Sleeping Awake (17 page)

Fuck.

“Where are my shoes?” Cienna
demanded. She pulled my arms to stop me and stepped in front of me.

I swallowed, unable to bring
myself to say the words.

“Noira! Those were $600
shoes!” She stomped her foot on the ground and let out an ear-piercing shriek.

I cringed. “I’ll buy them
back, Cienna. They’re just ordinary shoes.”

“Tomorrow,” Cienna said.
“You’ll buy them back tomorrow.”

At the top of the stairs,
Camelea appeared with a frown on her face. “Cienna,” she scolded. “Is now
really the time to be vain?”

“Shut up, Judas!” Cienna
hissed.

Camelea rolled her eyes.
“Maman wants us, so hurry up. She needs to get some rest.”

At the thought of Maman, I
took the stairs two at a time. As we got to the top of the stairs, Cienna
muttered something so that only I could hear.

“They were
not
ordinary
shoes!”

**~*~*~**~*~*~**

Maman’s suitcases were packed
and waiting for her by the side of her door. I wondered how long they’d been
sitting there waiting for the moment when she would leave us to the mercy of
that despicable man. Maman sat in the middle of her bed with its white sheets
and pillows. She was so pale; one might be able to glance over the room and not
notice that she was there. More peculiarly, she was surrounded by photo albums
and pictures that I wasn’t aware of her still owning. Wordlessly, we approached
her makeshift altar.

She was staring at a picture
of her and my father at their wedding. Maman looked lovely in a form-fitting
off-white silk dress with pearl straps. She smiled in a way that I had not seen
her smile in years; one that let all who witnessed it know that she was utterly
blissful and content with life. Even her eyes seemed softer and brighter.
Philippe looked at her as if he could not believe that Maman was his and his
alone. Tidying up the family picture were Philippe’s mother on one side, a
haughty look on her face, and Grandpa Bill looking on with his usual sombre and
all-knowing expression.

“Do you girls remember the
last time that you saw your grandmother?” Maman asked.

I remembered the day that
Maman
was talking about, and I knew why she brought it up. I was twelve, and I doubt
that I’ll ever forget the details. It was a Sunday, and in France, you spent
Sundays with your family, usually at your grandparents’ house. We only visited
my father’s mother a few times when I was younger. I used to wonder why we
didn’t see her often. After I visited her for the last time, I instantly
regretted ever wanting to see her.

I wore a white dress. I
remember dancing about my room just so that it would sway around me. “I’m an
angel,” I told my attendant, spinning and laughing. My dress turned into a
flower, petals opening and closing as I wove my way around my bedroom.

Before I knew it,
Maman
was at my door with my sisters in toe, and we were being told to put on our
seatbelts as we drove away from the house. The ride there was unusually silent;
we all knew that it was a big deal that
Grand-mère
had invited us
over for dinner, we just didn’t know
how
big of a deal it was.

I grabbed onto my seat as we
drove through the gates of Grand-mère’s house. It snarled over us with its
crooked chimneys and curtains drawn shut to block out all outside light. It was
February, and the leaves on the trees were gone. The howling wind didn’t add
much to the feel of the place. I clung to Maman as we ascended.

Once we arrived in the parlour,
I turned to see what my sisters were doing. Cienna and Camelea had taken a seat
beside Maman.

“Papa, may I sit in your lap?”
I asked.

It was a relief when he lifted
me up. The five us sat in silence until
Grand
-
mère arrived.

“Good evening,” she stepped
into the doorway. Even though she was barely taller than me, Grand-mère seemed
to loom above us all.

I jumped down from Philippe’s
lap, and he stood. “Maman.”

He kissed both of Grand-mère’s
cheeks and escorted her to her seat. While he did this, I squeezed in between
Cienna and Maman. Grand
-
mère was sitting beside Philippe, and I didn’t
want to be anywhere near her. Her eyebrows’ arches were so high that she bore a
permanent look of surprise.

“I trust that you weren’t
waiting for very long,” Grand
-
mère said once we were seated. She sat
with her back so straight that I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were
whalebones in her dress.

“We weren’t,” Philippe
replied.

“Good,” she said. “Be a dear,
Philippe, and fix us some drinks. I’m confused as to why you haven’t done so
already. You know that I don’t like to wait.”

