It started drizzling in the yard with the swings. He thought that Darline would run inside and was ready to follow her, but she didn’t move.

“Where’s your son now?” he asked.

“I have a friend from work who has a boy like him and she sometimes watches him for me. We take turns.”

By “a boy like him,” did she mean a fatherless boy, a sea-orphaned boy? Or did her child suffer from some type of infirmity?

“Is he sick?” he asked.

“He was the first one to fall in the water,” she said. “It may have done something to his head.”

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She was laying out all her life’s complications for him to consider. She was telling him that he could either go or stay. He wanted to stay.

She squeezed her body into a swing and tried to force it to move. He listened as the metal chains squeaked above her. She pushed herself back and forth a few times, then dug her shoes into the dirt to stop. When her feet were firmly on the ground, he leaned over and kissed her.

They went inside, and he asked her to wait in the dim, narrow hallway while he went to the room he shared with three other men and made her son a paper airplane. This was the only kind of toy he’d had when he was a boy. Whenever he found pieces of paper in the trash or on the ground, he’d make himself a paper airplane. Eventually, he had become an expert at it. The first paper airplane he made for Paris was plain white and unadorned, but it had long, narrow wings so it could fly far.

She had a habit of making lists in a small notebook. Lists of things she needed to do for the day, lists of the people she’d taken to shelters from the beach, even though she hadn’t gone there since rescuing him. The Coast Guard had become more vigilant and the landings had decreased.

One day she read him something from the notebook. His name was the only one on a list she titled “People from the Beach I Have Kissed.”

He took the opportunity to ask her why she’d kept going back to that beach after her husband had drowned there.

She always called for help for those who were drowning, she said, just as she had the day Arnold arrived. She never jumped into the water to save anyone, because she didn’t think she’d be able to stay afloat. Besides, a desperate person can use your head as a step stool to climb out of the waves and she had her son to think about. She kept coming back to the beach because it was her husband’s burial place, and her own. The person she’d been when the three of them, she and her husband and her son, had got on that boat and left Haiti—that person was also lost at sea.

This landing was even more abrupt than his last one. His free fall ended as his body slammed into the drum of the cement mixer. He was being tossed inside a dark blender full of grout. Every few seconds, his face would emerge from under the wet, pounded sand and pebbles, and he would keep his mouth closed, trying to force air out through his nose and push away the grainy mix that his body was trying to inhale.

He pretended that he was swimming and tried to flutter-kick, just as he had when the speedboat stopped in the middle of the ocean and he was told to swim ashore. He attempted arm strokes, but couldn’t move either his arms or his legs. Still, his body was in constant motion, because the mixer continued to turn. He reached for the shaft, what in a more stable space, in a house or a temple or some other holy place, you might call a poto mitan, a middle pillar. He used what was left of his strength to propel his body toward the shaft and wrap his hands around it. He was able to hold on only briefly before he was pulled in another direction.

He felt lighter now, even lighter than he had when falling. His bones were melting, his blood evaporating, and he was now like parchment or something porous—tulle, or the white eyelet lace Darline adored. He had not been paying attention to the alternating hum and jangle of the mixer. He hadn’t noticed that there were streaks of blood polluting the cement, or that he was feeling no pain. Then the mixer stopped spinning and he heard the stillness, which was soon replaced by screams and grunts and “Oh, my God”s. Then he heard the sirens, which took him back to the beach, to the gray sand and Darline’s sable face, her indigo jogging suit, Paris’s red shirt, and his own orange-and-green-speckled vomit at the fast-food place.

From where he was lying inside the cement mixer, he saw an airplane cut across the clear blue sky. And that was when he realized that he was dying, and that his dying offered him a kind of freedom he’d never had before. Whatever he thought about he could see in front of him. Whatever he wanted he could have, except what he wanted most of all, which was not to die. He had wished for something with wings to pluck him out of the cement mixer, and there it was up in the sky now, in the shape of an airplane. He and Darline had been putting money away to take Paris on an airplane. It was either a trip or a ring, and they were essentially already married, Darline had told him. Paris was their ring. They loved each other and they loved him. He was their son.

He wanted to see Darline and Paris again. If only one last time. He wanted to see their faces. He wanted to hold their hands. He wanted to kiss them in the different ways he often had, her on the lips and him on top of his head, where his fontanel would be if he were still a baby.

The plane was slipping out of view, and he heard himself whisper, “Rete la”—“Wait”—“Quédate.” He meant to tell the airplane to stay, or Darline and Paris to stay in his mind, but the fat pink face of his foreman was blocking the sky and he heard the usually gruff man say, “Don’t worry, Fernandez. I’m not going anywhere. Help is on the way, bud.”

Oh, yes, the papers he’d used to get the job said that he was Ernesto Fernandez from Santiago de Cuba. No one on the site, not even the other Haitians, knew his real name. They didn’t believe he was “Cuban Cuban,” as they’d said, but since he spoke Spanish they thought he’d spent some time there and had taken the name.

He did not know how long this half-consciousness would last, his being able to think and remember, so he wanted to keep pushing, to see how far he could take it. What if he made himself float out of the cement mixer? What if he travelled through the city and visited the only two people he loved? He wanted them to see him or, if they could not see him, sense him. He wasn’t sure how this would work. Maybe they would feel a hot wind or a cold breeze. Maybe something near them would move. A picture frame might slip, a drinking glass shatter. Might they notice his shadow out of the corner of their eye, sniff for his pungent after-work smell, or hear his favorite song? Would their palms itch? Would they feel the flutter of his kisses? Or would he appear in their dreams?