The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

had been talking, laughing, and at times crying all night long.
    His aunt was already awake by the time he got up the next morning. With help from Old Zo’s daughter, who seemed to have been rented out to his aunt for the duration of his visit, she had already set up breakfast on the small table brought out to the front gallery from inside the house. His aunt seemed restless, almost anxious, as if she’d been waiting for him to rise for hours.
    “Go wash yourself, Da,” she said, handing him a towel. “I’ll be waiting for you here.”
    Low shrubs covered in dew brushed against his ankles as he made his way down a trail toward the stream at the bottom of the fall. The water was freezing cold when he slipped in, but he welcomed the sensation of having almost every muscle in his body contract, as if to salute the dawn.
    Had his father ever bathed in this stream? Had his parents soaked here together, in this same spot, when they’d come to stay with his aunt? He had so little information and so few memories to draw on that every once in a while he would substitute moments from his own life in trying to re-create theirs. But lately what was taking up the most space in his mind was not the way his parents had lived but the way they had died.
    A group of women were coming down the path toward the river with calabashes and plastic jugs balancing on top of their heads. They would bathe, then fill their containers further up, closer to the fall. He remembered spending hours as a boy watching the women bathe topless, their breasts flapping against their chests as they soaped and scrubbed themselves with mint and parsley sprigs, as if to eradicate every speck of night dust from their skin.
    When he got back to his aunt’s house, he had a visitor, a short, muscular boy with a restrained smile and an overly firm handshake. The boy’s brawny arms were covered with tattoos from his elbows down to his wrists, his skin a canvas of Chinese characters, plus kings and queens from a card deck. One-Eyed Jack, Hector, Lancelot, Judith, Rachel, Argine, and Palas, they were all there in miniature, carved into his nut-brown skin in navy blue and red ink.
    “I sent for Claude,” his aunt announced. “He’s the one I was telling you about, one of the boys who was sent back.”
    Claude was sitting next to his aunt, on the top step in front of the house, dipping his bread in the coffee Old Zo’s daughter had just made.
    “Claude understands Creole and is learning to speak bit by bit,” his aunt said, “but he has no one to speak English to. I would like you to talk with him.”
    Claude was probably in his late teens, too young, it seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and his adopted land. Dany sat down on the step next to Claude, and Old Zo’s daughter handed him a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.
    “How long have you been here?” he asked Claude.
    “Too long, man,” Claude replied, “but I guess it could be worse. I could be down in the city, in Port, eating crap and sleeping on the street. Everyone here’s been really cool to me, especially your aunt. She’s really taken me under her wing.”
    Claude flapped his heavily tattooed arms, as if to illustrate the word “wing.”
    “When I first got here,” he continued, “I thought I’d get stoned. I mean, I thought people would throw rocks at me, man. Not the other kind of stoned. I mean, coming out of New York, then being in prison in Port for three months because I had no place to go, then finally my moms, who didn’t speak to me for the whole time I was locked up, came to Port and hooked me up with some family up here.”
    His aunt was leaning forward with both hands holding up her face, her white hair braided like a crown of gardenias around her head. She was listening to them speak, like someone trying to capture the indefinable essence of a great piece of music. Watching her face, the pleasure she was taking in the unfamiliar words made