An Untamed State (4 page)

My father works in construction so his office in Port-au-Prince isn’t well appointed—it’s mostly just a space with a door. The floor is covered in cement dust and bits of gravel. Shelves crammed with three-ring binders, blueprints, and his engineering textbooks from college line the walls. On the coatrack, there are three hard hats—the one from his first job in the United States, the one his company gave him when he retired, and the one he bought when he started his own company. When we were kids, my brother and sister and I loved to wear our father’s hard hats. They were always too big but it was fun to pretend we were just like our father, that we too could build great things.

In my father’s office there is also a desk—wide, made of cherry, polished until it gleams, an imposing contrast to the rest of the office. Each time he hires a new employee, my father invites them to a brief meeting in his office, where he sits behind his shiny desk. He laces his fingers behind his head and stretches his legs and calmly tells the employee he will never pay a ransom, not for himself, not for any member of his family. He smiles and says, “Welcome to Duval Engineering.” He wants the people who work for him to know the only money they will ever receive from him is money they earn through sweat and hard work.

My sister, Mona, works with my father. She’s an engineer too. We were all surprised when she agreed to work with him. She was always the rebel, wearing makeup and short skirts and piercing her ears too many times, the one who openly defied our parents with her
wild ways
. She is also smart and loyal. Mona and my father don’t necessarily get along but my father is getting old and he trusts blood, says family is the only thing you can trust in a country like Haiti. He is a liar of the highest order. Family is one of many things you cannot trust in a country like Haiti. Mona spends half of every month in Port-au-Prince and the other half in Miami with her husband, a Cuban artist named Carlos, whom we call Carlito because it drives him crazy. Mona is my best friend. Wherever she has gone, the whole of our lives, I have tried to follow. Michael and I moved to Miami because she was there. Wherever she is feels more like home.

When Mona started working for Duval Engineering, all I could think of was something terrible happening to her. Mona always laughed off my concern, said the day she stopped feeling safe in the country where her parents were born, she’d leave for good. As I sat in that crazy-hot room, waiting for something to happen, I wondered if Mona felt safe. I wondered if she knew how unsafe I was, if Michael had called her yet, if she had flown to Port-au-Prince to wait with our family for my release. I knew one thing for certain—she would want me to fight because I would want her to fight if she were in my place.

My mother is terrified of being kidnapped—the threat of it haunts her. She finds the indignity of captivity unbearable. She is a woman who covets her privacy, and to be surrounded by strange men, to be exposed to them in any way, is not an experience she believes she can survive.

When my mother and I had conversations about kidnapping in the before, I got angry. I told her there were people who needed her. I told her if she were kidnapped, she would have no choice but to survive. I told her nothing truly bad happens when someone is kidnapped, that a kidnapping is only a matter of time and money and that she would always have both. This was when it was easy to speak wrongly on such things. In the after, I understood my mother’s fear more clearly. She knew my father too well.

When my mental accounting began to frighten me, I sat on the narrow bed and tried to pretend I was in Miami, hiding in a host’s bedroom at an awkward dinner party. I was waiting for Michael to find me, something I forced him to do often, but then a tall man strode into the room like he owned everything in it and I was right back in my cage. He wore a tight pair of jeans and a T-shirt with the likeness of Tupac on the front. His eyes were wide and soft brown, like you could see right through them. Just below his left eye was a thickly braided scar that trembled when he spoke. An automatic pistol was tucked into his waistband. He looked at me and smiled.

“I am the Commander,” he said.

I nodded slowly and before I could stop myself, I said, “Commander of what? Where is your army?”

He crossed the room and grabbed me by my throat, pulling me to my feet. I slapped at his forearms but he tightened his grip. My face grew taut as I struggled to breathe. When he was satisfied with his display of authority, he shoved me back onto the bed. He wiped his hands, spat on the floor. He laughed. “Let’s try this again. I am the Commander. Today, I am the Commander of you.”

“Like hell,” I snapped. I bit my lower lip. I wanted nothing more than to repeat my question but I could still feel his fingers holding my throat closed. The edges of the room were dark and fuzzy.

The Commander sniffed loudly, leaned in real close. “How come you don’t cry? I was certain there would be tears already.”

“I do not waste my tears.”

He began pacing. He pulled his gun from his waistband and waved it toward me. “Your family,” he said. “They will pay a lot of money for you. U.S. dollars.”

I watched his frenetic pattern back and forth across the room. I looked him right in the eye. “My father doesn’t believe in paying kidnappers. You should know that.”

The Commander approached me again. He pressed the gun flat against my chest, slowly dragging it between my breasts. I wondered if he could smell my milk, on the verge of leaking. He licked his lips. “Your father will pay for his youngest daughter. I am to understand you are his favorite.”

The word
daughter
lay heavy on his tongue, took on a repulsive shape.

I dug my fingernails into my thighs and hoped my father would be a better man than I knew him to be, would ignore his convictions, would pay, and quickly. I hoped I did not know my father as well as I feared.

The Commander sat next to me, our thighs touching. I tried to move away but he grabbed my thigh, his fingers digging into the meat of my body. “I’ve been to Miami,” he said. “A fine city.”

I stared at the terrible scar beneath his eye. I tried to memorize his features, his clothing, his shoes—Skechers. I recognized the logo. These details felt important. I had to go the bathroom very badly but I didn’t want to ask. I did not want to ask my kidnappers for anything.

