“We should leave,” he murmurs. “So that one day, I can hold you like this and feel our child living inside you.”
I sigh. We have promised each other that we will not bring a child into this world, and it is but one more sorrow heaped onto a mountain of sorrows we share. “How many times will we have this conversation? We’ll never have enough money for plane tickets.”
“We’ll never have enough money to live here, either.”
“Perhaps we should just throw ourselves in the ocean.” Yves stiffens and I squeeze his hand. “I wasn’t being serious.”
“Some friends of mine are taking a boat to Miami week after next.”
I laugh rudely because this is another conversation we have had too often. Many of our friends have tried to leave on boats. Some have made it, some have not, and too many have turned back when they realized that the many miles between Haiti and Miami are not so small as the space on the map. “They are taking a boat to the middle of the ocean, where they will surely die.”
“This boat will make it,” Yves says confidently. “A priest is travelling with them.”
I close my eyes and try to breathe, yearning for just one breath of fresh air. “Because his kind has done so much to help us here on land?”
“Don’t talk like that.” He is silent for a moment. “I told them we would be going too.”
I turn around and try to make out his features beneath the moon’s shadows. “Have you taken complete leave of your senses?”
Yves grips my shoulders to the point of pain. Only when I wince does he loosen his hold. “This is the only thing that does make sense. Agwe will see to it that we make it to Miami, and then we can go to South Beach and Little Havana and watch cable TV.”
My upper lip curls in disgust. “You will put your faith in the same god that traps us on this godforsaken island? Surely you have better reasons.”
“If we go we might know, once in our lives, what it is like to breathe.”
My heart stops and the room suddenly feels like a big echo. I can hear Yves’s heart beating where mine is not. I can imagine what Yves’s face might look like beneath the Miami sun. And I know that I will follow him wherever he goes.
When I wake, I blink, covering my eyes as cruel shafts of sunlight cover our bodies. My mother is standing at the foot of the bed, clutching the black-and-white photo of my father.
“Mama?”
“The walls are thin,” she whispers.
I stare at my hands. They appear to have aged overnight. “Is something wrong?”
“Gabrielle, you must go with Yves,” she says, handing me the picture of my father.
I stare at the picture, trying to recognize the curve of my eyebrow or the slant of my nose in his features. When I look up, my mother is gone. For the next two weeks I work and Yves spends his days doing odd jobs and scouring the city for supplies he anticipates us needing. I feel like there are two of me; I go through the motions, straightening my desk, taking correspondence for my boss, gossiping with my co-workers while at the same time I am daydreaming of Miami and places where Yves and I are never hungry or tired or scared or any of the other things we have become. I tell no one of our plans to leave, but the part of me going through the motions wants to tell everyone I see in the hopes that perhaps someone will try and stop me, remind me of all the unknowns between here and there.
At night, we exhaust ourselves making frantic love. We no longer bother to stifle our moans and cries and I find myself doing things I would never have considered doing before; things I have always wanted to do. There is a certain freedom in impending escape. Three nights before we are to leave, Yves and I are in bed, making love. We are neither loud nor quiet as, holding my breasts in my hands, I trace his muscled calves and dark thighs with my nipples, shivering because it feels better than I could ever have imagined. Gently, Yves places one of his hands against the back of my head, urging me toward his cock. I resist at first, but he is insistent in his desire, his hand pressing harder, fingers tangling in my hair and taking firm hold. In the dim moonlight, I stare at his cock for a few moments, breathing softly. It looks different to me, in this moment, rigid and veined, curving ever so slightly to the right. I part my lips, licking them before I kiss the strangely smooth tip of his cock. His entire body tenses, Yves’s knees cracking from the effort. I pretend that I am tasting an exotic new candy, slowly tracing every inch of him with my tongue. I drag my teeth along the thick vein that runs along the dark underside of his cock. My tongue slips into the small slit at the head. He tastes salty, yet clean, and my nervousness quickly subsides. I take Yves’s throbbing length into my mouth. It becomes difficult to breathe, but it also excites me, makes me wet as he carefully guides me, his hands gripping harder and harder, his breathing faster.
Suddenly, he stops, roughly rolling me onto my chest, digging his fingers into my hips, pulling my ass into the air. I press my forehead against my arms, gritting my teeth, and I allow Yves to enter my darkest passage, whispering nasty words into the night as he rocks in and out of my ass. At once I feel so much pleasure and so much pain and the only thing I know is that I want more – more of the dull ache and the sharp tingling just beneath my clit, more of feeling like I will shatter into pieces if he inches any further. More. At the height of passion, Yves says my name, his voice so tremulous it makes my heart ache. It is nice to know that he craves me in the same way I crave him, that my body clinging to his is a balm.
Afterward, we lie side by side, our limbs heavy, and Yves talks to me about South Beach with the assurance of a man who has spent his entire life in such a place; a place where rich people and beautiful people and famous people dance salsa at night and eat in fancy restaurants overlooking the water. He tells me of expensive cars that never break down and jobs for everyone; good jobs where he can use his engineering degree and I can do whatever I want. And he tells me about Little Haiti, a neighbourhood just like our country, only better because the air conditioning always works and we can watch cable TV. Cable TV always comes up in our conversations. We are fascinated by its excess. He tells me all of this and I can feel his body next to mine, tense, almost twitching with excitement. Yves has smiled more in the past two weeks than in the three years we have been married and the 24 years we have known each other, and I smile with him because I need to believe that this idyllic place exists. I listen even though I have doubts, and I listen because I don’t know quite what to say.
The boat will embark under the cover of night. On the evening of flight, I leave work as I always do, turning off all the lights and computers, smiling at the security guard, telling everyone I will see them tomorrow. It is always when I am leaving work that I realize what an odd country Haiti is, with the Internet, computers, fax machines and photocopiers in offices, and the people who use them living in shacks with the barest of amenities. We are truly a people living in two different times. Yves is waiting for me as he always is, but today he wears a nice pair of slacks and a button-down shirt and the black shoes he wears to church. This is his best outfit, only slightly faded and frayed. The tie his father gave him hangs from his left pocket. We don’t talk on the way home. We only hold hands and he grips my fingers so tightly that my elbow starts tingling. I say nothing, however, because I know that right now, Yves needs something to hold on to.
I want to steal away into the sugarcane fields we pass, ignoring the old men, dark, dirty and sweaty as they wield their machetes. I want to find a hidden spot and beg Yves to take me, right there. I want to feel the soil beneath my back and the stalks of cane cutting my skin. I want to leave my blood on the land and my cries in the air before we continue our walk home, Yves’s seed staining my thighs, my clothes and demeanour hiding an intimate knowledge. But such a thing is entirely inappropriate, or at least it was before all this madness began. My face burns as I realize what I am thinking and I start walking faster. I have changed so much in so short a time.