An Untamed State Read online

  “We are not friends. We are not lovers. I do not choose this. I do not want you. My God, surely you can see that.”

  He was seemingly oblivious. TiPierre brought his mouth to my breast and began to suckle softly. I panicked, shoved him away, but he refused to stop, refused to hold any part of me as sacred. The ache began to lessen as he stole the milk from my body. The relief was so startling I could not bear it. I dug my fingernails into his shoulders and scratched so hard, I hoped I might find bone. He cursed and pulled away. I covered my chest with my arms, shaking again.

  “You cannot do that. You cannot.”

  For once, TiPierre heard me. He shrugged, resumed talking about his son, and I let myself breathe. The son’s name was Innocent Sylvain; he was nine months old. “I’ll bring you a picture of my boy,” he said.

  I grunted. I did not want to see any evidence of the man in this animal.

  “In a different world, our sons could be playmates but in this world, my son will someday end up working for yours.”

  “I have no son. Please stop saying I do.”

  TiPierre slid on top of my body again, pinning my wrists above my head.

  My body could not take any more. I knew that. I knew his intentions. “No,” I said. “No more tonight, I cannot.”

  He ignored me.

  After hours of labor, when it finally came time to push, the doctor had to reach inside me to turn the boy around. The pain was so intense it rendered me silent. All I could focus on was the pain and then the doctor told me to push and I had so little energy left but I held on to my thighs and Michael held me, his sweaty forehead pressed against mine. As the baby began to emerge, my body felt like it was coming apart, like my pelvic bones were separating then fracturing. It was only after the baby was all the way out that I groaned, a loose and ugly sound. That is the pain I remembered on the tenth night, when so much had been done to my body. It was my only frame of reference for a pain more profound than the body should survive.

  There was a time when I did not want a child.

  My husband and I were young and successful in Miami. The life we were living was all I wanted for us. We were not careful but I thought my disinterest in motherhood would reinforce our irresponsible approach to birth control, which mostly involved hope and, once in a while, Michael pulling out.

  I did not want a child.

  A year and a half before I had Christophe, I had a miscarriage. Michael never knew.

  I didn’t even realize I was pregnant until everything had gone wrong. I was at the beach, running, when a tight fist twisted everything inside me and forced it out. I drove home, bleeding, thinking, “At least my car seats are leather,” and when Michael wasn’t home I was relieved. I sat on the toilet staring at my blood, drying in streaks almost to my knee.

  I waited until I had a better idea of what to do. I waited for Michael to come home but he didn’t so I undressed, stuffed my clothes in the trash and took a hot shower. I did not cry. It was for the best, that’s what I told myself.

  When I was pregnant with Christophe, I was feeling tired and irritable all the time. I thought it was work stress. There’s always a steady stream of clients for an immigration attorney in Miami—so many people desperate to stay, desperate to bring the ones they love to the Promised Land even if they haven’t found any promise yet. My caseload was insane after my leave of absence. If Michael didn’t call me most nights to remind me to come home at a decent hour, I worked well into the night. I was nauseous anytime I smelled something citrusy or flowery or salty. I spent an entire day in my private bathroom, my forehead pressed to the toilet seat, my chest and back muscles sore from the heaving. I ignored the incessant ringing of my office phone and my cell phone and the chime of new e-mails pouring in every few minutes. After work, I stopped at Walgreens and bought a double-pack pregnancy test. I went to a gas station and peed on a stick and peed on another stick. The tests had those digital readouts that blink Yes or No so any idiot can determine if they are in the family way. I did not want a child. I got so angry I started crying because I don’t love easy and loving a child or the idea of a child felt like it was too, too much.

