as though he were an oversized child. Raising a comforter over his chest, she gently kissed her father’s forehead. They were both panting as their faces came apart, the daughter from the effort of carrying the father and the father from having been carried.

  Suddenly their panting turned into loud chuckles.

  “There are many falls before the big one,” he said.

  “Thank God you got that good carpet,” she said.

  Then, her face growing somber again, the daughter said, “How can I leave you, Papa?”

  “You can,” he said, “and you will. You have your life and I have what’s left of mine. I want you to always do what you want. I don’t want you to have any regrets.”

  “You need dialysis,” she pleaded. “Why don’t you accept it?”

  The daughter reached over and grabbed a glass of water from the side table. She held the back of her father’s head as he took a few sips. Elsie rushed over and took the glass from her as she lowered her father’s head back onto the pillow. The daughter nearly pierced her lips with her teeth while trying to keep tears from slipping down her face.

  “I know you’re having your family problem, Elsie,” the daughter said, straining not to raise her voice, “but why did it take you so long to get here after my father fell out of his bed? I think Papa’s right. I’m going to call the agency to ask for someone else.”

  Elsie wanted to plead to stay. She liked Gaspard and didn’t want him to have to break in someone new. Besides, after wiring that money to Blaise for Olivia’s ransom—he had specially asked that she wire it rather than bring it to him—she now desperately needed the work. However, if they wanted her to leave, she would. She only hoped her dismissal wouldn’t cost her other jobs.

  “I’ll wrap things up,” she told them, “until you get someone else.”

  ■ ■

  One night after Elsie and Olivia heard Blaise play at an outdoor festival at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami, they were walking toward the part of the parking lot that was reserved for the performers when Olivia announced that she was going to find a man to move back with her to Haiti.

  “Do you have to love him or can it be just anyone?” Elsie had asked.

  Mildly drunk from a whole afternoon of beer sipping, Olivia had mumbled, “Anyone.”

  “How can you live without love?” Blaise had said, waxing lyrical in a way Elsie had never heard before, except when he was onstage and chatting up the women who came to hear his band with his idea of public come-ons. (“You’re looking like a piña colada, baby. Can I have a sip?”) Corny, harmless stuff that Elsie was accustomed to.

  “I can live without love,” Olivia had said, “but I can’t leave without money and I can’t live without my country. I’m tired of being in this country. This country makes us mean.”

  Elsie guessed at that moment that Olivia was still thinking about one of their patients’ sons from the day before, a middle-aged white man, a loan officer at a bank. In their presence, as they were changing shifts, the man, obviously drunk, had turned over his senile father and slapped the old man’s wrinkly bottom with his palm several times.

  “See how you like it now,” he’d said.

  Calling the agency that had hired them, then the Department of Social Services, over a mistreated patient yet again, Olivia had barely been able to find the words.

  The night of the concert, to distract Olivia from her thoughts of abused patients, and to distract each other from thoughts of losing Olivia, the three of them had returned to Blaise and Elsie’s apartment and had wiped off an entire bottle of five-star Rhum Barbancourt. Sometime in the early-morning hours, without anyone’s request or guidance, they had fallen into bed together, exchanging jumbled words, lingering kisses, and caresses, whose sources they weren’t interested in keeping track of. That night, they were no longer sure what to call themselves. What were they exactly? A triad. A ménage à trois. No. Dosas. They were dosas. All three of them untwinned, lonely, alone together.

  When they woke up Olivia was gone.

  ■ ■

  Blaise called again early the next morning. Elsie was still in bed but was preparing to leave Gaspard for good. Gaspard and his daughter were still asleep and, aside from the hum of Gaspard’s oxygen compressor, the house was quiet.

  “I shouldn’t have let her go,” Blaise whispered before Elsie could say hello.

  When Blaise was with the band, he would sometimes go days without sleep in order to rehearse around the clock. By the time his gig would come around, he’d be so hyper that his voice would sound mechanical, as though all emotion had been purged out of it. He sounded that way now as Elsie tried to keep up.

  “We weren’t getting along anymore,” he said. “We were going to break up. That’s why she just picked up and left.”

  A light came on down the hall, in the room where Gaspard’s daughter was sleeping. Elsie heard a door creak open then the shuffling of feet. A shadow approached. The daughter slid Elsie’s door open an even larger crack and peeked in, rubbing a clenched fist against her eyes to fully rouse herself.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked Elsie.

