I sweated everywhere—beneath my arms and between my thighs, along my spine. My breasts still leaked. My body was weeping but whenever I felt like crying I bit down on my knuckles until the pain distracted me. What little air there was grew so thick I thought I might die. My chest tightened ever more.

As a child, I felt that strange sense of suffocating, often. There was the heat of a Nebraska summer and there was the heat of Port-au-Prince and they were two very different things.

Every summer, my parents took us to Haiti during the worst possible time—June and July. We always began packing in early May. It was easy to sift through our clothes—nice outfits for church and visiting distant relatives, swimsuits for the beach, T-shirts and shorts to play with our cousins. The more difficult packing was the various goods we were expected to bring—American movies on videotape and later, DVD, Gap clothing, large bottles of olive oil and industrial-sized bags of rice from discount warehouses, small electronics, Nike sneakers, cornflakes, Tampax, all the things that were outrageously expensive and eagerly coveted in the motherland, what my siblings and I called Haiti, always with a smirk. My mother coordinated the packing efforts, putting these goods in suitcases large enough to accommodate the body of a large adult male, perhaps two. At the airport, we would stand in line with all the other dyaspora and their unfathomably large suitcases. I found the whole affair mortifying and tried to stand as far away from my parents and their embarrassing luggage as possible. It was easy to spot the Haitian families not only from the suitcases, but from the hovering masses of American-born children hiding in plain sight at a comfortable distance.

Before every trip, my parents reminded us of the proper etiquette for children in Haiti. They did not want us to draw undue attention to ourselves. They wanted us to be seen and not heard, speaking when spoken to, never speaking out of turn, never raising our voices or being disrespectful. Despite their best efforts we always drew attention to ourselves. My brother tried to sag his jeans until a stranger in the airport grabbed him by the ears and hitched his pants up to their proper place, sucking her teeth and shaking her head. Mona and I wore low-cut T-shirts and large hoop earrings and short skirts. All three of us wore headphones, listening to music our parents disapproved of. We answered our parents in English when they spoke to us in French.

The airport in Port-au-Prince was the worst place on earth for spoiled children. It was the only place we ever visited where you had to go outside after getting off the plane and before entering the terminal. The moment we started walking down the hot metal staircase, the unbearably thick air wrapped itself around our bodies, seeping into our pores. The walk across the tarmac was interminable as the throng of Haitians, elated or miserable about returning home, pushed us forward. We waited in an endless customs line overwhelmed by the heat and the smell of so many sweaty people in cramped quarters and then, outside the airport as we waited for a cab or a relative to pick us up, it was like being thrown into the middle of a riot, everyone shouting, waving their hands wildly in the air, ignoring the rules of polite conduct and personal space.

We always stayed with my mother’s favorite sister. Tante Lola married well and owned lots of property. There was a guesthouse with its own pool behind her house and we installed ourselves there for weeks at a time.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—summer afternoons at the beach, swimming in the warm and salty blue of the ocean. We ate grilled meat and drank Coke from green glass bottles, biting the rim, enjoying the sound our teeth made against the glass. We played in the sand and my sister and I chased my brother up and down the beach while our parents cheerfully ignored us. There is a picture of me sitting on the beach. I am fourteen, skinny, just starting puberty, late bloomer. I am wearing the first bathing suit I have ever been allowed to choose for myself. It is blue, one piece, cut high at the hips but modestly. There is a strap around my neck that reaches down to a threaded knot between my collarbones. I am wearing sunglasses because I want to look sophisticated. I want to stare at cute boys as they come out of the water, without admonishment from my parents. My knees are pulled to my chest. I am also wearing a straw hat with a matching blue band, a gift from my father. I saw the hat while we were driving through the city on the way from visiting one relative to another. A vendor had what seemed like hundreds of hats displayed on a large tarp. I started tapping the window with my hand excitedly. I begged my father to pull over and suddenly he did and I grinned like a crazy person. We all piled out of the car and hovered around the display, each trying to decide on the perfect chapeau. I would wear the hat every day for the rest of our trip and back in the States I would wear my perfect hat for the rest of the summer until school started and a classmate teased me about my sombrero and then the hat found its way to the back of my closet, crushed by sneakers, a black sock, a softball helmet.

