Haiti Noir 2 by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat [Danticat, Edwidge]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781617751936
Amazon: 1617751936
Barnesnoble: 1617751936
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

THE PORT-AU-PRINCE MARRIAGE SPECIAL

BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Delmas

(Originally published in 2008)

"They told me, Madame, that I’m going to die.”

I don’t know if it was a dreadful gut feeling that had sent Mélisande to that particular clinic, rather than other healing places, but she’d gone down near the bicentennial park downtown and had gotten her arms pricked and her blood drawn, only to receive a death sentence. She’d been coughing for some time, soft and discreet at first, then more and more thunderously, which had led to my removing my young son from her care. But only this morning when she got a fever and developed a level of sluggishness, which I instantly recognized, from my late father’s battles with various types of respiratory illnesses, possibly as pneumonia; only then did she finally decide to seek medical care.

She was sobbing now as she stood in the doorway of my bedroom, her body as flat as one of the doorframe beams. Leaning against the somber wood, she hiked up a flowered silk skirt to wipe the tears from her face. I immediately recognized that skirt as one I’d formerly owned. I had paid about seventy dollars for it at a sale at a fancy boutique in Miami—back when I was in college, before I married a classmate, a fellow Haitian, whose family owned a hotel in Port-au-Prince.

“Have you told your mother?” I asked her.

She was a child really, a girl, fifteen or sixteen at most. Her mother worked as a cook at our hotel. They had lied about her age so that Mélisande could get the job as one of our son’s nannies, but given the fact that the mother had six younger children in the provinces, in Léogâne, I figured that Mélisande had plenty of experience for the job. I don’t know why I trusted Mélisande. Perhaps it was because she was from my parents’ hometown. Some of her relatives might have known some of mine. I didn’t trust that many people with my son, but it was obvious as soon as I placed him in Mélisande’s arms and she probed out of him the loudest laugh he’d ever tried, that he loved her. Perhaps what drew him to her were the same things I found appealing about her: her elfin face, her reedy voice, her slightly hesitant walk, as though she was never really sure it was safe to touch the ground.

Roland, my husband, had thought that Mélisande should be in school, but we hadn’t forced it or insisted, as we could have, that she go. Or at least that she attend some type of vocational class in cooking or sewing when she wasn’t looking after our son. Sometimes, during her free time, we saw her helping her mother cook or I saw her joke with the hotel maids as she cleaned the guests’ rooms with them. The agreement she had with the maids was that whenever she helped them out, whatever was left behind in the rooms would be split with her.

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