The Dragonfly’s Tale

by Sharon Millar

Northern Range

(Originally published in 2013)

Carmelita

Weeks before Christmas, in the hills of the Northern Range, a boy disappears from home. He is seventeen years old. His mother, Carmelita Nunes, calls on the Orisha gods and prays to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Her son is not yet a man and she knows that makes him both more dangerous and more vulnerable. On the first day of his absence, she draws a thick black line through the almanac hanging on the kitchen wall. On the third day, a black Friday, she dresses in her best clothes and calls a taxi. When she passes through the village, sitting in the backseat, some people raise their hands in gentle waves while others stare, their arms still. The village had lost hunting dogs and caged parrots, but never a boy. Even the aging white French Creole, who has never spoken to her, and old man Lum Fatt, who still dreams of China, come to see her drive down the winding road toward the police station.

Carmelita is not naive, but weeks before, when her two other children had come to the house to talk about Daniel, she’d turned her head and raised the volume on the radio. First Oriana had come and then Johnny. It was only after Daniel had raised his hand to her, the hand moving from his side with lightning violence, that there was talk of sending him to Johnny in town. “Send him,” Oriana had said, “send him so that Johnny could teach him about respect.” He’d stayed with Johnny and his wife for less than two days. Oh God, Carmelita thought, after Johnny called to say Daniel was heading home.

“You can’t talk some sense into him?” Her voice echoed down the telephone wire.

“I have Lilla to think of, Ma. She’s afraid of him.”

Most of the young boys make their money growing weed in the forest, ducking and hiding from the police helicopters that swoop like clumsy dragonflies before chop-chopping their way back to the city. That’s all it was, she thought, nothing the other boys aren’t doing.

To keep him at home, Carmelita showed him how to curry birds: chickens, ducks, pigeons. Cutting, chopping, frying, stewing. She held a plucked duck over the open fire, singeing the skin, cut the fat gland off the end of a chicken, and killed a pigeon quietly without breaking its tiny bones. She showed him how to add pimento pepper and ground ginger as her mother had taught her.

“South boys work in oil and town boys work in banks,” said Daniel as he watched her cook, “but what happen to the village boys from the north?” He spoke to the duck, sitting cold and pimple-skinned on the counter, not to her.

“You think any tomato or christophene could ever compete with that black gold? Those south boys born into that. It come like they own that fountain of oil. And town boys only eating sushi and managing money market.”

The duck was now in the pot, its skin sizzling and browning, mixing with the seasoning, flooding the kitchen with such a good scent that it was as if he were saying something that she wanted to hear, something happy. When she looked up from the pot, his topaz eyes were on her, baleful and sly. She tamped down the doubt that she’d grown this child. Looking away, he shook his head, a quick movement, like a dog trying to get water out of his ear.

Later, he told her that sometimes they worked from a small base on Chachachacare, the abandoned island that once housed nuns and lepers—he’d seen women, dark silhouettes on the pirogues. “They’ll kill me if they know I talk,” he told her later that night. “They tell me so all the time.”

“Who is they, Daniel?” she asked. “Who is they?”

But he was too busy eating his duck to answer her.

That night she looked up the word sushi in the dictionary, but it was not listed in her old pocket version. Though she did find the word cocaine.

* * *

It is only after they pass the large immortelle tree, the big taxi juddering into first gear on the hairpin turn, that Carmelita allows herself to breathe. Now that she is out of view, she can stop feeling shame. No doubt the villagers will have milled around in the road after she left, looking for the silvery flashes of the big Chevrolet as it rounded the corners of the hill.

Mr. Ali is only called up to the village in emergencies. Right next to her on the backseat is the faint brown stain from when Myrtle nearly sliced off her finger and Carmelita had to hold her hand up over her head while Mr. Ali barrelled down the hill. Myrtle is a good friend; thirty years of looking at each other across a hedge, day and night, and minding each other’s children, made them like family. Myrtle had come over last night to tell her the village talk.

“People saying that Dan cross Chale Jamiah,” she said. “Is one of two things happen to him, Carmelita. Either Jamiah’s people pick him up or the police hold him. The only thing we could do is pray.”