Like a startled cat, Philippe
sprang from his seat and went over the bar.

“And will you be having a
drink, Trischa?” Grand-mère asked, smiling. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

Maman stiffened beside me.
“No, thank you.”

“No, thank you to the drink or
the pregnancy?”

Philippe almost knocked over
the bottle of Cognac.

“No, thank you to the drink.”

“I see,” Grand
-
mère
said, turning to accept her drink from Philippe.

I frowned up at Maman. I
didn’t know that she might be pregnant. I looked at Philippe; he was rather
pale. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening.

“I do
so
deplore
Sundays,”
Grand
-
mère went on. “There’s hardly anything to do after
Mass, so one has to amuse oneself with whatever type of company one can find.
Don’t you agree, Philippe?”

“Yes, Maman.”

Grand
-
mère sighed and
took a sip of her drink.

I sat up, ready to tell Grand
-
mère
all about our fun Sundays, when I felt a sharp pain in my side. Out of the
corner of my eye, I saw Maman’s hand return to her lap. I didn’t say anything.

“How is your work at the
hospital, Maman?” Philippe asked.

“
Ghastly.
You wouldn’t believe
the kind of riffraff that they allow into the hospital now. Apparently it’s
illegal
to turn people away. As for the Africans, well, they clearly didn’t have
bills for their huts at home and simply
cannot
be bothered to learn how
to pay them here...”

Maman stiffened again.

“…I am simply
exhausted
from having doubled my efforts at fundraising,” Grand
-
mère finished.

The maid arrived and announced
that it was time for dinner. Maman didn’t wait for Grand
-
mère to lead us
through to the dining room; she marched right on ahead and dragged me behind
her. Cienna and Camelea hurried after us.

Once the butler finished
serving, Grand
-
mère began again. “Have you heard that Françoise and Yves
had a little boy, Philippe? They named him Étienne after his grandfather.”

“I heard,” Philippe said.

“Cienna?” Grand
-
mère
said.

She looked up from her soup.

“
Oui, Grand-mère
?”
Cienna asked.

Grand
-
mère smiled at
Cienna in a manner that I suppose was meant to be sweet. However, with her arched
eyebrows, she looked frightening. “Wouldn’t you like a little brother to play
with?”

To this day, I wish that I had
been somehow able to stop Cienna before she had given her answer. It was meant
in innocence, but as we later found out, it only served as support for
Grand-mère’s loathing of Maman.

“That would be nice.”

       I
looked up at her. She winked. Grand-mère
spent the rest of dinner tossing
names at Philippe and asking him if he happened to have kept in contact with
any of them. They were all daughters of her friends and people who, I assumed
at the time, he’d grown up with.

Maman
stood. “I don’t
think so, Michèle. I’v
e
got a headache.”

Grand
-
mère rang a
little bell that I hadn’t noticed was beside her. A maid emerged from the
kitchen. “Annette, kindly show Mademoiselle Thompson to one of the guest
bedrooms so that she may rest.”

Maman was Madame Saint Clair
as well. And even if Grand
-
mère was using the name that Maman was born
with, it was Jeannot-Thompson. Maman made a startled cry.

Philippe stood. “Go, Trischa.”

Maman stared at Philippe. She
didn’t smile at him like she usually did, and there was no warmth in her gaze.
She looked almost like a statue. Silently, she placed her napkin on the table
and followed behind Annette.

“Now then,” Grand
-
mère
said, smiling. “Wouldn’t you girls like a tour of the house while your father
and I discuss adult things?”

We didn’t reply. Annette
returned and began an oral history of the house. Apparently a high-ranking Nazi
official had temporarily lived there during their occupation of Paris. I
wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that
Grand
-
mère was somehow
related to Hitler for all of her purist ideals.

“What was she saying about
Africans?” Cienna whispered to me as we walked through the halls.

       “She
thinks that they all came here on a boat,” I replied.

“So what’s wrong with that? We
go sailing all the time.” Cienna said, biting her lip.

“She doesn’t think that they
belong here,” I hissed. Up ahead, Annette waited impatiently for us to join her
in yet another guest bedroom where some famous person or the other had stayed.

“Why not?” Camelea asked.

“She doesn’t like them,” I
replied.

