I bump into my cousin Clement who’s spending a few days with us from Port-au-Prince.
“Do you know that guy over there?” he asks.
I look around, at the boys prowling and the girls flashing a lot of skin. The music is so loud I feel it vibrating in my eardrums. “What guy?”
“This guy making out with Nelly. Is his name Ben?”
I nod. “It sure is. What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you. Could you give me a sec?”
I follow Clement inside my father’s study. “What’s up?” I say again.
“Do you actually know Ben?” he asks gravely.
“Well, we used to be friends. He taught me how to drive.”
Clement scratches his ear. “Listen, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but Ben is out on a bail bond.”
I can hear my parents laughing in the kitchen. They drink cocktails, dark ones, often peeping through the venetian blinds to check on the “kids.” “I can’t believe my little girl just turned eighteen,” Mom says. “It seems like only days ago when we were playing koukou, ah!”
My heart is dancing the cha-cha. “What was he arrested for?”
Clement lights up a cigarette. “A drug deal gone bad. A fight at a pool party followed by a boy’s body being found in his trunk.”
A pool party, huh?
The cigarette hangs loosely from his lips. He lets it dangle there until the ashes fall off by themselves into a tiny gray pile on the floor. “Damnit!” he says. “I can’t believe this crooked cop is still walking around freely with his police badge.”
He lets me smoke some of his cigarette, and the gray smoke curls up toward the discolored ceiling. I slump down on a sofa, hoping that Clement is mistaken. The adults in the kitchen move on to talking about politics and the situation in Port-au-Prince. About the corrupt new police who replaced the army a few weeks ago.
“Are you sure about Ben?” I ask. “I mean, you know how it works here. Could just be rumors.”
“Believe me, ti cheri, I know what I’m talking about.”
My heart is skidding up into my throat. I need to find Nelly. Can it be true that Ben is a murderer? I remember the pool incident. I think about his broody eyes, his listen-to-me lips.
I look everywhere. Nelly and Ben are gone. Just gone.
It’s midnight. I dial Nelly’s phone number. No one picks up. The deejay belts out Bob Marley, and I chug my cup of cola champagne a little harder and realize how empty it is. The music is crisp in my ears, light and airy.
One in the morning. Nothing. At two o’clock, most of the guests are gone. I try Nelly’s home phone again. Nothing. While dialing, I get so many mosquito bites I take a pen and play connect-the-dots on my legs. Sleep crusts the corners of my eyes.
The last guests leave around five a.m. I finally get Nelly’s mother on the phone. She says her daughter hasn’t come home, and do I have any idea where she might be?
“We need to find Nelly,” I tell Clement in a coarse voice after hanging up. “Maybe she’s over at his house. He told me once where he lives. Would you please take me there?”
We don’t exactly give it a second thought. We get into Clement’s Honda. The sun is just waking up, and the wind whistles through the winged windows of the car. The cold air whips my hair as we pass houses patched with tin, cardboard, and plastic. Kenscoff smells of fresh leaves and donkey dung. The town is so quiet at this time of day that all I can hear is the jingle bells of ice-cream carts pushed by men on their way to Pétionville to sell sweet coconut popsicles. The road leading to Ben’s house is narrow and crooked. My heart is burning. I am haunted by the disturbing stories about Ben, and it’s nerve-racking.
Clement uses a rock to knock on the gate. We wait and listen; I think I hear the singing of psalms inside. A woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a red blouse comes out of the house. She looks at us curiously. “M ka ede w?” she asks. Can I help you?
“I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, ma’am, but we really need to see Ben,” I stammer.
She asks us to follow her, and we walk inside a room where four women are praying and incense is burning with a pleasant smell. All the shades are drawn. One woman lifts her head and nods. Clement and I nod back and follow the one in red down some stairs into a basement. She knocks on a door. “Ben,” she says, “there are some people here to see you.”
The door opens, and the smell of marijuana rushes out along with the rank odor of alcohol and stale cigarettes. Ben emerges from the room, his lids thick, his eyes red and watery.
“Hey, Ben,” I say, trying to sound casual even though I am sure my fear is visible. “How are you?”
His lips are drawn in a tight smile. His eyes are dead.
“I’m looking for Nelly,” I continue. “Is she here?”
He opens the door, and there are three other guys in his bedroom, all high on something. Two of them, their eyes set deep in their sockets, are watching TV. The third one has passed out. He is lying on a padded sofa, bathing in his own vomit, the smell of which almost makes me sick. There’s a faint lamp in one corner of the room, and no sunlight gets in at all. We walk in and Ben puts his hand out, laying it on my arm. “She won’t come out of the bathroom,” he says.
His hand is raw on my skin. The darkness in his voice makes me shiver. His expression is unreadable. How did I ever find him cute? I notice a gun on his desk. The danger in this room is sharp enough to make the air around us crackle.
“Seems like you had quite a party here,” Clement says with a detached voice. How can he sound so relaxed?
I knock softly on the bathroom door. “Nelly, are you in there?”
No answer. Clement gives me a quick glance over his shoulder. I knock again. “Nelly, it’s Magda. Please open the door.”
Ben pulls me near. His hand caresses my shoulder, slides down my back, and comes to rest beneath my armpit, at the swell of my breast. “I’m sure she’s okay.”
I hear someone’s faint crying. Oh God! What did he do to her? Then the door cracks open, and Nelly sticks her head out. Her dark hair hangs across her forehead in messy strands.
She comes out of the bathroom and hugs me. Her eyes are dark, hooded.
“We’ll be going now,” Clement says then.
Nelly turns away from me to look at the men. Fear whisks across her face. Ben is tracing his finger along a scar on his chin. “No problem, man,” he says.
He doesn’t appear anything like the man I met months before. His good looks are gone. There is a stiffness to his face. He has an empty stare. When he kisses Nelly on the lips, she doesn’t kiss him back. Ben’s cheeks harden and his neck tendons engorge. There’s this dangerous look in his eyes again. The one I’ve seen in cats’ eyes while they play with their prey.
We make a quick exit to the car. I am about to get into the vehicle when a wave of nausea rolls over me too fast for me to feel it coming. I dry heave for several long moments. When the nausea finally abates, my temples are pounding, and the sunlight suddenly seems too bright. I pull myself inside the car, taking deep breaths to calm down.
On the cusp of morning, we ride into the sunrise, past the big old two-story houses with porch swings and flower beds along the front walks, the beautiful old flamboyant trees that line the quiet streets and hold on to their bloody leaves.
“I was afraid he was going to rape me,” Nelly says. “That’s why I wouldn’t come out of the bathroom.”
“I was afraid he was going to kill me,” I say. “But I couldn’t just leave you there.”
The bumpy Kenscoff Road is quiet, and the damp air raises goose bumps on my skin as I look ahead into the breaking clouds, warm colors coming in to soften the sky-pinks and golds that blossom against the horizon like jungle flowers.