Haiti Noir

Meanwhile, they gave the little orphan to me, the surviving mother. Still stunned by the rapidity of my action and its consequences, I cradled her with my own daughter. I had hatched my plan hastily, no doubt, but it was pretty smart. I couldn’t believe I was really carrying it out. All I had done, in fact, was take advantage of a given situation and wait for nature to take its course. After the very first visit to the doctor, even before the great-aunt announced her decision, Beatrice had confided that the other mother had a heart condition and had to be spared any strong emotion. The doctor had prescribed medicine and a special diet. Her lifestyle had to change to limit risk factors. Beatrice repeated the entire doctor’s jargon to me with a worried look. I listened with the appropriate expression on my face, without playing it up too much, already thinking of ways to exploit this illness, a gift from heaven. I needed to increase the “risk factors,” because the other one had to disappear for my plan to succeed. If I didn’t watch out for my daughter’s interests, who would? That was the least I could do for this child. She hadn’t asked me for anything and I had brought her into the world. It was fine to say that the two little girls would be cared for, but how could I not dream of that expansive horizon offered to the one who’d be taken in by the great-aunt? How could I not want to prevent my child from taking that long, sterile road I had gone down, the permanent anxiety of never knowing what tomorrow will bring, the feeling of walking with your arms dangling helplessly at your side in a perpetual state of frustration and rage?

I didn’t go to the other mother’s funeral. I stayed with the two babies. On that day, I said goodbye to my daughter.

It was so easy to substitute one for the other, to comb my baby’s hair the way the other mother combed hers, to switch the few articles of their clothing that were different, to put one stuffed rabbit in place of the other. It never would have worked if the other mother were still alive. She would have seen through the swindle right away. But I didn’t touch her that night. I could have activated the process, hastened the end. I did nothing of the kind. I let fate decide what would happen next. Who knows? They might have found her still alive at dawn.

That night, I’d been awakened by a thump and a child’s whimpers. Instinctively-a child’s sigh now had the power to dictate my actions-I turned my head to the cradle. My daughter was sleeping peacefully. I walked through the doorway between the two bedrooms.

The other mother was writhing on her bed. I took care of the baby first, gave her back her pacifier, before turning to the shrunken form on the rumpled bed. That’s when I noticed her pale, literally twisted face. With one hand on her left breast and her features ugly with pain, she was inhaling noisily, a wild sound wrenched from her guts. The Bible she read every evening before she went to sleep was lying on the floor. My first reaction was to look for her medication; the pills Beatrice had brought back from the pharmacy, and put one under her tongue as the doctor ordered. Then I held back. Why would I do that? I gently covered the sleeping child in her cradle and patted her little raised bottom. I had nothing against that little girl. She was my own baby’s sister, and besides, she was indispensable for my plan. Before leaving the room, I turned my head to the other mother. It seemed to me she was trying to raise her hand in my direction. I could hear her increasingly awful gasps, like calls for help stuck in the bottom of her throat, unable to reach the voice. For a second, her eyes-two frightened butterflies, prisoners of silence and pain-rested upon me. I turned mine slowly away.

In the bedroom at the other end of the hall, Beatrice wouldn’t get up before dawn. I went back to bed and waited for daylight.

When she returned from the funeral, Beatrice took out Marie Carlotta’s birth certificate. “Now this child has no father and no mother, but luckily she has aunts who love her very much and will take care of her. While I’m waiting for her to go to the great-aunt’s, I’ll take good care of her. Tomorrow I have an appointment with the lawyer.”

I leaned over the two little girls lying on their backs in their playpen and picked one of them up. I kissed my daughter and gave her to Beatrice.