When Charlie pulled up to the hotel, returning from the orphanages with the church women, the first thing she saw was Lizbeth practically tripping down the stairs toward her.
“Whoa there, careful,” she said as the woman fell into her arms.
“She’s gone, Charlie. Senzey’s missing!”
“Hold on a sec. What’s going on?”
“She was there at lunch with us, but now she’s just up and disappeared!”
Charlie checked her watch. “Maybe she went to do an errand, or take a walk.”
Lizbeth shook her head. “Nope. She took her things with her. That girl wasn’t fixing to come back. How’re we ever gonna find her?”
“Did she leave a note? Anything?”
Lizbeth fumbled with her pocket. “Just her little sketchbook.” She handed the spiral-bound pad to Charlie. The pages were covered with pencil drawings, doodles, and half-finished renderings that were signs of some serious practice. Flipping through back to front, Charlie stopped. Looking up at her from the paper was a sweet portrait of Lizbeth, her eyes shining bright, and with a smile that couldn’t help but cause Charlie to smile herself. On the page facing it was a drawing of a young man, with those same eyes, that exact same smile.
“It’s gonna get dark out before you know it. I’m worried sick.” Lizbeth’s eyes shifted down the driveway toward the street.
“Senzey knows her way around. She’ll be fine.”
“But why wouldn’t she tell us where she was off to?”
By nightfall, Charlie, too, began to worry. Of course Senzey knew how to take care of herself, but Lizbeth was a wreck. And Charlie feared that the longer they waited, the more difficult it might be to find her. That’s when she turned to Mackenson for help. “Please ask around your neighborhood,” she told him over the phone. “Find out if anyone has seen her.”
It wasn’t until around ten o’clock that Mackenson finally called back. He’d found Senzey walking, alone, in Cité Soleil. She was in a bad way.
Charlie ignored Mackenson’s advice that she should wait until morning to come to his house. “It is not safe to be driving in this city at night,” he insisted. “Not even just for a woman alone, but for anyone.”
Once on the road, Charlie did start to have second thoughts. It was pitch dark, with no streetlights anywhere. The roads were deserted, save for the few spots where small crowds had gathered, for one reason or another. She drove slowly, leaning into the windshield, stopping frequently to check the directions Mackenson had provided along with a warning not to deviate one bit from what he told her.
Suddenly her headlights revealed a commotion in the street ahead. Charlie slowed even more as she approached, and saw that it was a policeman signaling her to keep moving. Behind him was his partner, standing over a body lying in the gutter, motionless.
She was relieved to find Mackenson waiting for her outside his house, waving her in with his lit cell phone as if she were a pilot taxiing on the tarmac. From what she could make out in the dark, most of the neighborhood leading to Mackenson’s place was one of the most desperate she’d seen all week—shacks made from cardboard and metal, homes that looked like they were constructed out of scraps from the dump. But now Charlie found herself parked in front of a tidy cinderblock house, painted a cool green that reminded her of ice-cream.
Mackenson led her through a small concrete patio, and hesitated before opening the front door. “I have to tell you something before we go in. My job was not all that we lost in the earthquake.”
It wasn’t until Charlie was introduced to Mackenson’s wife that she understood what he meant. In the darkness of the candlelit room the woman stood with her armpits resting on two crutches, her one leg planted firmly on the floor.
“This is my wife, Fabiola. Fabiola, sa a se Charlie.”
The woman leaned on one crutch and held out her hand. Charlie felt a warmth in her handshake that seemed to come from deep in her soul.
Charlie took in the room around her. The walls were bare, save for a large, mahogany cross, and a clock that seemed to have stopped doing its job long ago. A looming credenza and a solid rectangular dining table with six matching chairs were the only furniture in the room, except for a chalkboard that stood in one corner, its surface curiously covered with numbers and sums.
“Where’s Senzey?” she asked.
Mackenson pulled up a chair for Fabiola, and pointed toward one of the two sheer curtains that separated the room they were in from the rest of the small house. Charlie imagined there must be a kitchen through one of the doorways, and that the other led to a bedroom.
“She is finally resting. When I found her, it was like she was in a trance, just walking, her eyes not telling me anything. I asked her if something happened, but she wouldn’t talk. I could see that she had been crying, because her face was stained with tears and dust. I brought her here, and she still wouldn’t talk. Fabiola tried to give her some ginger tea, but she would not drink it.”
“What could have happened to her?” Charlie wondered out loud.
Mackenson shook his head. “I don’t know. Finally, Fabiola got her to lie down, to try to sleep.”
“Thank you, Mackenson,” Charlie said. “Thank you both.”
Fabiola stood at the sound of a cry from behind the curtain, and returned to the room with a skinny young girl in a nightgown trailing behind her.
“You have kids?” Charlie asked, suddenly embarrassed by how little she knew of Mackenson’s life.
“Yes. This is our daughter, Rozalie. And we are also raising the two sons of my cousin.”
Charlie’s eyes went to the chalkboard.
“I am teaching them what I can,” Mackenson said.
Charlie noted a defensiveness in his tone. How could she not have known this, with all that talk about how parents didn’t have the money for education. Never once had it occurred to her that Mackenson might be in that very situation.
“Maybe the next session,” he added. “We are trying.”
Charlie watched Mackenson take his wife’s crutches and help her settle back into the chair, where the sleepy child hung her arms around her mother’s neck and curled up onto her lap as if they were one.
“I found them.”
Charlie looked up to see Senzey standing in the doorway. Her eyes were cold, her posture limp. The striped jersey dress she’d been wearing when they left Jacmel now looked soiled, and seemed to hang on her slender frame like a sack.
Charlie went to Senzey’s side. “Who?” she asked as she led her to a chair. “Who did you find?”
“The people. The man and the woman who took my baby.”
“The baby-finders?” Mackenson asked.
Senzey’s words came out flat, as though squeezed of their feeling. “I walked all over looking for them, going first to the house where they lived in Cité Soleil, where they took me a few times. Nobody was there. Then I went to the places they used to take me. To the clinic, where they first met me outside. They were nowhere. Finally, I went back to the house, and waited in front, to see if they would come home. And they did.”
“Where is he?” Charlie asked. “Where’s Lukson?”
She watched as Senzey’s gaze turned to the sleeping girl in Fabiola’s lap. A tear began its path down her cheek as she spoke. “My baby—they told me—they think my baby did not survive.”