“Nadege Goes Home”

by Yveka Pierre (Haiti)

“Nounou, how are you baby.”

“Uncle Jean what’s up.”

I knew a favor was coming, none of the elders in my family ever called just to say hello. Besides, Haitians have a way with wielding words like water, a skill that only seems to get better with age. Uncle Jean’s style is fluid, and he always starts like a babbling brook, unassuming until his words build like tsunami and brings everything crashing down. His sister, my aunt Rose, had no finesse she was all ice spear.

“Nadege, when are you coming home?”

The last time Florida saw my face was for my mother’s funeral three years ago.

Fucking cancer.

Let Aunt Rose tell it, if my mom had just listened to her, and drank that asossi tea, lit candles at this altar, said this many rosaries, killed that all white chicken, and went to Haiti to rub dirt on an ancestor’s grave she would’ve been cured.

Killing chickens has never cured stage 4 pancreatic cancer as far as I knew.

“Nadege, honey are you listening to me?”

“Sorry Unc, I zoned out.”

“You young people and your concentration, ah it’s too much of the screens. ”

“Unc, I’m sorry ok. Chapo’m ba pou ou chef,” I said in Kreyol, knowing the old joking adage of respect would stop his diatribe mid sentence.

“Nadege, you have to come home.”

“Oh Unc, if you miss me, I’ll buy you a ticket to come see me next time I’m in Oakland for a few weeks.”

“Ah Nadege cherie, you’re not listening to me. You, have to come home. It’s your brother.”

____________________

I first met my brother Jimmy when I immigrated to America from Haiti. I was 12 and he was 15. I remembered him standing next to my uncle in the Fort Lauderdale airport his eyes glued to the game boy in his hand, I clutched my mom’s hands and stared at him trying to find myself in the brother my mother always spoke about in hushed French at my grand-mère’s house.

We looked nothing alike. I’m told that I looked like my father, some grimo my mother swore she loved to distraction. At least enough to send Jimmy off to America to live with her brother at age 3 so she could make a life with him. They got “married” in a spiritual ceremony. She wore a white dress, that she could never pass down due to the animal blood dripped across the front in an Erzulie vévé.

The first words my brother ever said to me were “what’s up,” which came after prompting and pushing from my uncle.

My brain plays memories like an old film, sometimes wavy but always accurate. Jimmy remembers hugging me at the airport he remembers falling into the role of protective big brother early. I remember the truth instead.

I thought of that first meeting while sitting in the San Francisco airport waiting on my Friday morning flight to Fort Lauderdale. There was something that always makes me nervous about flying, and not the rattling in a tin can bullshit.

For me, the flight was the freeing part, it was the airports and the waiting that made my skin feel like crawling. I hated the silence that strangers try to fill with small talk.

“Those are really interesting earrings, what are they,” the middle aged white man in the flight waiting area said before I successfully detangled my headphones. I was fucking clairvoyant, it looked like.

“They’re cowboy hats.”

“Oh where is that accent, from, I can’t quite place it.”

It's a fucking Haitian accent, I snarled in my head.

“Florida probably,” I answered, with as much finality I could ease into my voice without sounding rude.

“I love Florida!” he said while pushing up the sleeves of his sweater, “what part are you from.”

But I mean how much can you love Florida if you “can’t quite place” my damn accent. South Florida was crawling with Haitians and plenty of their voices sounded like songs just like mine. We were all waiting on a flight to Fort Lauderdale.

I looked down at his hands, which were resting on the knees of his khaki’s as he leaned forward and tried his best to make eye contact. There was no mistaking the tan line around his ring finger.

“I’m from all over,” I answered while gathering my purse and vibrating phone. “Sorry to run, but I’m getting a call.” I glanced down and saw my brother’s name. The accompanying photo is an old one, a “before mom’s cancer photo” from when he visited me in California. Before it all went to shit.

I knew I didn’t owe him an explanation, but the guilt that raised me lasted long after childhood was over, and politeness had been driven into my bones so hard it was in the marrow.

“Oh look a ghost,” I answered while walking away from the married stranger, trailing my weekender bag behind me.

“Dedge, please tell me you’re not flying in for this intervention that I’m not supposed to know about,” my brother Jimmy announced in one breath.

“Well hello to you too pill popper.”

“Dedge. I’m good, I would tell you if I wasn’t good.”

“Bullshit. You wouldn’t tell me shit. You didn’t tell me shit last time until it was time to pay for a lawyer.”

My brother was silent on the line, all I could hear was the thumping beat in the background of wherever he was.

“I called you with my shit at 3 am on a bridge six month ago because we promised that we could lie about anything but this shit remember?”

“Dedge. I got it under control.”

“Cool, then consider it a fun weekend trip shooting the shit with your baby sister, I need a ride from the airport, or should I get a rental?”

