NADOU'S PAPA IN MIAMI HAS BEEN TALKING about bringing her there. He has a lawyer, but the process is very long and complicated. Tonton élie has to keep taking Nadou to appointments at the US embassy and all these other places. We don't know when she'll get her visa or even if she'll get it. Nadou keeps her phone right next to her all the time, even when she's bathing, just in case her papa calls.
I tell her, "If you drown your phone in the kivèt, he'll never be able to call you again."
Nadine's papa is not family to me, so he can't do anything for me. But Nadou promises that if she goes to America, I will go, too. "You're my sister," she tells me. "Even if we can't leave at the same time, I'll send for you as soon as I can."
Nadou and I dream about Miami and all the things we will do once we are there together. Our dreams get bigger and bigger, more exaggerated—we keep trying to come up with something bigger and better than the last time.
"We could go bowling," I say. "Like in Justin Bieber's 'Baby' video."
"We could see a movie in a theater," Nadou says. "On a big screen."
"We could get our belly buttons pierced."
"We could do that here."
"We could get air-conditioning."
"It might be cold there."
"We could make money and buy a car and drive it all the way to New York City," I say.
"All the way to Montreal," Nadou says.
"All the way to Paris." I giggle.
"We could get real jobs."
"We could work at a supermarket. Or a mall."
"We could go to college."
"We could become doctors."
"We could become president!"
"Of Haiti or of the United States?"
"Both!"
We laugh like it's a big joke, because joking is the only way we have to talk about things we can't really control.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT NADINE ATE THAT I didn't eat yesterday. We had mayi moulen with sòs pwa, cornmeal with bean sauce, for dinner, which we cooked together while Tonton élie was out listening to politics on the radio and drinking kleren somewhere with other men. And I was feeling fine. Then, in the middle of the night tonight, Nadine shakes me awake.
"Magda!" she hisses.
I sit up, startled, my heart pounding. "What!"
"Twalèt kenbe m!" she whispers. "I have to go to the bathroom! Now!"
I flop back down and turn over, pulling the sheet over my head. "Can't you hold it until morning? Tonton élie isn't back yet. You know we're not supposed to leave the tent at night without him."
"No!" Nadine squeaks more loudly. "I need to go now."
"Nadou, it's the middle of the night—"
"Do you want me to have diarrhea in this bed?"
I shine the display of my cell phone over Nadine. She definitely looks uncomfortable, with a light sheen of sweat at her hairline. "Fine, let's go," I mumble, and I slip on my plastic sandals.
"This is all your fault," she hisses accusatorially as she unbolts the sheet of plywood that makes up our front door, her fingers slipping as she rushes. "I knew you would put too much clove in the sòs pwa. You're always adding too many cloves. You know it does this to me."
"I added no more clove than anyone else would have." As much as Manman taught me to add, I think to myself.
Using my cell phone as a flashlight, we wend our way to the camp toilets. They are portable plastic toilets, and one of the aid organizations pays people who live in the camp a little bit of money to clean them. This is how shameful our lives have become: foreigners paying us to clean our own houses. The toilets are hot and horrible and make me gag. There is always something leaking and creeping across the sidewalk, a slow-moving puddle that trickles into the street. They don't even have doors anymore—people took them to use the wood for other things—so you'd never use one alone. You need someone with you to stand in the open doorway, and, anyway, it doesn't feel safe to be there alone, especially at night.
Nadine and I have trained ourselves never to have to use the camp toilets if we can help it. When we have to pee, we go in a plastic kivèt, then pour it into the sewage ditch and rinse it out: easy. When we've got to do more than that, we have to strategize. I mean, it really changes things when you have to plan. It means I don't drink coffee anymore.
Most of the time, Nadine will go to her friend Jimmy Jean-Pierre's place, which is just a couple of blocks away, where they have a real toilet. She keeps her own roll of toilet paper on top of our TV and takes it with her whenever she goes. She says Jimmy wouldn't have a problem with my doing that, too, but I don't know him that well, and I'm embarrassed, and I don't want his family to think I'm a freeloader. Sometimes I go to the latrine behind the little restaurant across the street, which is owned by a lady named Loulouze who wears huge earrings. "Of course, my child, you've got no mother. Use it whenever you like." But I don't want to take advantage of her kindness.
And you can't always plan ahead …
In the dark, on nights when we don't have power, the camp looks like a different place than it does in the day, deserted and menacing. Even my fears are blurry—the bogeymen of my childhood imagination, and the rapists Tonton élie is always warning us of. A lone streetlight, installed by a relief organization, illuminates the area right around the toilets, but until we reach it, we are in a landscape of invisible phantoms and lurking monsters.
"Go faster, go faster!" Nadine begs.
She takes a deep breath, then hurries inside and pulls down her pajama pants just in time. I stand where the door should be, blocking the view of all the nonexistent passersby, and I pick at a hangnail, trying not to listen to what Nadine is doing.
I hold my breath. This is one of the worst smells in the world. I can think of only one smell that's worse, and that's the stench of rot that rose up from the city in the days after the quake, that told you death was everywhere, everywhere. But the toilet smell is terrible in a different way, maybe because we're supposed to get used to it. I keep holding my breath, and my chest gets tighter and tighter. The air from my lungs backs up into my throat, my nose, my mouth, and I try to release it bit by bit without breathing any new air in. It takes more than a minute for me to feel dizzy and see purple-black spots, and without thinking, I gulp in a huge quaff of warm, putrid air.
It is acrid and horrible, searing and thick with shit and poison. I imagine the germs buzzing in the air, traveling down into my lungs. The smell is so strong, it lingers on my tongue. My stomach lurches, and I feel a sour burn at the back of my throat.
"Nadou, are you finished?"
"I'm not sure … ," she whimpers miserably. "I think there might still be more in there …"
I am brisk with Nadine because sometimes she can get very exaggerated about illness and discomfort—she has always been this way—and because I would rather be sleeping peacefully in bed than standing out in the middle of the camp in the middle of the night, my cheap plastic sandals sticking in the filthy toilet mud, holding my breath outside this sickening cesspool. Still, I'm glad I am here. It is unpleasant to be sick, but it would be so much worse to be sick alone in this place. I feel sad and lonely just imagining Nadou stumbling through the dark alone, by the dim light of the cell phone, to have diarrhea in the horrible camp toilet. Who would block the doorway for her if I wasn't there? Who would block the doorway for me, if our roles were reversed? Who would be there to laugh about it with me afterward, to laugh at the stupidity and awfulness of it all?
"Okay, let's go," says Nadine. Her voice sounds small. "My butt's all raw," she whispers with a trace of an apologetic smile on her face.
"Anmwèy!" I burst out laughing and gasp, "Mezanmi, Nadou!"
We walk more slowly back to our now-home as the first pink fingers of light appear over the horizon and the camp's roosters rouse themselves and begin to crow.
