Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat Page A

years younger than he was, I had barely interacted with him when I was a girl because his parents had divorced when I was quite young and he lived mostly with his father, who’d rarely mingled with our family. My father could barely remember Marius at all, as he was still a boy when Papa left Haiti for the United States. A decade after I’d moved to the United States, I heard that Marius had taken a boat to Miami. A few days before my flight from New York to Port-au-Prince, his mother had called to tell us that he was dead.
    Once he’d offered his condolences to Tante Zi over the phone, my father asked me to pick up the extension and tell her that I would take care of things, would get Marius’s body sent to her in Haiti.
    After offering my own condolences to a tearful and hiccupping Tante Zi, I asked her where Marius was living before he died.
    She paused as if to breathe past a large lump in her throat, and then whispered, “Miami,” sounding puzzled, as if wondering why I was making her repeat something she’d already repeated many times.
    “Do you have the address of the place where he was living in Miami?” I asked.
    “No,” she said. But she did have the telephone number of Marius’s roommate of two years. His name was Delens.
    I would call Delens, I told her, and get back to her.
    I dialed Delens’s number soon after I hung up with Tante Zi and asked in Creole if I could speak with him. The young man who answered replied, “Would you mind speaking English? I grew up here. It’s hard for me to speak Creole.”
    It turned out that he was Delens. I told him, in English, that I was Marius’s cousin and was trying to help locate his body to send it back to Port-au-Prince. Could he help me?
    He gave me the number of the Freeman Funeral Home, where Marius’s body had already been placed while awaiting expatriation. He didn’t have the amount of money the funeral home charged and Tante Zi didn’t trust him enough to send it to him, accusing him of being responsible—in some way that he could neither comprehend nor explain—for Marius’s death.
    At the end of the conversation, I cautiously asked Delens in my most polite voice, “Can you please tell me what Marius died of?”
    “Move maladi ya
,” he responded in perfectly enunciated, nonaccented Creole. The bad disease, a euphemism for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
    “When did it happen?” I asked. “When did he get it?”
    “I don’t know.” He switched back to hip-hop-toned English. “Maybe he had it even before he left Haiti. I don’t know. But he’s been living wild here, man, made some stupid-ass mistakes.”
    “Did he leave anything behind?” I thought Tante Zi might want to know. Maybe he had some assets that could help mitigate the transportation and funeral costs. But I wasn’t thinking only about money. Perhaps there were more personal effects, legal papers, letters, photographs, journals, keepsakes that later on might comfort his mother.
    “He had nothing,” Delens replied harshly. “He was living it up and wasted everything. All he had when he died was sixty dollars.”
    Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t accept that a thirty-year-old man had left nothing else behind. When I hung up and summarized the other end of the conversation for my father, he told me that Tante Zi believed that Marius had been poisoned by his roommate, but almost everyone in the family had different theories. There were those who thought he had committed suicide and others who were certain he’d died of a drug overdose. I didn’t know what or whom to believe, but it really didn’t matter. A grieving mother was waiting to be reunited with her son. And since she couldn’t come to him, we had to find some way to bring him to her.
    The funeral, if held in Miami, would cost three thousand dollars, Mr. Freeman told me when I called. But for Marius’s body to be shipped back to Haiti, the price would go up to five thousand. He’d already had