  Elsie nodded.

  “I wish I’d begged her not to go,” Blaise was saying.

  The daughter pulled Elsie’s door shut behind her and continued toward her father’s room down the hall.

  “What happened?” Elsie asked. “You sent the money, didn’t you? Th
ey released her?”

  The phone line crackled and Elsie heard several bumps. Was Blaise stomping his feet? Banging his head against a wall? Pounding the phone into his forehead?

  “Where is she?” Elsie tried to moderate her voice.

  “We had a fight,” he said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone. We had a spat and she left.”

  The daughter opened Elsie’s door and once again pushed her head in.

  “Elsie, my father would like to see you when you’re done,” she said, before pulling the door behind her once more.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” Elsie said. “My boss needs me. But first tell me she’s okay.”

  She didn’t want to hear whatever else was coming, but she couldn’t hang up.

  “We paid the ransom,” he said, now rushing to get his words out before she could hang up. “But they didn’t release her. She’s dead.”

  Elsie walked back to the bed she’d called hers for the last few months and sat down. This was the longest she’d ever been at any single job. For a while she had allowed herself to forget that this bed with its foamy mattress, which was supposed to use numbers to remember the shape of your body, was not really hers. Taking a deep breath, she moved the phone away from her face and let it rest on her lap.

  “Are you there?” Blaise was shouting now. “Can you hear me?”

  “Where was she found?” Elsie raised the phone back to her ear.

  “She was dumped in front of her mother’s house,” Blaise shrieked like a wounded animal. “In the middle of the night.”

  Elsie ran her fingers across her cheeks where, the night they’d fallen in bed together, Blaise had kissed her for the last time. That night, it was hard for Elsie to differentiate Olivia’s hands from Blaise’s on her naked body. But in her drunken haze, it felt perfectly normal, like they’d all needed one another too much to restrain themselves. Now the tears were catching her off guard, coming much quicker than she’d expected. She lowered her head and buried her eyes in the crook of her elbow.

  “You won’t believe it,” Blaise said, frantically gargling the words as they came through.

  “What?” Elsie said, wishing, not for the first time since he and Olivia had not stopped talking to her, that the three of them were once again drunk and in bed together.

  “Her mother says that before she left the house, Olivia wrote her name at the bottom of her feet.”

  Elsie could imagine Olivia, her conked, plastered hair wild as it had been that night with the three of them, and wild again as she pulled her feet toward her face and, with a marker that she’d probably brought all the way from Miami just for that purpose, scribbled her name on the soles of her feet. Knowing Olivia, she’d probably seen this as the only precaution against the loss of identity that might possibly follow her being beheaded.

  “They didn’t, did they?” Elsie asked.

  “No,” Blaise said. “Her mother says her face, her entire body, was intact.”

  He put some emphasis on “her entire body,” Elsie realized, because he wanted to signal to her that Olivia had also not been raped. Elsie let out a sigh of relief for both, a sigh so loud that Blaise followed with one of his own. “Her mother’s going to bury her in her family’s mausoleum, in their village out north,” he added.

  “Are you going?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Would you?”

  She didn’t let him finish. Of course she wouldn’t go. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She had already booked a flight to go to Les Cayes in a few months to visit her family during their town’s annual celebration for its patron saint, Saint Sauveur, and she’d need to bring her family not just money but all the extra things they’d asked for, a small fridge and oven for her parents and a laptop computer for her sister.

  Just then his line beeped twice, startling her.

  “It’s Haiti,” he said. “I have to go.”

  He hung up just as abruptly as he had reentered her life.

  “Elsie, are you all right?” Gaspard was standing in the doorway. Short of breath, he spread out his arms and grabbed both sides of the door frame. His daughter was standing behind him with a portable oxygen tank.

  Elsie wasn’t sure how long they’d both been standing there, but whatever sounds she’d been unconsciously making, whatever moans, growls, whimpers, and squeals had escaped out of her mouth, had brought them there. She moved toward them, tightening her robe belt around her waist. Grunting, Gaspard looked past her, his eyes wandering around the room, taking in the platform bed and companion dresser.

  “Elsie, my daughter seems to think she heard you crying.” Gaspard’s blood-drained lips were trembling as though he were cold, yet he still appeared more concerned about her than about himself when he asked, “Is your sister all right?”

