An Untamed State Read online

  My mother’s father died when she was six. Her first stepfather died when she was eleven. Her second stepfather died when she was fourteen and her third stepfather died when she was eighteen. Her mother has been living with the same man for more than twenty years, but refuses to marry him. Her concern is understandable. My grandmother and the man I know as my grandfather live in a small, two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx where she has lived since she first came to the United States. She worked as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Manhattan and sent for her twelve children one by one. When the youngest finally set foot on American soil she started taking classes at a local community college, determined to do more with the remainder of her life than clean the messes of the lives of others.

  My parents came to the States separately, my father, Sebastien, when he was nineteen by way of Montreal then Queens and my mother, Fabienne, by way of the Bronx. They flew here on Pan Am. They saved the airsick bags embossed with the Pan Am logo and marveled, when they shared these parts of their history, at how similar their stories were.

  Once upon a time, my parents were strangers in a strange land but they found each other. They found love, meeting at a wedding where my father, taken by her strange smile and the careless way she moved on the dance floor, asked my mother if he could drive her home. She was accompanied by her sister, Veronique, who would later become my godmother. The sisters sat in the backseat of my father’s Chevelle, giggling the entire way because, as my mother would later tell me, Sebastien Duval was so very serious.

  A week after that first meeting, my father told my maternal grandmother he was going to marry her daughter. He courted my mother, always visiting her at her mother’s apartment, where she lived with several of her twelve siblings. My father wore a neatly pressed suit and tie. He was often nervous and it charmed my mother that she created such uncertainty in a man otherwise brimming with confidence.

  They mostly sat on a plastic-covered couch and talked, quietly, while the younger of my mother’s siblings ran around with too much energy in a too small apartment. Three of her brothers, older, glowered at my father anytime they walked through the room and sometimes made idle threats about the bones they would break if my father stepped out of line. My parents had little privacy. Their romance blossomed between shared breaths and touching thighs and unwavering glances while life in that cramped apartment raged around them.

  It is a wonder they were able to fall in love. Falling in love, my mother says, requires its own private space. She and my father had no choice but to carve that private space for themselves where there was none.

  Though my father made his intentions plain early on, he waited six months to propose. On the day he asked my mother to be his wife, my father took her to see The Towering Inferno. She loved Steve McQueen, thought he was a very handsome American. My parents held hands throughout the movie, my father brushing his fingers across my mother’s knuckles. This gesture made her heart race, my mother said, because it was the most intimate moment they had ever shared. As he walked my mother back to her apartment, my father began to talk of how someday, he was going to build towers, only his weren’t going to burn. No. His towers were going to soar into the sky and nothing, he said, nothing would make him happier than having my mother by his side. Though most people don’t realize it, my father is the wild and romantic partner in their relationship. My mother said nothing and they continued walking along empty New York streets.

  Later they stood, quietly in the foyer of my mother’s building as my mother considered my father’s words. He waited, his forehead sweaty, his suit hanging loosely from his narrow frame, his body becoming smaller and smaller as his hope faltered. My mother enjoyed the quiet tension of the moment. She was not being cruel. She had spent so much of her life always surrounded by too many people clamoring for someone’s attention, clamoring for everything a person could need, never getting enough. All she truly longed for was quiet and space and she knew my father would provide those things for her. My father’s hand shook as he slid a modest diamond on her finger. He held her wrist gently, his thumb resting against the slightly curved bone. He said, “I am an ambitious man,” and my mother replied, “I believe you are.”

  A year later, they married, and a year after that, my father graduated from City College of New York with his degree in civil engineering, took a job at a large construction firm in Nebraska. He took my mother away from everything she knew but even though she didn’t believe in fairy tales, he was her Prince Charming.

  Where he went, she followed.

  The first thing Michael heard was a terrible, high-pitched whine—a car horn, maybe, though something was off about the sound. His head ached dully and there was something wet on his forehead, streaming along the left side of his nose and down his face. He sat up, tried to focus but all he could see was bright light, splintered. There was crying, the sound of a child crying, his child crying, he realized. Broken glass on his legs, one piece, buried in his knee. It didn’t hurt but it looked strange, almost beautiful as it refracted a narrow beam of light.

