17 August 1984
Lala is pretending to have fallen asleep. After he had nearly crushed her hand, Adan had stomped outside to gather the coconuts the tree had discarded and others he had set aside for Coyote. He was tired of hiding, Adan had decided – better to get rid of the white woman so he could tie up that loose end and return to his house as a man, live his life in the open. He had grabbed the cutlass as he left the room and from their bed Lala hears it whistling through the coconut fronds and fiber.
At times like this Lala does not know what to do. She is unsure whether she should go outside, near Adan and that whistling cutlass, to dredge the coir fiber in sand and scrub the dirty pots in the salty surf. She is unsure whether she should stay in bed, curled up as she is, with a throbbing hand and a stinging breast and try to rest until Adan has left with a load for Coyote. Lala decides that he may leave more quickly if he thinks that she is sleeping, that she is doing nothing that can further offend him, and so she tries her best to return to the land of dreams, where Baby is alive.
But Lala cannot sleep. And when the cutlass stops its whistling and she hears the dull thud of his feet on the steps, Lala turns to face the wall and closes her eyes.
In the foggy darkness of their bedroom she feels rather than sees Adan looking at her, senses rather than hears that he is still angry. It is the type of anger in search of a release, and Lala is therefore unsure about her decision to pretend to be asleep. While she thinks about this she considers the possible infractions: being asleep in bed instead of up doing chores like the good women of the world, her turned back instead of a willing smile, any number of household chores left undone, a dead baby she cannot bring back.
She is facing the wall beside their bed with her hand set carefully on the pillow beside her to cool and her eyes tightly closed and she is breathing quietly, the way she imagines she does when she is asleep. The problem is that the only person who knows what she truly breathes like when asleep is Adan, and the curiosity of whether her breathing is a convincing approximation keeps her shoulders tense.
“I know you ain’t fucking sleeping, Lala.”
She cannot turn around. In that moment the weight of all her injuries falls upon her, those existing and those remembered, and the sheer bulk of them renders her immobile. There is the left nipple that, despite a poultice of aloe gel and breadfruit leaves, still seeps through the toilet paper she folds and positions inside of the cup of her bra each morning. There is the knee that has ached her for several months now, that she bandages each night before bed and unwraps on any occasion when she has to leave the house or do something for Adan that will require enough proximity for him to be angered by this evidence of her injury. There is the leaden weight at the bottom of her spine beneath a peeling burn in the shape of the clothes iron.
But in that moment Lala also suffers the remembered horrors – the time when, with Baby still in her belly, she was held by her face at the edge of the cement steps and made to scream why he should not let her go, not let her fall enough feet to split her head like a watermelon; the time when he held the cutlass to her throat so closely that when he at last released her there was the thinnest line of beaded blood across her windpipe; the time he dragged her by her hair up those twenty-five steps, and the clumps of hair that bore witness to her struggle had littered the steps the following day.
Even if she wants to move, she cannot, so firmly do these memories hold her still, so that when a stinging lash falls across her back and her eyes fly open with her mouth in the surprise of pain without origin, Lala considers that the true source of her pain is not the current cruelty, but the fact that she cannot do anything to avoid it, even if she wanted to.
“Get up, Lala! Get to fuck up! Who you think you fooling?”
“Why you does be doing me so?”
“Get. To. Rass. Hole. Up!”
* * *
People lie about the first slap. Lala knows you can never trust a woman who can tell you the direction from which the fist first came, because if you are genuinely shocked that first time you are beaten, the only thing you remember is the sting. You cannot remember the direction because you were not expecting it. It is like the stories men like Adan tell about getting shot and not even realizing it and your senses have to process the evidence of the aftermath of something your brain still cannot comprehend. Your eyes see blood, your ears recall the report of gunfire, your nose smells gunpowder, you taste bile, you feel a wet red spot. Meaning you are shot. With that first slap you never know you have been slapped until your senses recover enough to tell you. Any woman who says otherwise is a witch who expected the slap anyway and very likely provoked it. Such a woman is therefore possessed of eyes too wide open to suggest genuine love in the first place.
Lala cannot now remember where that first slap came from, she cannot remember the finer details of what it was about, but Lala knows that, in the dim light of morning after that first slap, she became Wilma without even thinking about it. Wilma’s response to chaos was always to seek order in the things around her.
