New york day women danticat pdf

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Examine how your chosen text explores what it means to be of Haitian descent in the New World. What is the significance of Haitian and Haitian Dyasporic traditions as they are portrayed here? How does this work reiterate or complicate claims about Haiti? How does it address or reinforce discriminatory practices, particularly as it relates to the intersections between race, class, gender, nationality, or sexuality?

Please find a strong point of view, on which to base your discussion and remember to take into account the context and to stress why your argument matters.

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In order to develop this argument, you will address a specific aspect of 1 of our primary texts to develop a unique thesis that will guide your entire essay. You are also expected to develop in-depth textual analysis as well as incorporate 2 secondary sources to support your claim.

You should choose a particular angle to analyze your chosen text and position yourself within a scholarly debate by engaging with at least 2 pieces of literary criticism. Make sure to have an original argument supported by criticism rather than a summary of someone else’s argument. You need to cite any outside sources consulted, even if you do not cite the text directly. Failure to do so would constitute plagiarism

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BOOKS: PDFs BELOW

Allende, Isabel. Island Beneath the Sea (ISBN: 9780061988257). SECONDARY

Carpentier, Alejo. Kingdom of This World (ISBN: 9780374537388). SECONDARY SOURCE

Danticat, Edwidge. Butterfly’s Way (ISBN: ISBN: 9781569472187). SECONDARY SOURCE

---, ed. Everything Inside (ISBN: 9780525521273). PRIMARY SOURCE

FICTION

Claire of the Sea Light

The Dew Breaker

The Farming of Bones

Krik? Krak!

Breath, Eyes, Memory

NONFICTION

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

Brother, I’m Dying

After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti

FOR YOUNG READERS

My Mommy Medicine

Untwine

Mama’s Nightingale

Anacaona, Golden Flower

Behind the Mountains

Eight Days

The Last Mapou

AS EDITOR

The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures

Haiti Noir

Haiti Noir 2: The Classics

The Best American Essays 2011

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2019 by Edwidge Danticat

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a

division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Danticat, Edwidge, [date] author.

Title: Everything inside / by Edwidge Danticat. Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018047646 (print) | LCCN 2018049904 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525521280 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525521273 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PS3554.A5815 (ebook) | LCC PS3554.A5815 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54— dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047646

Ebook ISBN 9780525521280 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph by Michael Fitzsimmons / Alamy Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v5.4 ep

http://www.aaknopf.com
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047646
FOR JONATHAN AND JOANNE

Being born is the first exile.

To walk the earth

is an eternal diaspora.

CINDY JIMÉNEZ-VERA

We love because it’s the only true adventure.

NIKKI GIOVANNI

Contents

Dosas

In the Old Days

The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special

The Gift

Hot-Air Balloons

Sunrise, Sunset

Seven Stories

Without Inspection

Dosas

E lsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex- husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince. Elsie had just fed Gaspard some cabbage soup when her cell phone rang. Gaspard was lying in bed, his head carefully propped on two pillows, his bloated and pitted face angled toward the bedroom skylight, which allowed him a slanted view of a giant coconut palm that for years had been leaning over the lakeside house in Gaspard’s single-family development.

Elsie pressed the phone between her left ear and shoulder and used her right hand to wipe a lingering piece of cabbage from Gaspard’s chin. Waving both hands as though conducting an orchestra, Gaspard signaled to her not to leave the room while motioning for her to carry on with her conversation. Turning her attention from Gaspard to the phone, Elsie moved it closer to her lips and asked, “Ki lè?”

“This morning.” Sounding hoarse and exhausted, Blaise, the ex- husband, jumbled his words. His usual singsong tone, which Elsie attributed to his actually being a singer, was gone. It was replaced by a nearly inaudible whisper. “She was leaving her mother’s house,” he continued. “Two men grabbed her, pushed her into a car, and drove off.”

