Read Online The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat - Free Book Online

Papa. I’ve been working really hard.”
    They never spoke of difficult things during these phone calls, of money or illnesses or doctors’ visits. Papa always downplayed his aches and pains, which her mother would highlight in the letters. Events were relayed briefly, a list of accomplishments, no discussion of failures or losses, which could spoil moods for days, weeks, and months, until the next phone call.
    “Do you have a boyfriend?” Her mother took back the phone. Nadine could imagine her skipping around their living room like a child’s ball bouncing. “Is there anyone in your life?”
    “No, Manman,” she said.
    “Don’t wait too long,” her mother said. “You don’t want to be old alone.”
    “All right, Manman.”
    “Papa and I saw a kolibri today.” Her mother liked moving from one subject to another. Her parents loved birds, especially hummingbirds, and never failed to report a sighting to her. Since every schoolboy made it his mission to slingshot hummingbirds to death, she was amazed that there were any left in Port-au-Prince, especially in her parents’ neighborhood.
    “It was just a little one,” her mother was saying. “Very small.”
    She could hear her father add, “It’s very clever. I think it’s going to last. It loves our new hibiscus.”
    “You have hibiscus?” Nadine asked.
    “Just a hedge,” her mother said. “It’s just starting to blossom. It brings us bees too, but I wouldn’t say we have a hive.”
    “That’s nice, Manman,” she said. “I have to go now.”
    “So soon?”
    “Please say good night to Papa.”
    “Okay, my heart.”
    “I promise I’ll call again.”
    The next morning, Nadine watched as Ms. Hinds packed her things and changed into a bright-yellow oversized sweatsuit and matching cap while waiting for the doctor to come and sign her discharge papers.
    “My mother bought me this hideous outfit,” Ms. Hinds wrote on the pad, which was now half filled with words: commands to the nurses, updates to her parents from the previous evening’s visit.
    “Is someone coming for you?” Nadine asked.
    “My parents,” Ms. Hinds wrote. Handing Nadine the pad, she reached up and stroked the raised tip of the metal tube in her neck, as if she were worried about her parents seeing it again.
    “Good,” Nadine said. “The doctor will be here soon.”
    Nadine was tempted to warn Ms. Hinds that whatever form of relief she must be feeling now would only last for a while, the dread of being voiceless hitting her anew each day as though it had just happened, when she would awake from dreams in which she’d spoken to find that she had no voice, or when she would see something alarming and realize that she couldn’t scream for help, or even when she would realize that she herself was slowly forgetting, without the help of old audio or videocassettes or answering-machine greetings, what her own voice used to sound like. She didn’t say anything, however. Like all her other patients, Ms. Hinds would soon find all this out herself.
    Nadine spent half her lunch hour staring at the barred windows on the brown building across the alley, watching the Psych nurses scribbling in charts and filing them, rushing to answer sudden calls from the ward.
    Josette walked up to the table much earlier than usual, obviously looking for her.
    “What is it?” Nadine asked.
    “Se Ms. Hinds,” Josette said. “She’d like to say good-bye to you.”
    She thought of asking Josette to tell Ms. Hinds that she couldn’t be found, but fearing that this would create some type of conspirational camaraderie between her and Josette, she decided against it.
    Ms. Hinds and her parents were waiting by the elevator bank in the ward. Ms. Hinds was sitting in a wheelchair with her discharge papers and a clear plastic bag full of odds and ends on her lap. Her father, a strapping man, was clutching the back of the wheelchair with moist, nervous hands, which gripped the chair more tightly for fear