“Do you have a place to lay her body, your wife?” she asked, steadying her fidgeting daughter’s hands in hers. “You can, if you like, make use of a burial site in the cemetery where I have some open land.”
When he left the parlor, he walked back home, with the child, where the frantic midwife was waiting with the bottles and powder and purified water, which along with the funeral expenses would wipe out most of his dead wife’s savings.
“You went out with this san manman child after dusk?” the midwife chided.
The next day, when his wife’s sister arrived for the funeral, he simply gave the baby to her along with the little money he had left. He was relieved not to have to worry about her for a while.
He worked harder, spent more time at sea so that he’d have enough to send for her care, but he never visited her, nor did he ask for her to be brought to him for visits. But as her third birthday approached, he felt he was ready to see her again. So he asked that she arrive on her birthday. And she did, looking long and thin and just like her mother. He had a pink ruffled muslin dress sewn for her that he would have replicated in a larger size each year. Her mother had made her one just like it, imagining that she would wear it for her first birthday. He had sent her off with it, not knowing whether they’d even put it on her. He wished now that his wife had been prescient about her own death, like so many people’s relatives claim to have seen them be. She had never told him what he might do with their daughter should anything happen to her.
The night of Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s seventh birthday, there was an informal vigil on the beach for the rogue wave victim, Gaspard’s fisherman friend, who was now considered lost at sea. Even though a full moon gleamed overhead, Gaspard and a few of the other fishermen had made a bonfire, and over the fisherman’s widow’s occasional wails they sat on the warm sand and drank kleren, played cards and dominoes, and told stories, just as they would at an official wake.
Dozens of townspeople came by the beach, bringing, as was the custom, small amounts of money to the fisherman’s widow. The town’s mayor came too, fearful that the way the fisherman died might be the very first sign of something more potentially and geographically tragic and widespread in the days and weeks to come.
At some point in the evening, Gaspard had lost sight of his daughter. He had occasionally looked up from his drink and seen her holding hands in a circle with a group of girls playing won or dashing behind the shacks on the beach for hide-and-seek. But he hadn’t seen her for some time, and the crowd of townspeople had grown thick.
Rising from the sand near the bonfire, he felt unsteady on his feet as the alcohol seeped through him. He was unable to even string together the words to properly ask the people he staggered into whether or not they had seen his daughter.
Suddenly he spotted her, sitting alone next to a woman. It was a woman he knew, except he had never seen her like this. Her hair was wrapped in a silver net, above some giant plastic rollers, and she was wearing a satin night dress the same shade as the moon. She had slippers on her feet, fuzzy red ones that looked like they might stink if they got wet. It was the fabric vendor, and she was in deep conversation with his timid-looking daughter.
This pleased him, made him happy, but it also made his drunk and nearly broken heart start beating faster. What could the woman be telling his daughter? he wondered. And why here? Why now?
He was too afraid to approach them and would have been happy to stand there with the kleren bottle dangling from his hand, except the fabric vendor noticed him and waved him over with the flailing sleeve of her fragile-looking nightgown.
She and his daughter were sitting on some large boulders that must have been picked up from somewhere else and put there for them. He sat on the sand and leaned closer so that he might hear them above the chattering well-wishers.
“Condolences for your friend,” the fabric vendor said.
His daughter turned her face away each time one of them glanced at her.
“Yes,” the fabric vendor blurted out emphatically, as though they were toward the end of a very long conversation. “I’ll take her. Tonight.”
Claire kept her eyes on the sand, but he could see a tear instantly slide down the side of her face. He wanted to reach for her, bury his nose in her face the way she liked to needle hers into his when he was distracted or sad.
“Why now? Why tonight?” he managed to say.
“It’s now or never.” The woman reached down to wipe the sliding tear, but the girl quickly moved her face. “I need another way to remember this day.” She brought her hands together in a fold in her night dress, between her knees. “Now or never.” She then clumsily lowered her hands to the girl’s back and attempted to stroke it.
Claire’s body was shaking as she watched the pile of driftwood and dried sticks that made up the puttering bonfire, which was meant to be as much a farewell as a beacon to bring the lost fisherman home.
“Claire Limyè Lanmè,” Gaspard called out to her.
Claire did not turn her face.
He had one final story to tell her before she was no longer his, but the kleren and the light-headed feeling it gave him were suppressing his words.
One night before he knew his wife was pregnant, they went out to sea together for some night fishing. Rowing quietly for some time, they circled the same small area before his dinghy stalled as if it had reached a wall. He was afraid that they might be stuck on a reef, but he managed to push back. Peering into the moonlit surface of the sea, his wife had removed her pleated sundress until she was sitting there in only her plain white cotton panties, her protruding belly aimed like an arrow at the void.
“Non,” Gaspard said, quickly noticing her slightly larger belly and breasts and realizing what she was trying to show him. But before he could say anything else, she slipped both her legs over the hull and slid into the sea, her body parting the waters, pulling her forward as she sunk her head into the wet darkness then raised it up and out again.
She was gliding away from him to even deeper water. He rowed toward her, now frantically shouting, “Claire, reken, sharks. There could be sharks.”
“There will be if you keep calling them by name,” she said, and laughed a deep, breathless laugh.
As he caught up with her, his face relaxed. Then they saw what she had swum out to see. Surrounding her was a dazzling glow. It was as though her patch of the sea was being lit from below. She was, from her perfectly round breasts down, in the middle of a large school of tiny silver fish, which were ignoring her and feeding on equally gleaming specks floating on the water’s surface.
He stopped rowing and remained outside of it, watching her and pondering the news she had silently delivered to him, in awe. Then it was the sea he was watching. The bioluminescence amazed him. But soon, his panic returning, he started shouting her name again.
“Claire, come in now, Claire!”
She backed away from the fish, splitting the school in half as she paddled toward the boat. And for a moment she reminded him of Lasirèn, the long-haired, long-bodied brown goddess of the sea. With an angelic face like a bronzed Lady of Charity, Lasirèn’s vision was, it was believed, the last thing most fishermen saw before they died at sea, her arms the first thing they slipped into, even before their bodies hit the water. In his dinghy, like many others, he had a mirror and comb, a bugle and conch shell, which comprised a small shrine to attract Lasirèn’s protection.
When his wife reached the boat, he reached over and offered her his hand and she took it and climbed back in, even as the silver fish vanished, returning the sea surface to a charcoal gray.