Muldoon Bridge, ablaze in the golden light of the evening sun, has been widened and is now a four-lane asphalt-paved highway. The river—it, too, shimmering gold, seems narrower than he recalls, and tamer. A log that had been wedged in its center since the days of traveling in Mr. Walter’s car, and which trapped debris that washed in from the sea and debris headed down the river toward the sea, is, to his pleasure and at the same time horror, still there. The mangrove, kept under control by the municipality, has been cut back well away from the roadway. Harry is curious about the flooding of the road in high tide, wonders if the new raised bridge and the new walled-off roadway have alleviated this problem; wanting to avoid attention, he does not inquire.
The area where he dispersed his mother’s ashes has been altered, too. Where once were bamboo and rozay forests through which one had, in the past, to brush-cut one’s way is now a parking lot. Beyond the parking is an area of kept lawn on which several people sit, watching the dying sun set. He had intended that as the taxi passed, he would pay his respects to his mother’s memory, but he is caught off-guard by this recreation area with picnic tables and fire pits and seated people. The taxi speeds past before he has the chance to look out to the water’s horizon and invoke his mother’s name.
He gets out of the taxi at a junction well before Timbano Trace. He waits in the twilight on the roadside, as if expecting someone. Then, when no one is in sight, he slips away, down the dark and narrow path.
He is in too much of a hurry to take the time to try and identify the small plot of land he and his mother lived in. In any case the steps, which might have revealed the spot, must have—along with the much-crazed man who once lived in its shadow—finally succumbed.
He recognizes Tante Eugenie’s large and bent frame as she spreads wet clothing on the tops of the jasmine bushes at the side of the house. From his approach, he scrutinizes the clothing as best as he can in the low light to see if he might recognize any of it. She turns and sees him. Although she has thrown her hands in the air, ready to embrace him, he notices that she is, oddly, frowning. She limps hurriedly toward him, her mouth set tight. He is about to speak, but she snaps a finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she cautions urgently.
Energy instinctively drains from his body. He wants quick confirmation to the question “Is she here?” but, afraid of any and all answers, he has lost his breath. He glances side to side, peering hard into the dark surroundings. Reaching him, Tante Eugenie throws her arms around him, tightening her grip to still his tremble. As if someone might be eavesdropping, she whispers, “Why it take you so long to come? We waiting and waiting for you. Come. You alone?”
She grips his hand hard and pulls him purposefully around, past the house down to the beach. She points. Sitting on the sand, leaning against a log that only somewhat conceals her, is the familiar body. He cups Tante Eugenie’s face in his hands and kisses her on her tobacco-blackened lips. Coarse hairs on her upper lip prick his face.
She sees him just as he is upon her, and she smiles broadly. “Oh Lord, Harry. I knew you would figure it out.” He is exhausted, bent by the faith she has in him. Anger that she has caused such grief with the staging of her drowning grips him, even as he is overwhelmingly relieved, grateful that she is alive. He wants to shove her hard, and at the same time to hold and never let her go. He presses her hand to his mouth, and when she feels the wetness of tears on her hand, she cradles him in her arms. “We don’t have too much time, Harry. Everything ready. We were only waiting.” Then she laughs and adds, “Well, we were waiting, but more than that, we were hoping.” She begins to stand up. He holds her back. “Your face was on the front page of yesterday’s paper. It is probably in today’s paper, too. Everyone in this country knows you. You are on people’s minds right now.”
“I know that. I know we can’t stay here. Everything is arranged. It is only for you to agree to. I ready for a fresh start.”
She puts a hand on his leg and presses it there firmly to quiet him. In this place I am dead, Harry. They had funeral for me today. This is my chance. If they find me now, you know what will happen?”
Rose regards her hand on his leg and takes time to plead, time as if the world had slowed around them and nothing was pressing. “Harry, I want a simple-simple thing—to be able to look at you, to look at those eyes, and talk about all kinds of things, and I want you to look back at me, and talk with me. That is not a lot to want. It is a person’s right. To give and get love—not mother-and-child love, but the kind two adults share? You remember how happy I was, swimming in the sea in front of your house? You remember how happy we, you and me, were?”
Plaintively he responds, “But don’t you see? We can’t even go back there now. I spent yesterday with Piyari. She said enough for me to know that if there is a hint of an idea that you are alive, the first place you will be looked for is Elderberry Bay. That side of the world is out of the question.”
“Well, that was clear to me from the start.”
She stands up first, covers her head in a scarf, and then tops that with a straw hat. Even so, if it were not immediately evident that she is Rose Bihar, the quality and contemporary pattern of the fabric of the scarf and the stylishness of the hat she wears would have drawn attention had there been anyone else on the beach to notice. She holds out her hand for his and helps him up.
He walks beside her, stunned, back up the beach.
Uncle Mako began making the pirogue safe and seaworthy from the time Rose stepped out of the sea in front of their house several days ago. He has relished abetting in adventure that he had never managed to arrange for himself. If Tante Eugenie had agreed, he confided earlier to Rose, he already would have used the pirogue, and all the hope he could have mustered for himself, and he would have gone in search of Africa. But the way things had been going in the country these days, politically, that is, he had no more need for the pirogue. Here was a woman who was ready, he said to Rose, joking that it was too bad he wasn’t a younger man, and nothing was going to stop him from now giving that same pirogue to her and his favorite grandson.