Lala had started with the bed that first morning she was boxed in their bed – she had removed the fitted sheet, the flat sheet and the two pillow cases and washed them, taken down the curtains from the window behind the bed and washed them too. Swept the wooden floor, mopped it, beaten the rug, taken Adan’s rusting yellow unicycle from the corner of the room and scraped and polished it until it shone, replaced it and fretted that it would not stand upright, propped it with a rock and tried not to worry that it would roll away on its own as if ridden by a ghost, scrubbed the rotting cupboards without thought to splinters, scraped the mildew and dried scraps of food from the garbage can beneath the sink, washed the dishes until her hands were gray from prolonged exposure to blue soap. She startled herself when she caught a glimpse of a woman with a black eye in the pockmarked shard of mirror that Adan had tacked to the wooden partition in the kitchen to help him with his shaving. She had stared at this woman, at the purple right cheek and bloodshot eye, and tried to remember whether this woman was someone she knew, someone whose name she should recall.
(Why you so fucking own-way, Lala?)
In the early nights of their marriage, after that first beating, Lala had made deals with God while her new husband snored. If He would only make this the marriage of her dreams, she had offered, if He would only grant them a happy life full of children and laughter around tables at dinnertime and matching outfits at the races or the fairs, if God would do that for her, she would forgive him taking her mother before she got the chance to really know her, she would forgive him for subjecting her to growing up with Carson and Wilma, she would go to church, she would forget about Tone, she would not hold these beatings against Adan.
(“Rass. Hole. Own-Way!”)
Of course she did not leave him. What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other? Didn’t Wilma’s neighbor run out of her home and into Wilma’s almost every Friday evening once her husband came home? Hadn’t she seen the evidence on one or another woman she had known of worse beatings than these? Had her own mother not tolerated such beatings?
Lala had instead focused on the good days – bus rides into town with the setting sun behind them, window-shopping outside Harrison’s and marveling at the clothes on the mannequins, the big Kawasaki that flew past them that Adan said he’d buy himself one day, with an extra helmet so she could ride on the back of the bike with the wind making those long, long braids whip against her bum. Any outfit she wanted, said Adan, once he had the money – any outfit at all.
When the ability to move returns to her, it returns so forcefully, so decisively, that she is out of the bed and behind the chair before her thoughts have asked her feet to stand. But movement alone does not bring memory with it, and as often happens at times like this, she cannot remember his name to call him, to make him stop.
“What happen? What happen?”
“Why you couldn’t just leave Baby? What kind of woman you is, Lala, to let go Baby so?”
“I didn’t let go Baby on purpose! I sorry, I didn’t mean to let she go!”
She pleads from the corner of their room for his forgiveness, she tells him she is sorry.
“Please,” she says. “I did not mean for our Baby to die – please.”
But she cannot say that name, the last thing his mother gave him before dying, the one appeal that might stop him. And when she is sobbing on the floor at his feet, and she has resigned herself to the strike that will finally kill her, when she has already welcomed the peace that death will bring – the possibility, perhaps, of seeing Baby again in one or other of the places where dead people go – he sucks his teeth like she is not even deserving of his beatings and retreats to his chair and his bible, and she sees a path straight to the door and she escapes, running down the cement steps without thought to the risk of breaking her neck, so free she feels she is flying.
* * *
Down the beach the pink man with the big gruff dog is crying. He is bent almost double over the green wrought-iron railing that delineates his piece of Paradise, and he makes deep sobs that somehow still sound as if he is making it up. What can a man such as this have to cry about? Lala slows down, wipes her own tears. Betsy is on her side, shuddering and frothing by his feet on the patio. The pink man is wearing the same black shorts he wears every day to take Betsy for her walk and his toes are covered in the sand that dusts his patio like pastry flour scattered on a flat surface in the work-up to a pie. Lala has previously wondered whether these tourists do not mind how this powdery sand must stick to everything, making it impossible to houseclean, how it must make everything slippery, how it surely infects with the memory of wetness and salty skin and swimming a space meant to be dry and clean and stationary.
He does not seem to see Lala running, nor does he startle when she stops. He is oblivious to everything but Betsy suffering beside him, trying to drag herself upright every few minutes, struggling to lift her head to nudge his thigh, pawing the railings and whining, wondering why he does not save her.
A woman Lala has never seen before comes off the beach in a sarong that shrouds her and a large straw hat that might be the reason for the shadows that cover her eyes. She pats the back of the pink man, letting her hand linger until it hardly leaves the surface of his skin and sort of squirms there, flopping about in a series of useless shivers. With her other hand she holds the hat firmly on her head and she shouts at no one in particular to call a vet, for Christ’s sake, even as she grimaces at the slimy green froth that trails perilously close to her slippered feet.
