DOSAS

Edwidge Danticat

ELSIE WAS WITH her live-in renal failure patient when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince. Elsie had just fed Gaspard, the renal patient, when her cell phone rang. Gaspard was lying in bed, his head carefully propped on two foam pillows, his bloated and pitted, and sometimes itchy, face angled toward the gray-tinted bedroom skylight, which allowed him a slanted view of a giant coconut palm that had been leaning over the lakeside house in Gaspard’s single-family development for years.

Elsie removed the empty plate from Gaspard’s nightstand and wiped a lingering string of spinach from his chin. Waving both hands as though conducting an orchestra, Gaspard signaled to her not to leave the room, while motioning for her to carry on with her phone conversation. Quickly turning her attention from Gaspard to the phone, Elsie pressed it close to her lips and asked, “Ki lè?”

“This morning.” Sounding hoarse and exhausted, Blaise, the ex-husband, jumbled his words. His singsong tone, which Elsie often attributed to his actually being a singer, was gone. It was replaced by a nearly inaudible whisper. “She was leaving her mother’s house,” he continued. “Two men grabbed her, pushed her into a car, and drove off.”

Elsie could imagine Blaise sitting, or standing, with the phone trapped between his neck and shoulders, while he used his hands to pick at his fingernails. It was one of his many obsessions, clean fingernails. Dirty fingers drive him crazy, she’d reasoned, because Blaise had been raised by a market woman and a mechanic and had barely missed having dirty fingers all his life.

“You didn’t go with her?” Elsie asked.

“You’re right,” he answered, loudly drawing an endless breath through what Elsie knew were grinding teeth. “I should have been with her.”

Elsie’s patient’s eyes wandered down from the ceiling, where the blooming palm had sprinkled the skylight glass with a handful of tiny brown seeds. He’d been pretending not to hear, but was now looking directly at Elsie. Restlessly shifting his weight from one side of the bed to the next, he paused to catch his breath. He wanted her off the phone.

Gaspard had turned seventy that day and before his lunch had requested a bottle of champagne from his daughter, champagne which he shouldn’t be having, but for which he’d pleaded so much that the daughter had given in on the condition that he would take only a few sips after the toast. The daughter, Mona, who was a decade younger than Elsie’s thirty-five years, was visiting from New York and had gone out to procure what was surely the most expensive bottle of champagne she could find. And suddenly she was back.

“Elsie, I need you to hang up,” the daughter said in Creole as she laid out three crystal champagne flutes on a folding table by the bed.

“Call me back,” Elsie told Blaise.

After she hung up, Elsie moved closer to the sick man’s spindly daughter and watched as she gently slid a champagne flute between her father’s fingers.

“À la vie.” She chose to toast him in French. “To life,” she then added. Though there might not be much life left.

■ ■

That afternoon, Blaise called back to tell Elsie that Olivia’s mother had heard from her kidnappers. The mother had asked to speak to Olivia but her captors refused to put her on the phone.

“They want fifty thousand.” Blaise spoke in such a rapid nasal voice that Elsie had to ask him to repeat the figure.

“American dollars?” she asked, just to be sure.

She imagined him nodding by slowly moving his egg-shaped head up and down as he answered, “Wi.”

“Of course her mother doesn’t have it,” Blaise said. “These are not rich people. Everyone says we should negotiate. Can maybe get it down to ten. I could try to borrow that.”

For just a second, Elsie imagined him meaning ten dollars, which would have made things easier. Ten dollars and her old friend and rival would be free. Her ex-husband would stop calling and interrupting her at work. He, of course, meant ten thousand American dollars.

“Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” Elsie mumbled a brief prayer under her breath. “I’m sorry,” she told Blaise.

“This is hell.” He sounded almost too calm now. She wasn’t surprised because he was always subdued by worry. Weeks after he was kicked out of the popular konpa band he’d founded and had been the lead singer of, he did nothing but stay home and stare into space whenever she tried to talk to him. Then too he had been exceedingly calm.

■ ■

Elsie’s former friend Olivia was seductive. Everyone who ever met her acknowledged it. Chestnut colored, with a massive head of hair that she always wore in a gelled bun, Olivia was beautiful. But what Elsie had first noticed about her when they’d first met was her ambition. Olivia was Elsie’s age, but was a lot more outgoing and charming. She liked to touch people on either the arm, back, or shoulder while talking to them, whether they were patients, doctors, nurses, or other nurses’ aides. No one seemed to mind, though, her touch becoming something not just anticipated or welcomed but yearned for. Olivia was one of the most popular certified nurses’ aides at the agency that assigned them work. Because of her good looks and near-perfect mastery of textbook English, she often got assigned the easiest patients in the most upscale neighborhoods.

Elsie and Olivia had met at a two-week refresher course for home attendants and upon completion of the course had gravitated toward each other. Whenever possible, they’d asked their agency to assign them the same group homes, where they mostly cared for bedridden elderly patients. At night when their wards were well medicated and asleep, they’d stay up and gossip in hushed tones, judging and condemning their patients’ children and grandchildren, whose images were framed near bottles of medicine on bedside tables, but whose voices they rarely heard on the phone and whose faces they hardly ever saw in person.

■ ■

The next morning Elsie brought Gaspard his toothbrush and toothpaste and helped him change out of his pajamas into the now too-small slacks and shirt he insisted on wearing in bed during the day. Just as he had every morning for the last week or so, he reached over and ran his coarse fingertips across Elsie’s high cheekbones and whispered, “Elsie, my flower, I think I’m at the end.”

