Edwidge Danticat - Claire of the Sea Light

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Edwidge Danticat

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Yale University for permission to reprint an excerpt from Tell Me by Jean Toomer from the Toomer Papers: Jean Toomer Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reprinted by permission of the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale University.

Portions of this work were previously published, in different form, in the following publications: The New Yorker (January 10, 2005, and November 24, 2008); Secret Desires, edited by Carol Taylor (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005); The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith (London: Penguin Group, 2008); The Best African American Fiction 2010, edited by Gerald Early and Nikki Giovanni (New York: Ballantine, 2010); and Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat (New York: Akashic Books, 2012).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danticat, Edwidge.
Claire of the sea light / Edwidge Danticat.First edition
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-385-34968-0
1. GirlsCrimes againstFiction. 2. Missing childrenFiction. 3. City and town lifeHaitiFiction. 4. SecretsFiction. 5. HaitiFiction. I. Title.
PS 3554. A 5815 C 57 2013
813.54dc23 2012043876

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front-of-jacket photograph by Carl Juste
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

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For my mother, Rose,
and my daughters, Mira and Leila

Tell me, dear beauty of the dusk,

When purple ribbons bind the hill,

Do dreams your secret wish fulfill,

Do prayers, like kernels from the husk

Come from your lips? Tell me if when

The mountains loom at night, giant shades

Of softer shadow, swift like blades

Of grass seeds come to flower. Then

Tell me if the night winds bend

Them towards me

JEAN TOOMER , Tell Me

The morning Claire Limy Lanm Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claires father, Nozias, a fisherman, was one of many who saw it in the distance as he walked toward his sloop. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick a pink sky.

Just as quickly as it had swelled, the wave cracked. Its barrel collapsed, pummeling a cutter called Fifine, sinking it and Caleb, the sole fisherman onboard.

Nozias ran to the edge of the water, wading in to where the tide reached his knees. Lost now was a good friend, whom Nozias had greeted for years as they walked past each other, before dawn, on their way out to sea.

A dozen or so other fishermen were already standing next to Nozias. He looked down the beach at Calebs shack, where Calebs wife, FifineJosephinehad probably returned to bed after seeing him off. Nozias knew from his experience, and could sense it in his bones, that both Caleb and the boat were gone. They might wash up in a day or two, or more likely they never would.

It was a sweltering Saturday morning in the first week of May. Nozias had slept in longer than usual, contemplating the impossible decision hed always known that he would one day have to make: to whom, finally, to give his daughter.

Woke up earlier and I would have been there, he ran back home and tearfully told his little girl.

Claire was still lying on a cot in their single-room shack. The back of her thin nightdress was soaked with sweat. She wrapped her long, molasses-colored arms around Noziass neck, just as she had when she was even littler, pressing her nose against his cheek. Some years before, Nozias had told her what had happened on her first day on earth, that giving birth to her, her mother had died. So her birthday was also a day of death, and the freak wave and the dead fisherman proved that it had never ceased to be.

The day Claire Limy Lanm turned six was also the day Ville Roses undertaker, Albert Vincent, was inaugurated as the new mayor. He kept both positions, leading to all kinds of jokes about the town eventually becoming a cemetery so he could get more clients. Albert was a man of unmatched elegance, even though he had shaky hands. He wore a beige two-piece suit every day, just as he did on the day of his inauguration. His eyes, people said, had not always been the lavender color that they were now. Their clouding, sad but gorgeous, was owing to the sun and early-onset cataracts. On the day of his swearing-in, Albert, shaking hands and all, recited from memory a speech about the towns history. He did this from the top step of the town hall, a white nineteenth-century gingerbread that overlooked a flamboyant-filled piazza, where hundreds of residents stood elbow to elbow in the afternoon sun.

Ville Rose was home to about eleven thousand people, five percent of them wealthy or comfortable. The rest were poor, some dirt-poor. Many were out of work, but some were farmers or fishermen (some both) or seasonal sugarcane workers. Twenty miles south of the capital and crammed between a stretch of the most unpredictable waters of the Caribbean Sea and an eroded Haitian mountain range, the town had a flower-shaped perimeter that, from the mountains, looked like the unfurling petals of a massive tropical rose, so the major road connecting the town to the sea became the stem and was called Avenue Pied Rose or Stem Rose Avenue, with its many alleys and capillaries being called pines, or thorns.

Albert Vincents victory rally was held at the towns centerthe ovule of the roseacross from Sainte Rose de Lima Cathedral, which had been repainted a deeper lilac for the inauguration. Albert offered his inaugural address while covering his hands with a black fedora that few had ever seen on his head. On the edge of the crowd, perched on Noziass shoulder, Claire Limy Lanm was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her plaited hair covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes. At some point, Claire noticed that she and her father were standing next to a plump woman with a cherubic face framed with a long, straight hairpiece. The woman was wearing black pants and a black blouse and had a white hibiscus pinned behind her ear. She owned Ville Roses only fabric shop.

Thank you for putting your trust in me, Albert Vincent now boomed into the crowd. The speech was at last winding down nearly a half hour after hed begun speaking.