1

A CROWD HAD GATHERED AROUND MRS. WINTER. The commotion at the graveside vibrated with suppressed hilarity. Me, I wasn’t able to keep properly solemn. When my shoulders had started shaking with silent laughter, I’d ducked behind the plain pine coffin still on its stand outside the grave.

I bit my lips to keep the giggles in, and peeked around the coffin to watch the goings-on.

Mrs. Winter had given up the attempt to discreetly pull her bloomers back up. Through the milling legs of the mourners, I could see her trying desperately instead to kick off the pale pink nylon that had slithered down from her haunches and snagged around her ankles.

Her kick sent a tiny flash of gold skittering across the cemetery lawn to land near me. I glanced down. I picked up the small tangle of gold-coloured wire and put it in my jacket pocket for later. Right now, I had some high drama to watch.

Pastor Paul, ever helpful, bent to the ground at Mrs. Winter’s feet and reached for his parishioner’s panties. Lord help me Jesus, he was really going to pick them up! But he drew his fingers back. He looked mortified. Maybe he was thinking how the panties had recently been snugged up to Mrs. Winter’s naked flesh. I thought my belly was going to bust, I was trying so hard not to laugh aloud. I bet you Dadda would have laughed with me, if he wasn’t in that coffin right now.

Mrs. Winter got the tip of one of her pumps caught in the froth of pink nylon. She cheeped in dismay and fell heavily to the ground. Lawdamercy! I bent right over, shaking with laughter, trying to not pee myself from it.

Pastor Paul and Mrs. Winter’s son Leroy were pulling on her arms now, trying to get her off the ground. “Oh, Dadda, oh,” I whispered through my giggles. “Wherever you are, I hope you seeing this.” I held my belly and wept tears of mirth. Serve the old bat right for insulting me like that. Not a day went by at work that she didn’t find some sly way to sink in the knife. She had to do the same thing at my father’s funeral, too? Mrs. Winter was halfway up. She had one arm hooked around Leroy’s neck, and Pastor Paul was pushing her from behind. A few of the mourners asked her if she was all right. “Oh, migod,” was all she said; “oh, migod.” My laughter was edging up on hysteria. Too much; death and mirth all at once. I rested my hands on my knees and took little panting breaths to calm myself. I couldn’t hide behind the coffin forever.

At least the tingling in my hand had stopped. A few minutes earlier, standing at the open grave, I’d suddenly felt too warm, and my hand had gotten pins and needles.

I took the scrap of wire out of my pocket. It had been crushed flat. I pulled on the loops of wire until something of its original shape began to emerge. I had a good look at it, and gasped.

I held the pin up against the sunlight. It caught a spark of light, threw blades of sunshine at my eyes. It had gotten warped over the years, forced into service to hold up Mrs. Winter’s loose drawers. It used to be a decorative pin for wearing on a blouse, its gold wire looped in the shape of an ornate C, T, and L: Chastity Theresa Lambkin. My girlhood name. Mumma’d given me that pin for my eighth birthday. Years ago, after they’d declared Mumma dead and we’d had the memorial service for her, little Chastity-girl me had noticed it missing. And missing it had stayed; no time to look for it in all the commotion of the hearing, of moving to my aunt and uncle’s, and the children at school whispering to each other whenever they saw me.

Where in blazes Mrs. Winter had found my pin?

“Mum? What’s going on?”

Ife was standing there, holding young Stanley’s hand. Ife’s black dress hung off her shoulders, its hem crooked.

Stanley gave me a shy little wave.

Ife had gotten the best bits of me and her father combined: the glow of his perfect dark brown skin; his lips, the way they peaked in the middle when he smiled. My dimples, my well-shaped legs. She was plump, like all the women in our family, but that never stopped a West Indian man yet. Not a real man, anyway. If I could just get her to wear clothes that suited her!

Not my Ife. She covered up her charms with baggy, ankle-length dresses in unhelpful colours, slouched around in rubber flipflops or those horrible wide-toed cork sandals from abroad. Been so long since I’d seen her legs, she might as well not have any.

Nothing could hide that smile, though. She turned it on me now, and even though it was an uncertain smile today, it made my world a little bit brighter.

But I firmly squashed the joy at seeing her sweet face, made mine sour. I tucked the warped pin back into my pocket and turned to my daughter Ifeoma, to whom I wasn’t speaking. Well, not really speaking. I mean, I would say ’morning and so, you know, but nothing more until she took back that awful thing she’d called me.

“Mrs. Winter tripped,” I told her as I hugged her. “And you know I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Mum’ like that.” Using the hug for cover, I stroked her back. No bra again. That child had no respect for the dead. And no fashion sense either; that dress! My seventies throwback hippie girl child. At least she wasn’t wearing sandals and socks today, but proper high heels.

“You’re my mother,” Ife murmured into our hug. “It’s not respectful for me to call you ‘Calamity,’ like… like…”

I pulled back and glared at Ifeoma. “Like what? You’d best mind yourself with me. You know I’m vex with you already, after last night.”

Ife pressed her lips together. She used to do that as a little girl when she didn’t want to eat her greens. “… like you’re my sister,” she said quietly.

And just so, she squashed my heart like you crush a piece of paper into a ball you’re going to throw in the trash. I turned my face from her.

Stanley stood at the lip of the open grave, peering in. He pulled at his collar. This might be the first time in his nine years that he was wearing a suit.

“You’re my mother,” Ife said. “Why I can’t just call you ‘Mummy’?”

Last night, she’d called me a “matriarch.” Like I was some wrinkled, prune-faced dowager wearing a hairnet and clothes thirty years out of fashion.

Mrs. Winter was standing all the way up now. She was favouring one ankle. She still had one arm wrapped around Leroy’s neck. The other was around Pastor Paul’s. Mrs. Saranta was fanning her face with a prayer book. One of the ushers, a long, skinny young man with big eyes and hands like shovels, had picked Mrs. Winter’s tiger-print handbag up off the grass and was collecting all the things that had spilled out of it.

We used to be as close as sisters, Ife and I. The night I took her out to celebrate her twenty-first birthday with her first legal drink, the bartender had asked us both if we were of drinking age. And we’d laughed, and flirted with him the whole evening. I didn’t tell him she was my daughter until after I took him home that night and made him call out for God in my bed.

But now I wasn’t just old; I was fully an orphan, too, instead of the half of one I had been for so many decades. And finally, the tears came. “He’s gone, Ife. Dadda’s gone.”

Ife took me into her arms again. “Ssh, it’s all right.” If she’d been irritated with me before, there was no sign of it now. For all I’d tried to teach her, she’d never learned how to hold a grudge good and hard, like a shield.

I let myself sob into her neck for a while. My breath rushed and halted.

Mrs. Winter said, quite firmly, “I want to go home.” Good. Interfering woman was probably too shamed to stay after half the town had seen her smalls fall off. Why she had to come today? Bad enough I had to endure her at work. Mrs. Winter thought it was her job to supervise me into an early grave.

Pastor Paul offered to have one of the ushers help Leroy walk her to her car. But no, she wanted the pastor. He gazed around until he spotted me. He gave an apologetic shrug, held up five fingers, and mouthed, Five minutes? I nodded. The three of them hobbled off towards the parking lot. Now our funeral party could recover some of its dignity. What a pity you all alone in this time of trial, child. Chuh. Never mind her; I’d rather fuck the horse she rode in on.

But that was no proper way to be thinking at my father’s funeral.

“You feeling better now, Mum?”

“Right as rain. But I wish you’d worn something a little more tailored, you know?”

Ife smiled at me, tentatively. “This is my best black dress,” she said. “It’s the one I wear when I want to impress. Stanley, come away from there. You might fall in.”

“I won’t fall,” Stanley replied.

“Come over here, I said.”

He did. I wouldn’t let Ife change the subject, though. I knew her tricks better than she knew them herself. “That dress is black crushed gauze, my darling. You look like a big turkey buzzard flapping through the air.”

Ife’s smile hardened like ice. “So we’re going to talk about my looks again?”

I took her face in both my hands. “Your looks are fine. Why you always so worried about looks? You only need to pretty yourself up a little bit.” I don’t know where Ife got her meek nature from. Not from me. “I keep telling you, Ife; you should have more self-confidence. Shorten the skirts a bit, wear some prettier colours. And show a little bosom. We Lambkin women have more than enough to display.”

Ife glared. “Clifton likes me this way. You’re so old-fashioned, Mummy.”

God, “Mummy” was even worse than “Mum.” And since when was I “old-fashioned”? In high school, the other girls used to call my fashion sense scandalous, and I’d loved scandalizing them.

I could see Pastor Paul hurrying back from the parking lot. I took Stanley’s hand. “Come and say goodbye to Dadda,” I told him. The three of us moved closer to the rest of the funeral party. A trim, dark man, maybe sixtyish, made room for us. Peggy Bruce, who had arrived late, nodded a greeting. Even when we were in school, Peggy had always been late. “We going to start again soon,” I said to the mourners. “Pastor Paul on his way back.”

“Did Michael come?” Ife asked in a whisper.

“Who?” I whispered back.

Now Ife’s eyes had the glint of obsidian. “Michael,” she said, a little louder. “My father.” John Antoni peered at us, hungry for gossip.

“Hush,” I said under my breath.

A kiskedee bird zipped by overhead, laughing its high, piping chuckle at me before flying into the branches of one of the frangipani trees in the cemetery.

Ife said, “I thought you were taking care of the invitations! How could you just not tell him that his own father-in-law was dead?”

I lifted my chin. “Dadda was never Michael’s father-in-law.” Tears that had been on the verge of brimming tipped back into the bowls of my eyes again. The eye water was cold.

“Gran?” said Stanley. “I mean, Calamity?”