In another picture, my sister and I are standing on the beach, arm in arm. Behind us, my parents’ beach house in Jacmel is being built and the concrete frame of the house stands, windowless. My mother is on the long veranda, already finished. She is waving, her arm midair, her fingers curled toward us. I am fifteen. Mona is eighteen. It is Mona’s last summer before college. She is radiant. She can taste freedom, which is all we ever wanted, freedom from our parents, from the endless trips to Haiti, from our parents’ rules. Our ingratitude, in the face of our happiness, was fairly staggering. In the picture, we are both wearing two-piece bathing suits, matching. Mona convinced my parents it would be fine to allow us to wear bikinis because we were good girls. Mona was not really a good girl. I knew that, always waited up for her when she snuck out at home in the States to drive around in the backseats of cars with American boys. When she came home, she smelled like beer and cigarette smoke and my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed behind her ears and knees and under her elbows. Mona taught me about kissing and going to third base and wrote silly words on my back with her fingers as she taught me everything important. She told me about kids who didn’t have to be home by eight, who didn’t have to spend their Saturdays in a stupid basement surrounded by other miserable Haitian kids. In the picture, Mona’s lips are nuzzling my ear. She’s whispering, “You’ll be free soon too.” My childhood was very different from that of my brother and sister. By the time I was old enough to want to feel free, my parents had relaxed many of the strict rules they enforced for Michel and Mona. Michel is not in the picture because he was already in graduate school. When he went away to college, he never really came home. Sons are different, my mother says. They always look for home somewhere else. Daughters, though, a mother can count on. Daughters always come home.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—my father building toy boats and pointed hats for us from palm fronds. He taught us how to eat sugarcane, how we had to peel the thin bark and suck on the fibrous core. He took us to an old woman’s house and bought dous, a sugary fudge, wrapped in wax paper. We ate so much of it our mouths wrinkled. Back in the States, he was always serious, always wearing suits and shiny shoes, rarely laughing, rarely home because he had to build and outwork and outthink the white men he worked with. In Haiti, my father was a man who eagerly removed his shoes and rolled up his slacks to climb a palm tree to gather coconuts. One by one he would throw the coconuts down. My mother held the fruit high over her head and slammed them down on a sharp rock and when the hard shell cracked open, she would pull the coconut apart and peel the coconut meat from the shell, handing each of us large pieces. We hated coconut but we ate it anyway.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—my mother sitting with her sisters, gossiping about everyone they ever knew, their childhood friends and where those friends were now, their current friends and neighbors, former lovers, the people they worked with, their husbands, their fathers. My mother always glowed, her fair skin tanned, eyes bright, hair hanging down past her shoulders. Only in Haiti do I remember her laughing nakedly, talking openly, easily, in a way that was so foreign to us. Mona and I always hid nearby trying to hear every word of the adult conversation. Listening to my mother and aunts talking made us feel like we knew her.

Driving through Port-au-Prince is a precarious affair. There are more people than room on the road. There is no order, no patience, no civility. Anytime we climbed into the backseat to go somewhere, I felt wound up with nervous energy. I sat between my brother and sister gripping their thighs as they held on to their door handles, their knuckles white. It wasn’t the wild driving that scared me, though. It was the angry mobs swarming our car whenever we slowed at an intersection or to make a turn from one narrow street to another. No matter where we went, our car was always mobbed at street corners by men and women and children, hungry and angry and yearning to know what it might feel like to sit in the leather seats of an air-­conditioned luxury sedan. My father saw himself in those people. As we grew older, we saw ourselves in those people. The bones of our faces were the same. My father would open his window just a crack to throw out gourdes and sometimes, American dollars. He would try to pull away in the wake of the desperate clamor to reach for that money. I remember seeing a man with one leg and an enormous tumor beneath his right eye disfiguring his face and the way he slammed his hands against my window and stared at me with such disgust. I waved to him and he spit on the window, a thick globule of white saliva slowly sliding down the window. He shouted something I didn’t understand. My sister turned my head, held me in the crook of her arm. “Look straight ahead,” she said, and so I did. I looked straight ahead at the backs of my parents’ heads and the crowded street before us and I tried to forget how brightly the rage and frustration pulsed off the man with the broken body on the corner.

We loved Haiti. We hated Haiti. We did not understand or know Haiti. Years later, I still did not understand Haiti but I longed for the Haiti of my childhood. When I was kidnapped, I knew I would never find that Haiti ever again.