Safekeeping Read online

  “I cannot cross the border with you,” Julian says. “My papers are not in order.”

  I smile as we walk through the gritty streets of Newport with Romulus poking his nose out of Julian’s backpack. “I’ll get you over.”

  I am a different person now, walking along Lake Road into winter instead of spring, and this time I have Julian at my side, not Celia.

  Soon I will have them both.

  The schoolhouse rests in the russet palm of November, tiny, defenseless in the big forest. Celia and Jerry Lee sit on the step, sharing an apple. Celia’s head is tipped to one side, her eyes half closed. Her wild hair has grown long enough to tuck behind an ear, though it’s too stubborn to remain there. She is wearing a heavy coat but the roundness of her belly draws my eyes instantly.

  “I’ve been waiting,” she says softly.

  Jerry Lee gives one of his doggy chortles and bounds down the steps to greet us.

  * * *

  Later, Julian and Celia, Jerry Lee, Romulus and I sit in Our Lady’s barn, quietly waiting.

  A stooped woman enters. She goes about her chores. When she is finished, she hobbles over to us.

  It is the first time she and I have met face-to-face. Her skin is deeply lined, like a worn road map. She extends her hand to me. “I am Madame Seville.”

  Shaking hands with her is not enough. I extend my arms and she allows me to draw her into a hug, to hold her close. Her bones feel old and fragile beneath her coat. She smells of roasted hazelnuts.

  Finally, Madame Seville speaks. “Celia prefers to pass her time at the schoolhouse but it is too cold to remain there any longer. Come. Please. You must all stay with me.”

  Between Celia and Julian there is an immediate connection. We spend day and night together but it is often Julian and Celia side by side, with me two steps behind. They walk together, exploring the countryside the way Celia would never do with me. Their heads bend toward each other. They are always talking.

  After a few days Julian begins to tell Celia about Burundi. She listens quietly beside him and I feel like the extra beat in a rhyme, the one that doesn’t belong.

  I expect to chafe with jealousy.

  But if there is any, it’s unable to take root.

  How remarkably fast our friendships shift and form and reform.

  I cannot get enough of Madame Seville.

  Julian and Celia cannot get enough of each other.

  I wonder if, so many months ago, Celia recognized something she needed when she first found my mother’s photograph of Julian and asked, guardedly, if he was my boyfriend.

  The love growing between them makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. It’s as if they own all the air in the room.

  They move back into the schoolhouse together, fixing it inside and out, installing what is necessary for comfort.

  I remain in the farmhouse with Madame Seville. And slowly we begin talking, of everything, of my parents, and Haiti, and my summer with Celia. She speaks of her deceased son and husband, and the journey of her life.

  Julian and Celia work together to repair the leaks, restore the floor I ripped out for the chickens. They install a stove, donated by one of Madame Seville’s neighbors. And a privy.

  Through the winter, as Celia’s belly grows, as Julian and Celia make a nest for themselves out in the woods, I sleep across the hall from Madame. She teaches me to roast meat and bake bread, to sew curtains and make clothes.

  We never use English when we’re alone together. My French improves daily.

  With a poker face, Madame instructs me in the proper way to tend chickens.

  “Most farmers,” she informs me, “do not hold their birds in their laps.”

  At first I think she is cross. That I have ruined Wynonna and Ashley.

  And then I see the smile remake the folds of her face.

  When my mother invited me into her kitchen I had no interest. Now, each day, I absorb everything Madame Seville does and says. She talks about her life on this farm, first with her parents, then with her husband and child, and now alone. We are making soup and baking bread. The day has been storm-gray with spasms of snow and a cold wind blowing. But now, as the afternoon wanes, the sun appears low in the sky, reaching across the worn kitchen floorboards.

  I worry that we are too great an imposition on Madame Seville’s solitude and her generosity.

  “Thank you,” I say again for the hundredth time. “Thank you for all you did for us this summer. Thank you for all you are doing now.”