Carmelita had run this conversation over and over in her mind all night. She’d played it like a movie, each word an image. Everyone knew Chale Jamiah grew tomatoes. No one dared to say that tomatoes couldn’t build that big house in town; there was even talk that he’d bought an oil rig. You could sell tomatoes from morning to night but even the simplest child could do the math. Tomatoes didn’t buy oil rigs. He was a big whistler as well. They said he could whistle any tune. A nice-looking man who whistled and grew tomatoes. She’d met Jamiah once years ago when he’d come to the house to pay his respects after Frank had died. “Farmer to farmer,” he’d said, and she hadn’t thought any more of it.

When Frank collapsed in the lettuce bed at the side of the house, Carmelita was soaping baby Daniel’s head, shielding his golden eyes, he chittering in the lukewarm water of his kitchen-sink bath, little happy chirrups of contentment as the water poured over his head. She’d run to go to Frank, leaving Daniel in the water, wailing and slippery. By the time Mr. Ali made it up the hill, Myrtle had covered Frank’s face with a flowered sheet. After this Carmelita began to pray, imagining her prayers carrying the soul of her husband. She’d picked roses for Mother Mary while keeping her eyes open for five-toed hens to woo the Orisha gods. On some nights she’d burned incense for Ganesh who shared a shrine with Jesus under the hog plum tree. She wasn’t taking chances with Frank’s soul.

In the town below, Mr. Ali lets her out into a river of heated bodies—people swimming like guabines on the pavement. On the main boulevard, Guyanese and various small-island immigrants hock their wares. Cheap panties and pirated DVDs, strung side by side on collapsible display racks, hover above dirty drain water. At the police station, she looks for Corporal Beaubrun, a distant cousin.

He’s in the middle of breakfast, smoked herring and bake on his desk. Wiping his hands on the seat of his pants, he comes toward her. He’s a good-looking boy. Tall and dark with a square head and a nose carved like an answer to his heavy brow. At the counter he takes his time pulling his pen out of his pocket.

“I hear you having some trouble with your last one,” he says.

“He misses a father’s hand.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Since Wednesday morning. He said he was coming down here to do some business.”

“He wasn’t in school?”

She shakes her head.

“He has a woman?”

“No.” Oh God, she thinks to herself, is this man so dense that he does not understand what I am asking of him? “It might be too late when you all finally decide to look for him,” she says carefully.

“You know something you not telling me?”

“No, just worried.”

He shuffles a few papers on his desk. “How long we know each other?”

“Since primary school, you know that. What’s that got to do with this?”

“Sit tight and he will come home. The more trouble you make—”

“To look for a missing child is to make trouble?”

He places the cap back on his pen and glances at his breakfast. “Come,” he says. “Come and talk outside. I’ll walk you out.”

They leave the station, his hand lightly on her elbow.

“Has he ever told you who he works for?” He explains that the boys are recruited from villages all over the island. They are well paid to do what they consider easy work. These rural boys know the terrain, the trails through the hills, and are handy with their homemade pipe-guns. They are routinely moved around the island to fill gaps in an army of small-time criminals. If Daniel is ambitious and bright, could he be involved in this?

Carmelita hesitates before answering. What can she say without implicating her son in wrongdoing? Can she believe her youngest son knows right from wrong? Has she been too indulgent with him? She shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe. I can’t say for sure.”

Beaubrun sighs and pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket to wipe his brow. “I’ll call you if I hear anything. I’ll make some enquiries.”

* * *

All day she walks. She passes the old cathedral, cavernous and violet, which stands next to De Freitas Dry Goods with its bags of coffee, cocoa and nutmeg, pigtail buckets, and piles of blue soap. At the end of the street, Chan’s Laundry puffs little blasts of starchy steam onto the pavement. In this part of town, blue-bitch stone faces the fronts of the buildings, the corners laid with old ships’ ballast. Her father laid blue-bitch all his life—that hard beautiful stone pulled from the earth below the village—a solid, honest life, he always told his children. Work from the land.

