Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

Surprising even myself, I suddenly wanted to go home. I was missing my mother. What if she got so worried that she lost her mind, went running down every street in the capital screaming my name? What if she thought I was dead and my body taken to a mass grave?

Romain’s friend was nowhere to be found, and the pretty young woman at the check-in counter gave us such a disdainful look that it seemed she wouldn’t have offered us a room even if one had been available.

There was nothing preventing us from sitting here a while and having a drink, though, was there? Romain said. After that we’d go home.

We walked through the lobby, down a flight of stairs to a table under a large umbrella by the side of the heart-shaped pool. A man wearing a dark suit and a bow tie asked us what we wanted to drink. Romain ordered a Coke and so did I. It seemed like such a stupid thing to come all this way for, a Coke.

Romain looked up toward the steep hills above the hotel, and higher still at the row of mountains in the distance. A cloud was passing over the nearest and most prominent one, Mòn Lopital. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud moved on and the sky was as blue as cornflowers again.

Watching me staring up at the mountains, Romain said, “Imagine, a mountain named Hospital. Maybe we should go there.”

We had already failed at our small adventure. We were certainly doomed to botch a larger escapade, like a complete retreat to Mòn Lopital. Still, I replied, “Okay,” hoping that Romain wouldn’t want to follow through with that particular idea.

While we were sipping our Cokes, watching the fizzy dark liquid rise through the straws, a man about Romain’s age hesitantly wandered over to our table and sat down. Romain seemed relieved to see him. The man was meticulous-looking, clean-shaven, and tense. He shook Romain’s hand, nodded in my direction, then made some guarded remarks about the new political situation, how the hotel was going to lose a lot of its faithful clientele, the call girls, and the macoutes who’d hired them.

Romain casually said, “It must be rough, camarade.”

Then the man looked over at me, then back at Romain as though there was something he wanted to tell Romain but wasn’t sure I should also hear it.

Finally Romain said, “Man, it’s okay.” Then I realized there was a larger purpose to our coming to that particular hotel. As with everything else with Romain, this too was not simple.

“You can tell me in front of the little guy,” Romain said, lowering his head to sip more of his Coke. “Is he here?”

“No, man. I’m sorry,” the man said. And he looked truly regretful, even sympathetic. “He didn’t come here. Maybe he went somewhere else.”

The man’s eyes wandered toward the heart-shaped pool and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s pretty busy. Sorry you couldn’t get a room. We’ve got to take advantage while we can.”

With that, he got up and walked away. Romain kept his head down, kept on sipping his Coke. I should have been too young to understand what was going on, but I did. Twelve years for a boy like me, a boy without a father, a boy with a mother who tried to protect me so much that her actions incited me to go out and discover everything myself, was like twenty years for another kind of boy.

“He sometimes brought women here,” Romain said. “I used to follow him here. I thought he might have come here today.”

“Who, your father?” I asked.

I don’t know why, but every now and then I would ask a dumb question like that, demand an explanation for something I already knew.

“No,” Romain snapped, “ your father, Christophe.”

I don’t think he even realized why he said it. He was impatient, angry. His nerves were raw. Besides, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected it. Unaware that I was paying attention, people had often whispered things around me, from the girls in the neighborhood who coyly commented how much I looked like Tobin, the child of the wife, the “inside” child, to even Tobin himself, who was sometimes kind to me and sometimes refused to look me in the eye as though we were rivals, to the wife who refused to ever come anywhere near the tap station in order to avoid facing her husband’s indiscretions and their living results. Still, it was too painful for me to be reminded that I had a father who lived and worked so close to me and still didn’t call me his son. I didn’t understand why my mother had to struggle so much to earn money when she could have asked him for it, why she had to force Rosie into virtual slavery to keep us afloat. I didn’t understand why Christophe hadn’t offered my mother money to feed and clothe me, why he only sold her water at a discount and did not offer it to her outright since it was water that I, his son, could also use.

As I sat there with Romain with the straw separated from the Coke bottle yet still hanging out of his mouth, it wasn’t the shock of hearing Christophe declared my father yet again that made me cry. I was simply ashamed to be considered a dishonorable secret.

Romain tried to reach over and stroke my head, but I shoved his hand away. I wanted to grab one of the Coke bottles and smash it against his skull, but I knew he would catch the bottle before it could hurt him.

He had brought me here, he’d said, to make me a man. Was this what he meant? Did he think that seeing his own murderous father hiding out in a low-grade hotel to keep from being burned alive would illustrate what kind of man I ought not to be? Was telling me, reminding me, about Christophe in this blunt, off-the-cuff manner his way of teaching me that I shouldn’t want to be too much like Christophe either? Or was it simply Romain’s way of forcing me to accept what he was about to do?

It was becoming clear to me that Romain was leaving, going off someplace where I couldn’t follow him.

“The taxi’s waiting for you outside,” he told me. “He’ll get you back to your mother.”

I was too angry at him then to ask him where he was going. I didn’t care.

“I’m leaving the country,” he said. “I’m getting out tonight.”

“But you didn’t do anything.” I heard myself sobbing, but I didn’t know whether I was crying for Romain and Regulus or for Christophe and myself.

“I just can’t stay here,” Romain said.

“What about your mother?” I asked. “What about Regulus?”

“I’ll get in touch with my mother when I reach where I’m going,” he said. “As for Regulus, he’s not my problem.”

And then it was very obvious to me, starting with the way his hands were shaking and his frowns were sinking deeper into his sweating forehead, that Regulus had always been his problem, the biggest problem of his life.

“Go on now,” he said. “The taxi’s waiting for you.”

I slowly got up and walked away, counting each step up the staircase leading to the lobby and then down the driveway where the taxi was waiting. I never looked back.

In the taxi, I lay down on the backseat and closed my eyes, shutting out everything, all the noise, the chants, the crowds out on the street. The car moved slowly and the roads were bumpy, but I didn’t care.

Given all that was happening-the looting of homes and businesses of former government allies, the lynching, burning, and stoning of the macoutes, the thousands of bodies that were suddenly being discovered in secret rooms at the city morgues and in mass graves on the outskirts of the capital-it would have been heartless of my mother to punish me, and she didn’t. Instead she yelled at Rosie and Vaval for not watching me closely enough, for letting me wander away.

“Soon after you went off,” my mother said with a severe yet knowing look, an almost kind look, “Monsieur Christophe managed to get his water turned off, but not before everyone in the neighborhood got enough to use for days in case the situation takes a bad turn and we’re all trapped inside our houses, like in the old days before you were born, under the father.”