It was the center of a hot, green summer; still I bundled up the baby in a cotton blanket to ensure against chills. We brought a pitcher of limewater with us. I had gold coins with me as well, so this time I could pay the price for a cure. We were slower than we’d been when we were girls who ran through the hills chasing donkeys or being chased by them. We spotted some now, eating dried grass along the road. I wondered if Jean-François, once my children’s pet, was among them. When I said so, Jestine shook her head.
“If he is, you don’t want to know. You’ll just break your heart all over again for a creature that should be wild anyway.”
Still I whistled and called out his name. All of the donkeys glanced up at us. Jestine started laughing. “See!” she said. “If he’s among them he’s no different than they are now. You did yourself and him a favor when you set him free.”
But I saw the eyes of one of the donkeys set on me, and I knew. It was Jean-François. The pet I’d walked into the hills late one night had tried to follow me home.
Jestine saw the look on my face. “Now you’re going to cry,” she declared.
“Unlikely,” I answered.
I turned away so she wouldn’t see my tears. In my arms, my baby was fretting. Jestine looped an arm around my waist.
“You have a soft heart,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
We both laughed then. No one knew me the way she did, not even Frédéric. Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times. I went ahead and let myself cry, then pulled myself together.
The light was yellow now, hotter. We went on to the herb man’s house. Our route brought us past the waterfall that fell into a pool where tiny blue fish slipped through the shallows. I wished we could strip off our clothing and immerse ourselves in the cool water, but we continued on, past tangles of vines, some with thorns, some without. There was a hush here, and Jacobo was quiet, I think for the first time in his two weeks of life. We walked on, through the coils of greenery, light-footed, almost as if we were girls once more. There were ruins, a manor house from a hundred years earlier, crumbling into stone dust, and stalks of sugarcane grew wild. At last we reached the clearing where the herb man had his hut. Someone was living here, that much was certain. There were embers in a little fire pit, and some pots and pans scattered about. Jestine didn’t know I had once come here myself to thank the herb man. She didn’t know I had kissed him. She started to go into the house, but I said I would do it this time. I wasn’t afraid. If anyone was to pay for a cure for my baby, it should be me.
“Do you want me to ask for something for you, too?” I said before I went in.
Jestine’s expression shifted, and I saw her grief. “Ask him to get me back everything I lost. See if he can do that for me.”
I rapped on the door and was told to come inside. The baby was fussing, but only a little. I had to get used to the dark. I spied the herb man in his chair. He looked so old, as if he was already in another world.
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
He shrugged. It didn’t matter. “Is that the problem?” He nodded at my baby.
“He doesn’t sleep or eat.”
I brought Jacobo closer so that he could be examined. The herb man opened the blanket and studied the baby’s form. My son threw his arms up and cried with a deep voice.
“He’s strong,” the herb man said. “He has no fever. He just has other things on his mind.”
“What other things?” I couldn’t imagine what a baby might be thinking of other than sleep and milk and the warmth of his mother’s arms.
“He sees what you can’t see.” The baby had quieted and was staring into the herb man’s eyes. “Maybe he sees my death. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sees how I’ll go out and lie in the grass and blink and be gone. I’ll travel right up to the stars and look down at him. Or maybe he just sees the shadows on the wall.”
The herbalist signaled for me to wrap up my baby. As I did he slowly got up and brought forth a bottle of a brown liquid made of soursop and powdered herbs. He gave me a bundle of soursop tree leaves to rub over the baby’s blankets. The herb man was so old he could barely walk. I wondered how he fed himself, and I thought perhaps I should leave fruit and bread every week. He came to take the baby from my arms.
“He’ll sleep with one drop of this every night. Then he’ll get used to sleeping. He will look forward to it. But it won’t change who he is or how he sees.”