There was Jestine, waiting for me. We both slipped on our masks made of feathers so we could not be recognized. Jestine was wearing my mother’s pearls, the ones I’d bargained for with my good fortune. There were always men who chased after my friend, for even masked she was clearly the most beautiful woman in the crowd. She paid no attention. Perhaps we had indeed changed places and she no longer believed in love. She had one person in mind, her child, and that left no room for anyone else. People thought we were sisters and addressed us as such, and we laughed and drank rum at a stand on the street.
“I’m the pretty sister, but you’re the one who gets what she wants,” Jestine said.
It was true. I had ten children and a man I loved. No matter what my problems were, and how my own people shunned me, I was blessed by the many riches of my life.
“The whole world starts again in a few hours. You’re supposed to have hope tonight,” I told Jestine.
“I do. I hope that the red-haired woman dies a terrible death.”
Such things should not be said aloud, but I understood, and I joined her in this wish. We raised our glasses and drank to the Frenchwoman’s death. I had no qualms about doing so.
We wandered through the drunken crowd, past Glass Bottle Alley and Ding Alley, all places we weren’t supposed to be. We went to a food stand, bought cups of guava berry rum, cheered the musicians, walked through town, hand in hand. We were out till the stars began to disappear from the sky.
HOURS LATER THE FIRE started. A fight had begun, and a kerosene lantern had been kicked over. In moments, wooden buildings went up like straw. I was in bed with my husband when we heard what we thought was one of the children screaming. But it was the wind that had picked up and the cry of fire as one building after the other caught. Frédéric was out of bed in an instant. He pulled on trousers and a shirt. I loved to see his shoulders and his broad arms when he was dressing. I wished he would stay beside me, and leave the fire to others, but he wasn’t a person who would recoil from the possibility of harm to himself.
“Start pouring water around the house,” he told me. “Don’t leave the hill.”
I felt panicked when he went out. I called his name but he was gone. I didn’t care about anyone but him. There was a heaviness inside me, as if my life had left me. I went to the window to look for him, but he had turned the corner, and had taken the steps down the hill, already on his way to the synagogue, where a bucket brigade had begun to wet down buildings. Every effort was made, with the men working even harder when the breezes came up, soaking every wall and roof. I woke Rosalie, and we did the same with our home and store, with the help of the older children. The air was thick with sparks and smoke, but we worked away, our clothes drenched. I thought of Jestine alone at the harbor, pouring buckets of seawater on her porch and along the perimeter of her house. By then, flocks of birds were overhead in the dark sky, fleeing the smoke, taking wing on a course that led past Jestine’s house, out to sea. The pelican who had always nested on our roof, who I’d believed carried Adelle’s spirit, left that night when sparks fell into its nest. I felt an emptiness without that bird above me, there like one of the stars that rose above us in the sky.
The fire raged for two days, during which time we stayed close to home—wetting down the street and garden with bucket after bucket. Our rain barrel ran dry, and I had to send the boys dashing to the harbor to fill buckets with salt water. I counted the minutes until they were back home, safe from the flames. Cinders stung our clothes and eyes. Birds that had waited too long fell from the sky, bodies smashed on the road, their feathers drifting through puddles. I climbed out the roof and the children handed me buckets of green seawater to pour over the eaves. There was no birdsong, no chatter on the street, no ships’ horns, only something that sounded like a cry. For two days we barely ate or slept. Frédéric had not returned. I felt I had lost half of myself, more than half, actually, for I was nothing without him. Many people had been killed or wounded in the fires, and over a thousand buildings had burned to the ground. I mourned for our city, but there was only one person I waited for at the gate, my heart knotted with fear. My hair was loose, thick with ash; my hands had blistered from lugging pails of water with handles so hot from the fires they had burned marks into my palms.
When my husband at last came home he was black with soot. I didn’t care, but went to embrace him. I felt my heart had been returned to me. I wept but did not let him see me do so. I had to let him be himself, a young, hopeful man. I could not burden him with the depth of my love and how afraid I was when I thought I might lose him. I stepped away so that he might wash the fire off him.