  I stayed in that gas station bathroom for a long time, until the smell of antiseptic cleaning products and stale piss and the cheap air freshener being sprayed into the bathroom at five-minute intervals with a soft puff made me sick. I wrapped the pregnancy tests in toilet paper and carefully placed them in my purse like they needed to be handled with care. When I got home, Michael was in the kitchen cooking dinner because he’s the one who cooks most of the time. He smiled, his face pink and sweaty from slaving over a hot stove. He asked about my day and I sat at the kitchen table and told him how I was sick all day. He came over and held the back of his hand to my forehead, clucking, brushing my hair out of my face, and then he went back to cooking, smiling at me every few minutes, pretending not to worry.

  When I miscarried, Michael was in Key West with friends for the weekend. I waited for him to come home because I forgot he would not be coming home. I did not cry. I ached and cramped all night but I scrubbed the bathroom clean, I scrubbed the bathroom and watched the red run pink and then disappear and I scrubbed the seat in my car and I took the trash to a Dumpster behind the 7-Eleven just outside our neighborhood. I bought a pack of cigarettes and drove home slowly. I smoked. When I pulled into my driveway, I got out and lay on our lawn, Bermuda grass, not at all comfortable. I stared up at the palm trees, which always look beautiful at night, and I smoked the whole pack. I held my hands over my stomach, tender and rotten, strange fruit.

  By the time I was done smoking, my lungs ached and my teeth were gritty with tar and my fingers smelled terrible and still I lay on the grass. I said, “I do not care,” and “I do not want a child.” I lay there all night, until the sun rose and the sprinkler system turned on and soaked me to the bone and still I did not move. It was a Sunday morning so I listened as my neighbors started pulling out of their driveways to go to church. There are so many Catholics in Miami. I didn’t move until my bladder felt so full I thought I might piss all over the lawn. I stood because Michael was trying some new lawn maintenance routine and I didn’t want to ruin the yard.

  When he finally came home late that night, Michael was bright red with sunburn, his hair blonder than usual. He was still hungover. He said, “I had the best time, babe. You should have come.”

  I lay on the couch in the dark. He dropped himself on me and I gasped and put my hand on his shoulder and he misunderstood the gesture and buried his head between my breasts, shaking his head back and forth, so I bit my lower lip and I did not cry. He asked me to rub his body with calamine lotion. He forgot to wear sunscreen and giggled like a teenager, when he told me this, like taking risks was still funny. The bedroom reeked of bleach but Michael didn’t notice. He flopped on the bed face-first and I carefully straddled his waist and pushed his shirt up around his shoulders and slowly rubbed calamine lotion into his skin. He started snoring before I finished.

  As I sat at the kitchen table watching my husband cook, pregnant a second time, I thought about my tendency to keep so much of our story to myself. I reached into my purse, felt the padded handles of the tests, set them on the kitchen table. I cleared my throat, then moaned softly as a wave of nausea hit. I took a deep breath. I said, “Michael,” and he looked at me and I waved one of the pregnancy tests over my head. “We should probably talk about this.” He dropped the sauce-covered wooden spoon he was holding onto the kitchen floor and I looked down at the red pattern it created, something that looked like a sunburst. He jumped up, throwing a fist in the air, and said, “Hot damn.”

  I felt a strange pang and I held my hand up again. “We should talk about what to do.”

  He stilled. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want a child, you know that.”

  The sauce on the stove started bubbling. Michael ignored it. “But now we have one.”

  I shook my head and remembered
coming home from running at the beach with my bloody thighs and how that blood changed me. I said, “I can’t do this.” I grabbed my purse and ran out of the house and got in my car and drove out of the neighborhood so fast I was certain I would crash into something and maybe I was hoping for that too so I wouldn’t have to think or feel.

  When I was young my father taught me never to cry. He first told me this while I was upset about something trivial but of great importance to a young girl—a classmate who I thought was my friend but who I caught making fun of me, my wild hair, calling me Don King with a group of popular girls. I lay on my bed, hearing their taunts for hours. My father came into my room, said we needed to be strong because as Haitians in America we would always be fighting; Americans wouldn’t understand we came from a free people. He said they would always see us as slaves so we had to work harder, we had to be better, we had to be strong. He gave me a history lesson when I only needed him to commit some small act of kindness. He sat on the edge of my bed, as I hiccupped, my face streaked with tears. He said, “There is no room for emotion if you want to succeed in this country.” He patted my thigh and said, “What happened to you was unfair and unkind but ambition is the only emotion that matters. You must learn this now.” He walked away. I understood from an early age to keep my feelings to myself.