Lovely boy. I hunkered down to his eye level, balancing on the spikes of my black stiletto pumps. Huh. “Matriarch.” Could a matriarch do that? “And what can I do for you, my handsome boy?”

Stanley ran into my arms. He was all woodknuckle knees and awkwardness, his hair trimmed short, with a W pattern buzzed into the back and sides. His father Clifton had told me it had something to do with American wrestling on the tv. Stanley and I could chat for hours, about school and comics and food. His mind was like a new country; always something fascinating around the next bend. I didn’t see him as often as I liked. Seemed he always had homework to do on the weekend, or soccer practice. Ife and Clifton kept him busy.

“Does Great-Grandpa look scary?” Stanley asked.

“You can’t even see him,” said Ifeoma, butting in. “The casket is closed. Isn’t it, Mum?”

I inhaled the child’s pre-adolescent smell of spit and sweat. “Yes, my love,” I said to him. “It’s closed.”

Stanley sighed. He looked disappointed. “But I wanted to see,” he said. “Godfrey Mordecai at school said that Great-Grandpa would be a skellington, and he would be scary, and I would be frightened. I wouldn’t be frightened. I want to see, Gran. I want to see a real live skellington.”

“ ‘Skeleton,’ dear.” I felt a smile blooming on my lips. A live skeleton. Stanley was a little unclear on the concept. “Stanley, you have a curious mind. This is how I know you’re my blood.” I rose, smoothed my skirt down, and took his hand. Pastor Paul was scurrying our way. I told Stanley, “Let’s see if we can get the lid on the casket raised for you.” He grinned up at me, and we went to meet the pastor halfway. I took care to mind my ankles in the wobbly stilettos. They weren’t made to walk on grass.

Ife caught up with us. “Mum? Don’t do anything to frighten Stanley, please? He might have nightmares. Mum?”

What a way she overprotected that child!

“Mistress Lambkin,” said Pastor Paul. He was puffing from the exertion. “So sorry for the interruption. Shall we, ahm, continue with the proceedings now?”

He was another one who would never call me “Calamity,” no matter how much I asked him to. But he’d picked the wrong day to cross me. I nodded at him, all meekness. “Yes, thank you, Egbert,” I said in a clear, carrying voice.

Stanley giggled. A man standing close to us hid his smile behind a cough. Egbert glanced around. Oh, yes; plenty of people had heard me. If he hated his bloody name so much, why he didn’t just change it? I had changed mine.

Ifeoma snickered, flicked me an amused glance. Now, that was my girl; the one I’d raised. It was the same grin she’d given me that day in the grocery store, all those years ago.

I had just started working at the library. My first paycheque wouldn’t come for another month. I’d been feeding myself and little Ife on macaroni and cheese, and we’d run out of cheese. How old would she have been then? About seven, I think. We were in the cold foods aisle. I was trying to choose between eggs and a block of cheese. I could get only one of them. I was trying not to look at the packets of chicken, of stewing beef, of goat meat. I couldn’t tell how long it had been since we’d had meat. Ifeoma loved roasted chicken legs. Suddenly my crazy girl child took it into her head to start singing “Little Sally Water” at the top of her considerable lungs, complete with the moves. I was about to scold her when I realised that people were looking at her, not me.

“Rise, Sally, RISE!” Ifeoma had yelled, leaping up from the ground, “and dry your weeping eyes…”

Quickly, while she was turning to the east, the west, and to the one she loved the best, I’d slipped two packets of chicken legs and one of stewing goat into the big pockets of my dirndl skirt. With all the gathered material in that skirt, nobody would notice the lumps. Only then did I order Ife to stop making so much commotion. And damned if the child didn’t straighten up immediately, smooth her dress down, and come and pat one of my pockets! And such a conspiring grin on her face! The little devil had been providing distraction so I could feed us both. I missed that Ife. The sober, responsible one standing beside me at the cemetery now was no fun at all.

Egbert took a solemn few steps back to the graveside. “Everyone, please gather round,” he said.

Ife, Stanley, and I moved to stand beside him. I bent and whispered to Stanley, “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. We just have to finish this part first.”

He gave an eager nod. Ifeoma said nothing, but she made a sour face. I composed myself for the rest of the funeral.

“Dearly beloved,” said Pastor Paul, “James Allan Lambkin has come to the end of his life on this earth, and the beginning of his life with you. We therefore commit his body to the ground.”

When I was nine, Dadda had shown me how to fish. But for months he wouldn’t let me bait the hook myself. He did it for me, because he was afraid I would jook my fingers.

“Earth to earth,” said Pastor Paul.

When I was twelve and woke up one morning to blood-stained sheets and my first period, Dadda ran to the store and brought back a big shopping bag with pads in all different shapes and sizes. He stood outside the closed bathroom door and called out instructions to me for how to put them on.

Ifeoma sniffed and wiped her eyes. Stanley’s bottom lip was trembling. Damn, now I was tearing up, too.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

When I was thirteen and had passed my entrance exams to get into high school, Dadda took me to the big island to celebrate. We went to a fancy restaurant. He bought me ice cream and cake, and drank a toast to me with his glass of sorrel drink.

“In the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

When I was fifteen, I told Dadda that I was four months pregnant. He raged through the house for two hours, calling me nasty names and demanding to know who’d done it. I wouldn’t tell him. He stopped talking to me. He wouldn’t eat when I cooked. On the third day he ransacked my room and threw away all my makeup and nice clothes. On the fourth day I packed a small bag and moved out. Went to the big island and knocked on the door of Dadda’s sister Aunt Pearl and her husband Edward. Auntie Pearl let me know that I had shamed the whole family, but she and Uncle Edward gave me a roof and fed me, and they didn’t lecture me too often. I got a part-time job as a page in the library. Until my belly got too big for it, I worked all the hours they would give me, saved my money. It was Auntie who was with me the day I had Ifeoma. Auntie, and Michael.

I dashed my eyes dry. Old brute. He’d had his ways, but if he thought I was going to get sentimental about him now that he was dead, he was sorely mistaken.

“Amen.”

“Amen,” responded everyone at the grave site.

Pastor Paul turned to me and Ifeoma. “Now we’re going to lower the coffin into the grave,” he said. The word “grave” applied to my father was a shock. I felt it, like a blow over my heart. Dadda was in that box, and now they were going to cover him with dirt. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t make words come out.

“That’s fine,” said Ifeoma to the pastor. “Let’s just do that.”

Stanley was tugging urgently at my wrist. I patted his hand to let him know I understood. “We have a request first, Egbert,” I said to the pastor.

“Yes, Miss Lambki… Calamity?”

Good. He’d managed to force it out. “Pastor Paul,” I said as his reward—when the puppy obeys, you give it a treat—“can we open the coffin, please? I want to see Dadda’s face.” My voice broke on the last word.

“Of course, Mistress… Calamity; of course.”

“Oh, dear,” murmured Ifeoma. She pulled Stanley to her, wiped his face with the corner of her dress. He squirmed. She rummaged around in her handbag; one of those handwoven things made of jute or hay or something ecological of the sort. I gave Stanley a shaky wink. He looked scared and excited all at once.

“Let me give you your asthma medicine first,” said Ife.

“I don’t want it!” he replied, trying to wrench himself out of her hands. “It tastes like ass!”

I snorted, pretended I was blowing my nose.

“Stanley!” said Ife. She gave Stanley’s shoulder a little shake. “You have some respect for the dead!”

Fine thing for her to say, Ms. Braless. Stanley scowled at her, then looked down at the ground. I whispered to Ifeoma, “It tastes like—”

“Not so loud!” she muttered. “He hears these things on American television.”

I chuckled.

Pastor Paul called over the usher with the big hands, whispered to him. The usher nodded and got one of the others to help him slide back one corner of the coffin lid a little.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ife asked.

“Yes, darling. Stanley, are you ready?”

Stanley started to shake his head no. Turned it into an uncertain nod.

“Good boy. Never back down, you hear me? No matter what people say to you, always hold your spine straight and look them square in their eye. You understand me?”

“Yes,” he said in a small voice. He was staring at the casket.

I hoisted him up onto my hip and walked to the head of the coffin. Together, we looked inside.

It took a while to make out Dadda’s wizened face in the darkness of the coffin.

“What you think, Stanley?”

“He’s all skinny.”

“It’s true. Smoking isn’t good for you.”

“And he’s wrinkly.”

“Yes. He didn’t have a whole lot of flesh left on him. But he was still your great-grandpa.”

“And he’s not a skellington,” the boy said in a rush, “and Grandma?”

God, I hated when he called me that. “Yes, dear?”

“Why does he got makeup on his cheeks?”

Ifeoma answered, “They did that at the funeral home, to make him look more natural. Don’t you think he looks natural, Stan-Stan?”

“No,” said the precious boy. Oh, babes and sucklings. “I wanted to see a skellington. He just looks funny.”

“Stanley!” said Ife. “Manners!”

“Never mind, Stanley,” I said. “I agree with you. He just looks funny. You want to get down now?”

“Yes, Grandm—”

“Calamity.”

“Yes, Calamity.”

I sighed as I put Stanley to stand beside me. Ca-lam-i-ty. Easy to say. Just four small syllables, and not even so different from my childhood name. Just more truthful.

I nodded at the ushers. They put the lid back and commenced to lowering the coffin. It was slung into some kind of fantastic contraption, a scaffolding of metal and straps, by which they winched it down. Two years I’d been the one supporting Dadda’s dying weight. Now that he had turned to earth, he was too heavy for me. This metal cradle would have to do it.

We watched the coffin sink smoothly into the grave. People started throwing in wreaths and flowers. The man who had been standing close by turned to me. “I’m Gene Meeks,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you.” He wasn’t bad-looking, in a “gruff black actor who always plays the honourable old-school army officer” kind of way. A little too lean on the bone for my liking.