She has a picture of Daniel in her hand, holding it up toward the faces of strangers who sidestep her. When the sun begins throwing long shadows, Carmelita veers off the main street, crossing the river that leads to the other side of town. On this side, drinking men spill out from shanty bars with their nasty, stale urine and rum-sweat smells. Alleys dribble off the main road, wildness taking over. Behind the derelict government housing, the grid-order of the town disappears into indeterminate ends, twisted mazes of collapsing galvanized sheets and open latrines. Here and there golden marigolds grow in discarded truck tires. Farther on are the monstrous yards of the scrap-iron vendors, rumoured to be the front offices of bustling rent-a-gun operations. Surely someone here must know him. Recognize his face. Tell her something that the police could not.

Down an alley, in the dim light between the buildings, two women sit on an overturned Coca-Cola case with a makeshift table between them. One, a coarse-skinned Indian woman, is picking out seeds and leaves from a pile of weed, separating it into neat heaps. The second one looks up as Carmelita approaches, her hand motionless over the line of weed on the cigarillo paper. Both women shift at the same time, perfectly synchronised, blocking her view of the table.

“How do you do business?” she whispers. Is it like chicken, she wonders, that you buy by the pound?

The older woman holds up a finger to Carmelita. Wait, she is clearly saying. Don’t come any closer. She rises heavily, wearily, rubbing her back as she comes toward Carmelita.

“Do you know him?” Carmelita shows her the picture.

“How much you want?”

“Ahhm, one.”

“Just give me a twenty.” The woman takes the photograph from Carmelita. “Why you looking for this boy?”

“I’m his mother. He’s missing.”

“Everybody down here know Daniel.” The woman makes the sign of the cross before bagging the joint.

“When last you saw him?”

Before the end of the street, she’s thrown the joint into a clump of bushes.

* * *

When the sun cools she walks home. She stays off the pitch, still radiating the day’s heat, walking in the grass at the side of the road, her breath loud in her ears as she climbs and climbs up to her village. Halfway up, her feet stinging from the tiny pebbles on the road, she stops. The plateau overlooks the Gulf of Paria, a big, broody expanse of water. People say that this is where the cocaine crosses, coming from Venezuela. Across the bay, South America is just visible in the dying light. The scarlet ibis are flying home. They fly across the indigo water heading inland toward the swamp. Years before she’d taken Daniel to see the pink birds roost. The birds had landed in rosy blurs, whole ibis families staining the mangroves red.

“Mama, how do they know to come here every night?” he’d asked.

“They come,” she’d told him, “because this is where they sleep. Even the littlest bird knows he must come home to his mama.”

When she catches her breath, she begins walking again.

* * *

“Don’t cry,” says Myrtle the next morning when she brings Carmelita the newspapers and a ball of cocoa. “Daniel too beautiful to die. He’ll be alright. Don’t cry, Carmelita.”

A lagniappe child, the villagers said when her stomach began to rise like bread with Daniel. She was forty-four then. A change-of-life baby will break your heart, the old midwife told her. Two months before his due date, Daniel was born in a tropical storm. He was her smallest baby but she’d had the worst time with him. She had all the others at the hospital but Daniel was born in her bed, bloody and breathless. Against her thigh, his skull was no larger than a monkey’s, his skin translucent under the hurricane lanterns. The midwife wrapped him in a blanket and placed him in the drawer of a dresser. Carmelita had softened the edges of the drawer with cotton padding laid over sweet-smelling vetiver sprigs. For the first month of his life he wore a bracelet of black beads on his tiny wrist to ward off maljeaux while she prayed to keep the breath in his body. The baby had nothing of her flat, wide face and hairless sapodilla skin, or his father’s smooth cocoa complexion. He was thin-faced with marmalade eyes, a beautiful changeling child.