  I threw the bottle of lotion against the wall and then I lay next to Michael, staring at the ceiling fan and its lazy revolution, creaking every third turn. In the dark, I looked down at my stomach and the swelling that would not come. I could not allow myself to feel anything. I said, “It’s over,” and I did not cry. Michael kept snoring. I went outside and slept in the backseat of my car that night. I don’t know why but I wanted to be in a small space. Michael found me in the morning. When I rolled my window down, he narrowed his eyes and said, “What the fuck, Mireille?” I was still so tired. I said, “Call my office and tell them I’m not coming in today.” I rolled the window back up and curled back into a ball and covered my eyes with my arm. I ignored Michael as he pounded his fists against the glass. I had my spare key with me so he could only harass me, looking like a crazy man in front of our good Catholic neighbors. He went back in the house and not too long later, there was another knock on the glass. I opened my eyes and saw Mona staring at me, hands on her hips.

  “Open the door,” she mouthed.

  I knew she wouldn’t back down so I opened the door and slid across the seat. We were quiet for a while. Michael sat on the front porch, looking bewildered.

  “So, kid, what are we doing sitting in the backseat of your car?”

  I shrugged, stared out my window.

  “Do I need to get Carlito to beat Michael up? Did he hurt you?”

  I shook my head, closed my fingers into tight fists.

  Mona closed the distance between us and grabbed my chin between her fingers, forced me to look at her. “You are freaking me out. I need you to start talking.”

  “Michael would never hurt me.”

  “Then who did?”

  Tears welled in the corners of my eyes. I wiped them away. I refused to cry. I looked out the window again and whispered, “The thing is, Mona, I did not want a child so I don’t know why I feel like this.”

  “Oh honey,” Mona said. My sister brushed a long strand of hair from my face, tucked it behind my ear. She has always taken care of me. The day my father told me never to cry, Mona came to my room and washed my face with a cool washcloth and tickled my back and made me smile. She told me everything was going to be okay and that she’d help me with my hair, which she did. She said, “Fuck those white girls and fuck what Dad said.” She told me I could cry whenever the hell I wanted. I almost believed her.

  In the backseat of my car, I sighed. “So that’s that.”

  “What does Michael say?”

  I looked through the windshield at my husband, sitting on the porch staring at my car with such intensity I thought he might be able to hear us. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Jesus Christ, Miri. You have to tell him.”

  “You know, my friend Elsa once said babies don’t come easy. I know what she means now.”

  “Tell your husband, kid.”

  I turned and fixed Mona with a hard look. “You can never tell him. Never. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to sit here.”

  Mona sighed, pulled my head into her lap, and began lightly stroking my hair. “One day you’re going to go crazy with everything you don’t want to talk about. You really are.”

  I closed my eyes.

  Sometime later, Michael knocked on the window again. Mona rolled it down and he said, “What the hell is going on?”

  “She’s having a bad day, work bullshit. You need to be gentle with her for the next few weeks, Michael.”

  He reached through the window and pressed the button to unlock the doors, and walked around to the other side. “Move over.”

  I did, reluctantly, and immediately felt ridiculous being so cosseted by my husband and my sister.

  “So,” Michael said. “Since when do you have your sister lie to me?”

  Mona snorted. I glared at her. They each took one of my hands and the longer we sat there, the more the ache in my belly dulled.

  I am not easy to love but I am well loved. I try to love well in return.