  Madame Seville nods. “But you must stop thanking me, Radley. I did not take good care of you. I did not know there was Celia. I thought there was only you. I never left enough. I should have talked with you. I should have asked.”

  “It was enough, Madame. You kept us both alive. But I am worried. Are we asking too much of you now? And will it be too great a burden, all the extra work when the baby comes?”

  Madame Seville frowns. “Celia will hardly need my help when the baby comes. She has you and Julian.”

  “It’s just, Madame, that I don’t think Celia knows how to be a mother…”

  “Isn’t that what you taught her, Radley?”

  I stop stirring the soup and turn to her.

  Madame Seville smiles. “You saw her through a terrible time. You were patient with her when you wished to walk away. You made her feel safe and cared for. She will be a good mother, because of you.”

  Madame Seville removes the bread from the oven. The smell of it makes me remember the first loaf she ever left for us, how completely that bread chased away our hunger and our despair.

  And my mind turns to the orphans of Paradis des Enfants. I imagine baking bread for them, serving it warm from the oven.

  Madame Seville’s milky eyes drift over me like pale silk.

  “I have so many regrets, Madame.” I turn back to the soup pot and let the steam shroud my face.

  “Radley,” Madame Seville says as she taps the bread out onto a wire rack. “As long as you live, it is never too late to make amends. Take my advice, child. Don’t waste your precious life with regrets and sorrow. Find a way to make right what was wrong, and then move on.”

  “But how do you make amends to the dead?”

  “You are thinking of your parents.”

  I nod. And Chloe.

  “Radley, you are so young. You have so much yet to learn, about yourself, about the world. The way you live your life now, that is how you make amends to those you have lost, that is how you honor them.”

  I stand over the soup and let her words move through me.

  “Now, my young friend, go to the schoolhouse and fetch those two lovebirds and that clever cat and that saintly dog and tell them that dinner is ready.”

  And I do as she says.

  Celia goes into labor one bitter morning in early February. Madame Seville and I have prepared a birthing room at the farmhouse, but Celia decides instead to have her baby in the little school, in the freshly painted back room that once had been Wynonna and Ashley’s chicken yard.

  Madame Seville and I know something is up when we find Jerry Lee at the farmhouse door, whining. I let him in and he runs up the stairs and hides under Madame Seville’s bed.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  Madame Seville looks directly at me. “I think the baby is coming.”

  I throw on my coat and boots. Madame Seville hands me a doctor’s bag filled with fresh towels and clamps, a sterile needle and surgical thread. I carry this assortment of birthing tools and together we follow the path to the schoolhouse.

  Celia is unrecognizable. Her skin goes from deathly pale to an alarming purple depending on the state of her uterus. Her eyes glare through the agony of a contraction, then go dull and lifeless when the pain subsides. She’s been laboring hard for about five hours Julian tells us when we arrive. Stubborn as ever, she suffers without complaint, unwilling to admit any weakness. But her desperation fills every inch of the little room, and I feel helpless to c
omfort her.

  Do all women go through this to give birth? Did my mother go through this?

  After an hour of relentless contractions, we see the head of the baby crowning, and then all in a rush she’s here, in this world, screaming, turning a beautiful shade of pink. And Celia, who has been grimly silent through the entire ordeal, is suddenly laughing and crying as Julian holds this new life so tenderly that I know it doesn’t matter about the biological father. Julian instantly accepts this baby as his own.

  When it is my turn to hold her, Celia says, “Her name is Abigail.” Holding the baby in my arms forces me to remain steady but I look searchingly into Celia’s face and wonder why she chose that name. But when I ask, Celia, exhausted, just shrugs.

  After a few hours, Madame Seville goes back home but I remain a little longer.

  Jerry Lee returns on his own in the late afternoon. Abigail is nursing and Jerry Lee puts his head on Celia’s knee to watch. Earnestly, he inhales the scent of this beautiful new creature in Celia’s arms. It takes him less than a minute to fall completely under Abigail’s spell.

