An Untamed State

In the summer of 2008, Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American lawyer living in Miami, visits her parents in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with her husband, Michael, and their infant son, Christophe. As the family drives through the heavy steel gates of her parents' estate, three black SUVs surround their car. Armed men smash the windows, beat Michael unconscious, and drag Mireille from the vehicle while bystanders watch. Her captors call her dyaspora, a term of resentment used by Haitians who cannot leave the country for those who can. They cover her head with a burlap sack and force her into a vehicle.

Mireille is taken to a house in the slums and locked in a sweltering room. The novel alternates between the 13 days of her captivity and flashbacks. These introduce her father, Sebastien Duval, who grew up poor in Port-au-Prince, emigrated to the United States, and returned to Haiti to found the country's largest construction company. His philosophy, that nothing can defeat a man who tries hard enough, drives his refusal to pay the ransom quickly. Other flashbacks trace Mireille and Michael's courtship and the tensions in their interracial marriage, particularly with Michael's mother, Lorraine.

Michael regains consciousness and carries Christophe back to the Duval estate. Sebastien calls in an American hostage negotiator and insists on calm, but Michael demands immediate payment. Sebastien refuses, fearing that paying one ransom will invite the kidnapping of his entire extended family. He counteroffers only $125,000 against the kidnappers' million-dollar demand. Michael shoves his father-in-law against a wall and begins liquidating his own assets.

In captivity, Mireille meets the Commander, the gang's young leader, identifiable by a thick scar beneath his left eye. He demands one million dollars. When Sebastien has not paid by the third day, the Commander orders his men to punish Mireille. Five men rape her in succession while the Commander watches. Mireille counts the seconds each assault takes. One of the captors, TiPierre, tells her his name and apologizes, touching her with a tenderness that breaks her further. The Commander then takes Mireille to his bedroom, burns her with cigarettes, cuts her, and rapes her repeatedly.

TiPierre claims to have paid the other men to leave Mireille alone, but his protection is another form of ownership. He confides that he was sold as a restavek, a child servant, at age five, yet he rapes Mireille repeatedly. On the seventh day, the Commander's sister secretly frees Mireille, but the escape is staged: The Commander appears just as she reaches a café. After this, Mireille begins erasing her memories of her family, becoming "no one" to survive. She offers herself to the Commander, feigning surrender so he will not take by force what she gives.

Meanwhile, Michael enlists Mireille's cousin Victor, who has underworld connections, and they spend nights combing the slums, showing Mireille's picture. At the Duval estate, Mireille's mother, Fabienne, confronts Sebastien for the first time, demanding he bring their daughter home. On the twelfth day, the Commander removes Mireille's wedding and engagement rings and threatens to kidnap Christophe. Mireille responds with fierce calm, offering herself permanently in the child's place.

On the thirteenth day, the ransom is paid. The Commander tells Mireille his real name, Laurent Charles, and takes her to his bed one final time, demanding she perform tenderness. Mireille complies, kissing his forehead, washing his body, dying incrementally with each gesture. He releases her on a deserted street and tells her to run. She runs barefoot over broken glass until she finds a church, where she tells a preacher, "Mireille. Kidnapped." When Michael arrives, she does not fully recognize him. She wraps her arms around him but asks him not to touch her back.

A doctor catalogs fractured ribs, burns, and bruising, but Mireille refuses a pelvic examination. At her parents' house, she will not hold Christophe until she has showered, saying she cannot touch her child with what she has become. When Michael asks what happened, she tells him a careful lie: They knocked her around, but the worst was hunger and her milk drying up. Fabienne urges Mireille to put the "incident" behind her. Mireille tells her parents, "He didn't come for me. None of you came for me. You all let me rot."

The journey to Miami is an ordeal. On the plane, Mireille locks herself in the bathroom, and when Michael follows, she does not recognize him and whispers, "Don't hurt me." At home, she drives to her office but cannot step into the elevator, another cage. She flees north on the highway until she reaches the Jameson family farm in Nebraska. Lorraine meets her without surprise: "You were done wrong. You were done real wrong." Lorraine keeps Mireille busy with chores, teaches her to knead bread dough as an outlet for rage, and tends to her wounds without prying.

Michael struggles with his own trauma. On the night of Mireille's release, he and Victor confronted TiPierre. Michael beat him and held a gun under his chin but could not pull the trigger when TiPierre's girlfriend appeared holding their infant son. At the farm, Michael's frustration with Mireille's distance deepens. He leaves a note: "I love you. This is so much bigger than me. I don't know if I can do this." He spirals until Mireille's sister, Mona, confronts him: Step up or leave Mireille while she is still rebuilding, so she only has to put herself together once.

Michael returns to the farm with new rings and with Christophe, who is now walking. He slides the rings onto Mireille's finger. When Christophe toddles toward her, she hesitates, then picks him up. That night, she presses her lips to Michael's ear and tells him "the best truth I could, the one we could both live with." A doctor informs Mireille she needs reconstructive surgery. Lorraine insists, echoing Mireille's own words when Lorraine had cancer: Her family needs her. Mireille calls Michael and tells him to be the fighter for both of them or walk away. He flies back the next day.

An epilogue spans five years. Mireille spends months at the farm before returning to Miami, where a therapist tells her the truth she needs: She will get better, but she will never be okay in the way she once was. She and Michael have a daughter, Emma Lorraine, through a surrogate, as her body can no longer conceive. Years later, Mona convinces Mireille to visit Sebastien in Port-au-Prince. He explains he feared paying one ransom would endanger his entire family. Mireille tells him he sacrificed her. She says she forgives him, though she knows the forgiveness is a lie, a choice to preserve whatever good remains in herself.

At a Miami brunch, Mireille recognizes the Commander working as a busboy by the pulsing scar beneath his eye. She follows him into the alley and attacks him; he flees. The novel closes with Mireille standing outside her parents' gates during her return visit to Haiti, watching a dark SUV pass and thinking, "you have no idea what I can take." She turns to Michael and tells him her roots no longer reach to Haiti: Her father took that from her, and he "would be much easier to forgive." Michael says he is sorry, and the narrative ends on this acknowledgment, which is all that needs to be said.