Compared to some mornings, when Gaspard would stop to rest even while gargling, he seemed rather stable. His entire body was swelling up, though, blending his features in a way that made him look less and less singular all the time. Soon, Elsie feared, his face might become like an ever darkening balloon that someone had just drawn a few translucent dots on. Much to Elsie’s and his daughter’s dismay, Gaspard was still refusing dialysis, which was the only thing that might help.

“Where’s Nana?” he asked, using his nickname for his daughter.

The daughter was still sleeping in her old bedroom, whose walls were draped from floor to ceiling with sheer white fabric that the daughter purposely opened the windows to let flow in the early morning April breeze. Elsie knew little about the daughter except that she was living in New York, where she worked for a famous beauty company, designing labels for soaps, skin creams, and lotions that filled every shelf of every cabinet of every bathroom in the house. She was unmarried and had no children and had been a beauty queen at some point, judging from the pictures around the house in which she was wearing sequined gowns and bikinis with sashes across her body. In one of those pictures, she was Miss Haiti-America, whatever that was.

Elsie had also gathered from pieces of overhead conversations that some years ago, Gaspard’s wife, his daughter’s mother, had divorced him and moved back to Haiti. (“My wife took two good kidneys with her,” she’d once heard Gaspard tell a friend on the phone.) The daughter was willing to donate one of her kidneys to him, but Gaspard refused to even consider it.

Sometimes Gaspard would also share a few things with Elsie, to explain, she suspected, why his daughter couldn’t leave the city she’d been living in since college and move back to Miami to take care of him. He would often add, when his daughter showed up on Friday nights and left on Sunday afternoons, that his daughter was living the life he and her mother had always dreamed of for their only child, a free life where she earned enough money to never want for anything from anyone.

“I don’t want you to think she’s deserting me, like a lot of people forget their old people here,” he said.

“But she’s here often enough, Mesye Gaspard,” Elsie had said. “That’s what counts.”

Aside from his daughter, he hated having visitors. He minced no words in telling the people who called him, especially the clients and other accountants he’d worked with at his tax-preparation/multiservice business, that he wanted none of them to see him the way he was.

The daughter walked to Gaspard’s room as soon as she woke up. In order to avoid tiring him, they didn’t speak much, but for the better part of the morning, she read to him from an old Haitian novel with a prescient title, L’Espace d’un cillement (In the Flicker of an Eyelid).

■ ■

Blaise called once more that afternoon as Elsie was preparing a palm hearts and avocado salad that Gaspard had especially requested. It was something his wife used to prepare for him, he said, something he now wanted to share with his daughter, who this time would be spending an entire week with him.

“I think they hurt her, Elsie,” Blaise said. His speech was garbled and slow, as though he’d just woken up from a deep sleep.

“Why do you think that?” Elsie asked. Her thumb accidentally slipped across the blade of the knife she was using to slice the palm hearts. She squeezed the edge of the wound with her teeth, the sweet taste of her own blood filling her mouth.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I can feel it. You know she won’t give in easily. She’ll fight.”

The night Olivia and Blaise met, Elsie had taken her to see Blaise’s band, Kajou, play at Dede’s Night Club in Little Haiti. The place was owned by Luca Dede, a man in his late forties but who had a teenager’s face, a Haitian of partial Ghanaian origin whose maternal line was, like Elsie’s family, from the southern town of Les Cayes. Luca Dede’s music promoter father had discovered Blaise in Port-au-Prince and had gotten him a visa to tour the United States. Blaise overstayed his visa, kept playing, and never went back to Haiti. Elsie was so used to going to Dede’s, Blaise’s most consistent gig, that she didn’t even bother dressing up that night. She chose instead to wear a buttoned-up white shirt and a pair of casual dark slacks as though she were going to an office. Hungry for a night out, Olivia wore a too-tight, sequined cocktail dress that she’d bought in a thrift shop.

“It was the most soiree thing they had,” Olivia said when Elsie met her at the entrance. “They didn’t have one, but I wanted a red dress. I wanted fire. I wanted blood.”

“You need a man,” Elsie said.

“Correct,” Olivia said, tilting her body forward on five-inch heels to plant a kiss on Elsie’s cheek. Though they’d known each other for a while, it was the first time Olivia had greeted her with a kiss, rather than one of her usual intimate-feeling touches. They were out to have fun, away from their ordinary cage of sickness and death. Perhaps Olivia was simply celebrating that.

Being with Olivia that night gained Elsie a few glances from several men, including Luca Dede. Minding the bar as usual, Dede sent winks and drinks their way until it was clear that Olivia had only a passing interest in him. While Elsie didn’t dance that night, Olivia danced with every man who trotted over to their table and held out a hand to her. Several rum punches later, Olivia even got up between sets, and on a dare from Dede, sang, in a surprisingly pitch-perfect voice, the Haitian national anthem. Olivia got a standing ovation. The crowd whistled and hooted and Elsie couldn’t help noticing that, his voice magnified by the microphone Olivia had just returned to him, her husband cheered loudest of all.

“I’ll put her in the band,” he hollered.

“Make her president,” Dede echoed from the bar.

Three years before, Elsie and Blaise had met more quietly, but also at Dede’s. She too had walked into Dede’s with a friend, an old school friend from Haiti, the head of the agency who’d helped her get her visa to the United States, mentored her through her qualifying exams, hired her, and put her up until she was able to live on her own. Her friend had since moved to Atlanta to start another business there, but introducing her to Blaise was one of the many ways she’d tried to make sure Elsie wasn’t alone.

