Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat [Danticat, Edwidge]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-34968-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

For a while, she ignored Henri, who was mimicking her facial expressions and lip movements and grimacing to distract the others. But the more Henri was ignored, the more animated his impersonation became, until most of the children stopped listening to laugh at him. Or really to laugh at her.

She couldn’t tell when it started, but at some point while she had her back turned, Henri had yanked a ribbon from one girl’s hair, then had walked (or jumped) to the next row and pulled a handful of barrettes from Claire Faustin’s hair. The sight of Claire’s stoic face and the barrettes, spread out now like so many dead aphids on the floor at her feet, enraged Louise, who put the book down and slowly walked toward Henri.

As she approached him, he straightened his body and looked ahead. Even as she was standing beside him, she had not yet decided what to do. Should she send him to the back of the room? Send him home?

She had meant only to accentuate whatever command she gave him by pounding on the notebook in front of him with her open palm. But as she stood before him, a toothless smirk came across his face. She wanted to erase it, the way one might erase words and numbers from a blackboard.

She realized that she’d hit him only when she heard the other children gasp. Henri rubbed the side of his face. There were no finger marks that she could see, no blood streaming past his lips. He didn’t cry. Instead, he went on smiling, his toothless gap growing wider, until Louise walked back to her desk and continued reading.

That night, Max Senior left her house without saying a word. It was likely that he wouldn’t even speak to her again unless she attended the meeting with the boy’s mother and all of this was resolved.

Louise spent the next morning in bed, writing. She had been wrong to hit the boy, she knew, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He needed it. In fact he deserved it. This is what she planned to tell his mother. Or maybe she wouldn’t. This, she knew, was what was worrying Max Senior the most: that she might not show any remorse.

He was finally letting her go. She sensed this, though he’d not said it out loud. Now she would no longer have the children to read to, including that devil of a boy Henri. And that luminous child Claire. Now she would not even have Max Senior. She had long felt him slipping away, the intrigue of her biblical affliction waning as she moved deeper into middle age.

In the beginning, he had liked the taste of blood in her mouth. He would describe it to her in great detail as though his tongue were not inside her mouth.

“It is salty,” he would say. Then he would add, “It is sweet.” He was convinced that the taste was based on her moods, and she would let him go on and on about it, expressing the same thoughts with different words.

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