* * *

Father Duncan comes right behind Myrtle early on Saturday morning. Daniel has been gone three mornings. Four nights her son has slept somewhere else and she has no idea where. The night before, she’d not slept well, her feet aching from the long walk up the hill, and she rose twice to the sound of a baby’s cry. But each time it was only the big jumbie bird, roosting in the mango vert tree up behind the house. By the time she waves Myrtle out the gate and turns to go back inside, Father Duncan is already striding up her path, as if tragedy has made him lose his manners, his crucifix glinting in the sun, his great head bobbing above the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus hedge. She has to hide Ganesh, snatching him from beside Jesus, pushing his elephant head deep in the compost heap. But in the end, she is happy the priest has come and they say the rosary together, pausing after each decade to allow the words to drift up to Mary’s ears.

* * *

Beaubrun telephones on Monday morning.

“A body of a young boy was picked up by the Caura River. They’ve sent him to the mortuary in town. That’s all I know.”

Her heart beats a galloping staccato that rushes in her ears and brings black spots before her eyes. The telephone falls from her hand and hits the statue of Mary, knocking the mother of God off her pedestal and narrowly missing the Sacred Heart with the bloody heart of Jesus popping out of his chest. Carmelita opens her mouth and bawls.

Afterward she remembers that the village poured through her door like red ants, laying their hands on her, but even the softest touch bit and stung her skin and made her scream. It was only when old Dr. Chin arrived in his Honda CR-V to stick a needle into her arm that Carmelita stopped screaming.

* * *

On Tuesday morning she packs a small bag to go to the mortuary. In it is a rosary, a bottle of holy water, a clean shirt, and an ironed pair of pants for Daniel. Mr. Ali comes when she calls, holding her elbow as she walks to the car as if she is an old woman.

“You don’t have to go with Mr. Ali, Ma,” Johnny had said, “I’ll take you.”

But she had told him no. This was about her and Daniel.

* * *

The old colonial-built hospital is filled with airy rooms that filter the trade winds; the view through the jalousies looks down on vendors selling colas and fruit drinks at the entrance. At the back of the hospital, the mortuary stares at Carmelita, its closed windows giving it a stupid, blind appearance. Inside, a small Indian woman listens to Carmelita’s story before picking up the telephone. As she speaks, a small extra finger swings gently from the side of her left hand. This infant finger with its own half-moon nail causes a somersaulting in Carmelita’s stomach, a clenching in her womb. Across the room a wooden door bears a nameplate: Dr. Andrew Olivierre, Chief Pathologist. She takes a seat on a wooden bench across from this door.

“You can go in now,” the secretary eventually says.

Dr. Olivierre comes to meet her as she walks through the door, holding out his hand and smiling pleasantly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “There has been a mistake. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Nunes.”

“Excuse me? The police sent me.”

“We’ve seen this happen. People come in thinking they will find missing people here. But your son is not here.”

They sit in silence for a moment or two. There is a picture of a pretty woman with three children on his desk. The woman looks like her daughter Oriana, same dark hair and wide mouth. The doctor has two daughters and a son. The oldest girl looks a little younger than Daniel and there is a baby in the woman’s arms. The doctor flips his pen between his fingers and snaps it open and shut with sharp clicking noises.

“How you lose someone?” she asks the room. “A boy is not a handbag. Or a scrap of paper that fly off a table and disappear in the breeze; a boy is not something you could lose so.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Nunes,” the doctor says, his hand resting lightly between her shoulders as she leaves the room.

She waits on the bench outside the hospital for Johnny to come and get her. She still has the bag of Daniel’s clothes and the small bottle of holy water.

* * *

That night she dreams that Father Duncan caught a scarlet ibis and asked her to stew it for him to eat. The next morning, Wednesday, she draws a black line through the whole week on her almanac. She chooses a picture of Daniel sitting with the two dogs on her front porch. She will go back and give the doctor a picture. If Daniel does come in, at least he will recognize him.

When the car pulls into the mortuary the next morning, Carmelita is waiting. The doctor is in the passenger seat. The dark-haired woman from the picture kisses him goodbye, waving as he walks away.

“Goodbye,” she calls.

The morning sun backlights the doctor’s hair, but his face turns mulish and cruel as he approaches Carmelita. Still, she reaches out to touch him. When he clamps her wrist, she remembers how a dog bit her like this once, with a sudden snap.

