How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother’s deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. She glances at Franckline. Who is she, what are her stories, what does she tell and not tell? Once upon a time, Franckline arrived here from another country: there, surely, is at least one story, a story of ambition or love or flight. Is she married? (Lore quickly scans Franckline’s hand. Yes.) Does she have children? Are they sweet-tempered, mischievous, shy, gregarious? Where does she live, what objects fill her home? Has she ever been betrayed by someone?
Thirteen minutes.
The girl watches the clock, and Franckline can sense her spirits plummeting. She has lost track of the monitor, and Franckline doesn’t remind her. Given the slowdown in the contractions, she wants to hear the steady thumping and be able to read the regular spikes and decelerations on the printout. In the meantime, what to do for Lore? Franckline might see if she could borrow a book from one of the nurses for her, or a magazine. But she is sure that Lore would wave them away. Perhaps if Franckline offered to read to her. A few of the patients like to be read to by friends or family members. Franckline listens in, trying to expand her notion of what her adopted language might be applied to. These are usually poems that Franckline finds obscure but pleasantly rhythmic, or Bible passages that she knows better in French but enjoys hearing transmuted into the chunky mouthfuls that make up English. Last week a woman read to her sister from a novel about Russians at a great formal dance, princesses and dukes and so on. The two of them got into a lively discussion about the attractiveness of two different types of females, the girlish and the womanly. The pregnant woman said most men preferred the girlish. Her sister said they just pretended to, but really wanted the womanly. Then the patient sighed and asked her sister to put the book away and said she just wished the goddamn baby would come.
If — when — Franckline has this baby, she will not have her sister by her side. Gizelle, the only of her siblings she nearly stayed in Ayiti for. And, had she done so, would the ice in her mother’s heart have one day melted, would her aunties and cousins again have felt like the very thumbs and fingers of her hands? But she had been too young to understand about time — time seemed then so large and heavy, a boulder that would crush her. She could not stay and be ground under. She had no idea that time could ever move swiftly, as it does now, that people and their feelings might eventually change. Manman died ten years ago. Franckline had not been there, had not even known until weeks later, when Gizelle tracked her down. Gizelle will know when this child is born. There are neighbors with cell phones now; the country is not as far away as it once was.
The child might mean a return to Basin Rouge, her village, to see Gizelle and her brother and her other sisters after all these years. She and Bernard have been to Port-au-Prince twice, to visit his mother and other relatives, but Franckline refused to travel to her home village. Her sister Athalie had written: Papa says you killed Manman. You, the oldest, abandoned us. But perhaps if she brought her father a grandchild to hold, he might forgive her. And Bernard, with his respectful ways, and his kindnesses, would win everyone over, even the brothers-in-law. They would not be able to help being impressed by his new clothes, his education, the life he and Franckline are living in New York City, with an apartment all to themselves on a street planted with rhododendrons and azaleas. They will bring gifts: new sneakers, deflated soccer balls, talcum powder, cologne.
Sixteen minutes.
“Maybe the TV,” says Lore.
“Very good.” Franckline points the remote at the television. Two women and a man coalesce from a blurry panel of color. At first there’s no sound. The women sit on a couch and the man — the host, apparently — is behind a desk. The women, dressed in tight sleeveless sheaths and high-heeled pumps, laugh frantically over something the man has said, throwing themselves over their laps and then throwing themselves back, flinging their long hair behind them. The women lean and laugh, their mouths enormous, open, glistening things, their shoe heels pointed as skewers.
Franckline pushes at the volume button and the conversation rises into the room.
“… tried to make the tacos …”
“… food poisoning! He said he’ll never trust me again …”
(And then male laughter: haw haw haw haw haw.)
Lore is staring moodily at the screen, as if wounded by the banter of the women and the host egging it on. Franckline wonders if she ought to find another channel, but they will all be the same: laughter and loud voices, guns and car chases, at best a religious lecture. Merchandise spinning on a platform. Perhaps that would be all right: earrings and bracelets nestled in gray velvet, glinting in the bright TV lights. Sometimes, in the evening, tired from work, Franckline watches Home Shopping Network or QVC with the sound turned low. If you know you are never going to buy anything, it can be soothing to watch the glittering items offered one after the other. You probably enjoy them for nearly as long as the people who buy them do. Bernard believes that the television for anything but the news and the financial reports is a waste of time, and occasionally Franckline has to fix him with a look and say that perhaps he doesn’t ever need waste and forgetfulness but that she, at least for tonight, does.
“… a tattoo where? …”
“… no, darling, I won’t show you …”
(Haw haw haw haw haw!)
Nineteen minutes since Lore’s last contraction. Franckline feels a pulsing in her groin — not quite a pain, perhaps, or, yes, a pain. Is she imagining pain into being by fearing it? At the library in Flatbush, on the computers there, she has looked at the images of bicornate uteruses, pinkly meaty, split like a wishbone. The two petal-like chambers, the gestational sac residing in one. Her baby is growing in the left chamber. The hospital doctors say there’s a reasonable chance the chamber will expand enough to allow the baby to grow to term, especially since Franckline has already borne a full-term child, but they don’t want to make promises. She can’t help at times picturing the child running out of room, the head pushing against the uterine wall, or the cervix giving way and the unfinished life spilling out.
Snow falls outside the window, not heavy, not light, steady and wet-looking, small splatters of moisture rather than neat dry flecks. The evening she met Bernard he spoke of snow, the delicate, floating wonder of it, and the tall hills that stayed on the ground for weeks and did not disappear. They were at his mother’s table. Bernard had found her on the steps of the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, where she sat, footsore and very hungry, having wandered for hours in the city. She had lasted six months at home, trying not to see her lost baby in the face of every child. She had wept so compulsively, so unendingly, that even her aunt Thérèse, her favorite, who always indulged her, slapped her and said it was time to behave herself, to stop spitting at fate. She would have another child, many more, Tante Thérèse told her, at the right time, but Franckline wondered who would take her as his woman in her disgrace. Her value had been greatly reduced. Would she be made to join with someone she hated, who disgusted her? And in any case the thought of more children did nothing to numb the ache; it was that child, the silent child, the one she had come to know so well over the months she had carried him — his kicks and hiccups and slumbers — that she longed for. That child would never be born again, not in that body, on that day. She had been meant to be ashamed of him but he had been immune to her shame, had been something great and new and clean, for all the days he had lived.