  That night, leaving Julian and Celia and Abigail back at the schoolhouse, I curl up in my bed across the hall from Madame Seville and wonder what I would have done if I had had a child through all that has happened this past year. How would I have managed with a fragile, completely helpless infant like Abigail to keep safe?

  Over the next few days, holding the baby, walking the floor with her, my thoughts return more and more to Haiti. Who is holding those children? Who is keeping them safe?

  It is only now, because of Abby, that I finally realize what I need to do.

  “Madame,” I say. She is knitting a sweater for Abby. Watching her with the yarn, with the needles, I feel such a stab of sorrow, remembering my mom doing the same.

  Madame Seville looks up, never missing a stitch.

  “Madame,” I say. “I’m thinking of going back to Haiti.”

  Madame Seville smiles. “Of course,” she says. “Of course you must go.”

  She urges me to write to Monsieur Bellamy, to ask about the possibility of my returning.

  * * *

  Julian and Jerry Lee bring Abigail over the path from the schoolhouse for a visit each day. They arrive at our door with Abby’s little face rosy from the chill air. But when I touch her tiny hands and feet they’re as soft and warm as a fleecy pocket.

  At the end of each day Madame Seville nods off in her chair, Romulus purring contentedly in her lap.

  I remember my mother telling stories of how I would fall asleep over my dinner and she would lift me from my high chair, carry me upstairs to my crib.

  I listen gratefully to the quiet, steady breath through Madame Seville’s lips as she rests. She is yet one more person for whom my heart has expanded.

  Celia, Julian, that beautiful miracle of a baby, and Madame Seville.

  * * *

  Celia and I pin up freshly washed sheets while Madame pegs diapers onto the clothesline. Sun shines through the fresh cotton weave.

  Romulus and Jerry Lee nap together in a pool of April warmth beside Abigail’s basket.

  “Am I doing the right thing, going back to Haiti?” I ask. “Who else knows to carry Abigail like a little football when she has colic?”

  “Well, we know now,” Celia says.

  “Abigail will have three of us to see to her every need, Radley,” says Madame. “At the orphanage there are so many children and so few arms to hold them.”

  I remember thinking that same thing long ago, exactly that.

  Back then the needs of the orphans overwhelmed me.

  Their needs haven’t changed during my absence, not judging by the enthusiastic response of Monsieur Bellamy to my letter.

  It is I who have changed.

  Canada has been very good about my status. And Celia’s. And Julian’s, too. They’ve forgiven our illegal entry. It is as if Canada is making an extra effort to model civil and humane behavior in contrast to the dismal example set by their neighbor to the south.

  Abigail, born here, is Canadian.

  Though I’ve yet to see a penny, the U.S.government has promised to restore to me all of the funds taken from my parents’ accounts.

  I’ll have enough to help Celia and Julian and Madame Seville.

  And still enough left to buy a small plot of land for the orphans. Enough to build a new home for them.

  Madame Seville pegs up the last diaper just as Celia and I finish with the sheets. Madame comes around the clothes pole and takes my hand in her own. With one finger she strokes the skin on the back of my hand. I feel old sometimes, but when I look at our hands together, I know I am not old.

  “Look at the good you have done here,” Madame Seville says, smiling down at Abigail in her basket. “Imagine what you will do in Haiti.”

  * * *

  Celia and Julian and Madame Seville present me with a farewell gift, a camera they’ve bought to surprise me.

  “Take pictures of Haiti,” Celia says. “Send postcards to us.”

  She smiles and wraps me in her arms while Julian beams, holding the sleeping Abigail. Clever Romulus leans against Madame Seville’s leg. It will be hard to leave him here, but I know he will be well.

  I’m overwhelmed by their gift, so carefully considered, attained at such sacrifice to them all. The camera is small and used, nothing like my mother’s equipment.

