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.
Ever since then I’ve been living in agony, an agony I deliberately chose. I had to learn to accept the brutal and unexpected pain of separation. Every gesture has become an open wound that gets larger, adds onto the other wounds, accumulating like a blazing fire that can’t be put out. When I put her in Beatrice’s arms, she was so very attentive to the little “orphan.” I hugged the other baby and felt tears well up in my eyes, stinging my flesh. Hearing my daughter cry, knowing that the sound of my voice and the closeness of my body could calm her down, yet not budging, was agonizing. Letting Beatrice take care of her until her final departure, even more so.
I would have liked the process to go faster, the great-aunt to come over, sign the necessary papers, and leave with my daughter. That way I wouldn’t have her before my eyes every minute of the day, treating her like someone else’s child, watching her separating a bit more from me and turning to Beatrice, with the survival instinct natural to human beings.
There was no turning back now, and despite it all I did rejoice that my trick had succeeded. My daughter would have a much better life. She would have all the opportunities I didn’t dare dream of anymore. One day, I saw Beatrice looking at me while I was watching the child asleep in her cradle, with the other one’s daughter snuggled up against me. Did this childless widow understand my deception? Did she suspect that for once I had taken my destiny into my own hands, amending her aunt’s decision?
It’s too bad that, since then, every time my arms close around the one I kept, I can feel pieces of my heart disintegrating, then coming together again as I wait for the day that my daughter will leave me.
TWENTY DOLLARS
by Madison Smartt Bell
Morne du Cap
In the twilight of his last sliver of dream, Magloire saw VENDOLA, not as a single slip of green but all the bills fanned out in a diadem and glowing with an incandescent light, like a crown set on the head of Christ Resurrected. Indeed, the dollar bills crowned his own head but at the same time they appeared far away, so that he could not reach or grasp them. In this slippery zone between sleep and waking he often received counsel of his spirits, and now he believed that èzili Je Wouj was promising him he might conquer such a sum in the course of the day: twenty U.S. dollars-too small an amount to resolve his difficulties, thus not so large as to be unattainable.
He woke completely now, to cockcrow and the wispy sound of a palm leaf broom, sweeping the yard beyond the door. It was still almost completely dark. Anise’s sleeping breath flowed onto his forearm. She had turned toward him on the thin pallet where both of them slept. Were she awake she would not have done it. The whisper of air stirred something in him which he hurried to suppress, sitting up on the pallet and wiping his face with the back of his wrist. When he was a little younger, still in his teens, Magloire had been counseled by Doctor Oliver to wear a kapòt during all acts of love; such was the sort of foolishness that a well-meaning blan would conceive. He, Magloire, enjoyed only natural actions and undertook no actions that were not natural; therefore, he could seldom bring himself to wear a condom and by extension had not lain with his wife, as a man with a woman, for longer than two months. Besides, Anise would be irritable if he woke her now.
In a market basket near the door, draped with colored netting like a Christmas parcel, their son Léonty breathed easily in sleep. He was nearly two years old and had to curl his legs under him to fit into the basket, but he needed the protection of the net because mosquito bites had caused his fever; mosquitoes were still whining in the close humid air of the room, though the light was growing quickly. Magloire turned back the net for a moment to look at his son’s face. It seemed to him that the fever had passed, though he had not been able to find money to buy medicine.