  The day I found out I was pregnant with Christophe, I drove to a nearby hotel and checked in and paid with my credit card. I wanted to be found. I knew Michael would go online to see if I was spending money. I rolled back the comforter because my mother says hotel comforters are extremely unsanitary. I sat on the bed and read the leather-bound folio with all the important information about the hotel. There was a business center and a concierge and in-room dining. If I needed incidentals like a toothbrush and toothpaste, sewing kit, they would bring these items to me at no cost. I needed incidentals so I called the front desk. The buttons on the phone felt strange to the touch, sticky with human oils.

  When they arrived, I arranged my incidentals neatly on the bathroom counter—toothbrush, toothpaste, Q-tips, shower cap, shampoo, sewing kit. I returned to the bed, turned on the television and scanned the Pay-Per-View options. There was lots of porn involving complex configurations and various fetishes. Michael has a fondness for porn with white men fucking black women though he pretends he’s indifferent to pornography. There’s a folder on his laptop’s hard drive labeled “Zebra.” He thinks I don’t know. I love that he thinks he has secrets I don’t know about.

  I still did not want a child but I held my hands over my stomach just below my navel and pretended I did not feel a little hope, pretended I did not wonder if the child were a boy or a girl, what that child might look like. I wondered if Michael would find me, if he would care, if he would understand why we could not keep this child, why even if we did keep the child there was a good chance the child wouldn’t stay kept. I had grown superstitious about such things after the first miscarriage, secretly scouring the Internet for explanations, trying to understand the exact nature of my culpability. I would call Mona late at night, sharing my theories, and she would tiredly tell me it wasn’t my fault, that lots of women miscarry. I wanted to believe her. I always want to believe my sister. I looked at my watch. Two hours had passed. I brushed my teeth. I flushed the pack of cigarettes I had in my purse. I made a cup of instant coffee and the smell instantly made me nauseous. I threw up and just as I was pressing a cool washcloth against my forehead I heard a soft knock at the door. I peered through the eyehole and saw Michael. I pressed the palm of my hand against the door, wondering if he could feel me. He knocked again, so hard I worried the door might splinter. He wasn’t going to leave so I opened the door.

  He looked me up and down and said, “You look terrible, too skinny.”

  I didn’t have the energy to respond.

  Michael rubbed his forehead. He said, “You make me crazy,” and I said, “I know,” and I thought about how small my life would have be
en if I had never met him, small but easily contained.

  “There is something you should know.”

  He turned to face me. He looked serious. I went to the window, played with the long plastic rod for opening and closing the drapes, rolling it back and forth between my fingers.

  “They lie when they say every view in Florida is a beautiful view.”

  “I like the view from where I’m sitting.”

  I half laughed and pulled the drapes closed. “Always the charmer.”

  Michael stood and came to me, wrapped his arms around me. “I don’t care what it is, so long as you talk to me.”

  I patted his chest but did not move my hand away. He was warm, solid. “Our lives are good. We shouldn’t mess with the equilibrium of what we have.”

  He covered my hand with his. “You don’t sound at all like yourself. You’re kind of worrying me. Are you going to tell me you’re having an affair?”

  I looked up, gave him what I hoped was a rather furious look, and stomped over to the dresser, grabbed the empty ice bucket and threw it at Michael’s head.

  He ducked, looking sheepish. “Okay, okay. That wasn’t fair. I just don’t understand what’s going on.”

  My stomach churned. I said, “There was a baby once, Michael. I didn’t know the baby was there and then I did but it was too late.” I leaned against the door, with my hands behind my back. When he tried to move toward me again I shook my head, said, “No, don’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  I shrugged and slowly sank to the floor, stretching my legs out in front of me. I was so tired. “The weekend you went to Key West.”

  Michael sat back down on the bed. I watched as he tried to recall the events of that weekend. “Goddamn, Mireille.” His hands clenched into tight fists. “Goddamn you. I knew something was wrong. You should have told me.”

  “We can’t do this, Michael. You don’t know how hard it was.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance to know, did you?” he said, peevishly.

  I shrank. I was not going to cry. I rubbed my face, squeezed hard.