  He closed his eyes then slowly opened them again. He looked at his hands and noticed his wedding ring and tried to remember who he was wearing the ring for and then it all came back—his son, smiling in the backseat, his wife, Mireille, her small hand on his forearm, her wide smile, how she bit her lower lip when she was nervous, the glint in her eye when they argued and then the armed men, a rifle butt aimed at his head, his screaming child in the backseat, but most of all, the look of terror in Mireille’s eyes as she was taken away by two armed men.

  Michael opened his car door, hands shaking, and stumbled out, couldn’t balance, fell to his knees. There was a gnawing in his chest, a sharp pain just beneath the breastbone. “Christophe,” he whispered. Michael fumbled with the back door, quickly unstrapping Christophe, touching him everywhere, trying to make sure the boy wasn’t hurt. When he was sure Christophe was fine, Michael held the screaming child to his chest. He tried to form words that would make sense to a baby. Christophe could not be consoled. The car horn began to fade away as Christophe’s shrieks pitched higher, his little body shuddering as he tried to breathe and cry at the same time. Michael started walking into the mass of people who had gathered. “Help me,” he said hoarsely, and then he took a deep breath, covered Christophe’s head with his hand and shouted in a voice he could not recognize as his own, “Help me. Help us. My wife has been taken.”

  The gathered crowd just stared, some shaking their heads. His hands shook the entire time he was typing the code, blood and sweat in his eyes, but the gates slowly opened once more and Michael ran up the steep incline toward his in-laws’ house. He pounded his fists against the door—as large and imposing as ever, ornate mahogany, this detail clearer than others for some reason. He was wild with panic, didn’t know what to do, didn’t understand any of it, didn’t understand why he and Mireille weren’t still on their way to the beach for a perfect afternoon.

  One of the housekeepers, Nadine, answered the door with a smile that quickly drifted into a hard line as Michael ran past her and found Mireille’s father, Sebastien, in his study. Michael tightened his grip around his son. He fell to his knees, blood, sweat, even tears dripping from his face onto the immaculate marble. “They took her,” he wailed, rocking back and forth. “They took her,” he said again, this time the last of his words falling silent.

  Sebastien paled for a moment but quickly composed himself. He was Sebastien Duval. Composure was his only choice. He had learned that long ago. Sebastien cleared his throat and immediately picked up the phone, began dialing. He was calm, had always believed in the benefit of behaving rationally regardless of the circumstance. He looked at the crying man in front of him, the man with a thick body and blond hair and easy smile. Sebastien Duval stood, holding the phone, and pointed down at Michael. “Pull yourself together,” he said. “This matter will be handled.” He said these words as if they could possibly be true.

  Michael wi
ped his face with his T-shirt and stood, carefully. The ache in his head was sharper now. His whole face hurt. “Handled? My wife, your daughter, was just kidnapped. We have to call the police, the American embassy, the president, every goddamned body. We have to do something more than handle this.”

  Sebastien held up his hand, spoke a few, clipped words in French to whoever was on the phone, then hung up. “The negotiators are on their way,” he said. “The police have been notified. We must remain calm or the kidnappers will take advantage of our weakness.”

  Until that moment, Michael had not understood the vastness of the world and how small a place he held in it, in a country where he barely spoke the language, where women could be stolen from their families in broad daylight. Michael shook his head. “This isn’t happening,” he said, clenching his jaw. Michael tried not to think of Mireille’s petite frame, of what could be happening to her. His wife was strong. Her will was iron. He knew that. He held on to that.

  Christophe had stopped crying but he breathed in stuttered gasps, his eyes pink around the edges. “Mama mama mama,” he said.

  “I know,” Michael said, kissing Christophe’s cheek. “I want Mama too.”

