Excerpt of The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
(Page 4 of 9)
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"He come back," she says with more certainty than either Officer Bo or Manager Salinas. "He not leave you like that."
I promise to call my mother hourly with an update, but I know she’ll call me sooner than that, so I dial Gabri- elle Fonteneau’s cell phone. Gabrielle Fonteneau’s voice sounds just as it does on television, but more silken, nuanced, and seductive without the sitcom laugh track.
"To think," my father once said while watching her show, in which she plays a smart-mouthed nurse in an inner-city hospital’s maternity ward. "A Haitian-born actress with her own American television show. We have really come far."
"So nice of you to come all this way to personally deliver the sculpture," Gabrielle Fonteneau says. She sounds like she’s in a place with cicadas, waterfalls, palm trees, and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes away. I realize that I too am in such a place, but I’m not able to enjoy it.
"Were you told why I like this sculpture so much?" Gabrielle Fonteneau asks. "It’s regal and humble at the same time. It reminds me of my own father."
I hadn’t been trying to delve into the universal world of fathers, but I’m glad my sculpture reminds Gabrielle Fonteneau of her father, for I’m not beyond the spontaneous fanaticism inspired by famous people, whose breezy declarations seem to carry so much more weight than those of ordinary mortals. I still had trouble believing I had Gabrielle Fonteneau’s cell number, which Céline Benoit had made me promise not to share with anyone else, not even my father.
My thoughts are drifting from Gabrielle Fonteneau’s father to mine when I hear her say, "So when will you get here? You have the directions, right? Maybe you can join us for lunch tomorrow, at around twelve."
"We’ll be there," I say.
But I’m no longer so certain.
My father loves museums. When he’s not working at his barbershop, he’s often at the Brooklyn Museum. The Ancient Egyptian rooms are his favorites.
"The Egyptians, they was like us," he likes to say. The Egyptians worshiped their gods in many forms, fought among themselves, and were often ruled by foreigners. The pharaohs were like the dictators he had fled, and their queens were as beautiful as Gabrielle Fonteneau. But what he admires most about the Ancient Egyptians is the way they mourn their dead.
"They know how to grieve," he’d say, marveling at the mummification process that went on for weeks but re-sulted in corpses that survived thousands of years.
My whole adult life, I have struggled to find the proper manner of sculpting my father, a quiet and distant man who only came alive while standing with me most of the Saturday mornings of my childhood, mesmerized by the golden masks, the shawabtis, and the schist tablets, Isis, Nefertiti, and Osiris, the jackal-headed ruler of the underworld.
The sun is setting and my mother has called more than a dozen times when my father finally appears in the hotel room doorway. He looks like a much younger man and appears calm and rested, as if bronzed after a long day at the beach.
"Too smoky in here," he says.
I point to my makeshift ashtray, a Dixie cup filled with tobacco-dyed water and cigarette butts.
"Ka, let your father talk to you." He fans the smoky air with his hands, walks over to the bed, and bends down to unlace his sneakers. "Yon ti koze, a little chat."
"Where were you?" I feel my eyelids twitching, a nervous reaction I inherited from my epileptic mother. "Why didn’t you leave a note? And Papa, where is the sculpture?"
"That is why we must chat," he says, pulling off his sand-filled sneakers and rubbing the soles of his large, calloused feet each in turn. "I have objections."
Excerpted from The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat Copyright© 2004 by Edwidge Danticat. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