The Commander tapped my knee with his gun. He repeated himself, said, “I’ve been to Miami.”

I inched away again.

He grabbed my elbow. “Sit still.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been to Miami too.”

I did not want to tell him anything about my life. I did not want to tell him about my home with the silver palm trees in the front yard and small pool in the back where we swam with Christophe, or how on Fridays and Saturdays my husband and I got a babysitter and went to South Beach, where we ate expensive dinners and danced salsa all night, or how some days we were surprised to hear someone speak English, so varied were the tongues of the city. I did not want him to know anything about me.

The Commander grabbed the bone of my chin. He forced me to look at him. His eyes were strangely warm; not even the scar could make his eyes ugly. He said, “Don’t play games. We know everything about you, where you live, where you work, where your husband works.”

I pulled away. “Somehow I doubt that.”

He reached into his pocket and proffered a cell phone. “Call your family.”

My hands shook as I dialed the numbers. The phone rang once, twice, and then I heard my father’s voice. “It’s me,” I said.

The Commander plucked the phone from my hands. He said, “We will not negotiate. We want one million dollars for the beloved daughter of one of Haiti’s favorite sons.”

Whatever my father said amused the Commander greatly because his smile grew wider and wider. He handed me the phone.

I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

“You will have to be strong,” my father said.

I marveled at his ability to state the obvious, to say the most useless things.

“I’d like to speak with my husband,” I said.

There was a pause and then Michael said, “Babe,” and I closed my eyes, imagined sinking into his voice, imagined being safe again.

“Christophe . . .”

“He’s fine. I’m holding him right here.”

I listened as carefully as I could, trying to make out my son’s breathing.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked. “Have they hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I wanted to be careful and calm. I wanted to say something important, something that would help Michael find me, something he would remember and hold on to. I said, “I’m not that far from you. I am not far at all.” The Commander grabbed me by my hair, yanking hard. I did not make a sound even though my scalp burned. Christophe was listening. I did not want my child to be frightened. Michael shouted my name over and over.

The Commander said, “One million dollars. We will call in two days to make arrangements for payment.” He hung up and released his grip, shoving me to the floor. He waved his men out of the room and just before he locked me in my cage, he wiggled his finger back and forth, said, “You are not as smart as you think you are.”

I was alone again. I had two days and then I would be returned to Michael and Christophe and we could find our way home. I could survive two days with these men. I could.

My parents spent most of their lives trying to find their way home too. They wanted to return to their island, their people, their food; they yearned for the salt of the sea on their skin or at least my father did and my mother learned to want for what he wanted.

It is not easy to be the child of immigrants who, for most of my life, wore a longing for home nakedly. After they were married, my parents headed to the middle of the country because sometimes, to find home, you must first go farther afield. In Nebraska, a landlocked, flat place filled with thick, pale, cheery people, they were alone, far from everything they knew or loved but they were going to be happy. My father does not understand obstacles, doesn’t believe they exist. He cannot even see obstacles. Failure was never going to be an option. He often says, “There is nothing a man cannot get through if he tries hard enough.”

He built skyscrapers. We’d move for a year or two while he oversaw a new project, and come back to Omaha for a year or two, all our lives, all so he could reach higher and higher. My father said, “There’s no telling how high a man can reach if he’s willing to look up into the sky and straight into the sun.” On the day of the ribbon cutting for his first skyscraper, my father stood with my mother, side by side, their bodies practically melded together. He held his arm around her waist, his hand resting possessively against her stomach. My brother and sister and I ran in frantic circles around them, buoyed by the excitement of a tall building and an oversized pair of scissors and our father, wearing his hard hat and a well-tailored suit. My parents stood staring up at the tower of steel and glass gleaming brightly beneath the high sun. My father said, “I told you I would build you a monument to the sky,” and my mother murmured, “Yes, Sebastien, you certainly did.” She once told me there was something very attractive about an ambitious man. I think she confuses ambition and ruthlessness. That night, we went out to dinner after the ceremony and my parents spent most of their time sitting with their foreheads touching in their own world. My parents are not warm people. They love hard and deep but you have to work to understand the exact nature of that love, to see it, to feel it. That day was the first time I realized my parents loved each other more than they loved us though I couldn’t know then the price I would pay for that love.

E
ven hours after he stalked out, the Commander’s threat lingered, trapped in the thick heat of my cage. I whispered my father’s words.
There is nothing I cannot get through if I try hard enough.
My chest throbbed, my breasts still swelling, rock hard. Leaking milk spread over the cotton stretched across my chest. I had never planned on breastfeeding Christophe but when I first held him, so soft and mewing, his tiny lips quivering as they sought my breast, I couldn’t help but hold him to my chest; I couldn’t help but give him what he needed. Now, my son was alone with his father, needing me and there was nothing I could do. I gritted my teeth.

Growing up, my father told my siblings and me two things—I demand excellence and never forget you are Haitian first; your ancestors were free because they took control of their fate. When he came home from work each night, he’d find us in our corners of the house and ask, “How were you excellent today?” We needed to have a good answer. If he approved, a rare thing, he smiled, squeezed our shoulders. If he disapproved, he’d remove his glasses and rub his forehead, so wearied by our small failures. He would say, “You can be better. You control your fate.”