THIS MORNING NADINE WAKES UP AT FOUR to get ready. Her fingernails and toenails are painted red, and her hair is in curlers, after a trip to the beauty salon yesterday, and she's laid out the new outfit she got downtown—tight, skinny blue jeans, a white blouse, and a long vest that's the same golden-brown color as her strappy sandals. All new, not secondhand. Her earrings and necklace are gold-colored. élie gave her all the money he got from cash-for-work, even if it means we'll be eating white-flour porridge for the next week. Looking at her, you wouldn't know she is poor. We are happy for her.
If Nadou can leave, that is good for her, maybe good for all of us.
Nadine is bathing, using the blue plastic kivèt. She stands behind the tent with a rigged-up tarp for cover, soaping herself up in her underpants. Around her, a couple of chickens cluck and dash out of the way when the water she pours over herself splashes them. Chickens are dumb. I am a few feet away, cooking over the charcoal: boiled plantains, fried chicken, and sauce made of onions, tomato paste, green onion, garlic, thyme, and a Maggi cube. It is early, but I want to make a good last meal for her, something that will sustain her until she gets to Miami. As she washes, I think, This is the last time you'll have to bathe in cold water.
She wraps herself in a towel and goes back inside the tent, to the clothes she's laid out on the bed we share. Nadine has always laughed at how I sleep "ugly," kicking my legs out and flinging my arms wide, reaching over and stealing her sheet in the middle of the night or waking her up by resting my head on her shoulder. I realize I will sleep alone from now on. For a second my life spins out of focus. I can't think about these things. My eyes sting. The chicken sizzles in the pot before me.
"Magda!" Nadine calls from inside. Her voice sounds like a child's. "Come help me do my hair!"
We learned to braid hair on each other as little girls, armed with cloth ribbons and plastic barrettes, and later we learned how to do perms on each other. This morning I take out Nadine's curlers and brush her hair, adding touches of pomade here and there. Nadine watches in a handheld mirror. She is so silent this morning. I feel the minutes rushing toward us.
"How do you feel?" I ask her.
Nadine pauses. "Bizarre."
Nadou hasn't seen her papa since he left, when she was, maybe, eight. He was never there for her; he just sent Manman a Western Union money transfer every once in a while. Nadine's father never mattered before, but now he matters more than anything. She has papers that say her father is a US resident, and her mother died in the earthquake, and because of these things Nadine has a visa to go to America forever.
That is the funny thing—Nadine and I are so much like sisters that we forgot we aren't really sisters. Until now. Before this, it never mattered. I was Manman's daughter. I'm still Manman's daughter, in every way but the one that matters now. It took months of appointments and DNA tests (taking her blood, scraping the inside of her cheek), but now Nadine has a passport and that thick, magical manila envelope sealed by the US consulate. It is her passage to lòt bò dlo, the other side of the water.
Nadine only picks at the chicken and banann bouyi I've set in front of her. She's too nervous, too busy fussing with her makeup and her clothes. I sit on the bed, still wearing the same T-shirt and skirt I slept in, watching her, trying to memorize her. She's already slipping away; she's halfway gone. This separation is temporary, I keep telling myself.
Since January 12, every good-bye feels like it might be forever.
Jimmy has come to see her off. He has a camera in his hand. He smiles.
"Come, Magdalie, let's take a photo," says Nadine, and she tries to put her arm around me, but as soon as she does that, I start weeping.
"Don't hug me, or I'll cry," I tell her.
Jimmy snaps the photo and shows it to us. We look stupid—Nadine's arm wide open, failing to pull me in, her mouth in the middle of forming a word; me, still in my sleeping clothes, head down, a blur.
"Erase it," I tell Jimmy.
"But this is the last photo," he tells us.