Elsie could imagine Blaise sitting, or standing, just as she was, with his cell phone trapped between his long neck and narrow shoulders, while he used his hands to pick at his fingernails. Clean fingernails were one of his many obsessions. Dirty fingers drove him crazy, she’d reasoned, because, having trained as a mechanic in Haiti, he barely missed having his slender guitar-playing fingers being dirty all his life.

“You didn’t go to Haiti with her?” Elsie asked. “You’re right,” he answered, drawing what Elsie heard as an endless

breath. “I should have been with her.” Elsie’s patient’s eyes wandered down from the ceiling, where the

blooming palm had sprinkled the skylight glass with a handful of brown seeds. Gaspard had been pretending not to hear, but was now looking

directly at her. Restlessly shifting his weight from one side of the bed to the next, he paused now and then to catch his breath.

Gaspard had turned sixty-five that day and before his lunch had requested a bottle of Champagne from his daughter—Champagne that he shouldn’t be having, but for which he’d pleaded so much that his daughter had given in, on the condition that he would only take a few sips. The daughter, Mona, who was a decade younger than Elsie’s thirty- six years, had come from New York to visit her father in Miami Lakes. She’d gone out to procure the Champagne and now she was back.

“Elsie, I need you to hang up,” Mona said as she walked into the room and laid out three crystal Champagne flutes on a folding table by the bed.

“Call me soon,” Elsie told Blaise. After she hung up, Elsie moved closer to the sick man’s spindly

daughter. They were about the same height and size, but Elsie felt that she could be Mona’s mother. This was perhaps due to her many years of taking care of others. She was a nurse’s assistant, though no nurse was present on this particular job. She was there to keep Gaspard safe and comfortable, recording vital signs, feeding and grooming him, doing some light housework, and overall keeping him company between his twice-weekly dialysis sessions, until he decided whether or not he would accept his daughter’s offer of one of her kidneys. Mona had been approved as a donor, but Gaspard had still not made up his mind.

Mona poured the Champagne, and Elsie watched her closely as she handed a Champagne flute to her father.

“À la vie,” Mona said, toasting her father. “To life.”

—

That afternoon, Blaise called back to tell Elsie that Olivia’s mother had heard from the kidnappers. The mother had asked to speak to Olivia, but her captors refused to put her on the phone.

“They want fifty thousand.” Blaise spoke in such a rapid nasal voice that Elsie had to ask him to repeat the figure.

“American?” she asked, just to be sure. She imagined him nodding his egg-shaped head up and down as he

answered “Wi.”

“Of course, her mother doesn’t have it,” Blaise said. “These are not rich people. Everyone says we should negotiate. Can maybe get it down to ten. I’m trying to borrow it.”

She wished he meant ten dollars, which would have made things easier. Ten dollars and her old friend and rival would be free. Her ex- husband would stop calling her at work. But, of course, he meant ten thousand American dollars.

“Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” Elsie mumbled a brief prayer under her breath. “I’m sorry,” she told Blaise.

“This is hell.” He sounded too calm now. She wasn’t surprised by this. Blaise was always subdued by worry. Weeks after he left the konpa band he’d founded and had been the lead singer of, he did nothing but stay home and play his guitar. Then, too, he had been exceedingly calm.

—

Elsie’s former friend Olivia could be appealing. Chestnut colored, with a bushy head of hair that she wore in a gelled bun, Olivia was sort of nice looking. But what Elsie had first noticed about her was her ambition. Olivia was two years younger than Elsie and a lot more outgoing. She liked to touch people either on the arm, back, or shoulder while talking to them, whether they were patients, doctors, nurses, or other nurse’s aides. No one seemed to mind. Her touch quickly became not just anticipated or welcomed but yearned for. Olivia was one of the most popular certified nurse’s assistants at their North Miami agency. Because of her near- perfect mastery of textbook English, she was often assigned the richest and easiest patients.

Elsie and Olivia met at a one-week refresher course for home attendants, and upon completion of the course they had gravitated toward each other. Whenever possible, they’d asked their agency to assign them the same small group homes, where they cared mostly for bedridden elderly patients. At night when their wards were well medicated and asleep, they’d stay up and gossip in hushed tones, judging and condemning their patients’ children and grandchildren, whose images were framed near bottles of medicine on bedside tables but whose voices they rarely heard on the phone and whose faces they hardly ever

saw in person.

