Claire of the Sea Light

Ten years before the night Claire disappears, Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud is expecting a child. That year, the temperature is so high that “dozens of frogs exploded” (32). Gaëlle fears that the temperature will increase so much that she too might burst. She lays in bed, listening to her husband as he leaves the house. She empties her chamber pot outside, observing the various frog species. They are all dead. She takes the bodies and buries them beside a brook. spends the rest of the day in bed, eating little. Her husband, Laurent Lavaud, considers the dead frogs to be ominous portents. He tells her of the “group of young thugs” (34) he had seen hanging around the town’s only radio station.

The odor of the rotting frogs does not bother Gaëlle; their bodies soon washed away by “the early-summer rains” (34) which flood the creek where their house is located. Occasionally, Gaëlle wonders about her husband’s infidelity, but her suspicions are always “ended with red azaleas” (35). They drive into the old part of town, past the ruined castle (a relic from the French colonial period). They visit parts of town where they had been in their youth; as the only youngster in town with a car, Laurent had become “leader of their pack” (36), and Gaëlle was his “intended” (36). They drive to a spot near the old lighthouse, near Gaëlle’s childhood home. As they walk toward the shore, Gaëlle thinks about the baby inside her. A sonogram has revealed “a cyst growing in [the baby’s] chest and down her entire spine” (37). Rather than abort, Gaëlle has insisted on seeing “the whole thing through” (37).

The next day, Gaëlle works in her husband’s fabric shop for a few hours, an opportunity that she relishes. Her first customer is Claire Narcis (Nozias’s partner), who occasionally brings Gaëlle any gifts she can spare. Gaëlle thanks her but says for her to bring “no more” (38) gifts. It begins to rain. Gaëlle worries about the land near her house flooding, a constant concern.

Customers enter the shop to escape the rain and begin to trade gossip. Eventually, the rain stops and the customers disperse. The next few mornings are “dazzling, filled with splinters of daylight” (39). Weeks later, Gaëlle tells her husband that she wants to name their baby Rose, after Sò Rose (one of Gaëlle’s ancestors who helped to found the town). Laurent agrees.

That afternoon, Gaëlle decides to go for a walk. She spots a baby frog, dead beside the brook. Without thinking, she brushes off the ants and “[stuffs] the koki into her mouth” (42). She nearly vomits as she tries to swallow it whole and then thinks about the “two types of animals […] inside of her, in peril […] let them fight it out and see who will win” (42).

Rose is born the following evening. Gaëlle cuts the umbilical cord herself “with a pair of brand-new scissors from the shop” (44). Gaëlle weeps at the baby’s “unexpected flawlessness, at how magnificently whole she looked” (44). Baby Rose is perfectly healthy. Laurent does not “make it home in time to meet his daughter” (44); there is a shooting at the radio station, and he sustains three gunshot wounds. He “died on the spot” (44). People begin to claim that there is a worse plague in the town than exploding frogs: gangs.

Bernard Dorien lives in Cité Pendue, a “destitute and treacherous extension of Ville Rose” (45), where his parents own a restaurant. They breed pigeons for the restaurant, also selling them to young men who hope to perform a ritualistic sacrifice. Increasingly, these young men are joining gangs. There are also older men, ambitious business owners and local politicians who use the young men “to swell the ranks of political demonstrations” (46) or cause trouble with guns when needed. Disgusted by the huge upturn in pigeon sacrifices, Bernard’s parents close their breeding business. By this time, they have made enough money to expand their successful restaurant. Many of their customers are gang members, and Bernard’s parents feel repulsed to see innocent young men transformed by cocaine addiction. However, the “same blight that was destroying Cité Pendue was allowing them to prosper” (46); they can send Bernard to a good school, and he eventually joins the police force. Being a member of the police force means that, whenever a gang member faces arrest, Bernard receives the blame, and the gangs target his parents. Bernard drops out of the police training program after suffering a serious asthma attack, but he already has a new interest: the radio.

Interested in becoming a radio journalist, he plans to approach one of the local gang leaders, a one-armed man named Tiye who eats in his parents’ restaurant. Overhearing Tiye talk about violence, he wishes he could record the gang leader and reveal the truth to the rest of the country on his own radio show. He tells his friend Max about his idea; though younger, Max is a DJ at the radio station. Max worries that the station manager will be “too scared to take it on” (48). Max is right; the manager rejects the pitch, but a month later, a show based on similar content appears on the radio station without Bernard’s involvement. Gang members and victims of crime “hash out their differences” (49) with the help of an arbitrator. People (including gang members) tease Bernard. As he gets angry, the gang members try to convince him to attack the person who stole his idea. Max phones the restaurant, informing Bernard that Max’s father is sending him to Miami. Bernard feels the loss of his show and his friend “deep in his gut” (50).

The next morning, Special Forces policemen raid Bernard’s parents’ house and drag Bernard out. He is questioned about a robbery and shooting at the radio station the previous night, in which Laurent Lavaud was killed. The police have arrested Tiye, who has named Bernard as the “mastermind of the crime” (51). The police beat Bernard while they question him. They laugh at him and then throw him in a cell. Bernard’s parents visit him in his cell; his mother brings him an inhaler. Bernard weeps, “the hopelessness sinking in” (53). An hour after they leave, a magistrate arrives and tells Bernard of the charges against him: he is not only the mastermind behind the crime, but also a “turncoat police rookie” (53).

