I looked at the crowd rejoicing in the graves. The man closest to me pulled a femur bone from on top of one of the tombs and waved it in the air in slow circles. A few people walked with goats on leads or held in their arms. The sound of laughter kept up all around me. It had gone from a shock to a comfort to something that warmed me on the inside, that made my blood beat, that at least told me I was alive.

Ti Me had given up her role as nurse to me and was now standing by herself, watching the men and women sing. Sometimes, she sang along loudly; other times, she kept beat with hand claps.

Perhaps, I thought, I was destined to always be a child; perhaps it was silly to try to be otherwise. I thought of the life that lay ahead of me, a life of doing what my husband whispered to me late at night, of standing beside a Christian madwoman every day in church and pretending that her pronouncements were sane, of sitting across from a smelly old bishop who looked at me as the Whore of Babylon and had not spoken more than twenty words to me since I arrived. I thought of dying here, in this land, never seeing my mother’s face again. I felt it, suddenly, in my chest: I need her.

I began to laugh. It did not start as a giggle. It was horrible. My stomach ached with it, my lips hurt from peeling back, and my bones were shaking. I was laughing so hard I could not catch my breath. My smile widened and widened until my eyes were narrowed and I felt the tiny, hot burst of tears at the corners of my eyes. The strangest thing was that I could not hear myself. I could feel the laughter bang in my throat, but in my ears was only the roar of the people around me.

Ti Me turned to look at me—both shocked and amused. “It’s too much for Mamselle,” she said.

“No,” I gasped when I was able. “We stay.” Even in my hysteria, I could see the skepticism on her face. But I wanted to do at least one part of this right.

I sat down on the dirt, against one of the tombs. Ti Me, still looking anxious, stood beside me for a bit.

She knelt down. “Do you want to know what he said at the gate?”

“Who?”

“Papa Gede. He knows everything. He knows who will die and who will be born. He said you are now with child—two, he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking. He likes to make jokes. Rude ones, especially about pretty young women,” she said. “But I think—”

I began to laugh harder. I pressed my back into the tomb and rolled my neck. I could not say then if I wanted release from the moment or to be held in it forever. I was never good at deciding a side.

“No, mamselle, don’t do that!” Ti Me put her hands behind my head, trying to still me. She brushed the dust out of my hair.

“If I am … If I am … If I am,” I gasped, “so be it.”

“Mamselle, you will hurt yourself.”

“I have failed as a daughter, and I do not like being a wife. Perhaps I can be a mother,” I said, and then I began to laugh even harder, until Ti Me raised me up by the elbows, dusted off my church dress, and walked me, very carefully, out of the graveyard and back to my husband’s house.

By the time we arrived, I had quieted down some. I could feel myself hiccoughing, the flutter in my diaphragm. I did not think what Ti Me and that man, whoever he had been, what they said about me—I did not believe it could be true. But by then, Ti Me was convinced. She had me lie down in my bedroom, checked the shutters to make sure they were closed against the street, and set a tincture of ginger leaves and aloe at my bedside, so bitter it made me wince.

The house was empty except for the two of us. I could hear the whisper of the bottoms of Ti Me’s feet as she walked from my room, down the hall, and out to the yard. She had told me she would go to find Emmanuel, but I was not sure that I wished to see him yet.

Even in the heat, Ti Me had draped a blanket over me, and in my exhaustion I had let her. But now I tossed it off and pressed at my stomach, naming each part I imagined I felt through my skin. The liver, the kidneys. I imagined feeling the womb. I had not thought of this part of it, of falling pregnant without my mother there to name everything. I thought of the last day of our journey to Haiti, when we’d thrown the satchel Mama had handed me overboard and toasted to babies to come. I had done it to amuse Emmanuel, to amuse myself, really, by imagining what my mother would think if she could see me then. I had not let it occur to me that any of it could be real.

The world is only consequences, Libertie. I could hear her voice now.

“You do not always have to be right,” I said to the ceiling above me.