—

The next morning, Elsie helped Gaspard change out of his pajamas into the gray sweats he wore during the day. Elsie wished he would let her help him attempt a walk around the manicured grounds of his development or even let her take him for a ride in his wheelchair, but he much preferred to stay at home, in bed. Just as he had every morning for the last few days, he whispered, “Elsie, my flower, I think I’m at the end.”

Compared with some mornings, when Gaspard would stop to rest even while gargling, he was relatively stable. His face was swelling up, though, blending his features in a way that made his head look like a baby’s.

“Where’s Nana?” he asked, using his nickname for his daughter. Mona was sleeping in her old bedroom, whose walls were covered with

posters of no-longer-popular, or long-dead, singers and actors. Elsie knew little about her except that she was living in New York, where she worked for a beauty company, designing labels for soaps, skin creams, and lotions that filled every shelf of every cabinet of each of the three bathrooms in her father’s house. Mona was unmarried and had no children and had been a beauty queen at some point, judging from the pictures around the house in which she was wearing sequined gowns and bikinis with sashes across her chest. In one of those pictures, she was Miss Haiti-America, whatever that was.

Gaspard had told Elsie that some years ago, his wife, Mona’s mother, had divorced him and moved to Canada, where she had relatives. Gaspard had shared this with her, she suspected, to explain why there was no wife to help take care of him. He would often add, when his daughter showed up on Friday nights and left on Sunday afternoons, that Mona also had to visit her mother on some of the weekends she wasn’t with him.

“I don’t want you to think Nana’s deserting me, like a lot of children forget their parents here,” he said.

“She’s here now, Mesye Gaspard,” Elsie had said. “That’s what counts.”

Aside from his daughter, he hated having visitors. He minced no

words in telling the people who called him, especially the clients and other accountants he’d worked with for years at his tax- preparation/multiservice business, that he wanted none of them to see him the way he was.

Mona usually walked to Gaspard’s room as soon as she woke up. In order to avoid tiring him, they didn’t speak much, but for the better part of the morning, she would either be reading a book or texting on her phone.

—

Blaise called once more, around one o’clock that afternoon, just as Elsie was preparing a palm-hearts-and-avocado salad that Gaspard had requested. His wife used to prepare it for him, and he wished to share the dish with his daughter, who this time was spending the entire week with him.

“I think they hurt her, Elsie,” Blaise was saying. His speech was garbled and slow, as though he’d just woken up from a deep sleep.

“Why do you think that?” Elsie asked. Her thumb accidentally slipped across the blade of the knife she was using to slice the palm hearts. She squeezed the edge of the cut with her teeth, the sweet taste of her own blood lingering on her tongue.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I can feel it. You know she won’t give in just like that. She’ll fight.”

The night Olivia and Blaise met, Elsie had taken her to see Blaise’s band, Kajou, play at Dédé’s Night Club in Little Haiti. The place was owned by Luca Dédé, who, like Blaise, was from the northern Haitian town of Limbé. Luca Dédé, a better-off childhood friend of Blaise’s, had gotten Blaise a visa to tour Haitian clubs around the United States. The gigs had not worked out, and Blaise’s career never quite took off, making it necessary for him to work the occasional under-the-table job during the day.

That night, Elsie wore a plain white blouse with a modest knee-length black skirt, as though she were going to an office. Olivia wore a green- sequined cocktail dress that she’d bought in a thrift shop.

“It was the most soirée thing they had,” Olivia said when Elsie met her

at the entrance. Dédé’s was not a soirée-type place but a community watering hole

with exposed-brick walls and old black leather booths surrounding the tables scattered in front of the low stage, which was sometimes also used as a dance floor.

“They didn’t have one, but I wanted a red dress for tonight,” Olivia added. “I wanted fire. I wanted blood.”