That night Elsie had heard Blaise sing with Kajou for the first time. She was not impressed. Blaise and his band sounded like every other konpa band out there, repeating the same bubbly beats and endlessly urging everyone to raise their hands up in the air. He would later tell her that it was her look of disinterest, and even disdain, that had drawn him to her.

“You seemed like the only woman in the room I couldn’t seduce,” he said, while sliding into the empty chair next to her and ordering them rum sours after the show. He could never pass up a challenge.

■ ■

“I got a couple of loans,” Blaise announced when he called yet once again a few hours later. His voice cracked and he stuttered and Elsie wondered if he’d been crying.

“I have forty-five hundred now,” he added. “Do you think they’ll accept that?”

“Are you going to send the money just like that?” Elsie asked.

“I think I’ll bring it,” he said, sounding as though he hadn’t quite made up his mind. “I think I’ll get on the plane once I have all the money and bring it myself.”

“What if they take you too?” Elsie’s level of concern shocked even her. Selfishly, she wondered who would be called if he were kidnapped. Like her, he didn’t have any family in Miami. The closest thing he had were Dede and the bandmates, who’d parted company with him over money problems he’d refused to discuss with her. Maybe that’s why he’d left her for Olivia. Olivia would have insisted on knowing exactly what had happened with the band and why. Olivia might have tried to fix it, so he could keep playing at all cost. Olivia probably believed, just as he did, that he needed all his time for his music, that working as a parking attendant during the day was spiritually razing him.

“How do you know this isn’t some kind of plot to trick you out of your money?” Elsie asked.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “She’d never go this long without calling me.”

“You would know,” Elsie said.

It was something she’d said to him before, when she’d desperately tried to hide her jealousy with mock suspicion.

Soon after Olivia met Blaise, Olivia would also reach up to kiss his cheeks the way she had Elsie’s. At first Elsie had ignored this, however every once in a while she would bring it to their attention in a jokey way by saying something like, “Watch out, sister, that’s my man.” From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she’d learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

Whenever Blaise asked her to invite Olivia to his gigs, she always obliged because she also enjoyed Olivia’s company outside of work. And when the band broke up and he was no longer singing at Dede’s or anywhere else, the three of them would go out together to shop for groceries or see a movie, and even attend Sunday morning Mass at Notre Dame Catholic Church. They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus, child.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called before all this.” Blaise spoke now as though they were simply engaged in the dawdling pillow talk Elsie had once so enjoyed during their six-year marriage. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

“That’s how it goes with the quick divorce, non?” she said.

She was waiting for him to say something else about Olivia. He was slow at parceling out news. It had taken him months to inform her that he was leaving her for Olivia. Perhaps it would have been easier to accept had he simply blurted something out that first night he’d seen Olivia at Dede’s. Then she wouldn’t have spent so much time reviewing every moment the three of them had spent together, wondering whether they’d winked behind her back during Mass or smirked as she lay between them in the grass after their Saturday afternoon outings to watch him play soccer in the Little Haiti soccer park.

“Anything new?” she asked suddenly, wanting to shorten their talk.

“They called me directly.” She could hear him swallow hard. Her ears had grown accustomed to that kind of effortful gulp from working with Gaspard and others. “Vòlè yo.” The thieves.

“What did they sound like?” She wanted to know everything he knew so she could form a lucid image in her own mind, a shadow play identical to his.

“I think they were boys, men. I wasn’t recording,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Did you ask to speak to her?”

“They wouldn’t let me,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Do you think I’m in their heads and know what they’re thinking?”

“Did you insist?”

“Don’t you think I would?”

“I’m sure you did—”

“They’re in control, you know.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t sound like you do.”

“I do,” she conceded, “but did you tell them you wouldn’t send money unless you speak to her? Maybe they don’t have her anymore. You said it yourself. She would fight. Maybe she escaped.”

“Don’t you think I’d ask to speak to my own woman?” he shouted.

The way he spat this out irritated her. Woman? His own woman? He had never been the kind of man who called any woman his. At least not out loud. Maybe his phantom music career had secretly made him think that all women were his. He’d never yelled at her either. They had rarely fought, both of them keeping their quiet resentments, irritations, and boredom close to the chest. She now hated him for shouting. She hated them both.

“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “They didn’t speak to me for very long. They just told me to start planning her funeral if I don’t send at least ten thousand by tomorrow afternoon.”

Just then she heard Gaspard’s daughter call out from the other room. “Elsie, can you come here, please?” The daughter’s voice was laden with the permanent weariness of those who love the seriously ill.

“Please call me later,” she told Blaise and hung up.

■ ■

When Elsie got to Gaspard’s room, the daughter was sitting there with the same book on her lap. She’d once again been reading to her father when Elsie had slipped away with the intention of stacking the dishwasher with the lunch plates, but ended up answering Blaise’s call instead.

“Elsie,” the daughter said, as her father pushed his head farther back into the pillows. His fists were clenched in stoic agony, his eyes closed. His face was sweaty and he seemed to have been coughing. The daughter raised the oxygen mask over his nose and turned on the compressor, which had just been delivered that morning, and whose sound made it harder for Elsie to hear.

“Elsie, I’m sorry,” the daughter said to her in Creole. “I’m not here all the time. I don’t know how you function normally, but I’m really concerned about how much time you spend on the phone.”