My brother was not at the airport to pick me up. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. My family is really good at avoidance, and Jimmy was a master. That’s why I had my rental car booked and my hotel confirmed before my flight landed.

“What the fuck am I even doing here,” I whispered into the air as I rolled my weekender bag. Uncle Jean told me the family was meeting Sunday morning to have a “talk” with Jimmy. I should have just asked them to Skype me in or some shit, but somehow I thought the best course of action was to fly in on a Friday, to do what?

Warn him? Save him?

Jimmy called me a few minutes after I walked into my hotel room and made a beeline for the prepackaged hotel slippers and robe.

“Why do I have 2 missed calls from you, isn’t your flight landing at 9:30? They let people make calls on the airplane wifi?”

“Where the fuck did you get 9:30 from” I answered as I rifled through the minibar.

“You said that your flight would land at 6:30, you’re 3 hours ahead so I added 3 hours so that should be 9:30 right, why are you laughing?”

“I’m laughing because you had to know that shit ain’t made no sense Jimmy, why do you think I would have ever made you do math to figure out a pick up time.”

My family is filled with liars, it’s almost like it’s our love language. We don’t apologize when we know we’ve fucked up. We lie and let the falsehoods slither into conversations like lovable imposters. Then we present them like offerings.

Sometimes I wonder how long the tradition has been happening, are the lies just for us or do we set them free onto our other relationships. I know I do. So I forgave my brother by laughing off his lies, like we always did for one another.

“It’s fine, I’m at the hotel already anyway,” I said, moving the conversation forward.

“Hotel? What I thought you were staying with me,” my brother lied, his country accent a shadow of my past. He was laying it on thick.

My brother and I always joked that the countrier we sounded, the closer to hell we were getting, it was the first way we learned to express guilt, without apology but always in the sickly sweet way of honeysuckles and drawled out syllables that our mother’s kreyol didn’t harbor.

Our Southern Haitian bullshit always offered food, like some salve.

“You trynna eat later?” my brother drawled, interrupting my musings.

“Nah I got plans.”

“Yeah, aiight, tell Jay I said he’s a piece of shit.”

“Who said I had plans with Jay?”

“You’re here, he’s here, so I know you gonna do some stupid shit and see that nigga. I’m not gonna be in the middle of y’all shit no more. You hear me?”

“Yea I hear you.”

I met Jay. By the time my brother and I met on Saturday night, I had attempted purged the 15 years of memories of Jay into an edible fevered exploration of the shower head in the hotel bathroom, while on FaceTime with one of the models from my last shoot. Nichole was never left me on our anniversary in Paris with just a note, she didn’t have years of toxic back and forth, she was just fun.

Jimmy and I met up at a strip club, because you won’t find a better lemon-pepper wet wing fried hard than in a south Florida strip club.

“Yo remember when this place used to be called the Booby Trap?”

“Yea, it was in competition with that place on Broward, what was it called,” Jimmy snapped his fingers while tried to remember.

“THE BOOTY TRAP,” we yelled out together bursting out in peals of laughter.

“Whatever happened to that place,” I asked after catching my breath.

“It burned down a few years after you skipped town.”

“I didn’t skip town Jimbo, I just left.”

The silence hung over our corner table like a dark cloud, filled with the fight we’d been having for over a decade.

“You didn’t just leave Nadege, you fucking skipped town,” Jimmy said quietly before grabbing a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and heading outside.

I followed him a beat later, stopping to blow a kiss at one of the dancers that I went to high school with, I heard she was a nurse now, I guess the money was better at the club.

“Wait a fucking minute Jimmy, are you mad that I left,” I yelled out after my brother once I stepped outside and followed him to his car, “no one gave a shit man.”

“Nadege,” he began.

“Since when do you call me by my fucking full name?”

“Oh should I call you Edge like all of those fucking magazines do? You’re fucking mysterious with an American name now right? You’re goddamn Madonna.”

I watched my brother light his cigarette and take a drag, and my hands itched for one, but I hadn’t smoked one since mom’s cancer diagnosis.

“Jimbo, yeah I’m goddamn Madonna now. Edge paid off your student loans, and mom’s house so make fun of it if you want to.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t call you what?”

“Don’t call me Jimbo, I hate that shit.”

“Ok, then why the hell are you calling me Nadege?”

“Fine ok, I don’t want to fight with you tonight anyway,”

Jimmy said as he threw the half smoked cigarette on the ground and snuffed it out with his Nike.

“I didn’t skip town Jimmy, I just left,” I added quietly, somehow refusing to leave well enough alone.

The unexpected chill in the air should have been my warning, but I had always been so good at ignoring those.