“You know your father used to tutor me, yes?” he said. “You were just a girl then. Maybe fourteen.”

I stared into his face, trying to subtract the years from it. “Yes, you look familiar.”

“Mr. Lambkin was the only reason I got into college. My science subjects, you know? I graduated secondary school with high honours because of him. He was like a second father to me.”

“That must have been nice.” After I left home, Dadda never once asked after me, not even when Auntie told him that I had had the baby. He didn’t meet Ifeoma until she was four years old.

The ushers escorted us to the funeral home’s reception parlour. Pastor Paul installed me in the only armchair; everyone else had to make do with the flimsy stacking chairs. Ife gave Stanley her car keys so that he could get his precious glider and play with it outside.

The food that people had brought to share was already on the tables. The covers and lids came off, the mourners began to help themselves, and I spent the next hour enduring the slow, polite torture of the receiving line. Over by the decrepit piano, two cousins of Dadda’s I didn’t recognise—now, those were old women—belted out hymns while endless people shook my hand, told me how well they’d known my father, how much he’d done for them, how much they’d loved him. I recognised some of the ones who’d come to visit Dadda while I was looking after him. The rest were a blur. I smiled and said thank you until my teeth ached. Gene and Ife brought me some refreshment: a slice of the black cake I’d made, and in a little plastic cup, some fluorescent pink punch I hadn’t. I sipped it. My left eye spasmed against the sour-sweet chemical taste. “Jesus,” I said. “Who bring this?”

“Me,” answered Gene. “You don’t like it?”

He looked like somebody had kicked his puppy. I resigned myself and took a big gulp of the drink. I swallowed hard. “It’s wonderful,” I told him.

“Just what I needed.”

He beamed and patted my hand. I found myself gripping his hand back like a lifeline. I squeezed my eyes shut to blink back the sudden tears. Opened them again. With a sad smile, Gene nodded, gave my hand a firm squeeze. We stayed like that for a second or two. “You want me bring you some more?” he asked.

I released my hold. “Of the drink? Oh, no. That was quite enough.”

Mrs. Soledad stepped between us, neatly eclipsing Gene. For a little old woman, she knew how to take up space. She hugged me. “He on the next leg of the journey now,” she said. “One day you and he will catch up.”

I murmured a thank you. I didn’t know how else to respond. She cotched herself on the padded arm of my chair. “Don’t worry,” she said, seeing me get up to offer her my chair. “This suit me better.”

Mrs. Soledad had been Dadda’s neighbour. Her family had been salt farmers on Dolorosse since way back. She wouldn’t tell anyone her age. Her standard answer was “Somewhere between sixty and ‘oh God.’ ” She used to sit with Dadda when I was at work.

“I guess I won’t be coming by the house so much any more.”

“I guess so.”

“You know what you going to do yet?”

I shook my head.

Mrs. Soledad went to the big island only when she absolutely had to. She had a quarter-acre salt pond on her property where she still farmed solar salt, the way she and her husband and their families used to do. No way they could compete with the Gilmor Saline factory, but Mrs. Soledad sent her specialty salts to big island on the workers’ co-op boat every few weeks, to be sold in the Cayaba tourist market. She and Mr. Soledad had sent their son to university on salt—first one in both their families to get a degree—and she wasn’t going stop now. For food, she phoned her order in to Boulton’s grocery on the big island and paid on her credit card. The grocery delivered the food in boxes to the waterbus. She would put on some of her dead husband’s working clothes, meet the waterbus at the Dolorosse docks, pile everything into a wheelbarrow, and haul it up to her house. If you offered to help her with it, she would blister your ears for you with some choice swear words. Dadda once joked that if her bark was this bad, he never wanted to feel her bite. And she was hale. Hiked from one end of Blessée to the other every day, for exercise.

But right now, she simply sat beside me, in silence. The most settling silence I’d had all day. This was a side of her I hadn’t seen before. Hell, I’d never seen her in a dress before. In a little bit, my shoulders eased down from around my ears. I took a deep breath. “Nice hat,” I said. “Impressive.”

Mrs. Soledad preened. Today’s confection was a smart little black pillbox with a huge peacock feather thrust through it and curling around the nape of her neck. The feather started off black at its base, and prismed to iridescent greens and purples at its tip. A scrunched half-veil in black netting completed the look. “You like it?” she asked.

“It suits you.” I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t exactly answering her question. Where was Gene? I tried not to make it too obvious I was looking around for him.

Mrs. Soledad never went without a hat. “Protecting my head from the cancers,” she would say, pointing at the sun. I’d never seen her wear the same hat twice, and she liked them old-fashioned, gaudy, and extravagant. As far as Mrs. Soledad was concerned, every day was an Easter parade. She was Hindu, but that was just a minor detail.

“Well,” she said, easing her feet down to the floor again, “I just see somebody bring out the white rum. I going over there. It’s not a funeral if you don’t knock back a dram or two. To honour the dead, you know?” Off she went, before I could thank her for everything she had done for Dadda and me.

Gene came by. He had a plastic cup in either hand. He held one out to me.

“I don’t want any more,” I said.

He nodded. “I finally tasted it; the punch, I mean. I didn’t taste it when I made it. It was nasty! I just poured the rest of it down the drain.”

That got a little laugh from me. “Then what is this?” I took the cup, looked inside. Water? I sniffed it, and gasped as the fumes went up my nose.

“High wine,” Gene replied. Overproof rum. He poured a little of his on the floor in libation. “Spirits for the spirits.”

I copied him, then we each knocked back the remaining rum in our cups.

I coughed. “Thank you,” I rasped.

“Your father was my hero,” he said.

“Mmm.”

“I never believed the people who said it’s he who did it. Not Mr. Lambkin. He wasn’t like that.”

Suddenly I felt ill. Feverish. The world started to recede. I grabbed for the arm of the chair. Damn. Not this again.

There was a crash of breaking crockery. It startled me back into myself. I opened my eyes. At my feet lay the remains of a blue and white plate. Somebody must have dropped one of the dishes they’d brought to the potluck. Pastor Paul shooed people away from the shards. He shouted, “Whose plate is this?” No one answered. One of the singing cousins scurried to find a broom.

“Hello, Mother.” My son-in-law Clifton leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Sorry to take so long. My plane was delayed.” He peered into my face. “You all right?”

“I think I going to be sick.”

Clifton leapt right into action. He helped me up out of the armchair, put an arm around my shoulders. I was tottery on my stilettos. “She had a hard day,” he said to Gene. “She need to rest.”

“Of course, of course.” He backed away.

In two-twos, Clifton had made apologies to Pastor Paul for me, collected Ife and Stanley, and had gotten us out the door.

I stopped when we were outside the building. The afternoon sun beat down on my shoulders, but it didn’t stifle me like inside the funeral home. I took a deep breath of air that wasn’t buzzing with whispered condolences.

“How you feeling?” asked Ifeoma. She looked worried. Stanley too.

“Never better. I just needed to get out of there.”

“Gene was trying to sweet-talk her,” Clifton told Ife. “At Mr. Lambkin’s funeral!”

“It wasn’t like that.” I made a mental note to check in with the doctor about those bloody spells. That was the fifth or sixth one. “I’m okay to walk on my own now. Let’s just go.”

Clifton took his supporting arm from around me, and we all headed for the parking lot. Stanley was concentrating on the controls of his glider, making it fly on ahead of us. He tripped, but Clifton caught him by the back of his suit jacket before he fell. “Bring that thing down and stop playing with it,” he ordered. “Ife, how you could let him bring a toy to a funeral?”

“It’s not a toy!” said Stanley.

“He didn’t have it during the funeral,” Ife responded mildly. “I sent him outside to play during the reception. He would have died of boredom in there.”

I had it. “Willow Tree.”

Ife looked confused. “What?”

“That plate that dropped and broke. It was the Willow Tree china pattern. I used to have one like it.”

“Let us take you home, nuh?” Clifton said. “Ife could drive your car. Me and Stanley will follow in ours.”

“No, no. Don’t go to all that trouble. I’m fine. Fresh as a daisy in spring!” I threaded my way through the cars in the lot. The tarmac was softening in the heat. If I ruined my stilettos, I was going to blister Egbert Paul’s ears for him.

“You sure you don’t want us to drive you?” Ife asked again.

“I don’t need minding. The matriarch don’t need a full-time nurse yet.” I was smiling, but the words came out harsher than I meant them.

“Mummy, please stop it. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that you were a grandmother. In some cultures, grandmothers are honoured.”

“And in all cultures, grandmothers are old,” I snapped. Damn. Temper again. We were at Victoria, my red rattletrap of an Austin Mini car. I hugged Ife by way of apology. “Really. I’m okay.”

Nobody would do me a favour and steal that car. The left back window was brown paper covered with plastic wrap and held on with masking tape. A crack in the front windshield had long since walked its way from the bottom to the top of the glass. I wasn’t even going to ask the mechanic how much it would cost to replace the windshield. I still hadn’t finished paying him for when he’d fixed my brakes last year.

Clifton was frowning at Victoria. “You should get that muffler fixed, you know, Mother. It hanging a little low.”

Hanging low? Rusting away and falling off was more like it. I got my keys out of my purse, opened the car door so it could cool inside a bit before I put my behind on that hot seat. I rubbed my itchy hand.

“Your hand hurting?” asked Stanley.

I realised I had been rubbing that hand since we left the funeral home. “No,” I answered. “Allergy, maybe. Probably Gene’s punch.”

Stanley made a “yuck” face.