  When the negotiator arrived, American, dressed in a dark, perfectly tailored suit, a doctor had already been to the house to see to Michael’s injuries. Mireille’s mother, Fabienne, sat with Michael and Christophe while Sebastien stalked back and forth across the room. The negotiator, who introduced himself as Mr. Evans, sat and opened a large black briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of paper, and what they later explained was a recording device to use on the telephone.

  “We have to get ahead of the threat,” Evans said. “If we have a better sense of who is behind this, we’ll have a better chance of retrieving the victim quickly.”

  “The victim has a name,” Michael said, tersely. “Her name is Mireille, and she needs to be retrieved today.”

  The negotiator nodded. “Of course that’s what you want, sir, but that’s not quite how things work down here. Negotiation is a process and you should be prepared for this to take time.”

  “How much time?” Michael asked, loudly. “Quantify time.”

  “Sir, please, stay calm,” the negotiator said. “I know what I am doing.”

  Sebastien stopped pacing and stood quietly, rubbing his chin. “I am loath to negotiate with these animals. I pay one set of kidnappers and soon they’ll be coming for my entire family—my wife, my other daughter, my nieces and nephews. There is a great deal at stake here.”

  Michael stood, his entire body vibrating with frustration. “I’ll pay. Whatever it takes. I will pay now. I don’t care about any of that bullshit. I want my wife back.”

  “We have to wait for the ransom demand,” the negotiator said, “before we can do anything. At that time I will ask for proof of life and we will begin to negotiate. You have to be patient, Mr. Jameson. I am very good at my job. I will get your wife back.”

  Michael looked at his father-in-law, refused to look away. “I want to make the decisions on this matter.”

  “You know nothing of this country,” Sebastien said. “There is little you can do to help.”

  Michael fixed Sebastien with a hard stare. “I know my wife,” he said. “I will not be ignored.”

  Sebastien waved his hand in the air and resumed his pacing. “Let us not argue,” he said. “We must wait and we must be prepared.”

  He sounded confident, and looked at Michael without blinking. Michael swore he wouldn’t blink first.

  It was not personal. That is what I told myself as I waited for something to happen, for someone to come find me, save me, set me free.

  Kidnapping was a business transaction, one requiring intense negotiation and, eventually, compromise, but I would be safe. I would be returned to those I love, relatively unharmed. There was ample precedent for hope.

  One of the accountants who worked for my father, Gilbèrt, was kidnapped the previous year. His kidnappers originally asked for $125,000, but everyone knew it was simply a starting number, an initial conversation. Eventually, with professional assistance and proof of life, his family paid $53,850 for Gilbèrt.

  My parents’ friend, Corinne LeBlanche, was kidnapped not long before I was taken. She and her husband and five children lived in Haiti year-round. She always swore, to anyone who would listen, that were she ever kidnapped, her husband, Simon, best meet her at the airport with her passport and children once she was returned because she would never spend another night in the country. Simon was a fat, happy, prominent businessman who owned a chain of restaurants and gas stations that did quite well. He laughed when Corinne made such declarations. He didn’t yet understand how these things went differently for women. She and the children now live in Miami. She called me when Michael and I returned to the States. Even though we said very little, we spoke for a long time.

  Two years ago, the matriarch of the Gilles family was kidnapped. She was eighty-one. The kidnappers knew the family had more money than God. They failed to realize that she was frail and diabetic. She died soon after she was abducted. Everyone who knew her was thankful her suffering was brief, until the kidnappers, having learned the lesson that the elderly are bad for business, kidnapped her grandson, who at thirty-seven promised to be a far more lucrative investment.

  When my cousin Gabby was kidnapped, her family paid and she was released in less than two days. We marveled for weeks at what a mercy that was. She had always been a frail girl, prone to fits of crying and long depressive spells where she took to her bed and kept her room shrouded in darkness. After the kidnapping, though, Gabby never cried and she seemed happier, somehow. It was a miracle, her mother said. The rest of us did not know what to think.

  My negotiations would be somewhat more complex and far more costly. A good family name and a prominent father, they come at a high price even if, in those early days of my kidnapping, we had no idea just how high the ransom would be.

  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 ther
e. 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.