That night, the police drag Bernard out of his cell and release him. Tiye has “made a deal” (54) for his release, using blackmail against the police. Bernard decides to start writing his story and imagines the radio station’s most popular host interviewing him about it on air, but his mother informs him that Tiye wants to see him. Tiye and his gang are drinking in the restaurant, their drinks are free. Bernard approaches and sits with Tiye. That night, the bar is busy. People regard Bernard as “a kind of everyman hero” (56). That night, Bernard is murdered in his bed with “three bullets expertly […] administered to his heart” (57). That morning, on the radio report, Bernard is described as “another bandit” who has been “erased from the face of this earth” (57).

Max Arding Junior visits his hometown of Ville Rose for the first time in 10 years. He has brought a girl with him from Miami; his father worries that she is a “poor foreigner” (58). A large crowd have gathered to welcome him home, but Max recognizes few faces. His father’s friendship group changed entirely after his parents’ divorce. One day, his father had hoped, Max might have taken over as the local schoolmaster. Instead, Max chose to work in his mother’s sandwich shop in Little Haiti, Miami. That was where he had met Jessamine. He cannot find Jessamine at the party, as she left the airport to visit a relative and disappeared. Max’s father guides his son around the party. They talk to Vincent Albert; Max had been the ringbearer at the man’s wedding, his father had been the best man. Later that evening, Max’s father toasts his son’s return. After the party, Max still cannot contact Jessamine and he begins to worry. She is “the only person to whom her could speak openly about everything” (62), such as the fact that he had fathered a child 10 years ago; a child who he has never met. Max looks at the stars and thinks about his dead friend Bernard.

The next morning, Max has a visitor. As he runs excitedly to the door, expecting Jessamine, his father warns him to be calm and reveals that Max’s son is downstairs with Flore, his mother. The girl he sees is different from the Flore he knew, who had been a maid in his father’s house. Now running a beauty shop in Port-au-Prince, Max’s father invited her. Max sees a child step out from behind a divan, “stocky and strong” (65) and sucking on a lollipop. He looks exactly like Max and his father. Max greets his son and they talk; Max remembers a story told to him by Jessamine, whose own father had been absent for much of her youth. Just before she met him, he died.

As Max and his son stare at one another “in a mild trance” (67), Flore snaps her fingers and motions to leave, but the boy does not move. Though Max’s father offers for the boy to “stay here a day or two” (67), Flore rushes him away. Before they can depart, Flore hands the maid a gift for Max from his son: a sheet of paper with the word papa and a drawing of a faceless man. Max rushes out the door, chasing after Flore and his son. He offers to drive them home in his father’s car.

Max places his son into the backseat of the Toyota Jeep, the safety belts too small for the 10-year-old. Max and Flore sit in the front, and he begins to drive to Cité Pendue. Max has never been to the area but knows it through Bernard’s recollections and the music it produces. The traffic is thick as they silently pass street vendors and “low-grade brothels” (70). Max thinks about how little substantive discussion he ever shared with Flore. He finally breaks the silence, asking Flor “why did you give him such a name?” (71), to which she replies “because I wanted to” (71). They chat little, and Max sees his son asleep on the backseat.

Finally, they arrive at Flore’s home, and Max carries his sleeping son into the house. There is an overwhelming smell of vanilla essence as he lays the boy in the bedroom and then returns, “filled with regret” (72), to talk to Flore. He apologizes and can see her anger rising as she tells him that she never wants to see him again. Max asks her about his son, promising to contribute to his upbringing. Flore reveals that his mother and father have already sent her money and then asks him to leave. He asks directions to Rue de Saints, remembering that Bernard’s parents’ restaurant burned down, killing Tiye and his lieutenant. He follows the directions to a trash-filled street. After a moment of reflection, he drives away and takes a roundabout route home.

Max arrives home to find Jessamine sitting with his father on the porch. Pausing a moment in the car, he imagines the conversations the two might share. Maybe, he thinks, she might have told him that she was “not really his girlfriend” (76), but just a close friend. As his memories begin to overwhelm him, he starts the car and drives away, heading to the beach. He thinks about his abrupt departure from Haiti, sent away by his father after Flore’s pregnancy had been revealed. His best friend Bernard had died a day later.

Arriving at the beach, Max sees a “large-legged woman” (77) talking to a crowd, Nozias standing beside her. They are discussing a death. Max drinks a beer and sits beneath the palm trees. He sleeps and then wakes; a bonfire has been built before the “dead fisherman’s wife” (77). He hears people calling out the name “Claire” as he drifts through the crowd. Eventually, the crowds disperse; he sees Gaëlle enter a fisherman’s shack and then Nozias exiting the same shack and laying down on the beach, “confident, it seemed, that his daughter would return” (79), just as Max’s own father must be confident of his child’s return.