3

I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE LIKE RIDING A BICYCLE; YOU know they say you never forget how? But I was beginning to have my doubts.

There I hung where I’d found myself. No, where I’d put myself; halfway up the trunk of the almond tree on the cliff, my arms and legs wrapped round it in a grip so intimate it was practically lewd. And I was stuck. Shit. I weighed almost three times what I had at ten years old, and I now had arthritis in one knee.

I managed to turn my head and look down. It was a good seven-foot drop to the ground. Little Chastity would have leapt the distance like a tree frog and barely noticed the effort, but when I even thought of jumping down from that height, I could practically hear my kneecaps warning me of the consequences. They would pop right off, they promised. They would roll down the hill and over the cliff, and nobody would ever find them again, and I’d be lying under the tree, kneecapless and sorry.

I tightened my all-fours grip on the tree trunk. The first crotch of branches was fanned out just above my head. All I had to do was reach up with one hand and grab that nice, sturdy branch right there, lever myself up into the tree by it. I tried to extend my arm. But that caused a quaking in my other limbs. I wrapped my arm back around the trunk.

My left foot began to slip on the smooth almond bark. I was going to slide all the way down the trunk! I tried not to imagine what that would do to my inner thighs.

My toes touched a hard knob of living wood. The Knot! That was how I used to get up into my tree. This tree had a knot just like it. Just like it.

I used to put the toes of my left foot on the Knot, just like they were now. That would give me just enough purchase so that I could reach up around the torso of the tree with my left hand, like so… yes, there was the stub of a torn-off branch; the Handle. I hoped it would bear my weight. I grabbed onto it, stretched my other hand up and got hold of a good solid branch that forked out from the tree’s crotch. I wrapped both my arms around it.

What did I used to do next? I stayed there for a while, catching my breath and trying to remember. Oh, yes. Oh, shit. Was I still that flexible? I looked down again at the drop to the ground. I’d better be.

It took five tries, but I finally managed to lever my right leg up over the branch I was holding on to. By then my arms were trembling like coconut jelly and my fingers were beginning to let go.

But I knew that my legs wouldn’t let me down. “Thunder Thighs,” Mumma used to call Chastity proudly. I hooked one leg around the branch and flexed. I shifted a little. I squeezed harder, used my arms to twist my body. The motion pulled me up into the crook of the tree. I heard the inner seam of my clam-diggers giving away from the stress and the friction, but I’d done it! I had gotten back up in my almond tree, after all these years!

Not as skillfully as I’d imagined. I was lying in the crook of the tree, curled around its trunk. My inner thigh muscles were burning, and I’d probably skinned a few of my fingertips. And I was too exhausted to move. A nasty big greenwhip snake could come down out of the tree after me right now and I wouldn’t budge, not a rass.

But thinking about a greenwhip slipping through the branches towards me, I found that I could move after all. In fact, I was already sitting up and somehow edging my bottom over to that branch over there that looked sturdy enough for me. Careful, girl, careful.

And there I was, wedged into a V of branches like the one that used to be my childhood seat. It didn’t fit my fifty-three-year-old behind very well, but jammed in like that, at least I wasn’t going to fall. My problem would be getting unstuck.

Chuh. Worry about that later. I braced my feet on another branch, leaned against the trunk of the tree and got as comfortable as I could. Now for my book. A lazy morning reading a trashy mystery.

I’d put my book down to have my hands free to climb. There it was, lying at the foot of the tree, at the wrong end of gravity. “Fuck!” I screamed, scaring a kiskedee bird out of a sea grape bush.

A movement out on the beach far below me caught my eye. A man, strolling. He’d better be a resident. There was a kind of tourist that didn’t give two two’s about private property. I wrapped my arm around a branch above me and tried to pull myself free. If that was an intruder, I was going to give him a good West Indian style cussing; burn his ears right off for him and send him on his way.

I pulled on the branch. My ass stayed wedged. I pulled again. Nothing. I pushed down on the arms of the branches entrapping my behind. That worked, though it tore the seams of my clam-diggers open a little more. But I was on a mission now. Full of the fire of righteousness, I swung myself down towards the trunk. It would have worked, too, except that my already exhausted hands wouldn’t hold me. My fingers opened and I crashed to the ground, flat on my back.