“Your son is not here,” he says, his big body, with its womanish bottom, stiff and hostile.

Behind him, the car stops, its engine idling, in the middle of the road. “Drew!” the woman calls.

Carmelita pulls her hand back, shaking her wrist, the photograph falling on the ground. When she looks up, he has walked away and the big car has driven off.

 

Drew

Drew carefully examined the body of the young boy. He had been brought in after midnight early Sunday morning. Blue and black discolourations of settling blood were just starting along the boy’s back, his skin grey under the buzzing fluorescent lights. Tall, but still a child. No more than sixteen or seventeen. Could be a country boy, a cocoa panyol mixed with some Indian. There was a birthmark on his left cheek. Maybe a local white, but Drew doubted this because he’d know this child. Venezuelan? His mouth had collapsed into the spaces left by the missing front teeth, making the boy’s face appear babyish. Drew turned up the top lip. The gums were bruised, puckering around little bloody pockets left by the extracted teeth. Drew ran his tongue over his own front teeth, a quick reflexive move. The ends of the boy’s fingers had bled until death and now the hands curled lightly, peculiar and birdlike without their nails. Even with closed eyes, his face still had the startled expression of a panicked child as if the bullet had caught him negotiating to the end. A drug hit? But Drew knew that if Ralph had called him out, it meant the police were involved.

After he’d examined the body, Drew peeled his surgical gloves off, discarding them in the bin. The yellow death certificates came in triplicate, untidy with their bulging carbon copies. On the top copy, Drew carefully wrote the cause of death as vehicular accident. Underneath, he signed his name: Dr. Andrew Olivierre, Chief Pathologist, St. Mary’s General Hospital.

The first bodies had begun arriving within weeks of the election. Last week there’d been a prostitute, a pretty girl who had tried to blackmail the wrong person. Was Ralph so powerful that he could arbitrarily order someone to be killed? Drew pulled the sheet up, covering the child’s face. Where were this boy’s parents? They were the ones to blame for this. He could put his head on a block that none of his three would ever end up like this. Irresponsible people having children had spawned a generation of feral teenagers. This is what the ruling party had said during the election campaign and the population had agreed so much that the party had swept into government on a landslide vote.

At his weekly confession, Drew had struggled with his conscience. What was he to say to the priest? That part of his job as the government pathologist was to make the victims of police brutality disappear? It was not as if he were associated with a death squad or anything like the Tonton Macoute in Haiti. This was simply some housecleaning to tidy up the streets. He turned off the lights, locked the door and left. It was 3:15 on Sunday morning. The boy had been dead for a little over twenty-four hours.

Ralph and Drew still met every Wednesday at the Cricket Club, even though Ralph was now a government minister. When they had turned up for lunch that first Wednesday after the election, the whole room had stood and clapped when Ralph entered. He looked like a minister of national security, as if everything in his life had been leading up to playing this part. Drew had held his briefcase while Ralph stopped to shake hands with people on the way to their table.

But today, no one looked up when they entered the room.

Drew cut his chicken carefully as he spoke. “The mother tried to stop me in the car park this morning. I told her we didn’t have him. We should have buried him on Monday.”

“Does anyone else know he was brought in?” asked Ralph.

“I should ask you that. This was a child. Shit, man. This is not what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“What a fuck-up. We didn’t know he was so young.” Ralph sipped his drink. “We think he double-crossed Jamiah.”

“I still don’t understand. Who killed the boy?”

“Our men did. He knew everything about Jamiah but he couldn’t go back. We offered him protection to talk, but he refused.”

“We can’t be killing children.”

“You know, the little shit never cracked. He never talked.”

“They were very rough with him,” said Drew. This is where I should say something, he thought, this is where I should get up and walk out.

“This boy doesn’t exist anymore, so whoever they are could not have been rough with him. Do you understand? This boy must disappear completely. This was a fucking nightmare and now you giving me some crap to hold about this boy’s mother? Make him disappear, Drew. It’s your job.”

No, Drew wanted to say, it’s not my job. This was not supposed to be part of it.

