She woke before dawn to get the charcoal going. The tents and rusted shacks on Ruelle Porcelaine were quiet. A faint mist drifted down on the tarps as she boiled a bit of fish and sweet potato in a tin pot.
She wrapped the food neatly in paper and packed a tote bag with hand towels, candies, tangerines, hair ties, pomade, a pair of pink sandals, secondhand T-shirts and little pants. She wished she could bring more. Bernardo's flip-flops were wearing out, and Barbara needed a hair brush.
Marie Lud Francois had been thinking about this day for nearly two months, ever since she handed her two oldest children over to an orphanage.
Marie Lud ached to see them, but was wary. No emotion ran clean anymore. Nothing was right after the earthquake.
Her husband, Bernard Charles, gave her the money for the trip, about $3.50. He had been saving for several weeks. Bernard, who sews and fixes mattresses, had to stay behind and look for work. Marie Lud wished he could come with her. She wished that, for at least a moment, they could all be together.
Bernard was wiry and animated in a way that complemented Marie Lud's quiet warmth. He found the humor in nearly everything, and his old foot-pedal sewing table had become a gathering spot on the block.
Their son, Bernardo, who is 13 and shy like his mom, would shadow his dad, emulating him, helping him sew, repeating his jokes. Barbara was 9 and more outgoing, forever delighted and gleaming, following her older brother the way he followed his dad. Marie Lud wondered how her little ones were coping at the orphanage. She knew Bernardo would do anything to protect Barbara. But both were sensitive children, not particularly tough. She hoped they weren't getting picked on.
She listened to the noise of the city as it began to rise. The men down the street began their dominoes, thwacking the pieces down as they always did. The street below Ruelle Porcelaine sputtered with motorcycles and creaky jitneys and dump trucks filled with shattered concrete.
Marie Lud's family lived in two rooms in an old row of wooden shops. Since the earthquake Jan. 12, they had barely stepped inside them. The adjacent four-story building was cracked and threatened to come down on top of them. They slept in a vacant lot next door.
Her friend Blanc and their neighbor Edner joined her. They were going to visit their children at the same orphanage, about two hours away.
Marie Lud put a white sunbonnet on her 5-year-old daughter, Bernardin, and Blanc picked up her 13-month-old boy. Edner's teenage daughter appeared, and they all walked toward the bus stop on Rue Central. Edner, silver-haired and lanky, led in a pressed red guayabera, khaki pants and polished wingtips.
The neighborhood, Bel Air, was once a prosperous haven of little wooden homes with ornate fretwork and peaked tin roofs. The affluent had long ago moved away, but many of their ancient houses still stood, splintered and rickety, tilting this way or that.
The three parents and their children filed into a bus, with "My Insurance is God" painted on the windshield. When enough people had wedged in, the driver pulled away and Marie Lud gazed out the window.
They passed Place de la Paix, where in a past life the family had listened to the rara bands on weekends, or watched Bernardo play soccer. Thousands lived there now, in makeshift tents and lean-tos. Already, scraps of tin and wood were solidifying into something permanent.
For a brief spell after the disaster, Marie Lud had held a shred of hope for the future. Everyone was talking about rebuilding, creating jobs. But now the initial rush of grief and adrenaline was giving way to a silent horror that this was the future.
What if she could never get her children back? What if they were adopted by Americans? What if they forgot about her? What if they blamed her?
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The sound came like the roar of a jet from the deepest earth, followed by tremendous jack-hammering — dou-gou-dou-gou-dou-gou. Within seconds, an otherworldly scream rose in every direction.
Marie Lud's recollection of what followed that night of the earthquake comes in fragments: Running through the smoke and dust for half a mile to the National Palace. Seeing it collapsed like a smashed wedding cake. Standing all night with her children and tens of thousands of others in the open plaza of Champs de Mars. People clutching whatever random items they escaped their homes with. Chanting hymns. Swatting mosquitoes. Thinking that Bernard, who had been downtown on business, was dead. That ghostly scream with every aftershock.
The next morning, Marie Lud was desperate. It was as if all her points of reference had been wiped clean: no work, no school, no market, no home, no government. She didn't have food for her children, and was frantic about losing one of them in the crowd.
