The room was bright when I woke up. The curtains caught in the breeze and cast flickering shadows across my face. Caitlin was sitting out on the balcony, sunbathing. She must have swum already because her long hair hung wet and tangled down her back, creating a small pool of water on the tiles. The morning was so bright that past Caitlin I could see nothing at all, just a shining white abyss.
“Morning! You’re up early,” I called out to her.
“I couldn’t sleep. I had terrible dreams.”
Her voice was quiet and strange. As she climbed back into bed, I could see tears dried like sea salt against her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been crying.”
“It’s silly.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, nothing really.”
“Is it Dad?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
We had been happy this week. Our little apartment made us feel like grown-ups with our own place. Dad was at work all day so we were free to roam wild. Occasionally Caitlin disappeared with Thomas, leaving me grumpy and neglected, but we spent most of our time together. We were officially buddies under water, and we took that responsibility seriously, practicing our scuba hand signals cross-legged in front of each other. She had run out of air on one dive when I didn’t close the valve on her tank properly, and we had the chance to put our lessons into practice, sharing air up to the surface.
There was no reason to be sad, and if there had been, Caitlin wasn’t the one who cried.
She wiped a tear away and looked at me, a sad closed-mouth smile, the smile she shares with Dad.
Neither of us spoke for a few moments. The sheets were tangled from the hot night, and the fan was clattering round and round.
She rolled onto her back.
“I had a bad dream last night about Mom,” she said. “She was wrapping up our old childhood toys from the attic as Christmas presents for us and hoping we wouldn’t notice. We were too old for them, but she couldn’t afford new things. We went along with it, because we didn’t want her to feel bad even though we all knew.” She paused. “Anyway, I couldn’t get back to sleep after that so I went for a swim—really early, maybe six—and it was so quiet. No people or noise. Just the sound of the water. It’s so beautiful here.”
Another tear or two.
“I want this to work out for Dad, I do…”
“Maybe it will,” I offered.
“But even if it does, it isn’t real, is it? I want him to admit he screwed up and tell us what’s going on, but he hasn’t, and he won’t, will he, not as long as he can get away with it, and he expects us to play along, as if everything’s fine.”
She turned to me. I didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t ready to be angry at Dad.
“I just feel like something’s wrong and I can’t…” Her voice trailed away. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this,” she said, sighing.
Caity sometimes had these moments, premonitions and dreams, which we would have dismissed as woo woo, except when she said bad things were coming, she was usually right. We joked that in another era, she would have been banished to the outskirts of the village as a witch.
I wanted to make her feel better.
“Okay, do you need a good hug or a good smack?” I asked. As a family we generally agreed that when you were upset, it was far more productive to be smacked than hugged; affection only made you cry harder. Hugs were reserved for those moments when circumstances were sufficiently dire that crying was acceptable.
“Hmmm … smack, I reckon.”
“All right then.” I gave her four hard little slaps on her upper arm.
“Cow!” she shouted, and hit me back, until we both laughed, and then fell back on the bed.
“It’s my birthday, Caity.”
She rolled over swiftly toward me. “I’m sorry. What a totally crap way to start the day. Happy birthday!”
She gripped my face and planted a kiss aggressively on my forehead.
“Oi!”
“Right, enough of this: let’s go jump in the sea!”
We raced down to the water and bombed off the pier, coming up laughing and spluttering, wiping the salt out of our stinging eyes and letting her foreboding sink to the bottom, lost amid the coral and sea fishes where we hoped it would stay, rusty and barnacle-ridden, never to be needed again.
We went to find Dad in his office. Our skin dried immediately in the heat, and we relished the cool drips down our back from our wet hair.
“The birthday girl is up! Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tyler, happy birthday to you,” he sang double speed, as if it were a test run for the real song to come later. “Your mom called to wish you happy birthday a couple hours ago. I’m sure she’ll call back later,” he said before locking up and joining us outside. “Right, you girls better go get your stuff together for the day. The boat leaves in fifteen. It’s going to be hot out on the water, so bring sunscreen. You’ll need a towel, your dive logs—”
“We know!” we called behind us as we walked away shaking our heads affectionately, because no matter how many times we told him we were old enough to pack our own bags, he still tried to organize us. “I can’t help but be a dad,” he would say in response.
He had taken the day off work to take us on an excursion, hiring a speedboat and a driver. In the morning we dove a wreck together. It loomed in the water below us, tremulous and somber, a place sharks went to hide and the ghosts of fisherman took refuge. Entering into the hull through a porthole, every surface was encrusted with reef, bubbling and shimmying with a life of its own, eels slithering between the masts eyeing us with suspicion. We surfaced slowly, the three of us together, eagerly taking off our masks to talk about what we had seen as we bobbed in the open water waiting for the boat.
