“We have been on this journey for five days,” he said. “We have eight or nine more.”

Before us, the sea stretched in all directions, the water a deep green. “Do you see there?” he said, leaning in to point, his cheek on mine. “Look over there. Dolphins jumping in the waves.”

It only looked like flashes of light, and I told him so.

“No,” he said. “They’re dolphins.”

“Or maybe they are sirens,” I said “come to lure all these men to their deaths.”

“La Sirèn has a song,” he said solemnly. “They say her home is at the back of the mirror. In the other world.”

He did not move his mouth from my ear. Instead, he chanted into it,

La Sirèn, la balèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

M’ t’ap fè yon ti karès ak La Sirèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

M’ kouche ak La Sirèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

“What does it mean?”

“You have to guess.”

“I do not know your language well enough yet.”

“And you’ll never learn it with that attitude.”

“Tell me what it means.”

He leaned in close again. He had been waiting for this. I had played the game he wished, without even knowing it. “You’ll learn tonight.”

That night, he told me to lie on my back this time. As he pushed my nightgown down past my shoulders, I covered my face with my hands. He said:

“The mermaid, the whale,

“My hat falls into the sea.

“I caress the mermaid,

“My hat falls into the sea.

“I lie down with the mermaid,

“My hat falls into the sea.”

I saw Ben Daisy’s hat, covered in pansies, held to my mother’s chest. I pressed my fingertips into my eyelids until the image was washed over in an explosion of stars.

“Take your hands from your face, Libertie.”

I did what Emmanuel asked. We stared at each other for a minute, listening to the water move beneath us.

“Take off your shirt,” I said to him finally. He did not break my gaze as he obeyed me.

His skin looked so smooth in the dark. I reached for it, to run my hands along it, and he drew his breath in, sharp, as if I had burnt him. And then he caught my hand in his and firmly placed it back at my side.

“What we do together, the word for it in Kreyòl is ‘kouche.’ It means to make love, but it also means to be born and to die, and to lie down, too.”

“All those things at once?”

“All those things happen when we lie together. You must have felt that.”

I looked at him. I twitched my hips, impatient. “So begin, then.”

“Dogs’ bloodberries.” He reached for my breasts and began to softly touch them.

“What are those?” My voice was faint.

“They are little red berries—peppers, really—that grow at home. Women take them for their wombs—with the plant you have, vervain. It waters them. They become fertile.”