I shake my head, but she doesn’t see me. “You would rather be in Haiti?”
She sighs and turns over on her bed to face me again. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would’ve been like if my father had never sent for me and my mother when I was a baby. Like, maybe the twins would never have been born. And your mother would not have come here to give birth to you. And maybe we’d be like sisters. We’d go to the beach every day, and eat good Haitian food, and go shopping for jeans and American clothes, and whatever we needed to know about America, we’d see it in the movies.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “The nice beaches cost money, and the public beaches are dirty and crowded. There are no movie theaters, and to go to a shopping center with nice clothes, we would have to take a bus for eight hours to the Dominican Republic.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “I saw your pictures on Facebook. You were doing good. Especially with Ma’s money.”
“Well, me and my friends, we did different things. Not movies and malls. Not much in the city, in fact. I rode my bike through the streets of Les Cayes, rode donkeys up the mountainsides near Cap-Ha?tien, and the beaches we went to were not resorts. We shared the ocean with fishermen and washerwomen. And we gossiped and joked. And fought. I had to fight a lot, because people knew we were getting money from family abroad. Manman was tired of fighting. She wanted her own money. She wanted to see her sister. She wanted me to be like you.”
“Like me?”
“Matant Jo talked about you when she called. She said you were going to be the very first doctor in the family. Is it true? You’re going to be a doctor?”
She pauses, then sighs. “Don’t worry about me. Just make sure you get through your junior year. And stop messing with Bad Leg. And don’t go around asking about that white girl. Please.”
I nod, but she can’t see me in the dark. I rest my tired head on her last words, letting them be my pillow.
CHANTAL’S STORY
What if memory is like a muscle? My anatomy & physiology class tells me how the human body works, but it can’t tell me how the human mind works—not the brain, but the thoughts and memories.
I remember being nine years old, translating newspaper articles for my mother about my father’s murder. I remember everything about that day those detectives walked into our house and I had to sit there and listen to every detail and tell it back to my mother in Creole. I had to do it the other way around for those insurance people from Chrysler—translate my mother’s demands from Creole into English.
Creole and Haiti stick to my insides like glue—it’s like my bones and muscles. But America is my skin, my eyes, and my breath. According to my papers, I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m not a citizen. I’m a “resident alien.” The borders don’t care if we’re all human and my heart pumps blood the same as everyone else’s.
I try to walk a path that’s perfectly in between. On one side are the books and everything I have to do to make myself legit, and on the other side are the streets and everything I have to do to stay alive out here.
Ma wanted me to go to a big university. She told me not to worry about her and my sisters, to just do my own thing. But how could I? This is home. My mother is home. My sisters are home. And even you . . . you force me to remember the home I left behind. You make me remember my bones.
TWELVE
“FABIOLA, YOUR WRITING is good, but I have to give you a low grade because you didn’t back up any of your claims,” my English teacher, Mr. Nolan, says, looking at my paper and not at me.
I wonder if he can see a reflection of my face on that paper—if he can see me, my whole story. “Claims?” I ask.
“You were supposed to write a research paper, not a personal essay,” he says, handing me back the homework. “There are some interesting ideas here, but they’re unsubstantiated. You need to gather some sources, use quotes, and add a ‘Works Cited’ page. Use textual evidence.”
He quickly gathers up his things on his desk and leaves the classroom. English is the last class for the day, so I thought there’d be time for him to explain everything to me. I’ve been writing essays and poems in English my entire life. I went to an English school in Haiti. It doesn’t make sense that my paper isn’t perfect.
I stare at all his markings, comments on the sides, question marks, whole sentences crossed out. I feel attacked because I wrote down everything I knew about the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture and why he is important to me. But Mr. Nolan thinks everything I said was all wrong.
Someone coughs while I’m putting the essay back into my folder. Imani is standing in the doorway of the classroom. She already has on her coat and a gray scarf wrapped around half her face. “Why do you look like you’re about to cry?”