“Oww! Damn it all to hell, man!” My body was thrumming like a quattro string. For a few seconds, I just lay where I was, taking stock. Head felt okay, though rattled. Back holding up. Elbow—ouch. My elbow had banged a rockstone when I landed. Hurt like blazes, but didn’t seem broken. Legs? Yes, I could move them. Toes too.

Slowly, I rolled to one side, then up onto my knees. The arthritic one yelled at me.

I was shaking. The muscles in my arms could scarcely bear my weight. But I made it to my feet, started brushing the dirt off my behind.

What was lumpy in my pocket? I put my hand in, and came away with the bread and butter I’d brought for my breakfast, squashed to a third of its former width. It was oozing butter onto my hands. I threw the wretched thing into the sea grape bush and wiped my hand on the almond tree bark.

Oh, that man on the beach was really going to get it now!

I grabbed up my book and stomped down the path on shaky legs, working up a good head of steam. People wandering all over other people’s homes, looking for “local colour,” always going where they weren’t supposed to go.

By some miracle I made it to the shore without tripping. I approached the man.

It was Hector. I couldn’t tell for certain at first. He had his back to me. Sure looked like his kind of outfit; bright green wetsuit with purple inserts. I wasn’t sure about his colour sense, but I couldn’t hate a suit that showed off his assets like that.

He turned and caught me staring at his butt. Oops. “Oh, hi, Hector,” I said with a silly little wave.

He smiled as though someone had just brought him a surprise present. “Calamity!”

I hadn’t had a chance before to look at him good. He was a nice-looking man—the kind of solid, easy-to-smile face you could imagine waking up to see every morning. “I just wanted to find out… Well, these are people’s homes on Dolorosse. You know that, right?” Oh, damn. I was babbling.

“Well, I—”

“Every year we get tourists bothering us.” I have a thing for beefy shoulders. “Sneaking out here, getting drunk…” And that wetsuit was so tight I could make out his nipples.

“But I have—”

“Playing their music loud enough to wake the dead, taking their clothes off…” Whoops. Wrong thing to put my mind on. I tried hard to keep my eyes above the belly button. I almost succeeded.

“Next thing you know, some white woman with more rum in her belly than sense in her head going to mistake a seal for a mermaid…” Or see a real one. “… and half-drown herself trying to swim after it…” I stuttered to a halt. Damn. Get me bothered and I get snippy. And garrulous. Not a good combination.

“I have permission to be here,” Hector said.

“Yeah?” If I stuck to monosyllables, maybe I wouldn’t make a total ass of myself.

Now he looked mildly amused. “Yeah. From the government of Cayaba. Research permit.”

“Oh. That’s all right, then.” Then I giggled! I don’t giggle. Damned man was making me simper.

“I could bring it and show you, if you like.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. I believe you.” Thank heaven for skin dark enough to hide that I was blushing.

“I promise I won’t bring any drunken tourist women to cavort naked on this beach.”

Sheepish silence while we grinned foolishly at each other. Sheepish on my side, anyway. “I saw you from the almond tree on the cliff,” I blurted. That would get us off the topic of nakedness. “I was up in it.”

He looked to where I had pointed. “Wow. Not too many people our age climb trees.”

“Our age? How old would your age be, exactly?”

“Forty-three.”

“Well, I’m one or two years older than that, but I made it up into that tree today. Yesterday, it didn’t even exis…”

Yes, it had. It had been there all the time.

But the Knot, and the Handle…?

“Can I show you something?” he asked. He took me to the edge of the surf and pointed to some slabs of rock jutting out of the water.

There were three adult monk seals and two babies, sunning themselves. They usually preferred the small, uninhabited islands.

“Aren’t they marvellous?” He said. “People hunted them nearly to extinction, but they’re hanging on. By rights monk seals shouldn’t even exist, you know. They’re phocids, for Christ’s sake. In the tropics! They’re balanced on an evolutionary knife edge.”

“You mean because they’re almost extinct?”

“Not just that. You know what the biggest problem is for a seal?”

“How to catch fish without any hands.”

A puzzled frown.