I ask myself in my heart if I am jealous. God says we should not be envious of others, that it is a sin, but I still have to ask myself if, honestly, I am jealous of Nadine. She is leaving. She is going to a better place—to a place I have only seen in photos and in films, to a place where everyone has money, everyone has a car and a lawn and a flush toilet, where the streets are straight and flat and clean. To a place where she will go to university, and she can have a good life, where it will be easy to accomplish whatever she sets her mind to. To a place with no rubble and no makeshift tents. To a place without fear. I don't know when I'll join her. Maybe I am supposed to feel jealous. I ask myself and ask myself, I search the darkest places in my heart, but the truth is, I don't feel jealous at all. I just feel sad.
I'd wanted to give her something. I'd wanted to write her a poem or a story. I'd tried to write, but I couldn't think of what to say. Everything felt too heavy. I used to write all the time. I'd write about things I saw that day and about things I'd imagined, like romantic love, or stories in which the hardworking triumph and those who seek only pleasure are punished, tales with happy endings. I didn't realize it at the time, but they were a little like the soap operas Manman loved so much. I can't write those stories now. I can't write anything now.
Tonton élie takes Nadine in his arms, which is awkward, because he's not normally affectionate. It just makes this day feel stranger and more uncomfortable. élie can't go to the airport with us. He has to go break up rubble for that cash-for-work program the aid organizations run. If he doesn't go, they'll give his spot to someone else. "You are going to a better place," he tells Nadou. "Don't forget us. Don't forget your country. You are going to a more beautiful place so that you can come back someday and work to make things more beautiful here."
Nadine doesn't say anything, only sniffles. "Dakò," she finally whispers. "Okay."
I slip away to bathe quickly and get dressed before Jimmy gives us a ride to the airport. Jimmy's papa is lòt bò and sends him money every month. I put on one of our shirts, a yellow sleeveless blouse—we share all our clothes. Nadine has left almost all of them for me, and so now this is my shirt, not ours.
I keep thinking I can hold time still if I just concentrate on it.
We ride in silence to the airport, both of us in the backseat, holding hands. I think I should say something.
"Are you afraid of the airplane?"
"A little."
I can't think of anything else to say. Or maybe there are so many things to say, but none of them come to the surface. I watch all the streets we know and try to imagine what it would be like to be seeing them for the last time. It is Saturday morning. Children gather around a broken water pipe on the side of a muddy street and fill their buckets. A woman with fat, grandmotherly arms sells ripe bananas, peanut butter, bread, and hard-boiled eggs out of a basket in front of one of the camps. A motorcycle taxi shoots by carrying a woman passenger sitting sideways, elegantly, not creasing her skirt. A banner across the road advertises a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic. An elaborate taptap bus painted with the face of Brazilian soccer star Kaka stops in front of us. For a moment I want to say: Nadine, hold on to all this. Remember this. Not because it is all beautiful or good—so much of it is ugly and broken—but because it is ours.
Nadine looks out the window, absorbed in thought, her eyes fixed on a future I cannot see. The road leading to the airport, past the Trois Mains statue, is also a camp. Over the clustered sunbaked tents, the blue and gray sea of tarps, rise billboards. One, for Delta Airlines, shows New York City and the Statue of Liberty looming over it. The billboard hangs over the camp like a question mark and a promise and a joke. I wonder if Nadine will get to go to New York City.
We arrive. Standing on the curb in front of the departure terminal with her small black suitcase, Nadine looks lost. She gazes at me with the same lost expression she had on January 12, when she cried out, "Where is Manman?" Now she pushes her phone into my hand—with the little pink sticker of a rose on it, with her special love-song ringtones, with the sudoku she used to play when she couldn't fall asleep. "I won't be able to use this," she says, and she clears her throat.
"Orevwa," I say. "Till we meet again, sista. Do well for yourself."
"Orevwa," says Nadine. "I'll miss you."
"We'll see each other very soon," I say firmly.
"Mwen pap janm lage w. I'll never let you go." She nods. "I'll get you to the US as soon as I can, as soon as I can."
We hug for a quick moment. I slip her fifty gourdes I've saved, in case she gets hungry. I thought there would be more to say.
I walk her as far as I can and then watch her join the line of passengers waiting to board their planes. My fingernails dig crescent moons into my palms. I watch the back of her head as she blends into the crowd, as she becomes just another person departing, as she disappears from my life.