“How long we go back, Drew? Come nah, man. How long we friends?”

I’d like you to be part of my team, Ralph had said. How many months ago? Was it six already? If we want to clean up this country, we have to bend the rules a bit.

He’d presented a convincing argument, but Drew had always known that he didn’t have a choice.

In their final year at university, Drew had listened most nights to Ralph’s low voice cajoling and stroking, the murmurs travelling through the walls. He couldn’t believe the girls fell for it. But they did, every time. With a fleshy mouth that glistened pink and healthy when he laughed, a booming ha-ha-ha mouth that opened to show big, white teeth and a small, pointed tongue, Ralph was beautiful.

“It’s not whether I like him or not—it’s not about that. You can’t resist Ralph, he’s like a force of nature,” Drew told Isobel when he first started seeing her.

“I can resist him,” she’d replied.

“That’s what all women say,” he told her, but secretly he was pleased that she could see through Ralph.

Was this how it happened? That you crossed lines so easily? On their small island, where good and evil were so carefully demarcated, it was surprisingly easy to move between the two. Ralph was supported by a strong religious platform. It had been a clever manoeuvre by their prime minister to appeal to the righteous, a hard-nosed approach that sent shivers around the region. What was it the papers said? An unprecedented show of military muscle.

Every day, from the window in his office, Drew looked at the palms that waved the dead through, large branches forming a canopy against the sun. He was sorry that he had met with the boy’s mother; sorry that she’d shown him the picture of the boy. In the photograph, an even-featured boy with odd topaz eyes had smiled out at him. White teeth set against copper skin, a saga-boy smile.

“Why do they keep calling you out at night?” Isobel had asked him on the way to work that morning. “Tell Ralph, when you have lunch with him today, that your wife wants to know why he keeps calling her husband in the middle of the night.”

That night, after they’d made love, Isobel fell asleep with her back pressed up against him. She was sleeping deeply when he shook her awake.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

 

Isobel

The night Drew had woken her to tell her about the boy, there was no more lovemaking. She had to take a sleeping pill to fall asleep again. She woke groggy and waited for him to go to work before she got up. The hot water beating on her head when she showered cleared her thoughts. She would find the boy’s mother and tell her the terrible thing her husband had done. She wore a comfortable pair of shoes; it would take an hour to walk to the hospital where she guessed the woman would be. Drew had taken the car that morning and he would be expecting her to stay at home.

She walked through the cows that grazed under the branches of the large saman trees. The passion fruit vine on the fence that separated their house from the banking complex was heavy with fragrant globes. She walked past the guava trees on the hillock that overlooked the houses of the rich on the coast. From here she could see the hospital on the other side of the savannah, up the street and left off the highway. She timed her breath to her stride, as if she were pacing herself for a long run. The road was quiet, the school rush over, her girls sitting safely in their classrooms; Robbie was having his morning fruit at his grandmother’s home. Behind her, a truck roared up the highway, gears grinding as it picked up speed. She walked faster, trying to outpace the memory of Drew’s face. He dropped the children at school every morning, letting her sleep because he knew she liked to read late into the night. He’d probably kept them quiet this morning, packing Robbie’s bag and putting Mara’s hair in a ponytail.

She broke into a short run, her breath labouring as the truck thundered past her, leaving her with a lungful of diesel fumes.

The woman was where she expected. She’d noticed her a few days before, the day she’d dropped Drew at work. She’d seen the violence in the way he’d grabbed the woman’s hand. This had so shocked Isobel, she’d braked the car and called out to him. Now it made sense. And this was how she knew the woman would be here, sitting on a bench outside the mortuary.

“They have him,” Isobel said when she sat down next to the boy’s mother. “They have him inside. I’ll come with you to get him. Come, we will go together.” She was ready to face Drew. There was no need to tell the woman what had happened; she would be given a sealed casket. She told Carmelita to say that she would return with a lawyer if they did not produce her son.

