Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

That was the first time Terry heard the story about Nadia and Johel. He said, “It’s not true.” His whole body stiffened under the PT’s hands, as if the therapist had twisted a nerve: the PT had to take a break and let Terry sweat the pain off. But Terry remembered what the PT said, the old Creole proverb: “There’s no such thing as a natural death in Haiti.”

After that, Terry started haunting the chat rooms himself.

The real inside dirt was all in Creole, but the written language was hard to understand, and Terry would spend hours sitting at his laptop, puzzling out what people were saying. He started following Nadia’s career obsessively. He followed her election, her rise to prominence in the sénat , her alliance with the new president, himself a former musician. Terry read that several months after the installation of the new government, the long-delayed Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Canada allowing for the construction of a new road had been approved. Nadia was present at the signing. None of that exactly surprised him: she’d always given the judge shrewd counsel, and he’d known she was no fool. But if Terry was honest with himself, he never really imagined anything like that happening. And wherever he went on the Internet, there was always the same story.

When Kay moved up to Atlanta, she told Terry that Haiti was finished for her. And one reason she was leaving him was the way Terry was obsessing over the Internet. She knew it was never going to be finished for him. But Terry knew that wasn’t exactly right. He knew that Haiti would be finished for him when he knew the truth.

* * *

Terry went down to Haiti unannounced. That was something he knew from two decades’ experience in law enforcement: you want to talk to the suspect at the time and place of your own choosing. So he flew down on American Airlines, Miami to Port-au-Prince, with the missionaries and the aid workers and the diaspora coming home, then took a taxi over to the domestic airport, where he bought himself a ticket on the afternoon flight to Jérémie.

The next morning, Terry sat outside the judge’s house in Calasse with the regular folk who came to see Sénateur Célestin and ask her for favors. The women wore clean, neatly pressed dresses, and the men were in good dark suits. A mason had filled in the bullet holes that had pockmarked the cement wall, but the fresh yellow paint, not bleached by sun or rain, showed where the damage had been done.

There were half a dozen plastic chairs in front of the house. They were all full, but a young man noticed Terry’s cane and saw the beads of sweat on his face and bounded to his feet. Then Terry sat with the sun on his face, thinking of an afternoon he’d spent here a few months after he’d started working with the judge. Johel had an old football in the closet, and he and Terry had started tossing it around in the courtyard, right where Terry was sitting now. He was surprised what a clean, tight spiral the judge could put on the ball. Then Nadia showed up, and the three of them had started horsing around together. Because the courtyard of the house was narrow, they’d gone out onto the dirt road to have a little more space, and as will happen in Haiti, there were soon a dozen neighborhood kids playing with them. At first it was the adults against the kids; then Nadia, not so long out of girlhood herself, drifted away from Terry and the judge’s squad. Terry and the judge tried to explain to her and the kids the complicated rules of American football, but the only thing anyone really understood was throw the ball, catch the ball, and run with the ball — but that was enough for a good time …

Then Nadia’s bodyguard said “Blan.” Terry stood up gingerly. He could feel shimmering ripples of pain running through his leg. He was glad for the feeling, distracting him from his nervous stomach.

The house was just the way Johel had left it, right down to the portrait of the judge in his judicial robes on the living room wall. The judge’s family stared somberly from their silver frames; the judge’s books filled the judge’s bookshelves. Nadia was standing at the window, speaking on the phone. He saw the familiar back and muscled shoulders, but the straight shoulder-length hair was from another woman. Then she turned, and Terry fell, as if diving cleanly from a great height, into her sea-green eyes.

Neither of them spoke for a minute. Terry had thought that by presenting himself unannounced, he would have the advantage of surprise. But he had not counted on his own emotions. Nadia stumbled backward when she saw him, as if an invisible hand had pressed lightly on her shoulders. Then her face — unlined, unchanged — broke into a smile, and she ran to Terry, throwing herself — warm, fragrant, soft, alive — into his arms. Nadia was light, but the weight of her arms on his shoulders was enough to make him grunt with pain.

She said, “It’s you.”

“It’s just me,” Terry said. “It’s just me.”

Never let her go, Terry thought. The past is under the rubble and bricks. Terry felt her breathing and her heartbeat, and he thought, This is all that’s real, the past is like the dead — who wants to dig up those rotting bones?

“They told me you were dead,” she finally said.

She must have asked someone to look Terry up on the Internet and then stopped after the first link. Terry thought about those first weeks after the earthquake, when to see a familiar face was to see someone who had come back from the dead, when everyone was a presumed ghost.

“Not dead,” he said. “Just in Florida.”

Nadia stepped back.

“Then why you never call?” she asked. “I needed you.”

Now it was Terry’s turn to lie. “Johel told me to leave you alone. He comes to me in my dreams. And he told me to stay away.”

* * *

Nadia sat on the couch. She invited Terry to sit beside her, but the high cushions were too painful for his back, so he took the judge’s armchair. That’s where Johel used to sit and watch football, and even now the imprint of the big man’s body was in the cushions. Sitting in his chair felt like wearing the dead man’s clothes. Nadia smiled, but it was no longer that first smile of pure joy. Now she has started to wonder why Terry has come back from the dead to visit her. People came to her all day and wanted something. The poor came and wanted enough to eat. The rich came and wanted to be richer. There was only one person on the planet who wanted to see Nadia because of the thing she is. She kept Johel’s son in Port-au-Prince, in a house surrounded by a high wall, topped with barbed wire, and protected by a man with a shotgun.

But Terry knew about this secret place, this region of vulnerability. He asked about little Johel.

“He looks like his daddy,” Terry said, thumbing through the pictures on Nadia’s phone. There is no doubt — none at all — about who this chubby, round-faced child’s father is.

“He’s smart like his daddy,” Nadia said. “He can almost read.”

Terry said, “He used to worry about you, you know. I always said, ‘Don’t worry about Nadia. She can take care of herself.’ But he made me promise to take care of you, come what may.”

When Terry had walked into the room and felt her skin against his own, he had wavered. Truth never loved Terry, never slept on his chest; he never wanted Truth with every fiber of his being. Truth never took Terry’s hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it. Truth never looked over her shoulder at Terry. But when Nadia broke off her embrace, Terry knew, come what may, that he was frightened of Truth. Twenty years of experience and interrogation had taught Terry that Truth was a lady who wouldn’t take no for an answer.