“Why not?” Cienna asked.

“Because they’re Black.”

Cienna stopped walking. “But
Grandpa Bill is Black, and he’s Maman’s papa.”

I rolled my eyes. Explaining
everything to them was too tiresome a task. Instead, I grabbed her hands and
pulled her along as Annette disappeared into another room.

“Why do you know all this?”
Camelea asked.

“Because I listen, and you
don’t,” I snapped.

I didn’t say much for the rest
of the tour. I didn’t know about genetics then, but I wasn’t stupid. If a
person had a Caucasian mother and a Black father, then a person had to be both.
And if Maman was both, then we were Black as well. Did that mean that Grand
-
mère
didn’t like us either? It was obvious that she thought very little of Maman.

Maman
was waiting at the front door when our
tour ended. She handed us our coats as she spoke to Annette. “Kindly inform
Monsieur Saint Clair that if he is not ready in five minutes, we will be taking
a taxi home.”

Annette curtsied and hurried
off to find Philippe. The doorman opened the door for us, and we went out to
wait by the car.
Grand
-
mère didn’t come to say goodnight. When
Philippe tried to open the car door for Maman, she slapped his hand away.

“I’m not incompetent.”

The car ride home seemed
longer than the time it took for us to get there. When we got home,
Maman
hurriedly kissed us goodnight before going upstairs. Philippe called for our nounou
and told her to put us to bed. I expected him to hurry upstairs after Maman,
but he didn’t. Instead, he turned right and went off in the direction of his
office. 

*~*

“What does our last visit to
Grand-mère have to do with anything?” Camelea asked.

I turned to look at her. Was
she an idiot? I know that we were only preadolescents at the time, but it
should have been obvious that dinner had everything to do with why we were
living in New York instead of Paris.

“Michèle considered our marriage
to be a disgrace to her blue-blooded lineage,” Maman said. She pointed to a
second photo, one of Philippe and an older man who looked very much like him.
“Your father proved to be a disappointment. He’d gone off and married an
American of all people. The fact that my father was a Black Jamaican didn’t
improve matters. Philippe was to marry into another family of wealth. But most
of all, the family had to be European, have a respected family name, and above
all else, they had to be approved by Michèle.”

“Oh,” Camelea said.

Oh! I could have slapped her.
Clearly, Cienna got all the smarts as well as the looks during their time in
the womb.

“Put yourself in your father's
shoes,” Maman said. “What would you have done?”

“Maman, why are you trying to
make excuses for that man?” Cienna asked. Before, she’d been stroking Maman’s
hair; she stopped.

“I’m not making excuses,
Cienna,” Maman replied, leaning against her. “I’m just explaining what was
going through your father’s mind.”

People like to say that you
should never say never, but I would
never
take the route that
Philippe had chosen. I’d been on the receiving end of such a decision, and I
knew what the parties involved would experience. He didn’t have to walk away
like that. He could have grown a backbone and told his mother off. He could
have had her continue to not speak to him. He could have decided to not be her
toy and done the right thing. He could have prevented us unnecessary pain. He
could have been a husband and father. He should have stayed.

“It was all very sad.” Maman
sighed. She fondled her wedding ring. Even after Philippe left us, she never
took it off.

Sad wasn’t the word for it.
None of my most powerful anti-depressants and mood stabilizers could have had
an ounce of an effect on us.

“You shouldn't hate him for
he's done,” Maman said, smiling at us weakly. “You should pity him. Eleven
years is a long time, and all the things that he's missed during that period
will never come back to him."

I didn’t hate him; I loathed
him.

“After you pity him,”
Maman
said,
leaning back against her pillow, “you forgive him, just like I’ve
done.”

Maman’s words resonated as she
left us with silence to keep us company. I knew what she was talking about, of
course. Cienna and I had had similar discussions about why we were damaged in
our own sweet ways. And while I was all for learning how to fight the urge to
push away any man who dared to love me, I was not about to forgive Philippe.

*~*

The next morning, I felt as like I
had fallen asleep in wet mud and had been cemented to the bed overnight. When
Nicolaas came into my room, I couldn’t so much as turn my head towards the
door. I was still in my dress from our so-called dinner party, and my
pillowcase was painted black and red by my makeup. I looked like an extra in
the
Nightmare Before Christmas
.