Drew let them into his office, his face even. Had she expected something more dramatic, a scene perhaps, or some form of repentance? Instead, his quiet acquiescence frightened her. She’d been sure that she had the upper hand, but she’d underestimated him, and now it was she who was forced to consider her position. What had she gambled with this move, what must she be prepared to surrender?

“The casket is sealed,” he told Carmelita. “These discrepancies are quite normal. We were due to call you today. I am so sorry for your loss.”

Isobel was thrown by his poise, shocked by his ability to lie so easily. This shifting of gears revealed a stranger hidden inside her husband. When she was a child, she’d once slept the whole night with a garden lizard under the blanket. It had made her feel ill to think of the lizard heating up from her warmth.

“The casket will go to the funeral home,” she heard him say. “I’m signing the papers to release the body to the funeral home. You can bury him from there.”

* * *

When he came home that evening, they did not speak for three days. On the third night, he woke her in the middle of the night.

“Do you know what the fuck you have done?” he asked her. “Do you? You’ve put us all in danger.”

“I don’t want to know, Drew.” She kept her face averted. How much was she prepared to give up? Her marriage? The lives of her children?

The next morning they went on as usual because neither could think of what else to do.

* * *

It was only later that Isobel was able to piece together what had happened. The woman had bribed the funeral director to release the casket to her.

Let me bring the boy home for a last night. Let me feed his spirit one last meal. Let me pack his bag for heaven.

This is what Isobel imagined Carmelita would have said to the funeral director. It’s what she would have said.

Later Carmelita told her that she had bathed Daniel with lavender-scented water, sponging each laceration and examining every inch of his body. The next morning, she’d asked Father Duncan to reseal the coffin. In the family plot, he settled gently in the loamy dirt grown by generations of flesh and blood. That night, Carmelita found a gun hidden under some clothes in Daniel’s room. There was no one that she could ask about the technicalities of a gun. It shot when she fired. She looked up the address of Dr. Andrew Olivierre. It took her less than a week to learn the man’s routine.

* * *

It still surprised Isobel that neither child had mentioned the attack at the old house. In the aftermath, both girls had been calm. Carmelita had appeared just after midday. The neighbours said she sat there for most of the afternoon, waiting through a light drizzle under the trunk of a frangipani tree. When Drew pulled up to the gate, she moved quickly.

When she heard the first shots, Isobel ran toward the echo. By the time she arrived at the gate, Drew had Carmelita pinned against the car. With her arm twisted behind her back, her scapula stood in bold relief, like a broken wing.

Isobel pulled Drew off the keening woman, her hands frantic over his body, feeling for mortal wounds to explain the blood.

“Surface wounds,” she told him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Drew. It’s just a pellet gun. It’s just pellets.” Isobel knew that old women who live in the hills knew how to deliver babies, brew raw medicine, and cook like angels, but they did not know how to use guns. The pellet gun had wobbled in her trembling hands.

“Why you lie? Why you lie about Daniel? You know they kill him. You see how they strip his body and rip it up like a old bedsheet. You see how they knock out his teeth and pull out his nails. I grow that child like a plant. From a seed, I grow him. Why you lie, Mr. Doctor? God don’t sleep. You will rot in hell.”

“Stop it,” said Isobel. “Enough.”

“Miss Isobel. Is his signature. His writing. He signed it. And he had to see what I saw. He knew. He knew what they did and he lied for them. Is pure evil. Pure evil your husband do that night.”

That night Isobel and Drew made love for the first time since the day she’d appeared with Carmelita. At first they were cautious but soon they held each other with the sharp bites and blind thrusts of an unsettled argument. They were still very good together. But that morning she kept her face away, throwing an arm over her eyes and turning inward until he left the bed, not wanting to see the scabby marks on his chest.

By the end of the week they had moved to a quiet suburb and changed their phone numbers.

* * *

Isobel had never lived in the shadow of a mahogany tree. It stood tall, reaching toward the sky, giving off resinous clicks as it stretched its branches over the house. In the evening, the tree turned its leaves to catch the dry-season breeze that rode down the valley. If she listened from the kitchen, Isobel could hear the tiny pops as the tree released its cocoa-shaped pods, setting free the little helicopter spirals. Each morning she collected the spent husks where they lay curled like tiny sculptures on the sloping lawn that ran to the edge of the driveway.