We stopped on an empty beach accessible only by sea. The driver had caught some fish while we were diving, which he cooked up on an open fire in an overturned barrel. We ate the fish hungrily with our fingers, the white flesh crumbling away from the bones. We washed our sticky fish fingers in the sea afterward and then lay in the sun to digest.
It was the hottest day yet. Not the same sort of heat as before, which burned the soles of our feet on the sand, but a humid, dense heat that weighed down the shoulders like a shrug.
We spent the afternoon in the fishing village of Soufrière, visiting the volcano. Dad insisted the guide take us for a walk across the thin crust, ripe with rotten-egg gases.
On our way back, we bathed in the Diamond Falls and took a mud bath, sinking deep into the dark gray silt like earth creatures. We walked through the botanical gardens and were lulled into a sweet stupor by the rich scent of the too-tall flowers towering over us.
It was a perfect day.
When we made it back to the resort in the soft tones of late afternoon, the receptionist was waiting to tell Dad that he’d missed several urgent phone calls, but Cait and I dismissed this as work related, already meandering along the path up to our apartment to dress for my lobster dinner in Rodney Bay.
“I want you ready and at my office by six pm, okay?” Dad called after us.
We had a few more moments to believe in him, to believe in all this.
As we walked back down to his office, the sun, red and swollen, resting on the horizon far out at sea, we took it all in: the smell of the wet jungle, the thick nighttime air, the strange singsong beauty, rising and ringing out in a slow crescendo, leaving us drowning in the richness of it all, right up until that moment when we stepped into Dad’s cold office, and we looked at him, with his head bowed, and it all fell down around us.
I now know the words behind that wasp-buzz. We were right; it was Mom’s voice, crackling and urgent, traveling all the way from the damp dark field in Bath in which she had waited, calling again and again until Dad had answered. And that voice was pleading, saying on repeat: “Just get my kids back to me, please, get them back before Scotland Yard arrive, just get my kids back to me…”
Dad says that was the moment he knew it was over, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He really believed in Saint Lucia. That night he told Lana what was happening, and then his boss at the hotel, not just that he was a fugitive and he was leaving but that Scotland Yard and the FBI were following in his wake and they would be questioning everyone. And then he told us that he didn’t know how long it would be before we would see each other again. He cried those tears we all remember.
Before we went to bed, Dad made us run down to find Ros and complete our PADI written exam papers, because he didn’t want our hard work to go to waste. I don’t know how Dad explained this strange late-night rush to Ros. When he gave me my PADI certification card, Ros said I was probably the youngest certified diver in the world, because you had to be twelve years old to qualify, and today was my twelfth birthday.
Dad didn’t sleep that night as he tried to get things together, gathering cash and identification, buying tickets, and then saying goodbye to us. He says it wasn’t dawn. He remembers it being later in the day, hot already. He thinks he must have gone into Castries to buy the tickets first and then taken us to the airport. But Caitlin and I share that image of him, standing on the side of the road, wearing swim shorts, a baseball cap, and flip-flops with a sports bag thrown over his shoulder, waving goodbye. We watched until he disappeared into the dusty pink haze.
* * *
I don’t remember the flight home. Caitlin remembers we were frightened about who might be there to meet us at Heathrow. If it was Scotland Yard, what were we meant to say? She was angry too, that still no one had told us what was going on.
An old man with white hair offered us aloe vera for our sunburned legs on the flight and then insisted we share his bag of sweets with him. Cait also remembers her period started on the twelve-hour flight, unexpectedly, and there was nothing we could do about it, too shy to ask an air steward for tampons, so she sat in discomfort all the way home.
But I don’t remember anything.
Mom says about twenty-four hours after she made the call, just when she began looking into flights to Saint Lucia herself, to trawl police stations and orphanages, anywhere the authorities might have sent two girls whose father had been incarcerated and whose mother was deemed unfit to care for them—at that peak of hysteria, Caitlin and I pulled up in a car with Stephen, one of the family friends who had accompanied us to see Dad in the South of France. We would have recognized him at arrivals and been glad to see him.
Poppy had started barking at the sound of a car passing, and Mom had gone out into the street, as she had done countless times already, half hoping it would be us and half fearing it would be the police, there to arrest her, and up until then it had been no one at all. But this time there was a car, and Cait and I got out of the backseat, looking frazzled and delirious.
“Am I glad to see you two!” she said with a wired, unconvincing levity, looking from Caitlin’s face to mine. She thanked Stephen, inviting him in for a cup of tea, and that was it. We didn’t talk about what had happened. Even if I had wanted to talk about it, I didn’t have any words. I had left them all in the dust of a banana field and I didn’t find them again for years.