Untwine by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat [Danticat, Edwidge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

ALEJANDRA GOES OUT to her rental car for something, and when she comes back she tells us that there are news trucks outside the funeral home.

The lobby, too, is packed with people who are waiting to get into the chapel for the service.

I walk out with Alejandra while the rest of the family helps Mom and Dad to the chapel’s front row.

I wonder if Tina and Jean Michel are in the lobby. I peek out through a glass door, but don’t see them in the crowd of both church and school friends waiting to get in. I think I see Dr. Aidoo standing in the lobby, in a fancy black suit, but maybe I am hallucinating him.

I don’t have the heart, or energy, to walk through that crowd to find my friends or to make sure that Dr. Aidoo is really there. Besides, just as Dr. Aidoo himself predicted, I am starting to feel a bit nauseated, blurry eyed, and dizzy. I don’t want to fall and hit my head again. I ask Alejandra to take me to my parents.

I am still wearing my sunglasses as I walk to the front of the chapel. Even though Alejandra is holding on to my elbow, I feel like I’m floating towards Isabelle’s beautiful coffin, which is closed and covered with camellias and birds of paradise from my parents’ garden.

Next to the coffin is an easel with a large picture of Isabelle, her most recent school portrait. Under the always-too-bright school photographer’s lights, her face looks a bit too shiny. She’s wearing a faux pearl choker and a black, sequined blouse. Her braids hang right above her collarbone and she’s smiling.

The chapel fills up quickly. Then Pastor Ben gets up to welcome us.

“A sad and incomprehensible day,” he says, while tugging at his white beard.

Where is Lazarus now? I ask myself.

I can no longer disappear. I can no longer sink under. But I don’t like the surface, either. At times, I feel like I’m in the hospital again, fading in and out. I adjust the sunglasses, pulling their dark tint closer to my eyes.

Uncle Patrick gets up and walks to the podium. He talks about the day Isabelle and I were born.

Mom was on bed rest her entire pregnancy. She was supposed to have a scheduled C-section, but a week before the scheduled delivery date, she began having contractions. Panicked, Dad drove her to the hospital.

“They were eager to see the world,” Uncle Patrick says. “They demanded to come out.”

Many things might have gone wrong, he says. We might have become entangled in each other’s umbilical cords. One of us might have gobbled up all the nutrients and starved the other one in the womb. But we loved and supported each other, from day one.

Aunt Leslie gets up and talks about Isabelle’s love of music, her dream of traveling the world and becoming a famous composer. She mentions how Isabelle truly believed in what Nietzsche said, that life without music is a mistake. She talks about Isabelle’s sense of humor, her love of family.

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