David Mitchell - The Book of Other People

I wanted to ask her if he had written anything like that, or anything at all, about me, in case I had missed it, hadn’t seen it. But I knew he hadn’t. And she did too.

‘You could have been,’ I told her. ‘We both could have done the job.’

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘thirty years ago, you couldn’t bring a little girl around with you documenting the ills of the town. Both he and Maman told me as much.’

‘Look,’ I said, trying to cheer her up, ‘they gave you their whole world, which was this town. They gave you its name. They were very proud the day of your marriage. They loved Gaspard. They were sad that you couldn’t have children. They’d be so happy now.’

She turned the notebook pages, closing them all. I thought she was going to raise the mosquito net and crawl out, but she didn’t.

‘Speaking of Gaspard,’ I said.

‘You want to know when I’m going back?’

I felt like I was talking to one of the people who came to file their complaints. I needed specific locations, dates, and times.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because I am thinking of selling the house.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not the house.’

‘It’s starting to seem foolish to live here so close to the river,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like it’s a death trap.’

I wanted to climb in there with her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that it was all right now for us to try to forge our own paths, to move away from the past. Instead she gathered the notebooks in a pile and slid towards the edge of the bed away from them. She raised the mosquito net so fast that in an instant our faces were nearly touching. I was so unprepared for it that I had to slide the chair back a bit.

‘You want to know why I left Gaspard?’ she said. ‘It’s because of the baby.’

‘What about the baby?’ I asked.

‘It’s sick,’ she said.

‘Sick?’

‘Is that how you remember all the things people say to you?’ she asked. ‘Do you simply repeat what they say?’

‘What do you mean the baby’s sick?’ I asked.

Just then, Marthe walked in, announcing lunch. ‘Lélé, you haven’t eaten all day,’ she said, wagging a scolding index finger. ‘You have to eat to keep that baby strong.’

‘We’ll be down soon, chérie ,’ Lélé said.

‘Okay,’ said Marthe, ‘but we’re not going to let the food get cold. You know how much I hate cold food.’

‘Do you realize how long she’s been telling us that?’ Lélé said when Marthe left the room.

‘Probably our whole lives,’ I said.

‘Do you realize how astonishing that is?’

‘Tell me about the baby,’ I pressed.

‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said, ‘but Gaspard insisted because of my age, so we went to the hospital, L’Hôpital Sainte Croix, and had it done.’

I’m not sure I grasped everything she said. There was a test with pictures, an ultrasound. The baby, determined to be a girl, had a large cyst growing from the back of her neck, down her entire spine. If she lived long enough to be born, she would probably die soon after.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What caused that?’

‘A stroke of bad luck,’ she said. ‘No one knows.’

Both the doctor and Gaspard thought she should abort while she still could. She wanted to see the whole thing through, to carry full term.

‘This is your beheading,’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I’ll do what I can to help,’ I said.

‘There’s nothing to do,’ she said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘Have you thought about the birth?’ I asked.

‘Marthe will do it,’ she said. ‘Marthe will deliver her here, just like she did us.’

That night after dinner, it was too hot to stay inside and we sat out on the verandah again, listening to sounds we had neglected on other evenings: the wailing of cicadas, the crowing of disoriented cocks, the hushed laughter of distant neighbors cutting through our property. Unlike the summers of our childhood, when, in spite of the heat, we would have been running around half dressed, we heard no stirring in the trees around us, no birds settling in for the night. And we heard no croaking frogs splashing in and out of the river. We heard no frogs at all.

Already, my sister’s baby felt like an absence too, something we should grieve while ignoring. Every now and then, I would see her twist her body from side to side. Then she would rise up momentarily from her chair as the baby roused inside her for what seemed to me like a series of first times. Looking down at the gentle crescent curve of her body, she did not touch her stomach, nor did she invite me to touch it or lower my ear to it. And I did not dare ask.

Gaspard came by the house again early the next morning. It was a shockingly beautiful morning. Not yet sultry or overcast, but intensely bright, almost dazzling. It was the type of morning that evaporated all my other fears about living in a river’s path, the type of morning that would probably keep me in Léogâne forever, planting my vetiver and almond trees.

I was leaving for work when I saw Gaspard sitting in his car, his front wheels facing Lélé’s terrace. I tapped on the window, and he reached over and opened the door for me. Sliding into the passenger seat, I gave his shoulder the type of light squeeze he liked to give mine, as a greeting, an apology. Sitting there quietly, we took turns looking down at the gravel pathway leading through the almond trees towards the open road. When we were children, Lélé and I had often raced each other from the house to the road. Our dash had always seemed endless, exhausting, but we were extremely proud of ourselves when we made it to the end, either in front of or behind the other. Looking up at Lélé’s terrace where she sat every morning wrapped in a blanket watching the sun rise, Gaspard and I saw only her feet peeking out over the edge, encased in the lace-shaped clerestory trim.

‘I’m not going to leave her,’ he said. ‘After the baby’s born, we’ll see where we can go.’

He raised his hands as if to wave in Lélé’s direction, but she was looking past us, towards the mountains, framed by a halo of indigo sky.

‘She wants to bury the child here,’ he said. ‘She wants it to have spent its whole life here in your parents’ house. I suppose she feels that if she’d never left, none of this would have happened. She’d be here like you, alone, but safe from the things you document so well.’

‘It’s still questionable how well I do with the documenting,’ I said.

‘She admires you,’ he said, ‘and she thinks you do well.’

When I said nothing else, he added, ‘Among the trees. She wants to bury the child among the almond trees.’

Just then I noticed that he was not speaking to me at all. He was speaking to Lélé. She had turned her gaze away from the mountains and was looking straight at him, at us, her gaze unwavering, almost like a challenge, a dare.

‘It’s a fungus,’ Gaspard said.

‘I thought you didn’t know what caused it,’ I said.

‘Not the baby,’ he said, ‘the frogs.’

The day before, when he’d been visiting with Lélé, she had told him to try to find out for her what could have killed the river frogs. He’d gone back home and telephoned several people including one of his childhood friends, a Haitian-Canadian botanist who had told Gaspard that, given the descriptions and circumstances, he could only imagine that the frogs had probably died from a fungal disease that’s caused by the hotter than usual weather.

‘Is there anything we could have done for them?’ Gaspard had asked his friend.

‘No,’ the friend had said. ‘We all have our paths to tread and this was theirs.’