I laughed. “I see you tried it, too.” I did that little dance you had to do to get into a car wearing a pencil skirt: sit sideways on the seat first, with your legs outside the car; then knees and toes together, lift the feet into the car, swivel till you’re facing the steering wheel. Clifton closed the door after me. Such a gentleman.

I rolled down the window. It only stuck once. “I going straight home. Promise.”

“You have to work on Monday?” Ife asked.

“Yeah. Shit.”

“Grandma said ‘shit’!” burbled Stanley.

“Stanley, you will not use such language,” his mother told him.

“They gave me a week’s bereavement leave,” I said. “I wish it was a year.”

“Maybe Mrs. Winter will have to be off work till her ankle get better,” said Ife.

I rolled my eyes to the sky. “Please God.”

“Grandma can say ‘shit,’ ” muttered Stanley. He crossed his arms, pushed his lips out in a sulk.

“Grandma’s a big old woman,” Clifton told him. “She can say what she wants.”

“I am not old!” I started the car over his apologies. Old. I called out the car window, “Men your age still soo-sooing me in the street.” I tried to remember the last time anyone had wolf-whistled me. Chuh. Probably wasn’t so long ago.

The engine switched over to idle. “All right,” I said to them. “The old witch—excuse me, the old matriarch—is returning to her cottage in the woods now. She’s going to talk to her mongoose familiar and brew up some spells.”

“Spells?” Stanley looked delighted.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—covered in chocolate.”

His mouth fell open.

I put the car in gear. As they walked away, I saw Ifeoma put one arm around Clifton. Stanley took her free hand.

Damned punch was bitter in the back of my throat.

I was at the exit to the parking lot when I heard a car horn blowing at me. I stopped. A beige sedan pulled up alongside me. Gene got out and came to my window. “I think I upset you in there just now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t fret,” I replied. “Wasn’t you. It’s just the strain of… everything.” Like waking up four mornings ago to find that Dadda had died in the night. The arrangements. Putting on a good face. I was tired like dog, the little bit of arthritis in my left knee aching. I couldn’t wait to get home to the peace and quiet. No more Dadda and his secrets. Just me in the empty, lonely house.

“You could do me a favour, though,” I said to Gene.

“Anything.”

“I’m feeling little bit shaky. You could shadow me in your car? Just until the ferry dock? I want to be sure I get to the waterbus all right.”

He nodded. “I’m right behind you.”

ALEXANDER TREMAINE UNLOCKED THE DOOR that would take him to the Zooquarium’s outdoor exhibits. Not this morning, he prayed silently. I just want a normal day. Alexander hated filling out Incident Reports. Since taking this job as manager of the outdoor exhibits six months ago, it’s like he had one every few weeks. They had to be in triplicate, and Mrs. Thomas smirked whenever he handed one in. Again, Mr. Tremaine? You sure?

If Mrs. Thomas ever set foot outside the administration office, she’d see for herself what he meant. But she was very proud of the fact that she had been through the zoo only once: on the obligatory tour they’d given her on her first day at the job. Mrs. Thomas hated animals.

Alexander stepped out onto the cement path that snaked around the outdoor exhibits. Look like Dennis had already washed the path down with the hose this morning; the cement was dark with damp, though it hadn’t rained. Alexander checked in on the turtle rehab, the first stop. Mountain Girl was going to be okay. She was recovering from her encounter with a speedboat. She was eating well. On his way to the spoonbills, Alexander murmured a good morning at Dennis, who was using a big yard broom to sweep leaves and fallen almonds off the path. The spoonbills were happily trolling in their man-made mangrove swamp. Their colour was a little faded. Alexander made a note to ask Dennis to put some more pellets in their feed. Visitors didn’t want to see roseate spoonbills that weren’t rosy.

Only six-thirty in the morning, but the sun was beating down already. Management was in no hurry to install shade roofing for the walkway. If the heat kept visitors moving quickly through the exhibits, the Zooquarium could funnel more of them through in a day, plus fill up the Zooquarium cafeteria with people looking to sit down and have a cool drink or some soursop ice cream after the hike through the exhibits.

The seals were next. Alexander could smell the heavy piss scent of seal urine. He slowed down. He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his face.

He couldn’t put it off any longer. He left the path, walked up the grass-covered incline that led to the seals’ enclosure. He reached the waist-high cement wall and looked down into the enclosure. Monk seals were nocturnal, and asleep or sluggish during the day when the visitors came through. Disappointed children would stand at the seal pen and whine that this was boring. Not a month went by that some visitor didn’t complain that the seals weren’t moving and Something Should Be Done. Every year, Management talked about closing down the seal exhibit and putting in a dolphin show instead. But the Zooquarium was funded by the Ministry of the Environment, which had a mandate to educate the public about the protected seals, so they stayed.

There was Henny, dozing on the bottom of the pool. Well out of Henny’s territory was Penny. She’d hauled out onto one of the “dunes” and was snoring blissfully as she basked. Crab Cake and Hippo were sleeping on the rocks, too. Vampire (he bit) was in one of the sheltered caves, only his rear end sticking out.

One, two, three, four, five, Alexander counted. Six. Seven.

But the Zooquarium owned only five seals.

Alexander sighed. It was going to be an Incident Report morning.

THERE WERE PARKING SPACES topside on the waterbus. I wedged my car between a beat-up old VW and a flashy new RV that was scarlet as an arac apple. Somebody was showing off that they had the money to import an expensive car from “foreign.” Dadda called cars like that “penis extensions.”

Used to call.

Gene had found a space for his car a few rows over. What was I doing, accepting his offer to see me all the way home? I didn’t even know him, not really. Ife and Clifton would have come home with me.

I got a flash of Dadda’s coffin in the grave, the dull thumps of earth falling on it from the backhoe. I hugged myself to hold in the sobs threatening to shudder up from my belly.

We were underway. A few people got out of their cars and went to the railing of the waterbus to look out. Gene was one of them. He looked around for my car. I looked away, pretended not to see him.

Damn Gene. I had been trying to put my doubts about Dadda away. But with one sentence, he had them welling up inside me again.

I couldn’t keep still in the car. I got out of Victoria the Rustbucket and picked my way to the back of the boat, where Gene couldn’t see me.

Saturday evening. Peace on the water. No cargo ships taking equipment to the new salt plant. No speedboats, sport fishing boats, or glass-bottomed boats, either. Most of the pleasure boats had docked for the night. The dining rooms of the big hotels would be filling up with tourists. Later, the clubs would be filling up with locals and visitors. So long I hadn’t been out dancing.

I stood beneath the setting sun and watched the evening exodus of bats streaming out of the towers of the harbour buildings, flitting erratically, catching insects. They looked happy, like bat school was out and now it was time to play. A few of them dipped to the surface of the water, came away with small silver fish in their claws. The waterbus started making its stops: Tingle Island, Vieille Virgèn, Creek Island. The cars thinned out as people drove off at their stops.

“Nice evening,” came a raspy voice from behind me. I turned.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Mckinley.”

He jerked his chin at the water. “Not really evening till the little ones come out.” He was from Cayaba, made his living as a fisherman. More a white man than any other colour, from the look of him; but after a lifetime in boats in the sun, his skin was brick-ruddy, and wrinkled as a dirt road in dry season.

“Little ones?” I asked. “The bats?”

He leaned with his back against the railing, put his foot up on the big yellow tackle box he always had with him. “Yes. Some nights I like to go out in the rowboat, so it’s quiet. Bring a flashlight to draw them to the boat.”

In blackness, surrounded by warm velvet skins, flapping, touching your face… I shuddered. “Don’t sound to me like a good lime.”

“I like to hear them singing all around me in the dark.”

“The bats sing?”

“Well, kind of a chirp, you know? Like birds.”

“You right! Now I remember! Used to have clouds of them in the sky come nighttime, out around Blessée. You don’t see so many any more.”

He shook his head. “No. They used to roost on Tamany Heights. Fill up the whole cliff wall.”

“Mm.” Tamany Heights was now the Grand Tamany Hotel. “You going to bring me some red snapper next week?” Every Saturday morning, Mr. Mckinley or one of his sons came by with the morning’s catch. “So long now you haven’t had red snapper.”

He frowned. “Saline plant been messing up the water from since. Only few little snappers in the nets nowadays. Going to be worse now we have two plants.”

“Or some shark. Shark would be nice.”

“If we catch any, I bring it for you.”

“When I was small and I would tell Dadda that the bats were chirping, he never used to believe me.”

“Mr. Lambkin? How he doing?”

My heart lurched. “He passed. Tuesday. I just now coming from his funeral.”

“Awoah,” said Mr. Mckinley softly. “I see. So sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.”

“Chastity? Everything all right?” It was Gene.

“Calamity.”

“Yes. Sorry.”

Mr. Mckinley reached out and shook Gene’s hand. “I was just telling Mistress Lambkin how sorry I am to hear about her daddy. So many years now I know Mr. Lambkin. From before Blessée went down.” You know how some working men get tongue-tied around people who had high schooling? Not Mr. Mckinley.

“Mr. Mckinley, I’m so sorry. If I knew you and Dadda were friends, I would have told you about the funeral.”

He smiled. “Don’t fret yourself. Knowing somebody is one thing. Friends is something else.”

Gene pulled a flask of white rum out of his back pocket and unscrewed the top. “I liberated it from the funeral parlour,” he said. “A drink to Mr. Lambkin?”

“Thanks.” I took the bottle, knocked back a swig of it. “To Dadda.”

I passed the bottle to Mr. Mckinley. He looked surprised, but he took it, drank, made his toast: “Jimmy, walk good, you hear?” To us he said, “I make the mistake one day and tell him if his wife get bored with him, she could always come to me. He never speak to me after that again.”

“Dadda was always jealous for the women in his life.”

“Mm-hmm. So I find out.”

Gene made his own toast.

