Haiti Noir

Minouche squeezed his arm, signaling for him not to go. She didn’t appear to notice Tanya in the next bed. Or maybe she was in too much pain to care. He kissed both their foreheads again. Minouche was getting warm, either from the heat or from an infection. Her body was shivering too. He wondered whether she’d be alive when he returned.

Outside, he managed to climb into a packed tap tap heading up the hill. It was full of people praying, crying, and cursing at their cell phones for not working. There was a body sprawled out on the floor by their feet. Robby avoided their eyes and the arguments about what had happened and thought of only Caroline’s face and how she looked in that dress the night before.

Caroline never stayed in her NGO’s office past two. Robby hoped that she had been safely nestled in her large, sturdy home. He jumped out of the tap tap at the foothill leading up to her minimansion.

Out of habit, he dialed her number on his cell phone, but of course there was no reception. At the still-standing high metal gates, he called out her name, but she did not answer. There were no lights on in the house, or anywhere for that matter, and everyone seemed to be in the streets. Her car was not in the driveway.

He remembered how she’d sometimes call him in the evening. If he didn’t answer because he was with Tanya or Minouche, she wouldn’t care. She’d tell him that he was free to do as he wished. He was more attractive to her, she told him, because she had to compete for him.

If Robby was indeed the ghost he was starting to believe himself to be, then he would have been brought back to life by the lilting sound of Caroline’s voice. Then he turned around to see her running toward him through a crowd of her neighbors gathered in small groups holding bedsheets and pillows, as if preparing to lay down in the middle of the street for the night. She hugged and kissed him, and he picked her up and swung her around.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Come back to my place,” he said immediately, while staring at her made-up face, neatly combed hair, and clean blouse.

“Your place? Robby, I can’t even go back into my own house,” she replied, dusting off his clothes with her hands.

Someone, another man, called her name in the distance.

“I’m coming!” Caroline shouted back to him.

“Who’s that?” Robby asked.

“Victor. He’s a friend,” she said, not looking into his eyes. “Some of us are going to sleep in his yard. It should be safe there.”

Robby pulled her toward him, making sure that this Victor person could see them. She wiggled away from him, and he drew her back to him.

“Robby, what’s wrong with you? You should come to Victor’s with me.”

“No. You should come with me.”

“Stop playing games,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Then what’s this all about?”

“Please.” He reached for her hand, but she stepped back.

“Listen, Robby, as soon as daylight hits, I am leaving this place.”

“To go where?”

“ Dominican Republic, Montreal, Cuba, anywhere but here.”

Many of her neighbors with the blankets and pillows had dispersed, some making their way back up the hill to her friend Victor’s backyard, the others heading across the road to where a local priest and nuns had set up for the night.

“Please, chérie,” Robby pleaded as he pulled her to him again. “Please, Caroline. I need you to be with me tonight. My place is safe, if any place is safe on a night like this.”

He held her hand to his lips, kissed it, then placed it at his heart, which melted something inside of her. She kissed him on the cheek, embraced him, and whispered in his ear, “So it is now that you are finally inviting me to your home. This is what it takes to bring out the man in you?” Then she smiled and grabbed his hand. Cars were fewer and farther in between now, and those that went by them as they walked were packed with the dead and nearly dead.

They were both exhausted when they entered his dark bedroom. It was unbearably hot like the rest of the city, and the stagnant air grew sour. The moonlit, foul-smelling room revealed the silhouettes of the two bodies lying there, obviously dead, rendering Caroline as still as they were.

Robby gently took her arm and walked her over to each of them.

“This is Tanya,” he said, then reached down and kissed her on the cheek. “And this is Minouche,” he said, doing the same to her.

He motioned for Caroline’s hand, but she was pulling away, stepping back, trying to make her way out of the room, out of her lover’s house, and possibly out of the shaken, broken country.

But Robby would never let her go, because if the devil stirred again, beckoning the land to rattle and shift beneath them, forcing his little part of the house to collapse like a domino, encasing them all in this love, in this death, then they would truly be inseparable-he and his three lovers, bound for eternity.

ROSANNA BY JOSAPHAT-ROBERT LARGE

Pacot