“You need a man,” Elsie said. “Correct,” Olivia said, tilting forward on five-inch heels to plant a kiss

on Elsie’s cheek. It was the first time Olivia had greeted her with a kiss, rather than one of her usual intimate-feeling touches. They were out to have fun, away from their ordinary cage of sickness and death.

Several men gawked at them that night, including Luca Dédé, who kept stroking the thick ropy strands of his beard as if to calm his nerves. Dédé had just begun graying in one tuft near his forehead, which kept catching Elsie’s attention. She also realized that he wore the same thing nearly every time she saw him, a white shirt and khaki shorts.

Minding the bar as usual, Dédé sent winks and drinks their way until it was clear that Olivia had no interest in him. Olivia danced with every man who trotted over to their table and held out a hand to her. Several rum punches later, Olivia got up between sets, and on a dare from Elsie, Olivia went up on the stage, stood next to Blaise, and sang, in a surprisingly pitch-perfect voice, the Haitian national anthem. Olivia received a standing ovation. The crowd whistled and hooted, and Elsie couldn’t help notice that her husband was among those cheering the loudest.

“I’ll put her in the band,” he hollered into the microphone once Olivia handed it back to him.

“Make her lead singer,” Dédé called out from the bar. “She sings better than you, my friend.”

Elsie and Blaise had met more quietly at Dédé’s five years before. Elsie had walked into Dédé’s with an old friend from Haiti, the head of the nurse’s aide agency who had helped her get her visa to the United States, mentored her through her qualifying exams, hired her, and put her up until she could afford to live on her own.

The first time Elsie heard Blaise sing with Kajou, she was not impressed. Thrashing his long and limber body around the stage while wearing one of the guayabera shirts and loose-fitting pants he favored, Blaise kept singing, along with his band, the same bubbly-type songs and urging everyone to raise their hands up in the air. He would later tell her that it was her look of indifference, and even disdain, that had drawn him to her.

“You seemed like the only woman in the room I couldn’t win over,” he said while sliding into the empty chair next to her at Dédé’s. He never passed up a challenge.

—

“I got a couple of loans,” Blaise announced when he called yet again a few hours later that day. His voice cracked and he stuttered, and Elsie wondered if he’d been crying.

“I have forty-five hundred,” he added. “Do you think they’ll accept that?”

“You’re going to send the money just like that?” Elsie asked. “Once I have all the money, I’ll bring it myself,” he said. “What if they take you, too?” Elsie’s level of concern shocked even her.

Selfishly, she wondered who would be called if he were kidnapped. Like her, he didn’t have any family in Miami. The closest thing he had was Dédé and the bandmates, who were still angry with him over breaking up the band for reasons he’d refused to discuss with her. Perhaps that’s why he’d left her for Olivia. Olivia would have insisted on knowing exactly what happened with the band and why. Olivia might have tried to fix it, so they could keep playing together. Olivia probably believed, just as he did, that he needed all his time for his music, that working as a parking attendant during the day was spiritually razing him.

“How do you know this isn’t a plot to trick you out of your money?” Elsie asked.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “She’d never go this long without calling me.”

—

Soon after Olivia met Blaise, Olivia would also reach up to kiss his cheeks the way she had Elsie’s. At first Elsie ignored this. But every once in a while, she’d bring it to their attention in a jokey way by saying, “Watch out, sè m, that’s my man.” From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she’d learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

Whenever Blaise asked her to invite Olivia to his gigs, she obliged because she enjoyed Olivia’s company outside of work. And when he left the band and was no longer singing at Dédé’s, the three of them would go out together to shop for groceries or see a movie and even attend Sunday- morning Mass all together at Notre Dame Catholic Church in Little Haiti. They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus child.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long.” Blaise was now speaking as though they were simply engaged in the dawdling pillow talk Elsie had once so enjoyed during their five-year marriage. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

We haven’t talked in over six months, to be exact, she was thinking, but instead said, “That’s how it goes with the quick divorce, non?”

