Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

“In Haiti, you will meet my sister and Ti Me.”

“In Haiti, Papa will be the first to greet you.”

“You’ll learn how to say that word, once we are in Haiti.”

And I could almost believe him, I desperately wished to believe him, that the future was a promise. But then I would leave him and go back home.

Madame Elizabeth did not, of course, have her dressmaker’s dummy in Kings County, and so instead she laid out the pieces of my dress on the parlor floor. Every night, there was a bit more to my bridal costume, and I would come back from my talk with Emmanuel and see it where it lay, deflated, on the floorboards, a kind of skinny ghost of my life to come. It made me sick to see it all flat like that. A bad omen.

“Put it on me,” I told Miss Elizabeth, and she laughed. “I’ve never seen a girl so eager to be a bride.”

The night before the wedding, Emmanuel Chase came for dinner, and it was almost as it had been when we had first met. Mama stood at the top of the table and raised her cup and toasted both of us. “A happy marriage to my Libertie,” she said, and I felt the tears run down my face in gratitude that she had seemed to forgive me.

But when I went to embrace her later that evening and held her close, she whispered in my ear, “Don’t do it,” and I realized that she would never bring herself to forgive me, and I went up to bed cold.

Emmanuel Chase stayed the night, since he did not wish to travel back to the clinic so late. I lay in my room, feeling the heat creep back up my bones, imagining that I heard him crawling up the stairs to scratch at my door and beg for … what, I was not sure. I knew what happened in the marriage bed. I had known since a young age—Mama had not been shy about that. I thought of what would happen the next night and kicked the sheets off—they suddenly felt too heavy.

In the last week, our time together in the parlor had become something else. It was no longer a telling of what would happen once we got to that country I still could not quite imagine. Our time had become a kind of war between ourselves—or rather, a war of both of us against desire. I did not think a man could make the sounds that Emmanuel Chase made, as he reached first to grab my shoulders, then my arms, then my forearms, then my hands, where they rested in my lap—too daring, that. Then back to my shoulders and then my neck, which he pulled close to his, forcing me to bend my head toward his, as he desperately moved his mouth. I would watch him do all this and realize, with amazement, that I was doing the same to him, holding with the same urgency to his neck, mirroring the movement of his lips with my own.

And then we would hear a step above us, or Lenore or Mama drop a scalpel, or the sound of a canister rolling across the floor, and we would separate—those last few days, I’d heard him gasp as we did so—and pull apart, and sit in the velvet again, to quiet our breathing.

So I lay awake and waited to hear his fingernails draw across my door. But all night long, there was nothing.

At dawn, I rose. I could not stand lying there anymore. I crept down to the parlor and knelt on the floor, running my thumb up and down the seams of the wedding gown. Madame Elizabeth had stitched them with such care I wasn’t even sure where they were. I discovered one stray tuft of a thread, and I almost pulled it loose.

That’s how Madame Elizabeth found me when she came down an hour later. “You waste time in fancies,” she said. “You only have so many hours in your wedding day.” And she had helped me stand, directed me to the bowl of water she’d set out for my bath.

When I put on the final dress, the armpits and the neck immediately darkened, sweat leaking into tight cotton.

I was standing in the parlor, my arms above my head, as Madame Elizabeth dabbed underneath them with bicarbonate of soda, oohing and aahing about her progress, when Lenore rushed in.

“It is Miss Hannah,” she said. “She’s breathing heavy and almost gone.”

So Mama and Emmanuel both left the house—Mama in her nicest shawl, and Emmanuel half-shaved. “I can come, too,” I said, but neither stopped to tell me no; they were both already on their way.

Madame Elizabeth looked at me, full of pity. “It’s probably best for you to stay here.”

The house was suddenly quiet again, without them. It was almost like the old days. I lifted the hem of my skirt and headed toward the garden. “You’ll spoil it!” Madame Elizabeth called.

I turned my head to look at her. “I won’t.”

Lenore had taken good care of the garden while I was away. I saw my mother’s hand on the little pieces of wood she’d stuck by each row, and below it, sometimes, in Lenore’s, a drawing of the leaves in question. I squatted, just enough, over the grass. I closed my eyes. I breathed in.

Mama still grew pansies. I picked the pinkest one, pulled it from its stem, and rolled the petals between my fingers till they tore apart. They left a stinging stickiness, made the palms of my hands dry and thirsty. I held my palm to my nose, smelling my skin and the petals. I lifted my open palm to my mouth and licked it clean, each finger carefully, the bitter taste of flowers on my tongue. I reached out, with both fists, for the heads of more flowers and crammed them into my mouth. Did not the Bible say, My beloved