There was a flash of light there, the reflection from the bowl of water and herbs Ti Me had left by my side. I watched as the light from the water skipped over the ceiling—back and forth, back and forth. It meant nothing. It meant everything. I was not sure where this thing called a will came from. Mama had it. Emmanuel had it. Even mad Ella, in her obsessions, had a will. But I did not. Would it come when whatever was in me was born? Or did I have a little more time to develop one, before this something else was here?

I began to laugh again, a little weakly. The heat of the graveyard was beginning to leave me. I could feel the sweat cooling on my face. By the time Emmanuel returned, led by Ti Me, both of them panting from running there, I was sitting up in bed, sipping from the bowl of water, in the last little bit of sunlight from the shutters I had thrown open wide.

“You are feeling better, at least?” Emmanuel said, his voice hesitant.

I set down my cup. “There was never anything wrong with me.”

“Ti Me says you took fright.”

“I was only overheated. But I am well now.”

He sat down on the bed, motioned for Ti Me to leave the room.

“She told me what you heard at the cemetery.”

“Do you believe it?”

“It would not be surprising.”

“You do not sound delighted.”

“It is only that there is so much to do, still, for the two of us,” he said. He bent his head. He would not look at me.

He made as if to fall into bed beside me, but I pushed him away.

“You do not wish for this either,” I said.

“There is not much to be done. It was not part of the plan, but I cannot say I can’t see how it could be. Father will be satisfied, at least.”

“He was about to yell at me, last time I saw him.”

“You shouldn’t have fled from the church like that, this is true. You could have left more discreetly,” Emmanuel said. “But he forgave you when I said you might be with child. He remembers what that is like. He said, ‘Women lose their minds when they are carrying. It is their burden.’ But he was pleased. He will be pleased.”

“Is that all?”

“I can see how it could help with a lot of things.”

“I’m to raise it, to have it, here with a grandfather that hates its mother and a madwoman for an auntie.”

“Don’t call Ella that,” he said.

I did not meet his eye. Instead, I looked at the reflection of the two of us in the mirror across from the bed—the back of his neck, red with heat, and my own reflection, dark in the shadows of the afternoon.

“I am not feeling well again,” I said. “I want to rest some more.”

He looked only slightly disappointed. He got up to close the shutters.

“No. Leave them open. The noise helps make the room bearable.”

He tried to smile. “For tonight only,” he said. Then he left me.

When I heard him walk all the way down the hall, I went to the desk and opened the drawer, the one he had told me was mine alone. The letters were crammed in until they tore, the paper crumpled into a fan. I took them out and brought them back to the bed and held them in the cradle of my lap.

Mama’s need was too great. Think of that, I told myself. But who would have thought of that? I’d needed her and needed her and needed her when it was unseemly, and now here was the proof that she’d needed me back.

I tried to read her letters, but the words would not focus. My eyes would not let me take them in. I felt a pressure at my temples and suddenly very, very tired. To recognize that I had become another person for possibly a reason as foolish and flimsy as misunderstanding my mother—it was too painful to bear.

Fragments of the letters swam into clarity.

You do not write

You do not write

You do not write to me

Why?

Libertie

I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you from a babe in arms to a girl. You were mine, and I decided what you heard, who you listened to, what words formed on your lips. It was intoxicating to have that kind of open dominion over another, even more so because I knew you would grow to become your own person, and that person could be shaped by me.

You do not write to me

And then the letters went back to a blur.

I closed my eyes and rapped my fist on the desk—once, twice, three times.

And then I sat down and took a fresh sheet and dipped my pen in the ink.

I wrote on one sheet, simple and direct:

I am with child.

I called Ti Me and handed it to her to bring to the telegraph office on the Rue de Commerce. I spelled out the address carefully with my own hand. I made her repeat it back to me.

When she was gone, I looked at the pileup of my mother’s love.

I’ll burn it all this afternoon, I told myself in a flash of resolve. If I burn her words, I will be free of whatever she wants of me.

Instead, I stuffed the papers back in my drawer.