She was waiting for him to say something else about Olivia. He was slow at parceling out news. It had taken him months to inform her that he was leaving her for Olivia. It would have been easier to accept had he simply blurted it out one day. Then she wouldn’t have spent so much time reviewing every moment the three of them had spent together, wondering whether they’d winked behind her back during Mass or smirked as she lay between them in the grass after their Saturday-afternoon outings to watch him play soccer with Dédé and some of his other friends in Morningside Park.

“Anything new?” she asked, wanting to shorten their talk. “They called me directly.” He swallowed hard. Her ears had grown

accustomed to that kind of effortful gulp from working with Gaspard and others. “Vòlè yo.” The thieves.

“What did they sound like?” She wanted to know everything he knew so she could form a lucid image in her own mind, a shadow play identical to his.

“They sounded like boys, young men. I wasn’t recording,” he said,

annoyed. “Did you ask to speak to her?” “They wouldn’t let me,” he said. “Did you insist?” “Don’t you think I would? They’re in control, you know.” “I know.” “Doesn’t sound like you do.” “I do,” she conceded. “But did you tell them you wouldn’t send money

unless you speak to her? Maybe they don’t have her anymore. You said it yourself. She would fight. She could have escaped.”

“Don’t you think I’d ask to speak to my own woman?” he shouted. The way he spat this out irritated her. Woman? His own woman? He

had never been the kind of man who called any woman his. At least not out loud. Maybe his phantom music career made him believe that any woman could be his. He’d never yelled at her, either. They had rarely fought, both of them keeping their quiet resentments and irritations close to the chest. She hated him for shouting. She hated them both.

“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “They didn’t speak long. They told me to start planning her funeral if I don’t send at least ten thousand by tomorrow afternoon.”

Just then she heard Gaspard’s daughter call out from the other room, “Elsie, can you come here, please?” Mona’s voice was laden with the permanent weariness of those who love the seriously ill.

“Call me later,” she told Blaise and hung up.

—

When Elsie got to Gaspard’s room, Mona was sitting on the edge of his bed with the same book she’d been reading for a while on her lap. She’d been reading it when Elsie had slipped away with the intention of stacking the dishwasher with the lunch plates, but ended up answering Blaise’s call instead.

“Elsie,” Mona said as her father pressed his head farther back into the pillows. His fists were clenched in stoic agony, his eyes closed. His face was sweaty, and he seemed to have been coughing. Mona raised the

oxygen mask over his nose and turned on the compressor, which had been delivered that morning, and whose whirring sound made it harder for Elsie to hear.

“Elsie, I’m sorry,” Mona said to her in Creole. “I’m not here all the time. I don’t know how you function normally, but I’m really concerned about how much time you spend on the phone.”

Elsie didn’t want to explain why she was talking on the phone so much, but quickly decided she had to. Not only because she thought Mona was right, that Gaspard deserved more of her attention, but also because she had no one else to turn to for advice. The one friend she’d always relied on, the one who’d been with her the night she met Blaise, had moved to Atlanta. So she told Gaspard and his daughter why she’d been taking these calls and why the calls were so frequent, except she modified a few crucial details. Because she was still embarrassed by the actual facts, she told them Olivia was her sister and Blaise her brother-in- law.

“I’m sorry, Elsie.” Mona immediately softened. Gaspard opened his eyes and held out his hand toward Elsie. Elsie grabbed his fingers the way she did sometimes to help him rise to his feet.

“Do you want to go home?” Gaspard asked in an increasingly raspy voice. “We can get the agency to send someone else.”

“I’m not in her head, Papa,” Mona said, sounding much younger when she spoke Creole, “but I think working is best. Paying off these types of ransoms can ruin a person financially.”

“It’s better not to wait,” Gaspard said, still trying to catch his breath. “The less time your sister spends with these malfetè, the better off she’ll be.”

Gaspard turned his face toward his daughter for final approval, and Mona yielded and nodded her reluctant agreement.

“If you want to save your sister,” Gaspard said with an even-more- winded voice now, “you may have to give in.”