Mr. Mckinley nodded to me and Gene. “Thank you for sharing your flask with me. Some people wouldn’t want to drink from the same bottle as a working class man.” He picked up his tackle box. “Well, Jimmy had a hard row to hoe. But every man will put his past mistakes behind him, one way or another. Good evening to you.”

When he was gone, Gene said to me, “He and all?”

“He and all what?”

“He was talking about your mother disappearing.” He sighed. “This blasted island. Everybody always up in everybody else’s business. And nobody will forgive, nobody will forget.” We passed the bottle back and forth in silence for a bit. Then he glared at me, red-eyed. “You think Mr. Lambkin did it, too? Killed your mother?”

“Gene, he was my father. Two years I looked after him.”

He turned his face away from me. He knuckled at one eye. “Beg pardon. I just feeling guilty that I lost touch with him. Years now. Shouldn’t be putting that guilt on you.”

The revving of the waterbus’s engines slowed. We were nearly at Dolorosse. “We stopping soon,” I told him. “When I drive down the ramp, just follow me.”

“All right. I sorry, eh?”

“I know.”

We went back to our cars. Lots more cars getting off at Dolorosse nowadays; families moving to work at the new saline plant. There were some familiar faces, too. But I knew scarcely any of them by name. I hadn’t moved to Dolorosse to socialize.

Dolorosse Island was the last stop on the waterbus’s run. Blessée used to be the last; the last liveable island on the arm of the Cayaba archipelago. I’d lived on Blessée for the first fifteen years of my life before moving to the big island. When I was twenty-seven, a hurricane had hit Blessée. We weren’t ready for it—Blessée was outside the hurricane zone, and we hadn’t had one in over fifty years.

The 1987 storm pulverized Blessée in a matter of days. The survivors had been evacuated. Mr. Kite on Dolorosse had taken Dadda in, and Dadda had remained in that house till now.

Did I think that Dadda had killed Mumma? I hadn’t answered Gene’s question. Couldn’t give him an answer I didn’t have.

The cars drove down the waterbus ramp onto the island. The sun had taken its nightly dive headlong into the sea. In the dark, the little cement ferry house had its one yellow light on. From behind the station house window, Mr. Lee waved the incoming cars through. I flashed my ferry pass at him and took the gravel turnoff to get to Dadda’s house. Gene followed.

I got my cell phone out of my handbag. Speed-dialled. “Stanley? Let me talk to Ife, nuh?”

People were yelling in Ife’s house: Clifton’s voice, and Ife’s. I thought Stanley had sounded upset.

“Hello?”

“Ife, what you did to make Clifton so angry?”

“What I did? That is what you call me to say to me?”

“Lord, what a way you harsh! I thought you wanted to know if I get home safe.” A sigh from the other end. “Yes. I’m sorry, Mummy. So you home now?”

“Nearly there. I’m on Dolorosse. But tell me, nuh; why you and Clifton fighting?”

“Our anniversary is next week. I bought us tickets to attend that speech on labour reform by Caroline Sookdeo-Grant.”

“Not what you would call romantic.”

“I have to see somebody to know if to trust them, you know? See if they look down and to the left when they lying—’cause you know a politician going to tell you lies—or up and to the right. My NLP teacher says—”

I burst out laughing. “Ife, is what kind of stupidness that? You going to decide who to vote for by some kind of obeah?”

“It’s called Neurolinguistic Programming. I’m taking a four-week course: ‘Instant Rapport Through Rapid Eye Movements.’ ”

“Instant rapport with who?”

“I was hoping with Clifton. We not getting along so good right now.”

“Ife, don’t mess things up with that man, you know. You will suck salt before you find another one like him.”

Silence. A sigh. Then: “Yes, Mummy. You rest good tonight, you hear?”

And she was gone. I listened to the phone static for a second, playing the conversation back in my head, hearing where I had made it go wrong. Again.

I kissed my teeth and snapped the phone shut. I threw it back into my handbag on the passenger seat, next to the yam I’d bought from a roadside vendor before we took the waterbus to Dolorosse. I led Gene the rest of the way home and parked in front of my house. When I started to think of Dadda’s home as mine?

Gene pulled up behind me on the gravel road. We got out of our cars. He came towards me. Poor man; he looked a little shaky too from the funeral. “You’re home safe now,” he said. “So I will just go back and wait for the next waterb—”

I felt a sudden panic. “No, don’t be silly.” I gave a little laugh. “The waterbus not coming for another forty-five minutes. At least come inside and have a cool drink.”

He frowned. “But—”

“No, I won’t hear any objections. I hauled you out all this way. It’s the least I can do.”

“All right,” he said doubtfully. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m certain.” I wasn’t, but I led him up the five steps to the porch.

He pointed to the green wicker lounge chair and armchair that sat beside each other. “I’ll just wait out here,” he said.

When I first moved back to Dolorosse, Dadda would sometimes let me help him out to the porch of an evening. I would lower him into the lounge chair, put his legs up so he could lie back. I would put a blanket around him and we would sit and watch the stars. Months now he hadn’t been able to do that. I started to ask Gene whether he liked grapefruit juice.

Instead, I began to bawl.

Gene leapt to his feet. “Mih lord,” he said. “You should sit down. You want me to bring you some water?”

I tried to say, It’s all right, but words wouldn’t come out. The sobbing just got worse. It went bone deep, racking me to the core. Pretty soon I was wailing out my anguish, keening loud and harsh, like I was labouring.

“Come,” said Gene. “Sit over here.” He tried to guide me to the chair, but my knees failed me. So he tried to bear me up, but I’m no fine-boned bird of a woman. I collapsed onto the floor. Best he could do was take some of my weight so I didn’t land braps like the soil on Dadda’s coffin lid.

This wasn’t me. I wasn’t the type to faint away. I didn’t cry in front of strangers. But all I could do was pull my knees to me and rock, rock. And weep. A word came this time; pulled out of me with my breath: “Daddaa!” It spiralled up into the evening sky like a fleck of ash from a fire. It thinned out till I couldn’t hear it no more. The crying let up little bit.

Gene got a good grip under my arms and tried again to lift me. This time he got me up and sitting on the edge of the lounge chair. He sat beside me. I hugged my arms around myself and rocked and wept. My muscles were rigid, like stone. They had to be. They had to hold me together, or I was just going to fly apart.

Gene propped one elbow up on his knee, lowered his head into his hand. From the jerking of his shoulders, I knew that he weeping, too. So quietly. My rocking stopped. Slowly, giving him time to stop me if he wanted to, I put my arms around him. He choked out a sob; just one. He was making the soft, mewling sounds of someone trying to cry without noise. I shushed and rocked him like any baby.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Gene gasped. “When I heard, it was like somebody punch me in the belly.”

That got me crying again. I pressed my head into Gene’s shoulder. We held on to each other. Our tears wound down. “I wanted to sit with you on the floor,” he said. Through my face on his shoulder, I could feel his voice vibrating against my skin. “But the old hip have arthritis, you know?”

I laughed tears. “Thank you.”

He raised his woeful face. I leaned forward. And then we were kissing, wiping the eye water and nose running from each other’s faces with such tenderness. We managed to stand up together. In the back of my mind I was thinking this was wrong, this was disrespectful. I had just covered my father with cold earth. But all my body knew was that it had touched death, and it needed the antidote. I reached my hands inside Gene’s suit jacket, pulled out the tails of his shirt. I laid my hands against the warmth of living skin, flushed with blood from a beating heart.

Gene was running the back of one hand gently down one side of my throat, then the other. We couldn’t seem to break eye contact. He whispered, “This is all right?”

All I said was “Come inside.” I took him to my little bedroom. There, with tears running ignored down our faces, we helped each other remove the black grieving clothes, and took comfort in each other’s frail, living flesh.

She had come out of that cave on Blessée. Chastity wasn’t supposed to go into that cave. But she saw the little girl step out of it, squint into the sun, and look confused. Maybe the little girl’s parents let her play in the cave! Chastity felt jealous one time. But a little bit curious, and happy, too, to see another little girl like her. Except for school break times, Chastity didn’t have too many people to play with. Her school friends’ parents didn’t make the trip to the out islands often.

“Hello,” said Chastity.

The little girl shaded her eyes and frowned. She didn’t say anything. Her hair was tall for so; all the way down to her bumsie. And it was all knotted up, and the little girl wasn’t wearing her bath suit.

“What’s your name?” Chastity asked her. The girl just stood and looked at her. In the silence, Chastity could hear the waves whooshing in and out of the cave behind the little girl. “Did you lose your bath suit?” Chastity said “lose,” because that was what she always told Mumma and Dadda; that she’d lost her bath suits. But really, she just didn’t like wearing them. She’d taken the last one off in the sea. Walked in up to her chest, rolled the suit down her body, stepped out of it, and watched the waves take it away. The water had felt so nice, flowing over her. That time, she’d told Mumma that a dolphin had stolen her suit. Mumma just shook her head and rolled her eyes.

Something was wrong with the little girl’s skin. It was mostly a normal colour; sort of light yellow-brown, like Melody’s at school. But it was sort of blue-ish brown, too, like Chastity’s hands would get when she rooted around in the freezer for her favourite flavour of Frutee Freezer Pops. She liked the blue ones. Once she’d asked Dadda what kind of fruit made that bright acid blue. He’d told her it was sky juice. Next day she’d asked Mumma how they got the juice down out of the sky to make blue Frutee Pops, and Mumma had laughed her belly laugh that Chastity liked. The one with the little snort at the end of it.

The little girl still didn’t speak.