Elsie didn’t want to explain why she was talking on the phone but quickly decided she had to. Not only because she thought the daughter was right, that Gaspard deserved more of her attention, but also because she had no one else to turn to for advice. Her friend in Atlanta had tried to stay out of her separation and divorce, and, perhaps seduced by Olivia, had stopped returning her calls. And so she told Gaspard and his daughter why she had been taking these calls and why the calls were so frequent, except she modified a few crucial details. Because she was still embarrassed by the actual facts, she told them Olivia was her sister and Blaise her brother-in-law.

“I’m very sorry, Elsie.” The daughter immediately softened. Gaspard opened his eyes and held out his hand toward Elsie. Elsie grabbed his fingers the way she did sometimes to help him rise to his feet.

“Do you want to go home?” Gaspard asked in an increasingly raspy voice. “We can get the agency to send someone else.”

“I’m not in her head, Papa,” the daughter said, sounding much younger when she spoke in Creole than she did in English, “but I think working is best. Paying off these types of ransoms can ruin a person financially.”

“It’s better not to wait.” Gaspard said, still trying to catch his breath. “The less time your sister spends with these malfetè, the better off she’ll be.”

Gaspard turned his face toward his daughter for final approval and the daughter yielded and nodded in agreement.

“If you want to save your sister,” Gaspard said with an even more winded voice now, “you may have to give in.”

■ ■

“I have five thousand in the bank,” Elsie told Blaise when he called again that afternoon. She actually had sixty-seven hundred, but she couldn’t part with all her savings at once, in case another type of emergency came up in either Haiti or Miami. Somehow she felt he already knew about the five thousand, though. It was roughly the same amount she’d had saved when they’d been together. She’d hoped to double her savings but had been unable to after moving to a one-bedroom efficiency in North Miami, plus sending a monthly allowance to her parents, and paying school fees for her younger sister in Les Cayes. This is what Blaise had been trying to tell her all along. He desperately needed that money to save Olivia’s life.

■ ■

Sometimes Elsie was sure she could make out the approximate time Olivia and Blaise began seeing each other without her. Olivia started pairing up with someone else for the group home jobs and turned Elsie down when she asked her to join the usual outings with Elsie and Blaise.

The night Blaise left their apartment for good, Olivia sat outside Elsie’s first-floor window, in the front passenger seat of Blaise’s red four-door pickup, which he often used to carry speakers and instruments to his gigs. The pickup was parked under a streetlamp, and for most of the time that Elsie was staring through a crack in her drawn bedroom shades, Olivia’s disk-shaped face was flooded in a harsh bright light. At some point Olivia got out of the car then disappeared behind it and Elsie suspected that she’d crouched down in the shadows to pee before getting back in the front passenger seat, what Elsie had always called the “wife seat” during a few of their previous outings when Olivia would sit in the back. Only when the pickup, packed with Blaise’s belongings, was pulling away did Olivia finally look over at the apartment window, where Elsie quickly sank into the darkness. Sitting on the floor of her nearly empty apartment, Elsie realized she had to move. She couldn’t stay there anymore.

■ ■

The next evening Gaspard fell out of bed while reaching over to his bedside table for the book his daughter had been reading to him. Elsie heard the thump from her bedroom, and by the time she dashed down the hall, his daughter was already there, her bottom spiked up in the air, her face pressed against her father’s. With one arm under her father’s bulbous legs and the other wrapped around his back, she dragged him off the floor and raised him onto the edge of the bed.

Elsie paused in the doorway to watch the daughter lower her father into bed as though he were an oversized child. Raising a comforter over his chest, she gently kissed her father’s forehead. They were both panting as their faces came apart, the daughter from the effort of carrying the father and the father from having been carried.

Suddenly their panting turned into loud chuckles.

“There are many falls before the big one,” he said.

“Thank God you got that good carpet,” she said.

Then, her face growing somber again, the daughter said, “How can I leave you, Papa?”

“You can,” he said, “and you will. You have your life and I have what’s left of mine. I want you to always do what you want. I don’t want you to have any regrets.”

“You need dialysis,” she pleaded. “Why don’t you accept it?”

The daughter reached over and grabbed a glass of water from the side table. She held the back of her father’s head as he took a few sips. Elsie rushed over and took the glass from her as she lowered her father’s head back onto the pillow. The daughter nearly pierced her lips with her teeth while trying to keep tears from slipping down her face.

“I know you’re having your family problem, Elsie,” the daughter said, straining not to raise her voice, “but why did it take you so long to get here after my father fell out of his bed? I think Papa’s right. I’m going to call the agency to ask for someone else.”

Elsie wanted to plead to stay. She liked Gaspard and didn’t want him to have to break in someone new. Besides, after wiring that money to Blaise for Olivia’s ransom—he had specially asked that she wire it rather than bring it to him—she now desperately needed the work. However, if they wanted her to leave, she would. She only hoped her dismissal wouldn’t cost her other jobs.

“I’ll wrap things up,” she told them, “until you get someone else.”

■ ■

One night after Elsie and Olivia heard Blaise play at an outdoor festival at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami, they were walking toward the part of the parking lot that was reserved for the performers when Olivia announced that she was going to find a man to move back with her to Haiti.

“Do you have to love him or can it be just anyone?” Elsie had asked.

Mildly drunk from a whole afternoon of beer sipping, Olivia had mumbled, “Anyone.”

“How can you live without love?” Blaise had said, waxing lyrical in a way Elsie had never heard before, except when he was onstage and chatting up the women who came to hear his band with his idea of public come-ons. (“You’re looking like a piña colada, baby. Can I have a sip?”) Corny, harmless stuff that Elsie was accustomed to.