—

“I have five thousand in the bank,” Elsie told Blaise when he called again that afternoon. She actually had sixty-nine hundred, but she couldn’t part

with all her savings at once, in case another emergency came up either in Haiti or in Miami. He already knew about the five thousand. It was roughly the same amount she had saved when they’d been together. She’d hoped to double her savings but had been unable to after moving from her and Blaise’s apartment to a one-room efficiency in North Miami, plus she was sending a monthly allowance to her parents and paying school fees for her younger brother in Les Cayes. But what Blaise had been trying to tell her, and what she had not been understanding until now, was that he needed her 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 other nurse’s assistants 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 was outside Elsie’s first-floor window sitting 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 in the shadows to pee before getting back into the seat Elsie had always called the wife seat during a few of their previous outings when she sat in the front and Olivia in the back. Only when the pickup, packed with Blaise’s belongings, was pulling away did Olivia look over at the apartment window, where Elsie quickly sank into the darkness.

Sitting on the floor of her nearly empty apartment and seeing the dust that had been hidden by some of Blaise’s things, Elsie spotted, by the door, a Valentine’s Day card she’d given Blaise the year before. He must have dropped it while leaving. The card was white and square and was covered with red hearts. “Best husband ever” was written in both cursive and capital letters all over the front of it. Inside Elsie had simply written “Je t’aime.” She had left the card on Blaise’s pillow the morning of

Valentine’s Day while he was still asleep. She had a double shift that day, and he had a solo gig at a private party. They would not see each other until the next morning, when he didn’t mention the card at all. The night Blaise left, Elsie rose from beneath the window, picked up the card, and held it tightly against her chest. She realized then that she needed to move out of their apartment. She could not stay there any longer.

—

As she stood in line at the bank in North Miami, Elsie reached into her purse and nervously stroked this card, which she’d kept there since Blaise left. The teller, a young woman with a Bajan accent, asked if she was dissatisfied with their services and whether or not she wanted to speak to a manager. She said she needed the money urgently.

“Won’t you let us write you a check?” the young woman asked. “I need it in cash,” she said. She was sweating as she handed the fat envelope to the elderly Haitian

man behind the glass window at the money transfer place. “This money is going to end up in Haiti, isn’t it?” the old man said.

“Are you building something there?” The money would end up, she hoped, saving Olivia’s life. Blaise had

told her to wire it rather than bring it to him because he was too busy running around trying to collect funds all over Miami.

She had asked for the morning off to withdraw and wire the money, and when she got back, she found Gaspard on the floor, next to his bed. He had fallen while reaching over to his bedside table for a glass of water. Mona was already at his side, her bottom spiked up in the air, her face pressed against his. Elsie rushed over, and together they pulled Gaspard up by his shoulders and raised him onto the edge of the bed.

They were all panting, Elsie and Mona from the effort of pulling Gaspard up and Gaspard from having been pulled. Gaspard’s panting soon turned into loud chuckles.

“There are many falls before the big one,” he said. “Thank God you got the good rug,” Mona said, smiling. Then, her face growing somber again, she said, “How can I leave you

like this, Papa?” “You can and you will,” he said. “You have your life, and I have what’s

left of mine. I don’t want you to have any regrets.” “You need my kidney,” she said. “Why don’t you accept it?” Mona reached over and grabbed a glass of water from the side table.

She held the back of the glass as he took a few sips, then watched him slowly lower his head onto the pillow. Mona nearly pierced her lips with her teeth while trying to stop them from trembling.

“I know you’re having your family problem,” she said, straining not to raise her voice as she turned her attention to Elsie. “And I know we told you to go handle your situation, but the point is you weren’t here when my father fell out of this bed. I think Papa’s right. I’m going to call the agency to ask for someone else.”

Gaspard closed his eyes and pushed his head deeper into the pillow. He did not object. Elsie wanted to plead to stay. She liked Gaspard and didn’t want him to have to break in someone new. Besides, she now needed to work more than ever. But if they wanted her to leave, she would. She only hoped her dismissal wouldn’t cost her other jobs.