  Gaspard’s body swayed toward his daughter. The daughter reached for him, anchoring him with one hand while balancing the portable oxygen tank with the other. With a fearful glance at Gaspard’s shadow swaying unsteadily on the ground, Elsie rushed forward and grabbed him before saying, “Please reconsider your decision to release me, Mesye Gaspard. I won’t be getting these phone calls anymore.”

  ■ ■

  She was right. He never called her again.

  A week later, after Gaspard had ceded to his daughter’s pleas and agreed not just to dialysis but to have his name placed on a transplant list, Elsie had a weekend off while Gaspard was hospitalized, and with nothing else to do, she stopped by Dede’s on Saturday night, hoping Blaise might be there after returning from Haiti.

  It was still early so the place was nearly empty, except for some area college kids whom Dede allowed to buy drinks without ID. Dede was behind the bar. Elsie walked over and sat across from him as a waitress shouted a few orders at him.

  “How you holding up?” Dede asked after the waitress walked away with the drinks.

  “Working hard,” she said, “to get by.”

  “Still with the old people?” he asked.

  “They’re not always old now,” she said. “Sometimes they’re young people who’ve been in car accidents or have cancer.”

  Eventually they got to Blaise.

  After she and Blaise had met at Dede’s, she kept coming back to the bar with him whenever she was free and he was playing there. He then asked if he could move into her apartment so they could save money and see more of each other, since she was working so much. She found out that his tourist visa had expired long ago, and even though she’d just gotten her green card and wouldn’t be eligible for citizenship for another five years, they went to city hall and got married with the hope that one day she might be able to help him with his immigration status. After the three-minute city hall ceremony, at which Dede and the friend who had introduced her to Blaise were witnesses, Dede hosted a small wedding lunch for them at the bar. Elsie’s parents, who, just like Blaise’s, were also still living in Haiti, had been unable to attend.

  “I always thought you should have married me.” Dede now reached across the bar and playfully stroked Elsie’s shoulder. He had never been married and, according to Blaise, he never intended to.

  “You didn’t ask then and you’re not asking now,” she said.

  “Maybe I’m asking for something else.” He moved his fingers under her white oversized collarless blouse, across her clavicle down to the top button, and let his hand linger there for a few seconds. In his steadfast and unyielding gaze seemed to be some possibility of relief, or a few hours of sweaty comfort masked as excitement, like the kind she’d initially been seeking with Blaise. As pathetic as it seemed now, she loved Blaise most when he was onstage. She was seduced by something she didn’t even think he was good at. His devotion to his mediocre gifts had melted her heart. Watching other women pine over his singing excited her too. She was jealous of their ability to fantasize
about him, imagining that life with him would be one never-ending songfest. But every once in a while it went beyond that, during ordinary moments like when she watched him cook a salty omelet filled with smoked herring, which he would bring to her at the breakfast nook where they ate all their meals. This is when they would talk about one day having a baby.

  She’d promised him that they would have a child after they’d saved enough money to move into a white single-family house she’d seen for sale in North Miami. She had driven by the house dozens of times, imagining the two of them and their future children living there. She knew the address so well that she could recite it to herself, even in her sleep, like a prayer. A For Sale sign had been dangling in front of the house for so long that she believed the house was destined for them, that no one else would be able to buy it before they could. She learned from looking it up on one of the computers at the public library that the house was 1,847 square feet with three large bedrooms and two full baths. It also had a stand-alone efficiency with a separate entrance in the back. They could rent out the efficiency, she told him, to help pay for their mortgage.

  “Have you heard from him?” Dede now asked her, as she slowly removed his hand from inside her blouse.

  “Not in a while,” she said.

  “I hear he’s in Haiti for good now,” Dede said, winking after her rejection had sunken in. He reached over and grabbed a few glasses from under the bar and started wiping the insides with a small white towel. And maybe this was his revenge, or maybe he had been waiting to tell her, but between putting one glass down and picking up another, he said, “He’s living in Haiti with his old band’s money and a lot of cash from some kidnapping scam he and your friend Olivia came up with together. I promise you I have people on this. If they ever see them, they’re going to pay.”

  If this were happening to someone else, she would wonder why that person didn’t grab Dede’s neck and demand more details, why that person didn’t pound her breasts with her fist, tear off her clothes, and thrash around on the floor. But she did none of those things. It was as if suddenly some shred of doubt, which had been plaguing her, some small suspicion she’d harbored for days, were finally being confirmed.