“I can live without love,” Olivia had said, “but I can’t leave without money and I can’t live without my country. I’m tired of being in this country. This country makes us mean.”

Elsie guessed at that moment that Olivia was still thinking about one of their patients’ sons from the day before, a middle-aged white man, a loan officer at a bank. In their presence, as they were changing shifts, the man, obviously drunk, had turned over his senile father and slapped the old man’s wrinkly bottom with his palm several times.

“See how you like it now,” he’d said.

Calling the agency that had hired them, then the Department of Social Services, over a mistreated patient yet again, Olivia had barely been able to find the words.

The night of the concert, to distract Olivia from her thoughts of abused patients, and to distract each other from thoughts of losing Olivia, the three of them had returned to Blaise and Elsie’s apartment and had wiped off an entire bottle of five-star Rhum Barbancourt. Sometime in the early-morning hours, without anyone’s request or guidance, they had fallen into bed together, exchanging jumbled words, lingering kisses, and caresses, whose sources they weren’t interested in keeping track of. That night, they were no longer sure what to call themselves. What were they exactly? A triad. A ménage à trois. No. Dosas. They were dosas. All three of them untwinned, lonely, alone together.

When they woke up Olivia was gone.

■ ■

Blaise called again early the next morning. Elsie was still in bed but was preparing to leave Gaspard for good. Gaspard and his daughter were still asleep and, aside from the hum of Gaspard’s oxygen compressor, the house was quiet.

“I shouldn’t have let her go,” Blaise whispered before Elsie could say hello.

When Blaise was with the band, he would sometimes go days without sleep in order to rehearse around the clock. By the time his gig would come around, he’d be so hyper that his voice would sound mechanical, as though all emotion had been purged out of it. He sounded that way now as Elsie tried to keep up.

“We weren’t getting along anymore,” he said. “We were going to break up. That’s why she just picked up and left.”

A light came on down the hall, in the room where Gaspard’s daughter was sleeping. Elsie heard a door creak open then the shuffling of feet. A shadow approached. The daughter slid Elsie’s door open an even larger crack and peeked in, rubbing a clenched fist against her eyes to fully rouse herself.

“Is everything all right?” she asked Elsie.

Elsie nodded.

“I wish I’d begged her not to go,” Blaise was saying.

The daughter pulled Elsie’s door shut behind her and continued toward her father’s room down the hall.

“What happened?” Elsie asked. “You sent the money, didn’t you? They released her?”

The phone line crackled and Elsie heard several bumps. Was Blaise stomping his feet? Banging his head against a wall? Pounding the phone into his forehead?

“Where is she?” Elsie tried to moderate her voice.

“We had a fight,” he said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone. We had a spat and she left.”

The daughter opened Elsie’s door and once again pushed her head in.

“Elsie, my father would like to see you when you’re done,” she said, before pulling the door behind her once more.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Elsie said. “My boss needs me. But first tell me she’s okay.”

She didn’t want to hear whatever else was coming, but she couldn’t hang up.

“We paid the ransom,” he said, now rushing to get his words out before she could hang up. “But they didn’t release her. She’s dead.”

Elsie walked back to the bed she’d called hers for the last few months and sat down. This was the longest she’d ever been at any single job. For a while she had allowed herself to forget that this bed with its foamy mattress, which was supposed to use numbers to remember the shape of your body, was not really hers. Taking a deep breath, she moved the phone away from her face and let it rest on her lap.

“Are you there?” Blaise was shouting now. “Can you hear me?”

“Where was she found?” Elsie raised the phone back to her ear.

“She was dumped in front of her mother’s house,” Blaise shrieked like a wounded animal. “In the middle of the night.”

Elsie ran her fingers across her cheeks where, the night they’d fallen in bed together, Blaise had kissed her for the last time. That night, it was hard for Elsie to differentiate Olivia’s hands from Blaise’s on her naked body. But in her drunken haze, it felt perfectly normal, like they’d all needed one another too much to restrain themselves. Now the tears were catching her off guard, coming much quicker than she’d expected. She lowered her head and buried her eyes in the crook of her elbow.

“You won’t believe it,” Blaise said, frantically gargling the words as they came through.

“What?” Elsie said, wishing, not for the first time since he and Olivia had not stopped talking to her, that the three of them were once again drunk and in bed together.

“Her mother says that before she left the house, Olivia wrote her name at the bottom of her feet.”

Elsie could imagine Olivia, her conked, plastered hair wild as it had been that night with the three of them, and wild again as she pulled her feet toward her face and, with a marker that she’d probably brought all the way from Miami just for that purpose, scribbled her name on the soles of her feet. Knowing Olivia, she’d probably seen this as the only precaution against the loss of identity that might possibly follow her being beheaded.

“They didn’t, did they?” Elsie asked.

“No,” Blaise said. “Her mother says her face, her entire body, was intact.”

He put some emphasis on “her entire body,” Elsie realized, because he wanted to signal to her that Olivia had also not been raped. Elsie let out a sigh of relief for both, a sigh so loud that Blaise followed with one of his own. “Her mother’s going to bury her in her family’s mausoleum, in their village out north,” he added.

“Are you going?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Would you?”

She didn’t let him finish. Of course she wouldn’t go. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She had already booked a flight to go to Les Cayes in a few months to visit her family during their town’s annual celebration for its patron saint, Saint Sauveur, and she’d need to bring her family not just money but all the extra things they’d asked for, a small fridge and oven for her parents and a laptop computer for her sister.

Just then his line beeped twice, startling her.

