Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“My mother bought me this hideous outfit,” Ms. Hinds wrote on the pad, which was now half filled with words: commands to the nurses, updates to her parents from the previous evening’s visit.

“Is someone coming for you?” Nadine asked.

“My parents,” Ms. Hinds wrote. Handing Nadine the pad, she reached up and stroked the raised tip of the metal tube in her neck, as if she were worried about her parents seeing it again.

“Good,” Nadine said. “The doctor will be here soon.”

Nadine was tempted to warn Ms. Hinds that whatever form of relief she must be feeling now would only last for a while, the dread of being voiceless hitting her anew each day as though it had just happened, when she would awake from dreams in which she’d spoken to find that she had no voice, or when she would see something alarming and realize that she couldn’t scream for help, or even when she would realize that she herself was slowly forgetting, without the help of old audio or videocassettes or answering-machine greetings, what her own voice used to sound like. She didn’t say anything, however. Like all her other patients, Ms. Hinds would soon find all this out herself.

Nadine spent half her lunch hour staring at the barred windows on the brown building across the alley, watching the Psych nurses scribbling in charts and filing them, rushing to answer sudden calls from the ward.

Josette walked up to the table much earlier than usual, obviously looking for her.

“What is it?” Nadine asked.

“Se Ms. Hinds,” Josette said. “She’d like to say good-bye to you.”

She thought of asking Josette to tell Ms. Hinds that she couldn’t be found, but fearing that this would create some type of conspirational camaraderie between her and Josette, she decided against it.

Ms. Hinds and her parents were waiting by the elevator bank in the ward. Ms. Hinds was sitting in a wheelchair with her discharge papers and a clear plastic bag full of odds and ends on her lap. Her father, a strapping man, was clutching the back of the wheelchair with moist, nervous hands, which gripped the chair more tightly for fear of losing hold. The mother, thin and short like Ms. Hinds, looked as though she was fighting back cries, tears, a tempest of anger, barters with God.

Instead she fussed, trying to wrench the discharge papers and the bag from her daughter, irritating Ms. Hinds, who raised her pad from beneath the bag and scribbled quickly, “Nurse Osnac, my parents, Nicole and Justin Hinds.”

Nadine shook each parent’s hand in turn.

“Glad to make your acquaintance,” said the father.

The mother said nothing.

“Thank you for everything,” said the father. “Please share our thanks with the doctors, the other nurses, everyone.”

The elevator doors suddenly opened and they found themselves staring at the bodies that filled it to capacity, the doctors and nurses traveling between floors, the visitors. The Hindses let the doors close, and the others departed without them.

Ms. Hinds turned to an empty page toward the back of her pad and wrote, “Bye, Nurse Osnac.”

“Good luck,” Nadine said.

Another elevator opened. There were fewer people in this one and enough room for the Hindses. The father pushed the wheelchair, which jerked forward, nearly dumping Ms. Hinds facefirst into the elevator.

The elevator doors closed behind them sharply, leaving Nadine alone, facing a distorted reflection of herself in the wide, shiny metal surface. Had she carried to full term, her child, aborted two months after his or her conception, would likely have been born today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, probably sometime this week, but this month for certain.

She thought of this for only a moment, then of her parents, of Eric, of the pebble in the water glass in her bedroom at home, all of them belonging to the widened, unrecognizable woman staring back at her from the closed elevator doors.

Anne was talking about miracles right before they reached the cemetery. She was telling her husband and daughter about a case she’d recently heard reported on a religious cable access program, about a twelve-year-old Lebanese girl who cried crystal tears.

From the front passenger seat, the daughter had just blurted out “Ouch!”-one of those non sequiturs that Anne would rather not hear come out of her grown child’s mouth but that her daughter sometimes used as a shortcut for more precise reactions to anything that wasn’t easily comprehensible. It was either “Ouch!” “Cool,” “Okay,” or “Whatever,” a meaningless litany her daughter had been drawing from since she was fourteen years old.

Anne was thinking of scolding her daughter, of telling her she should talk to them like a woman now, weigh her words carefully so that, even though she was an “artiste,” they might take her seriously, but she held back, imagining what her daughter’s reaction to her suggestions might be: “Okay, whatever, Manman, please go on with your story.”

Her husband, who was always useful in helping her elaborate on her miraculous tales and who also disapproved of their daughter’s language, said in Creole, “If crystal was coming out of her eyes, I would think she’d be crying blood.”

“That’s what’s extraordinary,” Anne replied. “The crystal pieces were as sharp as knives, but they didn’t hurt her.”

“How big were these pieces?” the husband asked, slowing the car a bit as they entered the ramp leading to the Jackie Robinson Parkway.

Anne got one last look at the surrounding buildings, which were lit more brightly than usual, with Christmas trees, Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles in most of the windows. She tried to keep these visions in her mind, of illuminated pines, electric candles, and giant cardboard Santas, as the car merged into the curvy, narrow lane. She hated the drive and would have never put herself through it were it not so important to her that her daughter attend Christmas Eve Mass with her and her husband. While in college, her daughter had declared herself an atheist. Between her daughter, who chose not to believe in God, and her husband, who went to the Brooklyn Museum every week, to worship, it seemed to her, at the foot of Ancient Egyptian statues, she felt outnumbered by pagans.

Anne was just about to tell her husband and daughter that the crystal pieces, which had fallen out of the Lebanese girl’s eyes, were as big as ten-carat diamonds- she imagined her daughter retorting, “I bet her family wished she cried ten-carat diamonds”- when they reached the cemetery.

Every time she passed a cemetery, Anne held her breath. When she was a girl, Anne had gone swimming with her three-year-old brother on a beach in Grand Goave, and he had disappeared beneath the waves. Ever since then, she’d convinced herself that her brother was walking the earth looking for his grave. Whenever she went by a cemetery, any cemetery, she imagined him there, his tiny wet body bent over the tombstones, his ash-colored eyes surveying the letters, trying to find his name.

The cemetery was on both sides of them now, the head-stones glistening in the evening light. She held her breath the way she imagined her brother did before the weight of the sea collapsed his small lungs and he was forced to surrender to the water, sinking into a world of starfishes, sea turtles, weeds, and sharks. She had gone nowhere near the sea since her brother had disappeared; her heart raced even when she happened upon images of waves on television.

Who would put a busy thoroughfare in the middle of a cemetery, she wondered, forcing the living and their noisy cars to always be trespassing on the dead? It didn’t make sense, but maybe the parkway’s architects had been thinking beyond the daily needs of the living. Did they wonder if the dead might enjoy hearing sounds of life going on at high speed around them? If this were so, then why should the living be spared the dead’s own signs of existence: of shadows swaying in the breeze, of the laughter and cries of lost children, of the whispers of lovers, muffled as though in dreams.