“All right,” she said quietly. “I understand. I’ll wrap things up until you get someone else.”

—

One night after Elsie and Olivia had heard Blaise play as a last-minute replacement at an outdoor festival at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami, they were walking to the parking lot when Olivia announced that she wanted to find a man who was willing to move back to Haiti with her.

“Do you have to love him or can it be anyone?” Elsie had asked. Olivia’s voice slurred after a whole afternoon of beer sipping. “Anyone

with money,” she said. “My dear, can one live without love?” Blaise had answered, waxing

lyrical in a way Elsie had never heard before, except when he was onstage and chatting up the women in the audience with his public come-ons (“You’re looking like a piña colada, baby. Can I have a sip?”). Corny, harmless stuff, often half-comic, at least, that Elsie was accustomed to and that sometimes made her laugh.

“Oh, I can live without love,” Olivia had said, “but I can’t live without money. I can’t live without my country. I’m tired of being in this country. This country makes you do bad things.”

Elsie guessed that Olivia was still thinking about one of their revolving shifts, an in-home patient, an eighty-year-old man, whose son, a middle- aged white man, a loan officer at a bank, had in their presence, as they were changing shifts, turned his senile father on his side and slapped the old man’s wrinkly bottom with his palm several times.

“See how you like it,” he said. Calling her supervisor from her cell phone, Olivia had barely been able

to find the words to explain what she’d just seen. After the concert, to distract Olivia from her thoughts of abused patients, and perhaps to distract one another from contemplating losing Olivia, the three of them had returned to Blaise and Elsie’s apartment and had wiped off a 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. 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 near noon the next day, Olivia was gone.

—

Blaise called again early the following morning. Elsie was still in bed but was preparing to leave Gaspard for good. Gaspard and his daughter were 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. By the time his gig would come around, he’d be so wired that his voice would sound robotic and mechanical, as though all emotion had been purged from it. He sounded that way now as Elsie tried to keep up with what he was saying.

“We weren’t getting along anymore,” he murmured, rapid fire. “We were going to break up. That’s why she just picked up and left. And that’s why I’m—”

The hallway light came on. Elsie heard the shuffling of feet. A shadow approached on the oak floor. Mona slid Elsie’s door open 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. Mona 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? They

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.” Mona opened Elsie’s door and once again pushed her head in. “Elsie, my father wants to see you when you’re done,” she said, before

leaving again. “I’m sorry, I have to go,” Elsie said. “My patient 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, rushing to get his words out quickly.

“But they didn’t release her. She’s dead.” Elsie walked to the bed and sat down. 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 said calmly.

“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 needed one another too much to restrain themselves. Now the tears were catching her off guard. She lowered her head and buried her eyes in the crook of her elbow.

“But there’s something else. You won’t believe it,” Blaise said now in a frantic gargle of words.

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

“Her mother told me that before she left the house that morning, Olivia wrote her name on the bottoms of her feet.”

Elsie could imagine Olivia, her hair just as wild as it had been that night with the three of them, and wild again as she pulled her feet toward her face and scribbled her name on the soles. Olivia had probably anticipated her kidnapping and had seen this as a way of still being identifiable, even if she were beheaded.

“They didn’t, did they?” Elsie asked. “No,” Blaise said. “Her mother says her face, her entire body, were

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. She wondered how he could know that, but did not dare ask. Instead she let out a sigh of relief so loud that Blaise followed with one of his own.

“Her mother’s going to bury her in her own 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, and she’d need to not only bring her family money but also ship them all the extra things they’d asked for, including a small fridge for her parents and a laptop computer for her brother.

Just then the sound briefly cut off. “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. He

was breathing loudly as he spread out his arms to grab both sides of the doorframe. 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, or whimpers had escaped from her, had brought them there. She moved toward them, tightening the belt of her terry-cloth robe around her waist. Grunting, Gaspard looked past her, his eyes wandering around the small room, taking in the plain platform bed and its companion dresser.

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