The scent of jasmine hung in the air, commingling with the scent of fried plantains and the previous night’s roast. Plum held an express mail envelope from Jamaica, inside of which was a familiar brown envelope with her typewritten name. She slid her finger beneath the flap, hopeful for a concrete clue.
Inside was a map to a house on a hill in Anchovy. The months and years of searching came down to a sheet of paper from the private investigator with a crudely drawn map pointing the way from the main road, left of the abandoned train tracks, past the secondary school, down a rutted road, a quick left turn and the house upon the hill.
Two days later, Plum was on a plane to Jamaica, pressed up against the window, then rushing again through customs with a single wheeled bag. Outside, the heat embraced her. At another time she would have stood for a moment to let the sun warm her body that was still chilled from the forced indoor air. But she moved quickly to the van and off-site car rental office, then away from the oversized villas sprouting out of the hillside, the hotels overlooking the sea and the tourists so at home in her country in a way that she had never felt in theirs. And then she checked herself, for she was as American as some of the tourists were but still not as comfortable in her own country as the tourists were in any place they visited.
At Reading, she turned left toward Anchovy. How close she had been on her last trip here. This stretch of road—winding, and dark from trees that towered overhead and filled the gully to the right—wasn’t familiar to Plum. She drove slowly, carefully, blowing the horn just before rounding each curve of the road, holding up impatient drivers more familiar with the road. There was no place really to stop and let them pass. On one side was the gully and on the other a wall of damp rocks with ferns and weeds growing from the crevices. Plum pressed on, counting her breaths, her hands tight on the steering wheel.
The road flattened out and houses, small and not as flamboyant as the buildings on the coast, emerged on the left and right. The road, still narrow, wound around corners, until at last it opened up to a commercial stretch. She let the vehicles pass and as she waited bought a drink from a roadside vendor. Then she was on the way again, looking out for the point where the railroad crossed the main, the school, and a road on the left.
Again, Plum practiced her breathing. “I am your mother,” she said again and again. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time now.” She didn’t know what she would say to him.
The yard was overrun with weeds. The grove of banana and plantain trees and cocoa plants at the bottom of the hill was choked with weeds as well. Plum knew immediately that she wouldn’t find him there, but she climbed the hill anyway, hopeful, feeling her way with a stick through the knee-high brush, climbing until she reached the steep stone steps that led up to the wrap-around verandah. To the right of the house was an old chicken coop that someone had built too close to a cherry tree. Perhaps the tree had come after and had grown up and around the chicken coop. It didn’t matter. Up the steps. She glanced once to the left and once to the right, her eyes glancing over the chicken coop, catching a glint of metal from within it.
On the verandah, she tested the boards then stepped gingerly, avoiding the slats of wood that looked soft, like pieces that would crumble under her weight. She could see nothing through the windows, and the locks, though they jiggled and felt weak, didn’t budge. Plum wasn’t certain what the empty house could tell her, but she circled it, walking again through the brush to the back of the house, where someone had once had an outdoor kitchen. The blackened zinc sheets and stones remained, a testament to another life. Beneath the house, in the dark crawl space, she found a forgotten doll, its hair matted and face grungy and missing one of its legs. She caressed it as if it were indeed a child forgotten beneath the house, then cleaned it at the pipe that jutted from the bottom of the large water tank and left it in the sun to dry.
Eight years of active searching had come to this: an abandoned house, an outdoor stove and a doll (signs of a former life, but not necessarily his and hers), no trace of where Lenworth and her daughter had gone, no trace even of the girl’s name. There was no telling how long the house had been empty. Weeks? Months? Years? She wouldn’t cry. Instead, Plum forced her disappointment deep within, and buried again the words she had practiced for her little girl.
There was no use in waiting, but Plum waited anyway on the verandah, her arms on the railing, her eyes trained on the hill and the roof of the house in the valley below, her body like that of a woman expecting her family or visitors to appear any minute at the bottom of the hill. Clouds shifted in and out. Smoke rose from an outdoor fire near the house below with the rusted zinc roof. Goats let loose in the morning bleated as they made their way back home. Only when the sun was nearly down did she leave, weaving her way back down the hill in the shadows of the large breadfruit and star apple trees, and back down the long hill past Reading, through the city of Montego Bay and on to a mid-size hotel in Ironshore. She took with her the one-legged doll and an unconvincing conviction that her search would end right there at the house in Anchovy. She had come up empty too many times, and each time she walked away empty-handed she relived that first night, waking to find her baby gone, coming home to a house that was no longer hers, feeling again like a castaway abandoned at the first sign of trouble.