When Lala reaches them she notices that the woman’s slippers have jeweled straps that glimmer, even in the pinky gray before the full spill of sunshine. She notices how the woman looks at her and Lala is suddenly conscious of the warm trickle of blood on her cheek, the seaweed cloak on hands and hair, the throbbing in her teeth that mimics her heartbeat.
The woman says, “My God,” but she is no longer looking at Betsy; she is looking at Lala. Betsy breathes her last and the woman removes her shades to have a proper look and the pink man sobs harder. The woman removes her hand from his back and only then does he raise his head, wipe his eyes, and look at Lala.
“My God,” the woman says again, “what happened to you?” She starts to walk toward Lala. “Were you robbed?”
She keeps coming closer even though Lala is shaking her head, looking back down the beach, warning her to stay away. The pink man wipes his eyes, he is coming too. Lala looks around, trying to decide what to do, where to go. This is when she notices that the patio on which Betsy has died is attached to a big pale-blue villa, and that this villa shares a guard wall with the one adjacent to it. This other villa is not blue, it is white, and the wooden fence that tops the guard wall is familiar to her. It is one she has seen just recently.
“I can help you,” says the woman. “I can go inside and get Rosa, she will know what else to do.”
“No,” says Lala, “no. I am okay, it is okay.”
“Hey!” the woman is saying when Lala starts to run, “come here! Let us help you!”
Lala is running, fast, but not so fast that the pink man cannot catch her and eventually she finds herself sitting on his patio near the stiff shadow of his dead dog. Up close he is nothing like she expected, although it is difficult to say how. Up close, the pink man’s hand is burned brown, with little blond hairs like brush bristles sticking straight up and out of his skin. When the bristles come near Lala’s face she jumps and when she makes to run away, he says:
“Relax, I am not going to hurt you.”
He runs his fingers along her neck and hmmms below his breath.
“You have some nasty bruises there,” he says, “but I don’t think anything is broken. Who did this to you?”
Lala doesn’t answer.
The woman with the floppy hat and jeweled sandals looks at him and he at her and then they both look at Lala.
“Do you want to go to the hospital or the police?” the woman asks quietly. Lala shakes No and accepts some water in a wineglass from the blond-bristled hand. There are perhaps no other kinds of drinking glass in this villa. Lala’s mind is racing. The man says, “Drink slowly – your throat must be sore.” And she is not sure whether he means from the swelling or the screaming.
When she hands him back the wineglass and stands up to leave the patio, she notices that a single fly has already found Betsy’s body, that soon there will be others. Lala is thinking about the police. If these people call the police, it will just draw more attention, she is thinking. It will just give them cause to ask her more questions about Baby. She does not need policemen asking her more questions about Baby. She needs to get away from the police, from Adan, from these people, from this beach. And in order to do that she must seem as if she isn’t running, from any of them. When she finally runs, decides Lala, it must be a run that will take her to another place entirely, a place from which she will never return. Where can she run to, now? She cannot run to Wilma, whose house will not feel like a harbor. She cannot run to Tone, who has no place of his own to take her, no totem strong enough to keep her safe from harm.
She looks out at the sand beyond the patio and sees her baby, whose image then melts into a crab, scampering off the sand and toward her feet.
Soon Lala is sprinting again, back to where she came from, and this time the blond-bristled hand cannot hold her.
* * *
“I sorry, Lala,” Adan tells her that evening. “You know I sorry.”
She is wrapped in his big, broad arms and her face is tickled by the hair on his chest and he is talking to her above her head so that she has to imagine his repentance etched across his features.
“Is just . . . Baby gone and I, I couldn’t save she, Lala. I couldn’t save she after you drop she.”
He kisses the top of her head, strokes the hair from which her braided extensions had once been forcibly removed. She has stopped plaiting it in styles that cover the bald patch where he yanked out her hair by its roots. It is hard not to flinch when his hands reach that spot, it is hard to pretend that she has no memory of that hurt, even if she cannot remember what was the issue that had led to it, but Lala does not flinch, she does not shy away from those hands in her hair.
“I know, Adan,” she says. “Is all right.”
“I can’t even get the money to bury Baby,” says Adan. “I can’t even get she bury.”