“It’s a joke,” I said.

“Oh.” Derailed, he seemed at a loss for words for a second. Then: “Their biggest problem is heat.”

“Well, they solved that. Plenty of heat here in the tropics.”

“But you see, water has twenty times the conductivity of air.”

“Beg pardon?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Water will chill your body down twenty times faster than air. Even warm water will do that.”

“All right,” I said, “so seals need to stay warm. That’s why they’re so fat, right?”

“Yeah. Works fine in the water. But they haul out onto land every so often, to sleep, to breed, to moult… And they don’t have sweat glands. So in this part of the world, they start to overheat in about ninety minutes.”

He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he said. “If you start me up on this subject, I sometimes forget to stop. And these seals,” he continued, forgetting to stop, “the Cayaba seals; they have a big mystery to them.”

“How you mean?”

“They’re not Caribbean monk seals.”

“Why not? They’re in the Caribbean.”

He shook his head. “Don’t matter. They’re Monarchus monarchus, not Monarchus tropicalis. Mediterranean monk seals. I’m trying to figure out how they got here in the first place. That’s what I’m studying. But first, I need to get an idea what the real size of the population is: study their movement patterns and return rates, tag any newborn babies, conduct a census of them every few days.” He frowned. “I have to work on that. I keep getting the numbers wrong.”

“The Cayaba government don’t do that research?”

“The Zooquarium does, yes. But they haven’t gotten around yet to figuring out how a colony of monachus ended up way over here.”

I was boiling. When the sun got so hot?

“… most primitive living pinnipeds,” said Hector.

God, the heat was getting worse.

“… derelict fishing nets… danger…”

Hector didn’t even seem to notice it. Me, my whole body was burning. I could feel the tips of my ears getting red, my cheeks flushing.

“… Brucella… Calamity? You all right?”

“I don’t know. Too much sun.” I wiped some perspiration from my brow. My hand came away wet.

“You sweating like you just run a marathon.”

“A lady doesn’t sweat.” Dried sweat was irritating my hand. I rubbed it against the fabric of my pants. “Jesus, it so hot!”

Hector looked worried. “That tree over there will give you some shade. Come.”

But before we could take a step, something soft and light grazed my head from above, then landed at Hector’s feet. “The hell is that?” he cried out. He bent to pick it up.

“It didn’t hurt me. I’m okay.” Much better, in fact. The heat was passing off rapidly. I was even chilly.

Hector straightened up. “Where this came from?” He looked up at the sky. I followed his gaze. Nothing but blue. Not even the cloud that must have just covered the sun and made me shiver.

I looked down from the sky, blinked the glare away. Hector showed me the thing he was holding.

I grabbed her out of his hand. Bare Bear. Chastity’s Bare Bear. Held so tightly and loved so hard that her little stuffed rump was threadbare, her little gingham dress long gone. “Where this came from?”

“Look like it just fell out of the sky.”

“No, man; don’t joke. It must have washed up with the tide.”

“And landed on your head?”

“I don’t know; maybe this was on the sand already, and something else fell on my head.” Bare Bear winked her one glass eye at me. So long I hadn’t seen her. “A leaf from out a sea grape tree, something like that. Right, Bare Bear?” I hugged Lucky Bare Bear to my chest. I grinned at Hector. “She get small over the years. Or I get big.” She still fit in her old place, up against my breastbone.

“You feeling sick?” he asked. “You didn’t look too good just now.”

“I feel wonderful,” I answered. “Don’t fret. Tell me more about your seals.” He frowned a little, but he didn’t say anything. Just turned and started pointing out the seals again. “The babies not weaned yet.”

“How you know?”

“Their coats still black.”

A baby seal was humping its way over to one of the adults.

“He’s fat. Like Agway.”

“Agway?”

“The little boy on the beach yesterday morning.”

Whose dead family Hector had found. He looked stricken.

“Sorry.” My damned mouth. “I didn’t mean to make you think about them.”

“It’s all right.”

The baby reached the adult, butted its head against her belly. She rolled so that it could get at one of her teats. She propped herself up and looked at the baby as it latched on and began to nurse. She lay flat again, to continue her basking. I watched the baby pull, and my own nipples ached in response.