“Are you dumb?” Chastity asked. There was a little boy at school who didn’t speak too good. When he said words, they sounded all gargly. Jane Labonté who wore pretty red ribbons in her hair to school every day said that Walter was deafanddumb and her daddy said he should be in a home. But Miss said that Walter was fine, he was just deaf, and couldn’t hear how his speech sounded, and they mustn’t call him deafanddumb. He was taking special classes to learn to speak better. Chastity liked Walter. He would trade his orange juice with her at lunch time for cashew juice. Chastity liked the way the word “dumb” sounded. She would sometimes sing it over and over to herself when no-one was around to hear: dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

The girl took a hobbling step forward; another. She walked funny. She kept squinting at the sun and covering her eyes. She waddled over to Chastity, who laughed at the way the girl walked. But then Chastity remembered how Dadda had told her not to make fun of people. “I’m sorry,” she said to the girl. “How you hurt your feet? They going to get better?”

The little girl just made a gargling noise, reached out her hand, and stroked the fabric of Chastity’s sundress.

“Where are your clothes?” Chastity asked her. “Your mumma and dadda are going to be mad at you for losing them. They’re going to say, ‘We’re not made of money, you know? You should be more careful.’ Then your mumma and dadda will fight, and your mumma will go away and stay on the big island with relatives until she isn’t mad any more.”

The little girl tugged at the shoulder strap of Chastity’s sundress.

“No,” Chastity told her. “You can’t have mine.”

The girl didn’t seem to mind. With a look of amazement, she slid her hand under the strap. She pulled at the neck of the sundress and stared down the front of it. She laughed, a wet, snorting sound. Water came out of her nose. She grabbed at the hem of the dress, yanked it up in the air, looked at Chastity’s bare legs, and laughed some more.

Chastity pulled her hem back down. “You don’t have to laugh after me,” she said to the girl. “I don’t like clothes either.”

And to prove it, she shucked the dress over her head and threw it up on the rock. Her panties followed, and her sandals. She could climb and run better without them anyway.

The little girl watched solemnly until Chastity was as naked as she was. She gurgled some more, and smiled.

“Come,” said Chastity. “Let’s go swimming.” She started off towards the beach, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to go there if she didn’t have a grown-up with her. They wouldn’t go in very far.

But the little girl wasn’t following her. Chastity stopped. The girl was still standing by the entrance to the cave, looking puzzled.

Maybe she hadn’t heard what Chastity had said. Walter from school had to look at you to know what you wanted. “Come,” said Chastity again, motioning with her hand. The girl seemed to understand that. She ran a few steps, then put her hands on the ground and ran on her feet and hands, with her bumsie in the air. It looked like fun. Chastity tried it, but she couldn’t go as fast as the girl could. So she ran on just her feet. The little blue-brown girl loped along beside her like a mongoose. No, not blue. She didn’t have that funny blue-y colour to her any more; just pale yellow-brown skin.

Chastity could smell the briny sea before she saw it. Then she could hear it. They rounded the last corner on the path: past twisty scrub grass and big rockstones stuck in the white sand; past the line of sea grape bushes with their shiny round leaves that stretched out along the beach as far as they could see. They were on the sandy beach now. The leaping water gleamed blue before them in the sun. Chastity knew why they called them “waves”; because they waved at you, beckoning you to come in and play. “It’s like sky juice, right?” Chastity said. “Only salty.”

Laughing, they raced each other to the forbidden water.

Gene was spooned behind me, half-dozing. His chest hairs were damp against my naked back.

The booming of the sea sounded muffled. Light fog had rolled in. Sea or advection fog. So many years since Dadda would make me quote my lessons back to him, but I still remembered. Occurs when a body of warm moist air moves over a cooler sea surface and is cooled to dew point, which is the temperature at which condensation takes place. Cayaba had another name for it, though: jumbie breath. Was under cover of a night like this that Potoo Nelson and eighty-two other slaves climbed up the mountain and threw themselves off the cliffs into the sea at Rocky Bottom and drowned. In jumbie breath weather, people said the dead slaves came up out of the water and walked, looking for the man who had led them to their doom.

I could hear the branches of the coconut trees thrashing. The breeze had picked up little bit. The fog drifting past my window was tattered and shredding now.

Gene put his arm around my middle. My waist had gotten thicker these past two years. Even had a little overhang. Embarrassed, I pulled his arm higher, to under my breasts. He cupped one breast. We lay in that empty, floating bliss that comes after good sex. For the first time in days, my nerves didn’t feel stripped raw.

The clock radio on my bedside table clicked on. “Chuh,” I said. “I keep forgetting to unset that alarm.”

I felt Gene roll onto his back to look at it. “An alarm for nine o’clock at night?”

“Mm-hmm. Time for Dadda’s last medicine of the day.”

He grunted. We listened to the newswoman, her Cayaba accent clipped to near-BBC diction. Apparently Caroline Sookdeo-Grant had visited Holy Name Girls’ Secondary School yesterday. She had told them that women were half of Cayaba and the country needed their strength.

“You think she could win?” I asked Gene. Election day was in a few weeks. The campaigning was hotting up.

His grin was languid. “Over Johnson? You know he not going to lose any election he could buy.”

“Mm. I don’t pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn’t try to convince you that salt was sugar.” I rolled onto my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows.

The radio announcer continued: “The government of Cayaba has been in negotiations with the American institution the FFWD, the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development. Today, Cayaba Public Radio learned that completion of these critical negotiations over Cayaba’s debt repayment difficulties has been delayed for a month. Samuel Tanner, economic advisor to prime minister Garth Johnson, said the delay means that Cayaba will be tardy for its deadline to reach an accord on an economic management strategy with the FFWD. The interest alone on loans from the FFWD currently exceeds $750 million. Without concessions from the American foundation, the country faces falling further behind in its repayments.”

“Chuh,” I said. “Don’t need to be hearing that nonsense right now.” I reached over Gene and turned the radio off, enjoying the feeling of his chest hair tickling my breasts. Lazily, he stroked my arm.

I was feeling a little warm. No, I was very warm. Then way too fucking hot. “Woi.” The heat rushed up through me like when you know you’re going to puke. My cheeks were stinging, sweat popping out on my forehead. I sat and fanned myself with my hands. So I was looking right out the window when it happened. I saw it happen. My breath stopped in my throat. “Holy shit! You see that?”

“See what?”

I didn’t answer; couldn’t. I shoved myself off the bed and over to the window. Only wisps of fog left, and the crescent moon glowing down to help me see. I knew the distant silhouette in the window; knew it in my bones. “That wasn’t there before,” I said. My lips trembled as I spoke.

“What?” Gene was up out of the bed now. He joined me at the window.

I could only point. My extended hand shook. Rooted on the cliff as though it had always been there was the almond tree from my childhood. “That tree.”

“That tree?” Gene echoed.

“It just appeared out of nowhere.”

“It just appeared?”

Pique was better than terror. “What, like you turn Polly parrot?” I said, trying to sound teasing instead of scared no rass. “Yes, the tree. It just came there now. Wasn’t no tree there before.” I grabbed the window ledge to hide my shaking hands. I’d spent the morning up in that tree the day that Mumma was really gone for good. Now I was cold and shivering, damn it all to hell. I stepped into the lee of Gene’s body for some of his warmth.

Gene stared out the window, frowning. His face was creased with sleep and puffy with weeping. He looked like an old man. How I come to find myself knocking boots with a senior citizen?

“I don’t quite follow you,” Gene said. “That tree. You never see it before?”

I nodded, my mouth open. “I saw it,” I whispered. “It wasn’t there, and then it was. Is from Blessée. Went down when the island went down.”

Gene stepped completely away from me; turned and began gathering his clothes off the floor. “You need to get some rest,” he said.

“You think I imagined it!” I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. I was shuddering with the chill.

Gene stepped into his underwear, pulled up his pants. “You will feel different after a good night’s sleep. Grief make a person see and do strange things.” He zipped up.

I made myself turn my back to the window. “You mean like bringing some strange man home and screwing him in my father’s house?” I meant it to sound like a challenge, but the words came out trembly, half shame, half plea.

Gene stopped buttoning his shirt. He shook his head. “No, that’s normal.” His voice sounded so ordinary, the way you might say that of course it rains after the rain flies come out.

I glanced back out the window. Tree still there. “Normal? How you can say that what we just did was normal?”

“Funeral sex.”

“What?”

He came over to me, took my two hands in his. “I said, funeral sex. Never happen to you before?”

“No. People don’t drop dead on me regularly.”

He gave a wry smile and let me have my hands back. “You must be younger than me, then. Two strangers at the same funeral find themselves in bed right after. Don’t feel bad. It’s a thing grief does. I see it before.” I hated the compassion in his voice. “It just never happen to me before,” he said sadly.

I asked him, “You know what else never happen before?”

“What?”

“That tree, damn it! It wasn’t there before!”

“I know that’s what you believe.” He went and flicked on the light. I squinted in the sudden, painful brightness. “I know that’s what you believe,” I mocked him. “You don’t know. Don’t you dare patronise me in that mealy-mouthed kind of way!” I found a nightie in my dresser, pulled it over my head. “You sound like Ifeoma. I didn’t see that tree before because it wasn’t there before!”

A hardness came over his face. “Calamity, you’re hallucinating.”

I strode over to the bedroom door, yanked it open. “And you are leaving.”

“Damned right.” He brushed past me. From the hallway he said, “Drink a lot of water and try to get a good night’s sleep.”

I leaned out the door and snapped, “Don’t you tell me what to do!”

He glared at me. Stomped out into the living room. I stood in my bedroom. Every time I looked towards the window, I got the shakes. Gene came back into the bedroom.

“I told you you could come back in here?”

He made a face, squared up his shoulders. “Sorry for trying to give you orders,” he said. “Bad habit.”

Just like that.

“You’re a strong woman. I can see that. Looking after Mr. Lambkin all those years. But who looking after Calamity?”