Maman was gone. I closed my eyes as
the tears began to form.

The bed became heavy as Nicolaas
got in with me. My skin cooled to the touch of his lips brushing across my
forehead. My eyes fluttered open, unable to prevent the dam from bursting.

“Mooi.”

I shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked. When I
didn’t say anything, he pulled the comforter over me and tucked it under my
chin.

“Thank you,” I managed. My throat
felt as if I had swallowed a cupful of sand.

If he was surprised to hear my
voice, he hid it rather well. He simply nodded and leaned his head against the
pillow so that he was in my direct line of vision. It was oddly comforting to
just lay there with him.

“She’s gone,” I said.

His hand reached across as if to
touch my hair. I shrugged away. “I don’t want to be comforted.”

Nicolaas nodded his head to an
unknown rhythm.

“Maman has cancer,” I said. “I was
too self-absorbed to realise, so I don’t want you to try and make me feel
better.”

Despite my previous comment, the
distance between us lessened as he pulled me into a hug. His snakelike arms
slinked around my back; I was trapped.

“Nicolaas this is not funny.” I
struggled to break free, but like a fly in a spider’s web, I was stuck; he
would not let go. “Nicolaas!”

If possible, he held on tighter.

“Nicolaas, please stop.” I said,
blinking back the tears that were forcing their way to the surface. My body
gave way to the shivers and the moans, and Nicolaas’ white shirt was slowly
stained black from my mascara. All the while he cradled me, stroking my hair
and murmuring that it would be okay.

When I finally managed to
regain control of myself, Nicolaas spoke. “You’re not self-absorbed.”

I smirked at Nicolaas as I
looked up from my position on his chest. “That’s easy for you to say. Your
mother wasn’t dying of cancer before your apathetic eyes.”

“You’re not apathetic,”
Nicolaas said.

“Yes I am.”

“Okay, maybe just a little,”
he consented. “But that’s not why you didn’t notice; your mother didn’t want
you to.”

“But why though?” I asked.
“Why could she tell Philippe and not me? I am her daughter! Doesn’t that count
for anything?”

“Who is Philippe?”

I pulled away from Nicolaas
and tucked my knees under my chin.

“Noira?” he asked.

“My father. He came to dinner
last night. Didn’t Cienna tell you when she called?”

“No.”

“Well he’s here. He’s been
living in New York for almost a year, and Maman has been secretly seeing him.
Now he wants to be a part of our lives.”

“Maybe he wants your
forgiveness...”

I cut him off. “I don’t care
why he came to dinner. He was like my fucking hero and then he just up and
left.”

“He was your what?” Nicolaas
chuckled.

 I took up my pillow and
gave him a threatening look. “Don’t you dare make fun of me, Nicolaas Armgard.
Not when I am this unbalanced.”

Nicolaas put his arms in
surrender. “I was surprised, that’s all. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming
with your emotions. The last time that you mentioned your father was when I
threatened to permanently withhold my cock and leave for good.”

I slapped him in the face with
my pillow. “Are you calling me a nymphomaniac?”

“No!” He took refuge on the
other side of the bed.

“Then what are you saying?” I
demanded.

“Noira, I don’t think that you
are a nymphomaniac,” Nicolaas replied. “I just think that you’re scared of the
truth.”

“Whatever,” I sniffed.

“Now can you please put down
the pillow? You’re messing up my hair.”

“Forgive me for being more
concerned for my potentially dying mother and not your precious coiffeur,” I
said, rolling my eyes. I dropped the pillow in the middle of the bed.

“I never said that you
shouldn’t be concerned for your mother. Just allow a tiny bit of room for
concern for my hair.” Nicolaas pulled me into his deadlock embrace and kissed
my forehead.

“Why do you insist on kissing
me? I look like Halloween thrown up.”

He pinched my nose. “You’re
kind of cute when you look like a bum.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

The door to my room burst open
and Cienna came in. “That man is back. He wants us to get packed.”

“Cienna, I was trying to speak
to…”

Instinctively, I pulled up the
covers as Philippe came through my door behind Cienna. At least I knew where
she had inherited her lack of respect for people’s privacy.

**~*~*~**~*~*~**