Hold Tight, Don't Let Go by Laura Rose Wagner

Author:Laura Rose Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2014-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

I’ve stopped having patience for anyone. Other kids in the camp playing soccer and being loud make me angry. The rap and bachata that fill the air and pierce the tarp whenever the electricity comes on fill me with hate and make me bury my head under the pillow and curse them in my mind. It is so very hot under a tarp roof. My dreams awaken me, exhausted, aware, and furious.

I used to cry, but I can’t now, ever since I realized that Nadine had let me go. I want to scream and scream and scream enough to split the sky in two, but I choke whenever I try to weep. I feel as though my head is expanding sideways, ready to explode.

Every day I have waited for her. Because she promised, because a sister wouldn’t make a promise and then forget about me. Every day I have waited for her call: Magda, cheri, it’s time. I arranged your visa. Go to the embassy. I’ve fixed everything.

It’s an effort to drag myself out of bed each day.

I am washing clothes when the blan comes and takes my photo. It doesn’t surprise me. Foreigners take a lot of photos, and sometimes Haitians do, too: of the rows of temporary toilets and of people collecting water. They take photos of children, sometimes the clean ones with neat hair but more of dirty kids with no pants. They take photos of amputees, like Noémie, who lives on the other side of the camp, not realizing that she didn’t lose her leg in the earthquake but in a traffic accident six years ago. They take a lot of photos of rubble and of tents and houses made of tarps.

When the white man in the baseball cap takes my picture, I’ve got my skirt tucked up between my legs so it doesn’t get wet. I’m sitting on a low wooden bench, leaning over the plastic basin of soapy water, washing underwear. I’m humming the song from the Whirlpool commercial. The camera is black and huge, like a wide, fat gun. The man sweats greasily and smiles as he bends down to take my photo.

No one likes having her picture taken while she’s doing chores and a mess. I’d rather put on a Sunday dress and get my hair permed and put on some lip gloss and be standing in front of something nicer than a tent.

A memory flickers across my mind—something I haven’t thought about in months. A few days after the quake I saw a foreign photojournalist setting up a shot. He had an assistant with a big pointy black umbrella and lights, and he was taking a photo of a man sitting on a big pile of rubble. Now, why is that idiot sitting on a huge pile of rubble? I’d wondered. It didn’t make any sense to sit on top of a pile of rubble in the bright sunlight like that. There were other places to sit. And then I realized that they had put him there for the picture.

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