He wasn’t going to get around me by being nicey-nicey. “Calamity looking after Calamity. She one.”

He set his mouth hard. “So I see. Calamity don’t need nobody. You going to come and lock the front door behind me?”

I looked away from him. I didn’t reply.

“All right, then.”

I listened to the sound of his feet walking down the hallway and through the living room. I heard him open the front door, close it back with a deliberate gentleness. Little more time, I heard his car start up.

“That’s right,” I muttered. “Take your skinny behind away from my front yard.” I went and locked the front door. Returned to the bedroom and threw myself onto the bed. In the lighted room, the window was just a square of black. The blindness was worse than being able to see it. I leapt up again and outed the light. There was the tree, looming in the dark. “You don’t scare me,” I said to it. I lay back down. My pillow was damp and it smelled of sweat. I clutched a corner of it tightly. The rumpled top sheet was on the floor where we had kicked it. My funeral clothes were all over the floor, too. Fucking hell. That had been beyond the pale, even for me. Bury the father, come straight back to his house with a man, and… “I’m sorry, Dadda,” I whispered.

Oh, shit. The yam. It would rotten in the closed-up car. I sucked my teeth and got up again. I went out to the car. From the passenger side seat I picked up the piece of yellow yam. It was nearly as big as my head, its dark brown, rooty skin rough against my palms. I took it inside, to the kitchen. I put it on the kitchen counter.

Truth to tell, I wasn’t sleepy. By the clock set into the stove, it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. And I didn’t want to go back to my bed to stare at the almond tree and try to figure out if I was finally going stark, staring mad.

I wasn’t in the mood for tv. I opened the freezer and took out the two books I had in there, knotted into separate plastic bags. I squinted in the low light from the open fridge, trying to make out their titles. Oh, yes: Buxton Spice and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. The books had been in my freezerversity nearly three months now; more than enough time to kill a full life cycle of bookworm. Hadn’t read much in Dadda’s last few weeks. In the evenings after I’d fed him and got him to take his medicine, my mind had been too fretful for book learning.

I put one book on the kitchen table. Took the other one out of its plastic and cracked it open. But I wasn’t really seeing the words. I put it down, looked around the kitchen. My eye lighted on the piece of yam. I grinned. Night picnic on the beach. Like old times.

I found matches, lit a hurricane lamp and took it into the pantry. Its yellow-brown light set shadows to flickering on the pantry walls. My shadow did a devil-girl dance in the light.

On a shelf in the pantry stood two lonely bottles of store-bought cashew liqueur. Our pantry in Blessée used to have shelves full of cashew wine and liqueur; gallon bottles. Dadda had managed to save a few when Blessée blew away. He used them to bribe the Coast Guard rescuers to let him off at Dolorosse instead of taking him to a shelter on the big island like everybody else. They’d probably thought he was crazy to take the chance. They had probably been right. He had camped out right there on the beach for a day in the wind and the rain with the few possessions he had left. The Coast Guard was coming to remove him forcibly when Mr. Kite had taken him in. Mr. Kite was a weird old white guy from Germany. Came to Cayaba and went native.

I hooked two fingers through the handle of one of the liqueur bottles. Took it out to the kitchen table. Back in my room I stood off to one side so I couldn’t see out the window. I peeled out of my nightie and tossed it on the bed. No need to dirty more clothes; I just put on back the underwear and the skirt and blouse I had thrown on the floor before jumping into bed with Gene. Nobody to see how they were wrinkled. The panty hose were crumpled up and lying beside the bed. The translucent fabric looked like shed skin. One leg was laddered. I tossed them into the waste basket.

Back in the kitchen, one of the big cloth shopping bags hanging under the sink held the yam, the salt and pepper, and a stick of butter from the fridge. I slung the bag handles over my arm and hooked the liqueur bottle by its handle again. The hurricane lamp went into the other hand, to light my way. Barefoot, bare-legged, I went down the front steps and took the road to the beach.

The rockstones and the sticks on the path jooked my feet. So long I hadn’t walked on hard ground with no shoes. When I got so big and grown up, wearing shoes all the time?

The sea smelled salty and meaty tonight, like dinner. Once I reached the first stretch of beach sand with its scrub grass, the warm sand was soothing under my feet. The waves slushed at me in rhythm, like an old person puffing as she dozed.

In the dark, the hurricane lamp threw a protective circle of light around me. Grandmother Sea was snoring in her sleep, and I was feeling better already.

I set down the shopping bag and searched the beach until I’d found enough driftwood. I buried the yam in the sand. Over it, I piled the sticks, used flame from the lamp to get a fire going. I dug a shallow hole nearby, waited for it to fill from the bottom with sea water. The butter went into that, so it wouldn’t melt in the warm air. I stood the bottle in the sand, close to the fire. The heat would warm the liqueur a little.

Fuck. What I was going to sit on? I had forgotten about that. Walk all the way back to the house? If I went, I probably wouldn’t come out again tonight.

I had a naughty idea. I checked the beach up and down. Nobody. I pulled off my skirt and laid it on the sand. I felt so wicked, with the sea breeze blowing through my legs! But now I had a picnic blanket. I sat on my skirt and stared into the fire. It chuckled as it burned. I reached for the bottle of cashew liqueur, put the bottle of warm, sweet alcohol to my lips, and drank. With no dinner in my belly yet, I began to feel the booze one time. So I had more. The sea made its warm whooshing noise. I crooned to it, “The moonlight, the music, and you…,” and took another gulp. I tucked the bottle into the cradle made by my knees and thighs. The cool glass felt good against my skin. Up in the sky the new moon swung, yellow and sickled as a banana. A round shadow sat inside its horns. “Old moon sitting in the new moon’s arms,” I whispered to it; a phrase I’d learned from my freezerversity. I picked up the bottle, took three long pulls at it. I tucked its smooth roundness back against my pubic bone.

I was pleasantly woozy. The tingling spread out from the centre of me to my legs, torso, head, arms. My toes and the soles of my feet were warm. My fingertips prickled. I rubbed my hands together, so that friction increased the lovely heat.

“How my yam doing?” I asked of the fire. It made cheerful popping sounds back at me. The smell of smoke and burning wood was glorious. To just sit here, not a care for the clock, no need to go and check if Dadda was all right, if he needed anything. This is what I should have done in the first place, instead of taking Gene home. Ife would be so scandalized when I told her! Oh. But I wasn’t talking to her. Not really.

I drank a toast to Dadda, and one to Mumma. They were back together now. Maybe.

“Dadda, you ever wonder what happened to Mumma that night?”

“No.”

“Why not, Dadda?”

“I know what happened; she went away and left us.”

Just like she used to threaten to, any time she and Dadda argued, any time I had been bad. “I going to go far away and never come back,” she would say, trying to keep the smile from her lips. “Then allyou going to be sorry.”

We were.

I never pressed Dadda for the whole story. I was afraid of what words might come out to break the silence. And now I would never get to ask him.

I lurched to my feet. Whoops; a little unsteady. With my bottle and hurricane lamp, I went walking along the beach, looking for a good strong stick. Tiny red crabs scurried out of the light into their holes.

The wind was stronger, the waves tossing more. The night air was freshening, so Grandmother Sea was restless. I faced her and bowed to her. “Old woman,” I greeted her. “But still wet and juicy, eh?” I laughed. The wind swallowed the sound.

I pulled a handful of big, platter-shaped sea grape leaves off their stems, found a stick, and hurried back to the heat of the fire. With the stick, I poked in the sand underneath the fire until I unearthed the yam. The tip of the stick went into it easily. Perfect. I hooked the yam out of the fire and onto the sea grape leaves I’d spread as a plate. My fingers were still thrumming from the alcohol. Made me feel tingly all over. I took another drink so that the feeling wouldn’t end too soon. With my stick, I broke the piece of roasted yam in two. A delicious smell rose in the steam from it. My belly rumbled. I fished the butter out of its cool water, unwrapped it, dug my fingers in, got a good handful of it, and spread the butter into the crumbly yellow of the roasted yam. Then salt and pepper. I crouched over my dinner, pulling and eating pieces of buttered yellow yam out of its burned skin as soon as they cooled enough to handle. In between, I took swigs from the bottle. Should have brought fresh water with me. But I would be back at the house in a little bit.

Damn. That was more than sea spray misting my shoulders. There was the occasional warm drop of rain. I stared blearily into the darkness, but I couldn’t see beyond the fire. In the yellow-lit circle, splashes of darker beige were appearing here and there in the sand. Raindrops. They were spattering my head and shoulders now. I needed to finish the yam, fast. Its hot flesh burned my fingertips, but I kept plucking at it and popping the buttery-salt pieces into my mouth.

The sea had woken up. It roared and rushed the shore. A spear of lightning lit up angry, cresting waves. Thunder boomed back at the fuming sea. “Grandma Sea and Grandpa Sky,” I said, “why all you fighting?” I chuckled. “Poopa Sky, like your wife getting the Change, or what?” I snickered at my joke.

Three flashes of lightning, quick upon each other. Thunder shouted and the sea roared back. Just a passing shower. The water felt good on my skin.

I was full. I stood up in the spit-warm rain and flung my scraps into the water for the fish, almost throwing myself off balance. I drank the liqueur, watched the sea, and rubbed my burned and itchy fingertips against my thigh.

A rush of cloud water put out the lantern. It doused most of the fire, too. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The firelight had been hiding the beach from my view.

The sky pelted down raindrops and the sea flung spume back up. The clouds threw javelins of lightning. “Don’t fight with her!” I yelled at the sky. “She’s your wife! You must love her!”

The wind blew my words away. “Don’t hurt her,” I whispered.

Taking my drink, I wove my way along the sand. Small crabs scuttled sideways out of my way, running on claw-tips into their holes. I sipped from the bottle.