“It’s Haiti,” he said. “I have to go.”

He hung up just as abruptly as he had reentered her life.

“Elsie, are you all right?” Gaspard was standing in the doorway. Short of breath, he spread out his arms and grabbed both sides of the door frame. His daughter was standing behind him with a portable oxygen tank.

Elsie wasn’t sure how long they’d both been standing there, but whatever sounds she’d been unconsciously making, whatever moans, growls, whimpers, and squeals had escaped out of her mouth, had brought them there. She moved toward them, tightening her robe belt around her waist. Grunting, Gaspard looked past her, his eyes wandering around the room, taking in the platform bed and companion dresser.

“Elsie, my daughter seems to think she heard you crying.” Gaspard’s blood-drained lips were trembling as though he were cold, yet he still appeared more concerned about her than about himself when he asked, “Is your sister all right?”

Gaspard’s body swayed toward his daughter. The daughter reached for him, anchoring him with one hand while balancing the portable oxygen tank with the other. With a fearful glance at Gaspard’s shadow swaying unsteadily on the ground, Elsie rushed forward and grabbed him before saying, “Please reconsider your decision to release me, Mesye Gaspard. I won’t be getting these phone calls anymore.”

■ ■

She was right. He never called her again.

A week later, after Gaspard had ceded to his daughter’s pleas and agreed not just to dialysis but to have his name placed on a transplant list, Elsie had a weekend off while Gaspard was hospitalized, and with nothing else to do, she stopped by Dede’s on Saturday night, hoping Blaise might be there after returning from Haiti.

It was still early so the place was nearly empty, except for some area college kids whom Dede allowed to buy drinks without ID. Dede was behind the bar. Elsie walked over and sat across from him as a waitress shouted a few orders at him.

“How you holding up?” Dede asked after the waitress walked away with the drinks.

“Working hard,” she said, “to get by.”

“Still with the old people?” he asked.

“They’re not always old now,” she said. “Sometimes they’re young people who’ve been in car accidents or have cancer.”

Eventually they got to Blaise.

After she and Blaise had met at Dede’s, she kept coming back to the bar with him whenever she was free and he was playing there. He then asked if he could move into her apartment so they could save money and see more of each other, since she was working so much. She found out that his tourist visa had expired long ago, and even though she’d just gotten her green card and wouldn’t be eligible for citizenship for another five years, they went to city hall and got married with the hope that one day she might be able to help him with his immigration status. After the three-minute city hall ceremony, at which Dede and the friend who had introduced her to Blaise were witnesses, Dede hosted a small wedding lunch for them at the bar. Elsie’s parents, who, just like Blaise’s, were also still living in Haiti, had been unable to attend.

“I always thought you should have married me.” Dede now reached across the bar and playfully stroked Elsie’s shoulder. He had never been married and, according to Blaise, he never intended to.

“You didn’t ask then and you’re not asking now,” she said.

“Maybe I’m asking for something else.” He moved his fingers under her white oversized collarless blouse, across her clavicle down to the top button, and let his hand linger there for a few seconds. In his steadfast and unyielding gaze seemed to be some possibility of relief, or a few hours of sweaty comfort masked as excitement, like the kind she’d initially been seeking with Blaise. As pathetic as it seemed now, she loved Blaise most when he was onstage. She was seduced by something she didn’t even think he was good at. His devotion to his mediocre gifts had melted her heart. Watching other women pine over his singing excited her too. She was jealous of their ability to fantasize about him, imagining that life with him would be one never-ending songfest. But every once in a while it went beyond that, during ordinary moments like when she watched him cook a salty omelet filled with smoked herring, which he would bring to her at the breakfast nook where they ate all their meals. This is when they would talk about one day having a baby.

She’d promised him that they would have a child after they’d saved enough money to move into a white single-family house she’d seen for sale in North Miami. She had driven by the house dozens of times, imagining the two of them and their future children living there. She knew the address so well that she could recite it to herself, even in her sleep, like a prayer. A For Sale sign had been dangling in front of the house for so long that she believed the house was destined for them, that no one else would be able to buy it before they could. She learned from looking it up on one of the computers at the public library that the house was 1,847 square feet with three large bedrooms and two full baths. It also had a stand-alone efficiency with a separate entrance in the back. They could rent out the efficiency, she told him, to help pay for their mortgage.

“Have you heard from him?” Dede now asked her, as she slowly removed his hand from inside her blouse.

“Not in a while,” she said.

“I hear he’s in Haiti for good now,” Dede said, winking after her rejection had sunken in. He reached over and grabbed a few glasses from under the bar and started wiping the insides with a small white towel. And maybe this was his revenge, or maybe he had been waiting to tell her, but between putting one glass down and picking up another, he said, “He’s living in Haiti with his old band’s money and a lot of cash from some kidnapping scam he and your friend Olivia came up with together. I promise you I have people on this. If they ever see them, they’re going to pay.”

If this were happening to someone else, she would wonder why that person didn’t grab Dede’s neck and demand more details, why that person didn’t pound her breasts with her fist, tear off her clothes, and thrash around on the floor. But she did none of those things. It was as if suddenly some shred of doubt, which had been plaguing her, some small suspicion she’d harbored for days, were finally being confirmed.

“So she’s alive?” she asked.

“Oh, he told you she was dead?” Dede said, putting down the glass he was holding.

“She’s not dead?” she asked again, just to be sure.

“They took turns, I suppose,” he said. “She called to tell me he was kidnapped, then she told me he was dead, until I heard different.”

