I chose her

I chose her. Not because she was special or because she had soulful, intelligent eyes, but because of all the children in the orphanage she was the one with the lightest skin and the curliest hair. No five-year-old should have the power to make this type of decision. She has made me pay for it ever sense.

At seventeen she regularly sneaks out the house. She smokes cigarettes and she goes out with men. Grown men who have been to jail. She gets letters from them on plain stationary. I sneak them to her in efforts of winning her affection. The only thing that has stayed with her from Haiti is her sense of style, her gaudiness, her penchant for weaves, tight skirts, big purses, blue eye shadow. Mom has grown ten years older in the last five years. Her face looks perpetually drawn, her brow furrowed. Dad doesn’t say much about it, he’s always been pretty stoic, but his bouts of silliness are far and few between, his attitude is always, “She’s our child, we have to do whatever needs to be done to support her.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the biggest fan of the parental units. They foisted their misplaced liberalism on us. They wouldn’t let us eat refined sugar and didn’t let us watch t.v. and we looked like freaks in front of other kids because we didn't get any of their cultural references. Vegetarian, self righteous (they always donated to n.p.r.) and left leaning, they refused to mourn when Obama was assassinated because they claimed that he didn’t do enough for Blacks.

However, they didn’t deserve this and by this I mean her.

It was my fault, I chose her. She hates me, because she knows it. Deep in her heart she would rather still be there, in hell, than in this plush purgatory.

If the parents had known what would happen, they would never have done it. The boy forgets, he was only two, but I will never forget. That is one of the reasons why she hates me, though she will never admit it. It is because of me that she left there, the beautiful, dreadful misery. It's as if she won't be happy until she feels (and inflicts) all the pain for the years she missed.

The first thing I remember was the smell, the disinfectant, but harsher, more bitter than anything we have here. And once we entered I understood why. There were children and adolescents scooting on the ground, some drooling, some with withered legs wrapped behind their bodies. Hair sprouted in dry red-brown patches on the girls' heads. In retrospect, some of them probably suffered from the last bouts of polio in the western hemisphere. One girl, perhaps a thirteen year old, chortled with glee when she saw us and tried to drag her self over to us on her knees. Before the emaciated nun could hold her back she had wrapped her arms around my mother’s legs and planted her wet mouth on her thigh. My mother rubbed her back with absent affection. While the little, French nun, hurried over and sharply called one of the local black women who worked there to fetch her away.

I suddenly had to go to the bathroom. Bad. Mother took me. Dad stayed to talk to the nun about the history of the orphanage and how it had fared better under the dictators than with the quote un-quote progressives. The bathroom was obviously scrubbed and bleached on a regular basis but that still could not remove the caked in filth between the broken tiles and exposed cement of the floor. There was a black hole in the floor and two raised cement squares on either side of it. “But ma, where is the toilet?” I whined. My mother, Miss Peace Corp, was annoyed at her spoiled daughter who obviously didn’t know how to rough it. She took off my underwear and commanded me to squat over the hole. I peed all over my shoes.