Tante Eugenie is not as happy as she makes them believe she is. She thinks that a man who is used to waiting—if and when the time and the thing he has long been waiting for were to arrive—must use muscles in his brain and heart, muscles so long dormant that they would not easily be found. She frets, albeit quietly. Her Harry St. George is about to get into a boat, to travel open waters with the intention of reaching not Africa but Honduras. A day has not passed that she does not recall some morsel of it: the nights and days keeping watch with Dolly, they and the wives of the other men awaiting the return of Seudath’s boat, and then waiting for parts of the boat, of the men’s clothing, of their bodies to be washed ashore, if only to confirm and put to rest what they already knew.
For now they remain inside the house, Harry and Rose well away from the window and door, and they eat: fish, string beans, rice, and peas. Uncle Mako jokes with Rose that he and Tante Eugenie are Harry’s love counselors. That anytime Harry has a lady-related situation, he lands up there for them to help him out. Tante Eugenie, frying several days’ worth of bakes and stuffing them with dried pork hocks, jerk chicken, cheese, and jam fillings, sucks her teeth and asks Uncle Mako if he is trying to cause trouble bringing up Cynthia’s memory in front of Rose. To humor Uncle Mako, Rose feigns curiosity and jealousy and says that at least now, out on the quiet sea, she and Harry have lots to talk about. It surprises Harry that they have remembered Cynthia, and by her name, too. Clearly it pleases them to be involved in his life at crucial times. Tante Eugenie’s lips are pursed as she makes up packages of food and numbers them, so that they will be consumed according to order of perishability.
When it is dark enough, and likely that the few remaining residents of Raleigh are at least indoors if not asleep, Uncle Mako and Harry, out of the dry sandpit in which it was hidden, pull the boat quietly along wood-plank tracks. Harry climbs in, and Uncle Mako hands him bottles of water that Tante Eugenie has been discreetly filling at the standpipe several days in a row, a car tire, and a thick coil of heavy rope. Harry peers into the cabin, so low that one can enter it only by crouching, to see a mattress, a thin blanket, and next to the mattress, a bundle hidden under a large canvas tarpaulin. Curious, he lifts the tarp to find a bottle of rum and six jelly coconuts, two life jackets, and a pail. A flour sack he opens contains five rolls of toilet paper, a flashlight, a package of candles and matches, and a compass that not only gives north-south-east-west directions but also shows the position of the stars throughout the year. He is speechless; his future has been planned, without his knowledge, to the detail.
Back inside the house, Uncle Mako hands Rose rolled navigation charts. He explains to Harry that Rose, before she “drowned,” had made contact with a man who fixed up documents to help people leave the island and enter a foreign country without the intervention of Immigration. Harry has the odd sensation of watching himself descend into a deep whirlpool. He considers Rose. The Rose he once knew and would have done everything for has turned into a confident, take-charge kind of woman. She feels foreign to him. Uncle Mako is telling him that the man has arranged passage for them to Honduras in Central America. The man came to the house some nights ago, Uncle Mako is recounting, and showed Rose how to read the maps using the compass in the day and the sky at night. She should, with maps, compass, and the blessings of a star-studded sky, be able to guide them on the three-day journey to a cove on a small uninhabited island. There they must drop anchor and wait.
Abruptly Uncle Mako jerks his chin in the direction of Rose and interjects proudly, “Don’t make joke with this one, you hear, she is a bright-bright lady.” Harry remembers his own mother, recalling how quickly and unexpectedly she took up Mr. Persad’s business.
On the third day, continues Uncle Mako, weather and God above permitting, a shrimp trawler will meet and deliver them to the mainland. They will get a ride inland.
They sit and wait in awkward quiet until Uncle Mako gets up and says wearily, “Is time.” They gather at the pirogue, and Uncle Mako shows Harry how to start up the engine. The four of them shove the laden vessel to the water’s edge. Uncle Mako, taking a good look at the sky, declares the weather—from where they stand—to be as good as one might hope for. They help Rose into the boat, and the three of them send it farther into the warm water. While Uncle Mako digs his feet into the sand and grips the boat with all of his strength, which is still considerable for a man of his age, Tante Eugenie holds Harry’s face in her wet hands and kisses his lips. He wraps his arms around her and lets go only when she pushes him away, saying with an air of finality that they will not meet again but in heaven. Uncle Mako helps Harry hoist himself into the boat. His fears are all too immediately alerted by the boat lurching from side to side in that section of the sea where incoming and outgoing waves vie with each other. Harry reaches for the engine’s cord and pulls until it catches several tries later. The boat swerves erratically from side to side. Rose dares not look at Harry. They are drenched in sea spray even before Harry can aim the boat directly at the breaking waves ahead. When he looks back to wave, Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako are wading quickly toward the shore. The pirogue leaps over small waves, then medium-sized ones, and as it goes out farther, over larger ones that break just ahead of it, each time it lands with a hard firm slap.
Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie, gripping each other’s hands, stay on the damp nighttime beach well past the time the boat has vanished, waiting until they hear the engine’s chug no more.