Lala’s thoughts return to her tin, but she says nothing. It makes no sense to bring up the tin and how its contents could have helped to bury Baby. It makes no sense to agonize in her own mind about how the money in that tin could have helped her now.
“I going help, Adan, it have more people coming to get braids, I going save the money to bury Baby.”
He shifts restlessly, he stops stroking her hair so that she wonders where his hands are, what exactly they are doing.
“We need more than you little money,” says Adan. “Baby deserve a good funeral, a proper send-off . . . is not she fault that . . .”
And then he is weeping, sobbing disconsolately in a way that stuns her, a way that she has not heard since they met, a way that makes her unsure about whether she should lift her head and look at him or wrap her arms around his torso or tell him again that he is okay, that they will both be okay, even though she knows this is not true. She stays still, barely breathing. She does not hold him. She does not look.
A soft rain starts to fall, the kind that leaves little spears on the windows, like arrows pointing out the direction of the wind. He cannot do another job on the beach, explains Adan when he is calmer. The police are on high alert since the white man was killed, more of the inhabitants of the houses have hired security guards, some have fitted their guard walls with barbed wire, a few more have surely by now also purchased guns.
A job in the village is unlikely to get him the money he needs for an undertaker, unless it is a commercial job, and he can’t do that type of job alone. There is just this job with the weed, says Adan – that is the only way he can think of to get the money to bury Baby. He could ask Tone what he think about this new thing with the weed, but he can’t get Tone to come and meet him and talk about it. Tone ain’t no real hustler, Tone was always just a soldier, grouses Adan, just waiting for Adan to tell him what to do. He pauses, clears the hoarse from the back of his throat.
“Tone acting funny to you, Lala?”
“Tone?”
“Yeah, man acting sketchy couple months now; you ain’t notice how funny he acting when he come around? Even before Baby come, I was to ask you if you ain’t notice.”
“He acting the same as always to me,” Lala says softly. “I ain’t notice nothing different ’bout him.”
It takes her great effort to keep breathing normally, but Adan does not let on if he thinks anything amiss. He eventually unfolds the embrace within which he has wrapped her and says he is going out. He can’t just lie down and relax when Baby can’t even get a decent funeral, says Adan, in a way that sounds like an accusation, he is a man, and as man he going and figure out how to pay for the funeral she deserve.
Lala watches him stand, put his shirt back on, shove open the door and step into the damp air. She stares at the door for a long time after he has gone. She shivers. She doesn’t have much time.
* * *
When Lala answers the door half an hour after Adan’s exit, her face is masked with the mourning she believes it ought to wear – the innocent kind – in anticipation of the police again. Adan would not be back so soon, he would not knock, and she is not expecting anyone else.
In the way of all people guilty of extreme sin, the proof of her wrongdoing has started to be mirrored everywhere: in the number of times she has heard or seen the word murderer since she held her dead baby in her arms on the beach, in soap-opera plots, on the front page of newspapers. She is haunted too, by the body of her daughter – in the soulful eyes of a crab in a hole on the beach, in the cries of a little baby a client brings to sit next to them while Lala does her hair, a baby who stretches her feet in her pram until her bootie falls off to expose Baby’s triple-jointed toes.
She is convinced also that supernatural beings are conspiring on her daughter’s behalf to make her understand that she will pay for her part in her death. She understands that it is a wicked duppy who placed the pink-labeled can of formula she found sitting in the cupboard, just behind a few cans of beans, because she knows she has thrown out all of Baby’s milk. It is this duppy – or another, equally malevolent – who infuses the peculiar sound the paper bag of flour makes when she is making dumplings and it hits the floor with the same sound she heard when Baby was dropped. There are demons, she knows, who sprinkle the house with the smell of the Cussons baby powder she often dusted around Baby’s neck and chest, although she is certain there is no one in the house besides her and she is not using baby powder.
Her guilt seems to sit on her, so that she is sure that others must immediately recognize her hands are not clean, that she is at least partly to blame for her daughter’s death. And this is why she is expecting the police to come back to arrest her, why she masks her face when she answers the door, because only a face free of guilt can assist her if it is that dark policeman on the other side of the knocking.
But it is not the dark policeman. It is Tone.
“Why you come back here again?” is what she howls at him, even as her face crumbles and she weeps her relief. She is still howling as he holds her, kissing her nose right there on the step, kissing her forehead, licking the tears from her cheeks, patting away her relief as she cries, “Why the fuck you keep on coming back here?”