She grasped for a few more words but could find none. How could she have let herself be fooled, robbed, so easily? How could she have been so naïve, so stupid? Maybe it had something to do with Gaspard being so sick that week, with the possibility of his dying and his daughter being there to see it happen. She had been distracted.

Blaise and Olivia must have trained or practiced for weeks, to take more and more away from her, to strip her of both her money and her dignity. They also must have been convincing to the point that no one could even doubt them. They had fooled Dede too.

“I guess we’re both Boukis,” she finally said. “Imbeciles.”

“Suckers, idiots,” he added, wiping the insides of the glasses harder. “I’d understand if they were starving and couldn’t make money any other way, but they decided to become criminals so they can go back to Haiti and live the good life.”

“It’s not right,” she said, though nothing felt right anymore.

They were interrupted by some drink orders from another waitress. Dede worked silently filling the orders, then, when he was done, he said, “I promise you. They’re not going to enjoy all the money they stole from me.”

“You’re going to have them killed?” she asked.

“Maybe not killed.” He seemed surprised at how casually she uttered the words.

“Would you hurt them?” She heard the pleading tone in her voice, as though she were begging for their execution.

“You should want them dead,” he reassured her. “At least he didn’t marry me.”

“She might have married you,” Elsie said.

“Clearly I wasn’t her type. Wasn’t enough for her. Your husband was.”

She was asking herself now why he had married her. There were other women with a lot more money than she had, women who could have gotten him his papers faster. Maybe he was hoping she would commit a crime, steal one of her richer patients’ life savings for him. She was glad Gaspard’s daughter was there that week, otherwise Blaise might have possibly talked her into stealing from him, or even killing him. Who knows?

“What would you do if you went to Haiti and found them?” she asked, while considering the possibility herself.

“I’d give them a chance to pay me back first.” He grabbed a bottle of rum from the mirrored table behind him and pushed one of the glasses he’d been cleaning toward her. She demurred at first, waving it away, but then she realized that she wanted to keep talking to him. She also wanted to keep talking about Olivia and Blaise, and he was the only person she could talk to about them now.

“What would you do to her first?” he asked her.

“I’d shave her head,” she said, without even giving it much thought. “I’d shave off that head of hair she gelled so much.”

“That’s all?” he asked, laughing.

After taking a gulp of the rum, she said, “That’s not all. After shaving her head and cutting off all his fingers, I’d pound both their heads with a very big rock until their brains were liquid, like this drink now in my hand.”

“Wouy! That’s too much,” he said, pouring himself a glass. “I never want you mad at me.”

“What would you do?” she asked him.

“The stuff they do to the terrorists. The stuff with water I saw in a movie the other night. I’d wrap their heads with a sugar sack and pour water in their noses and make them think they’re drowning. And I wouldn’t do that to just them. I’d get all the other thieves who steal from people like us—”

“The Boukis. The naïve people.”

“Again, I’d understand if he was broke or she was starving,” he said.

“The more money they have, the greedier they are,” she said, feeling herself drifting away from Blaise and Olivia and slipping into some larger discussion about thieving and justice that she didn’t have the energy to pursue.

“Your revenge would be better than mine,” she said, circling back to Olivia and Blaise. “Those two would suffer a lot more with you.”

It was also not the first time he had been burned. Once, a seemingly-pregnant woman walked into the bar in the middle of the afternoon. She pretended to suddenly go into labor, and while he was looking for his cell phone to call an ambulance, she pulled out a gun and forced him to empty the cash register. He was bringing up that robbery now, saying he preferred that, being confronted face-to-face, to being robbed behind his back.

“This situation is not ending the same way,” he said, his voice growing louder and the pace at which he was speaking becoming faster. “I’m not turning this one over to the police to just drop. And what police? The Haitian police?”

She was thinking about going to a police station near her house and filing a report, in case Blaise and Olivia ever decided to move back to Miami. But how embarrassing would that be? She imagined the police calling her stupid or even lovestruck. They might even laugh behind her back. She had willingly given that money to Blaise anyway. She didn’t think it would do her much good either.

“That’s why I’m having them caught myself,” Dede was saying. “For you, for me, and for everyone else they did this to. Even if it’s the last thing I do before I die. Believe me, you’re going to start dreaming about killing them more and more from now on.”

She hoped not. She would rather think ahead, though she wasn’t sure anymore what lay ahead. She was glad Gaspard was still alive, that he had not died in her care. She wanted to keep moving, keep working. Alive or dead, neither Blaise nor Olivia was going to be part of her life anymore.

The details. They’d been so good at the details. Whose idea had it been, for example, to tell her that Olivia had written her name, like a tattoo, at the bottom of her feet? They might have also told her that Olivia had drawn a cross there too, as a symbol that she wanted a Christian burial. That last call, she realized, was to make sure she wasn’t coming to the supposed funeral.

Dede poured her another glass of rum. Then another. And even as the news of Olivia being alive slowly began to sink in, she was surprised that a kind of grief she hadn’t lingered on was now actually lifting, that a distant ache in her heart was slowly turning to relief. She wanted to fight that relief. She did not want to welcome, embrace, the slight reprieve she’d felt she’d been given in learning that someone she believed to be dead was now alive, as though Olivia had been resurrected after a week under the ground.