“We thought you were fucking dead Dedge. You packed a backpack, and took off and went to another country and no one knew where the hell you were for 3 months. You didn’t call, write, or send a goddamn pigeon.”

“It had nothing to do with you, and besides, they had you, I was just the spare anyway.”

“Dedge. You dropped out of high school. YOU MOVED TO FUCKING EUROPE AND DIDN’T TELL ANYONE. FOR MONTHS! ”

“That was fucking 15 years ago, how many times are we going to have this fucking fight,” I answered back my voice hard, and the words coming out too breathy as I tried to hold back tears.

Jimmy scoffed in response.

“I was trying to run away I guess,” I offered on a shaky breath.

“Yea, how far did you get?”

“Pretty far, a few times, but I’m back here again. No matter how far you go, you always take you with you,” I answered laughing despite nothing being funny.

“You know, that’s how I felt when I first started taking pills, like I was flying. And then I just felt numb, sitting there in my skin.”

We left the strip club parking lot, and ended up in Plantation, parked outside the cemetery where our mother was buried.

“You know that you don’t own your plot when you get buried, you rent it,” Jimmy said as we climbed out the car and stood in front of the black iron gates.

“Bullshit”

“Nawl, for real, you rent your hole for a few decades, and when they think you’re sufficiently decomposed, they squeeze you down on top of the bones under you, and sell your hole to some other grieving family.”

“Man that’s fucked up!”

“Is it though? You’re dead, the whole burial shit and shebang isn’t for you. It’s for the sad fucks you leave behind.”

“So what we’re the sad fucks mom left behind,” I asked to the air, as my brother started to deftly climb the gate. He landed in a tuck and roll, that looked too graceful for a man with a reconstructed knee.

“You coming or nah, famous folk don’t climb gates,” he taunted me from the other side.

I took a running leap and climbed to the top of the 9 foot gate and looked down at him laughing with his straight white teeth, and closed my eyes and jumped down, smacking my hands against the ground and rolling.

“Nice Dedge,” he called out, as he reached down to pull me up.

We walked by iPhone light to the catholic section of the cemetery looking for our mother’s plot, and finally found it, embarrassingly unadorned with flowers unlike all the other graves near hers. I stole a few roses from her neighbor and laid it on her headstone like a guilty offering.

“Hey mama,” I whispered.

“You know why I stopped using,” my brother said out of the blue.

“Cause mom got sick right?”

“Nah, I knew about the cancer for a few months before she told you, and I know that’s fucked up, don’t yell. I was still on pills heavy back then too.”

“Then what was it? Was it after your knee and shit got fixed.”

“Nah. I read some interview you did in that French magazine.

The one after you shaved your head, you remember that one?”

I thought back to the night my mom and I shaved our heads together, back when the chemo and radiation razed her crown and glory and left nothing but patches behind. How defiant we felt.

“Yea,” I responded, “I remember.”

“You called me your best friend. You said ‘I have this older brother, we’re both a little bit fucked up, but he’s my best friend.’ And I was like damn, that’s kind of pathetic, cause she’s my best friend too, and I don’t want her getting a call about me OD’ing or some shit.”

“It was fucked up not to tell you I was leaving. I’m sorry,” I whispered, abruptly changing the subject as we laid down flat on the grass, our heads resting against the headstone.

“I wasn’t just pissed you left Dedge, it fucked me up that you never came back. Like you didn’t see yourself here, with us. I don’t know, maybe I got pissed that you got to be free.”

“You rewriting history again. You left first.”

“I went to college!”

“Jimmy. You didn’t know what it was like staying behind trying to fix everything, you got to take your scholarship, your football and fucking fly away. You got to be free. And I got to be the fuck up up that only cared about art class.

They couldn’t see me past you.” My voice was low and flat, and the silence was only interrupted by by the sounds of the highway, far enough away to sound like the ocean.

“I know I was taking up a lot of the oxygen back then, but you know how hard it was being the ‘great Black hope’ of the whole family just cause I played ball? I was almost happy when I fucked my knee up junior year. I was lying down flat, just like this on the field and I thought, ‘Does this mean I can major in education now.’”

“Damn that’s fucked up.”

“I’m a good teacher you know. Seventy percent of my kids passed the AP exam last year.”

“I remember,” I answered.

I waited a beat before I asked, “you using again?”

“I got it under control this time Dedge. I do.”

“Fuck. Jimmy.”

We filled the space with the sound of our breath, somehow finding the same rhythm without direction. In for four. Hold five. Let out for six. Over and over until my heart stopped feeling like it was going to crawl out of my chest.

“Ok. So what do we do about the old folks?” I finally asked on a whisper.

“I guess we wait for morning,” Jimmy answered. And I nodded, the back of my head grazing the head stone as my fingertips glanced along the petals of the stolen roses.