The man who had lived there many years before had raised hibiscus. People had driven from all corners of the island to choose from his rainbow-hued hybrids. It gave her pleasure to return hibiscus to the garden and tuck them neatly into fat manure beds that she shaped with her garden hoe.

Her new home was deceptive, modestly folding in on itself, presenting a bland facade to the road, but it came from a long pedigree of high-ceilinged, graceful houses that dotted the surrounding hills. It was not like the home of the man who lived across the street, a good-looking brown-skinned man they nicknamed The Whistler. His house was contemporary, bare-boned, dramatic.

Below their house was a damp cellar, secured with a temperamental padlock, where Isobel stored the baby bassinet with its elaborate netting and faint scent of vetiver. She had spent her first mornings in their new home in this cool dark cave rooting out hidden treasures from long-gone eras. All the while she hunted, she could hear her neighbour whistling his way through a catchy series of 1920s dance hits. She heard him sweeping his front steps as he whistled, a cheerful reassuring sound that reminded her of the nursery smell of boiling rice and butter. When she’d looked out from the cellar, all she could see was the smudge of his broom as it danced in a mist of sunlit dust motes. She’d heard that he was very rich, money made from growing tomatoes, according to the other neighbours.

Isobel and Drew seldom spoke of the incident at the old house. Now days were spent arranging new routines. Once she had built her world on the assumption that Drew was a good man. It was he who attended church with the three children every week. Her oldest, at eight, had just begun to question why Isobel came only infrequently to Mass. Ava was pretty and fine-boned, looking like Drew’s mother, and the old lady shamelessly favoured her over the younger and plumper Mara. Her baby, Robert, was still beautiful in a bow-lipped, milky way. Everyone had told her that she would love the third child the most. When he emerged, perfectly whole and male, she feared he would steal her heart from her daughters. But her love for each child had a distinct flavour and texture, mercurial in the way it bubbled through her life.

The new house sat in the shadow of The Whistler’s house. At certain times of day, the raw-boned house eclipsed their light, blocking the sun at its hottest point. Ralph had found the house for them after the shooting, though for a time there was talk about moving to Canada. Ralph said not to worry about Carmelita and they had not pressed charges. There would be no retribution and even if she did go to the police, she would not get far. Isobel made Drew promise that Ralph would not harm the old lady.

“It’s the least you can do for her.”

Ralph said he knew the neighbour, a nice man. He grew lots of tomatoes; he’d made his fortune in them. When she’d first heard him whistling, Isobel had thought about the boy. That day, on the bench outside the mortuary, Carmelita had told Isobel about Daniel. In his last months, Daniel had learned to whistle. He perfected the birdcalls of the Northern Range, practising the gong sound of the bellbird that lived high in the moist forest and whistling out the window at the jumbie bird in the mango tree. These were memories Carmelita wanted to keep.

It was good that Carmelita and Isobel never knew the bloody tune Daniel whistled until the end. Or how the soldiers in the forest had prepared the body of the child in the way they were taught by their elders. Brutal as they had been in life, they were gentle and superstitious in death, preparing the body with deference, worrying about the nine-night’s ritual. Should they send a note to Dr. Drew to ask him to nail the boy’s feet to the hastily assembled box that guilt made them build before they sent him to the mortuary? Should they insist that Dr. Drew bury the boy facedown so he could not come back for retribution? In their heavy uniforms, these men did not fear the living, but deep in the forest they would take no chances with a dead boy.

If Isobel had known these things, she might not have stayed. But she never knew any of this. Instead, in the dry rotting-leaf smell of her new garden, she learned how to skim unwelcome thoughts from the surface of her mind.

It was Mara who saw the dragonfly, a big blue darner among the red ones that gathered every evening to dance above the olive water of the pond. “Did you know,” Isobel whispered, tickling the girls, “old wives say that he uses his tail to sew the lips of naughty boys shut? The devil’s darning needles.” They’d looked for him again, but he’d only come that once.