She now felt tears flowing down her face, tears she couldn’t stop. She didn’t want them to be tears of joy, but a few of them were. The country seemed a bit less scary now. Her parents and sister, whom she’d gone back to speaking to more regularly, seemed like they might be in less danger, say, from being kidnapped. Yet the tears kept flowing. Tears of anger too. Of being robbed of money that took years to save, of seeing her dream of owning the white house in North Miami disappear along with the children that, thankfully, they’d never have. She felt even more alone now than before she’d met either Blaise or Olivia, lonelier than when she’d just arrived in this country having only one friend.

Dede kept his eyes on her, but they were now filled with more concern than lust. Her tears were becoming moans then grunts, then, before she could fight her screams, a new revenge fantasy emerged. She was now wishing that her voice alone could destroy Dede’s place, that it could smash the glass bottles and turn them into shards. Her screech, her bawl, which was coming from so deep inside that she felt as though it were raising her off the ground, would help her float above Dede’s head, above the permanent drunks in the booths, and the college students, and the empty stage that Blaise had so often sung on, all of it shattering so fast and blending into the air so quickly that she could easily inhale it and bury it inside her body.

“I’ll take you home,” she heard Dede say, and the next thing she knew she was curled up in a ball in the backseat of his car, the same old black Mercedes he’d had for years, and which she thought was no longer working until he was heading down what, between opening and closing her eyes, she recognized as North Miami Avenue. He had somehow managed to obtain her address from her, or maybe, she thought, smiling, he had known it all along.

“You’re living in North Miami now?” she heard him say.

She was talking to him in her head, but no words came out of her mouth, which felt like it was full of vomit. Yes, she was living in North Miami, in the house of her dreams, but not in the way she’d intended. Soon after Blaise moved out, she’d driven by the house, and, unlike every other night she’d stopped by, there were lights on. Replacing the For Sale sign was now a rental sign for the one-room efficiency in the back. She saw this as a kind of miracle, a sign that she was truly meant to live there.

The new owners were young doctors from Jamaica and they told her they were happy to have her. Having her own separate entrance made it easy for her to make herself scarce. They often left her notes inviting her to dinner at the main house, but she was always working and was barely around. She sensed that they were being friendly because they felt sorry for her since she seemed to have no one. She was resisting becoming friends with them. She no longer wanted to make friends.

When they reached the house, she handed Dede the keys and he somehow managed to open the door and hold her upright at the same time. She felt him cradle her as she stumbled to the bathroom and emptied out her stomach in the toilet. When he carried her to the twin bed across from the door, she felt as though she were flying, not the good kind of flight, but the kind where you’re tumbling through the air and terrified of crashing.

On the bed, she felt herself slipping in and out, between half consciousness and a deep darkness in which Olivia and Blaise were waiting, like they had been waiting the night they’d all slept together. That night she had performed acts and said things she could no longer remember in detail. Maybe in the throes of passion she had even given them permission to be together. Maybe that’s why they’d both abandoned her.

She kept opening her eyes to fight this image of the three of them, but particularly of her telling them to go off and be together, to go live out their love, because it was obviously what the two of them wanted. She was now the dosa, the surplus one.

She felt a damp washcloth land gently on her forehead. Dede had made her a compress and was whispering comforting words in the air above her head. She could not make out most of the words, but after a long pause she heard him say, “You’re home now.”

She nodded in agreement.

“Yes, I’m home,” she managed to say.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

Having him stay would calm her down, even if he just sat on the floor across the room and watched her sleep. But then she would still wake up in the morning feeling alone with her own losses and pain.

“You can go,” she said, feeling a bit more confident now in her ability to speak.

“You sure?” he asked, while stroking her cheeks with his index finger. His finger, wet and slow, felt as though it were carving a warm stream into her skin, a stream that was soaking up her whole body.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“I wish I’d met you first,” he said, widening the circle he was now drawing with his finger on her face. “I wish I’d seen you first. I wish I’d known you first. I wish I’d loved you first.”

“You sound like one of his stupid songs.” She stuttered through the words, not sure whether he would find them funny or insulting.

“Those songs were stupid.” He chuckled, raising his hands over his mouth as if to suppress a deeper laugh. “The man was ruining a treasured kind of music and he didn’t even realize it. Or he didn’t care.”

“Why did you tolerate him?” she asked.

“Why did you?” he countered.

“He had his charms,” she said, and he did. One of them was how he became very conversational before sex. Talking was his foreplay. He would ask her to recount her day to him. He would want to hear all about her patients, her thoughts, her dreams, as if to help him expand, or reinvent, the person he was about to make love to.

“I tolerated him because he was my friend,” he said. “Because he was like a brother to me.”

“You’re sounding like one of his songs again,” she said.

“Maybe not all his songs were stupid,” he said. “Only people you care about can hurt you like he did.”

“Only people you love,” she said.

She didn’t realize that she had this many words left in her, and for Dede of all people. He was the one dragging these words out of her. He was making her speak. He was making her want to speak.

“That will never happen to me again,” she said.

“Maybe it won’t be him, but as long as you’re breathing you can be hurt.”

“Now you’re just saying anything to say something,” she said.

“Isn’t that what we’ve both been doing?”

“Go,” she said.

He raised the washcloth and kissed her wet forehead then put the washcloth back in place.

“I need to close up the bar anyway,” he said. “But I have to tell you this one more thing and I hope you don’t take it badly.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I didn’t know you were such a weakling with the rum.”

He laughed, this time loud and deep, and his laughter was not just keeping her from crashing but exuberantly filling the inside of her hollow-feeling head. She tried to laugh too, but wasn’t sure she was doing it. Instead, she started unbuttoning her blouse.

“I’m not usually this weak,” she said.

“Just tonight?” he asked.

“Just tonight.”

She surrendered.