WHEN THE BIG earthquake happened, I was in a courtyard—our house with its two floors was on one side, and another bigger house with its wide three floors was on the other side. I was putting clothes on the line after coming home from school. Manman had just taught me how to boil water in the big aluminum pot over hot coals to pour into a bucket of dirty clothes, then drop in a bar of indigo soap, and, once the water cooled off, crouch down around the bucket to scrub the clothes between my hands.
My hands were still too small to make the squishing wet sound my mother’s hands made when she washed clothes. Still, I was learning. And I was getting better.
I was humming a song. I don’t remember which one. My knees hurt from squatting so low. I stopped for a moment to stand up and wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wet hand, and maybe, I thought, I was dizzy, because everything around me moved. And then there was a rolling sound. I swayed and dipped, and in an instant, the walls around me started coming down. The columns that held the second floor of our house split in half, and the roof surrendered. A long crack eased up on the side of the other house. And soon, the concrete, the stones, the marble tiles, the dancing rebar, all fell down around me.
And it rained dust and screams and prayers.
I was in the middle of it all, standing on my two skinny, ashy legs, with my wet hands. Alive. Unbroken, after all.
My eyes are still shut.
But I am still standing.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
I am not dead.
Dray is.
His body is slumped over the banister, and he slides off, slowly, slowly. Bright red oozes from a hole on the side of his face, near his broken eye.
And I am shaking. I am the earthquake. I can’t stop shaking.
My cousins are frozen in place, but their eyes look past me, behind me.
Slowly, I turn.
And there, in the open doorway, is my Papa Legba. Still with his black tuxedo—torn and old now—his cigar, and his cane. Or a gun. Or a cane. No, a gun. A cane.
I stare. I want to move closer. To touch him. To ask him questions. But I just stare.
And then he sings his song.
Crossroads, cross paths,
Double-cross and cross-examine,
Cross a bridge across my mind.
A cross to bear across the line,
And cross the street across town.
Cross out, cross off,
cross your t’s and cross your fingers, then nail him to a cross as you cross your heart and hope not to die.
As he sings this, the streetlight begins to shine through him as if he is made of nothing. Slowly, the top hat, the tuxedo, the cane, and the man begin to disappear right before our eyes. He becomes the smoke in his cigar—thick cloudy air blending with the light and cold air.
He’s gone again. And I force my aching body to run after him. I hold my head as it pounds and spins. I reach the corner of American and Joy. He’s not there. Nothing is here. I want to call out his name. I want to say thank you. But instead, “Kasim” eases out. I turn to the house to see Dray’s white car parked in front. I don’t want to go back into that house with its dead man and his gun and my blood that is not my blood and their madichon.
Chantal runs out to get me and pull me back into the house.
Then Pri comes to stand next to us, next to where Donna is lying over the dead body crying and crying.
And I think, I never got to do that with Kasim, just as Pri says, “We never got to do that with our father.”
We all stand there and inhale, exhale together. In one breath.
“Go upstairs. Get a sheet,” Chantal says.
I have to step over Donna to get upstairs.
DRAYTON’S STORY
Ain’t no way for you to know what it feels like to leave your body when you die. It’s not like in the movies, where you just float up into the air. Ain’t no floating, white clouds, bright lights, angels singing . . . none of that shit.
It hurts. A bullet to the head . . . it goes straight through and turns into some kind of blow horn for your memories. It wakes up shit you ain’t never thought you would remember. And you realize that this shit ain’t new—you’ve been dead before.