In a few minutes I reached the low, flat rock. It was about waist height on me. I stood the bottle on it. Some evenings I would come out here and sit on it to watch the sunset, feel my bottom toasty on the sun-warmed surface.

This rock signalled the end of the beach; a few yards farther along, an exposed escarpment of the coral that underpinned Dolorosse jutted way out into the water. Trying to clamber over that was a good way to cut your feet to shreds.

I wiped rain water out of my eyes and heaved myself up onto the rock, beside the bottle. The movement set my head spinning. I sat as still as I could and waited for the dizziness to pass. The dance of lightning from the sky was magnificent. Bloated waves reached high, high, trying to push away the stabbing lightning. “That’s right!” I shouted to Mumma Sea. “Protect yourself!”

I shuddered in the rain. My burned fingertips buzzed. Vertigo spun the world around again. I groaned and lay down on the rock. Better. Its surface wasn’t warm tonight, but lying down felt so good. I pulled my feet up onto the rock and rolled over onto my back. I opened my mouth to catch raindrops. For a little while I made a game of that, giggling at the feel of rain splashing my skin. Suddenly, my skin was burning with fever. I sat up and reached for the bottle. The rock spun, and me with it. I threw myself down on it and clung, just trying not to fall off. A spectacular jag of lightning split the sky open. The boom of thunder made my ears buzz. I whimpered and shivered for a time. Then there was nothing.

The little girl got all excited as they hit the waves. She sucked in deep breaths of air. She waddled the first few yards, then a wave struck her in the face and rushed on to shore. The little girl laughed and shook water out of her eyes. She stood and did her awkward walk a bit further, leaving Chastity behind. Mumma and Dadda never let Chastity go out this far by herself. She hesitated. Took small steps backwards.

The water was chest high on the little girl now. She looked back at Chastity. She was smiling. She looked so happy! The little girl called out something that Chastity couldn’t hear over the sound of the sea, then turned and leapt into an oncoming wave that was as tall as she was. “Wait!” Chastity yelled, but the little girl was gone. What would the little girl’s parents say? Chastity began to feel worried.

The little girl surfaced, floating in a trough between the waves. She waved at Chastity.

She looked like she was having fun. “I’m coming!” Chastity shouted. She lowered her body into the water and started to dog-paddle towards her friend. The next wave lifted her up, then down, making her tummy flip-flop in a delicious way. The girl dove, came back up again, grinning. The next wave slapped Chastity full in the face. She got a noseful of water. It stung. She started to cough, dog-paddling the whole time. She got more water in her mouth. She was coughing too hard to see now, and another wave hit her. She was below the water. She couldn’t breathe. Frightened, she closed her eyes, her arms striking out for where she thought the surface was.

A hand grabbed her and pulled her up. Her face was in the air again. She took a big whooping breath, spat out water. The little girl was holding Chastity by her upper arm. She helped Chastity rise and fall with the next wave, and the next. She kept pulling them out deeper. “Whee!” Chastity said. “Go out more!” She helped by dog-paddling with her legs and her free arm. The little girl gurgled and grinned at her, and swam strongly. Pretty soon they were out really deep. The shore was far away. There weren’t even any waves out here. That meant that Chastity could swim without getting water in her eyes. “Let me go,” she said to the little girl, who was all blue-y again; a deeper blue this time. The little girl wouldn’t understand her, so Chastity pried the helping fingers off her arm. The little girl let go, and Chastity paddled around her in a big circle. “See what I can do?” she asked the little girl. “I’m a good swimmer. Mumma says so.”

The little girl did a roll in the water, holding her ankles. And another one without stopping, and even another ’nother one. She brought her head back up, laughing. She shook her long, matted hair. The dark knots sent water flying.

“How you do that?” Chastity asked. “Show me.” She tried to reach for her own ankles, got more sea water in her nose for her troubles. She sputtered it out. The little girl floated upright in the water, brought her knees up to her chest. She babbled again. Chastity looked down. She could see the little girl reaching to clutch her own ankles.

“Oh,” Chastity said. “Let me try.”

She could do that part, but she couldn’t roll without getting water up her nose. And she was tired, breathing hard. She reached for the little girl’s shoulder. The little girl seemed to understand. She curled her arm around Chastity’s body, under her armpits. Together they swam in the direction of the big rock that stuck up out of the water. Chastity had always wanted to go there, but Dadda said it was too dangerous. Now she was going to see what the big rock was like! She liked the yellow girl.

As they went, Chastity looked down. There was a lobster below them, a big one, all shiny-brown and yellow and spiny. Chastity thought of its pincers reaching for her exposed toes. She curled her feet under her and kicked them, trying to help herself and the little girl go faster.

They swam through a school of tiny fish, nearly colourless, each tiny as the first joint of Chastity’s pointing finger. They tickled when they passed over her body. Chastity giggled, until she saw what the little girl was doing. She had her head under the water while she was swimming, and her mouth open. She brought her head up, chewing and smacking her lips happily. “Nasty!” Chastity said to her. “You eating raw fish!” The little girl grinned a fishy grin.

They were through the school now. The girl just kept swimming. The rock was right in front of them. The sea was making waves as it crashed against the rock. Just small ones, but the power of the water was driving them towards the rock. Chastity was afraid they would be smashed against it.

Suddenly the little girl dove, taking Chastity under. She spluttered, tried to cough, breathed in more salty water. Then they were up again, in the air, touching the rock. The little girl was holding on to a part of it that stuck out. Choking, Chastity reached for it too. For a while, all she could do was hold on and cough. The waves tried to suck her into the water and bang her against the rock, but she held on.

The little girl looked concerned. She peered closely at Chastity, making question sounds in her throat. She rubbed Chastity’s back. “I’m okay,” Chastity reassured her. “Just… Can we climb right up on the rock?” Chastity didn’t wait for an answer. She braced her legs on the rock and started climbing up. When she got stuck, the little girl pushed her from beneath, then scrambled up onto the rock herself.

The rock was dark brown and full of lots of little holes with sharp edges. It hurt to stand up on it. Gingerly, Chastity moved around until she found a smoother place, right at the very top. It was warm from the sun up there. Almost too warm, but the water running off her body was cooling a part of the rock. Chastity sat on the cooler, wet part. She was glad of the sun’s warmth, because coming out of the water had chilled her body. The little girl came and lay beside her, chattering away in her liquid tongue.

“I like you,” Chastity said to her. “You want to be best friends?”

The little girl looked up at her, squinting into the sun. She put one long-fingered hand to her forehead to block out the glare. Her eyes did something funny. She smiled at Chastity. Chastity guessed that meant yes, they were now best friends. She smiled back.

The little girl squoonched herself down into a ball. With a crazy, yodelling scream, she sprang off the rock and cannonballed into the sea below. She popped up again, like the yellow almond fruit that floated when they fell into the sea. She gurgled at Chastity.

Chastity stood. Just before she made the jump, she thought she saw a bunch of rounds lumps rising from the water, like heads. It startled her, threw her off her stride. She jumped anyway; just not as strongly as she’d planned. “Yaaahhhh!” she yelled. She flew through the air, then plunged down, down, down towards the blue, knowing that it would be all right, that she would rise up again, and her friend would make sure she was safe.

What she hit was not water, but an outcropping of rock that was hidden just below the surface of the sea. The impact was brutal. Her whole body electrified with the shock of it; a jangling that made thought, even breath, impossible. Chastity didn’t know what happened from that moment until she awoke high up on the shore, well out of the way of the tide, in the lee of the sea grape bushes. Mumma was touching her shoulder and calling out her name. Mumma was crying softly. Chastity tried to lift her head, but the thrashing pain behind her eyes made her lay it back down onto the sand.

“Oh, God, God,” her mother moaned. “She wake up. Chastity, you all right? What happened to you?”

“Where’s the little girl?” Chastity whispered. She turned her head despite the pain.

“We have to get you to hospital,” Mumma said. She bent and picked Chastity up.

Weakly, Chastity held on around her mother’s neck. “Where’s the little girl?” she asked again. “The little blue girl.”

Her mother was hurrying towards the house. “Where your clothes, child? What you were doing?”

“I fell,” Chastity told her. Better not to say that she’d jumped. “Off that big rock.” She pointed at one of the large climbing rocks that were all over the beach.

“After I told you not to come and play down by the water by yourself!”

But she hadn’t been by herself. The little girl had been with her.

“I only turned my back for two-twos!”

Chastity whispered, “My head hurts.” She looked over her mother’s shoulder. There were footprints in the sand. They disappeared at the water line.

There was something on her head. Chastity put her hand up to her forehead and pulled at the thing she found there. Her head hurt so much! Through half-closed eyes, she looked at what was in her hand: seaweed, loosely braided into a bandage. Its shiny brown leaves were bloody. It had been tied around her head, covering the big gash she could feel above her ear. Chastity probed the gash with her fingers, which came away sticky with her own blood. That was when she finally felt frightened, and clung to her mother, and started to cry.

At the hospital, they said she had a mild concussion. They wouldn’t let her sleep all that night. Every time she was descending into blessed rest, a nurse or Dadda or Mumma would shake her awake. Her memories of that night were mostly of exhaustion, and crying, begging to be allowed to sleep. Towards morning, delirious with fatigue, she began to talk about the yellow girl with blue-y skin, and about the lobster that had wanted to eat her toes. She remembered Dadda, haggard from lack of sleep himself, whispering to her mother, “Hallucinations. Poor thing.” The hospital let her parents take her home that day, and she slept and slept until sunrise next morning. Her parents grounded her from the beach for a week, and forbade her to ever take her clothes off when she was outside in the open.

She never saw the yellow-blue brown girl again.