That night would have been her last. What saved her? Perhaps divine intervention. Perhaps the dirty, one-footed doll. She bathed it, wiped the skin clean with cotton balls doused in facial toner and detangled the hair, snipping stubborn knots with tiny manicure scissors, then braiding what remained. A mother without anyone to mother, without even an inkling of who her lost child had become. She left the hotel room for the beach, the vast body of water slapping up against the shore, with a plan to walk out to sea and not return. In the lobby, the hotel manager pulled her wrist and body toward him, dancing her into the night’s party on the patio overlooking the beach. The music, which from upstairs had only been a soft pulse, thrummed. He danced her into a circle of tourists, all dancing too fast for the beat, seemingly unaware of the rhythm. Her body betrayed her mind. It moved to the music. Her feet, her arms, her head, her hips, her lips fell in with the changing reggae beats, and she remained in the circle, a dark-skinned woman among the lighter-skinned tourists, teaching them how to feel the rhythm and move with the rhythm instead of against it.
As if they sensed her thoughts and knew her plans, no one left her alone for long. The party host danced her into a corner and across the room, into a circle of tourists who, from the set of their faces, had miscalculated the timing of their exit from the room. And when Plum eventually escaped the music and the movement, the guests staying in the room next to hers fell in as her escorts (or she theirs), walking as a unified group back to their respective rooms. By the time Plum escaped the seemingly endless party, it was too late to sleep, impossible even to quiet the thrum of the music in her head. She had little time left to pack, little time to think about her earlier plan to head out to sea. As if he knew, the concierge called and the staff came to take her bags and send her on her way for the early morning flight.
At the airport, an older woman who was flying for the first time latched onto Plum, telling her about the grandchildren born abroad whom she hadn’t yet met, how lonely it was being a grandmother from a distance, limited to sharing second-hand stories with her friends. Plum wanted to share her own pain of being a mother without anyone to mother.
At the check-in counter, Plum changed her mind and her ticket, pushed her return back by two days, re-rented a car and drove back through the city, up the long hill back toward Anchovy.
First, she stopped at the primary school and asked the principal about a Barrett or Ramsey girl.
“What her first name?”
But when Plum couldn’t give that, the principal became suspicious and said simply, “I can’t give out any information like that.”
And back to the houses around the one on the hill.
“Canada,” one neighbor, an elderly woman with a hunched back, said.
“No sah,” her husband replied. “All of the Ramsey dem in England.”
“Gwennie tell me Canada.”
“Gwennie no know nutten. When she ever get anything right?”
“Dearie, ask Rose. The wife and Rose were friends. Third house past Nurse. The one with the big mango tree in the yard and the blue verandah.”
And on to Rose’s house with its blue verandah and red steps.
“Friends? She never tell me nutten. Is after them gone I hear that they pack up and leave. Friends?” Rose sucked her teeth and shook her head. “Never see no friend like that.”
With each conversation—sweetest little girl and the baby boy too; never did hear where the wife come from—Plum’s despair grew, pushing her back to where she had been immediately after Lenworth disappeared. She couldn’t help but think he knew she was coming, had perhaps heard her voice on the radio or heard from someone else that she was searching for him, and had in return gone underground like a species of marine life living deep within the sea.
Inside the airport itself, Plum couldn’t see the sea, but she felt it calling her. Yet, she couldn’t answer the call, and when she could indeed see the sea from the small plane window, it was too late, much too late to go.
Looking out the window, she imagined a stick figure adrift in a boat. A castaway. The teenager who had been tricked into going to Jamaica in the first place by her own mother. The teenager who found trouble on the island and later found that her parents were unwilling to welcome home an unwed daughter-turned-mother. Not a true castaway. Not just yet. By the time she returned to the rented cottage to find her Mr. Barrett, Lenworth, gone, she was in her mind a true castaway, twice-abandoned by her mother and once by her lover.
Plum left that castaway, that abandoned girl, behind in Jamaica—a stick figure in a boat on the vast sea below, rowing without oars, her crying drowned by the plane roaring above. A speck in the distance disappearing to nothing.