  But for me it is completely perfect.

  As I sit in the airport, waiting for my flight, I take from my backpack my mother’s old wallet. At last I am ready to open it, to examine its contents.

  There are her identification and membership and charge cards, some embarrassing old school photos of me, about a dollar in change and three twenties folded into tiny packets and hidden away behind a small, flexible mirror. I look at my mom’s smiling face on her license. She must have gotten the photo taken in the summer. Her nose is sunburned. I stare into her eyes, smile back at her, realize how much I look like her. Her hair was really short when the photo was taken. The style reminds me of the pixie cut Celia gave me when we first got to Canada.

  Just when I think I’ve explored every compartment, I find the edge of an envelope just peeking out of a narrow slit. It takes me a minute or two to wiggle it out of its hiding place. My name appears on the front of the envelope in my mother’s handwriting.

  All these months, without knowing it, I’ve been carrying around the last letter from my mother.

  I hold the envelope in trembling hands. It’s as soft as her skin. The paper has started breaking down from the friction of being folded into that tiny space. What was it doing there? Why was she carrying it in her wallet? Why did she hide it instead of mailing it?

  I don’t want to break the seal. Once the envelope is open it will be finally the end of my mother. But I’m too hungry for her last words. Too hungry to wait.

  Carefully, I slide my finger under the flap and tease it open.

  It’s dated January 3. She must have written it as I was leaving for Haiti.

  There is an oil smudge on the right hand side of the paper. I flash fondly on my mother’s messy office and her butter bean salad. I rub the stain with my fingertips, then hold my fingers under my nose. But there is no lingering scent.

  My eyes fall ravenously on the familiar slant of my mother’s script.

  My dearest child, it says.

  If I live to see you fully grown, it can hardly make me prouder of you than I am today. You always had a grace of movement, even as an infant. Today that grace inhabits every aspect of your being.

  You never quite belonged to me, Radley. Not to me, nor anything or anyone.

  People gave you things from the time you were a little girl, surprising themselves and me, but never you.

  Whatever you wanted you received.

  You could have turned cruel with that kind of power. Instead you’ve turned that power toward the healing of others.

  I’ll never comprehend the d
ivine logic that put your life, your spirit into my arms. I think many times I did not deserve the privilege of being your mother. But that is what fate intended for us. And I am so grateful.

  No matter what has happened or what is yet to happen in this crazy world, my darling child, you will find a way to go on and do such good.

  Good luck, my beautiful girl, as you journey forward. Know that wherever you go, you carry my love with you.

  Always and forever,

  Mom

  Whenever I traveled, Mom always slipped a note into my bag, something I’d find and read a hundred times while we were apart.

  This, I think, was the note Mom meant to send with me to Haiti. I’ll never know why she held on to it.

  It’s a mystery, like Celia choosing to call the baby Abigail.

  No one knew my mom’s first name. No one.

  The first night I’m back in Haiti, Jethro sleeps with his well-traveled bear.

  Around midnight, one of the children appears at the side of my bed. I lift the blanket and she climbs in. She’s cozy and warm from head to toe. She curls up against me. Her small body presses firmly into my own, as if she is attaching herself to me, like the dressing of a wound.

  I wrap my arms around her and pull her close.

  She leaves in the morning as the others begin to stir, but I feel the weight of her against me all day.

  I am not certain who is healing whom.

  Madame Seville would say, “It doesn’t matter.”

  She’s right.

  Acknowledgments

  To Leda Schubert, faithful reader, intrepid friend, thank you for your invaluable insight and your unflagging support.

  To Liza Ketchum, who has walked so many miles at my side. From the depths of my heart, I am so grateful for you.

  To Mariam Diallo, who selflessly spends her discretionary time and money on the children at Orphelinat Foyer Evangelique. You are my inspiration and my hero.

  To Sandy King, if I searched every corner of the world, never could a better cheerleader, shepherd, and courageous sidekick be found.