“I have to go,” I told Hector.

“So quick?”

“So quick. Visiting a new friend. But maybe you would like to come by the house some day? I could cook you a meal.”

His face brightened. “Sounds nice.”

“All right. Call me when you’re free.”

Then I rushed home to change out of the torn-up pants and grab my purse. I had time to catch the next waterbus. Maybe I could see Agway one more time before they moved him out.

On the Saturday that Mumma didn’t come home, I woke up early. Couldn’t hear Mumma or Dadda moving around yet. I went to my dresser and found a t-shirt and my favourite climbing shorts, the red denim ones with the shiny gold buttons on them like pirate doubloons. The back left pocket was half torn away, and Mumma had told me not to wear them again until she’d mended them, but Mumma hated mending, and Chastity loved those shorts. I was very quiet. Mumma was probably still mad at me after the day before, so I didn’t want to give her any reason to notice me.

I tucked my new book under my arm. Three-Finger Jack, it was called. Deliciously scary. About a robber man from long time ago, over in Jamaica. I tiptoed out of the house and went down to the shore. I picked sea grapes from the bushes and stuffed myself till my tummy rumbled and my fingertips were purple. I walked barefoot on the wet sand, feeling it scrunchy and cool between my toes, and watched the little crabs skitter into their holes. I felt a small, guilty glee that Mumma hadn’t called me yet to breakfast and do chores. She would probably give me extra to do today, as punishment. I would have to face the music soon, but not yet. On borrowed time, I hiked back up the rise and around the bend to my special almond tree—the one on the cliff that overlooked the beach. I wasn’t supposed to go past the almond tree to the edge, but nobody had said I couldn’t climb the almond tree. I had slipped my book into the back waistband of my shorts and climbed up the tree to that comfortable spot where three joined branches held me up like a hand. I settled in and stayed there the whole morning, watching the sea breathe, reading my book. All that time, I felt nothing. No finger tingle. I didn’t notice that Mumma’s dinghy wasn’t pulled up on the beach. I felt nothing but the joy of a solitary Saturday, left to my own devices. You can’t find something if you don’t know you’ve lost it.

When it got to be late morning and still no Dadda or Mumma, I began to wonder. Plus I was hungry, for a real breakfast or an early lunch. I went back to the house. In the kitchen was a grumpy Dadda, washing dishes. He usually did them at night. Dadda snapped at me to go and plait my hair and wash my face and come back for lunch.

The fried breadfruit slices were burnt and the eggs were hard. Dadda barely touched his. He kept glancing out the window that looked towards the beach. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked him if I should go and do my Saturday chore of picking up the fallen cashew apples, juicing the flesh, and putting the nuts out to dry. He said yes. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to me. By now I was wondering where Mumma was. I asked him. He said, “Gone. Out.” I didn’t dare ask him the question that was worming away at my gut: Mumma mad at me? Is that why she’s staying out so long? If he didn’t know what I’d done to make her mad, I didn’t want to tell him.

Later, I brought in the bucket of cashew juice and another one of pressed cashew apple flesh. Dadda was on the settee in the living room, glowering at the tv. I put the buckets in the kitchen. Chores done, I took the phone to a corner of the living room and sat on the floor. I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting with Evelyn. Three-Finger Jack was on my knee, and I read in the spaces between our words.

Then it was dark. And Dadda was calling me to supper, and smiling a determined, too-frequent smile, and telling me that Mumma had said she might spend the night in town if she missed the last waterbus. That made sense. Mumma would come back in the morning, and we would all be friends again. I ignored the little knot of uneasy I always felt under my breastbone when Mumma stayed away. Tomorrow I would ask her if we could have a picnic on the beach, just her and me.

What book was I reading, Dadda asked. I chattered away happily to him about Three-Finger Jack. He took advantage of the book’s setting in Cockpit Country to quiz me on my geography, but I was ready for him: karst topography, limestone dissolves, which creates underground caverns. We played Snap, and I won two games and he won two games. True, he was a little preoccupied, but he always was when Mumma was gone like this. Then a bit more tv, then I went to bed.

Mumma’s dinghy drifted back to shore the next day, empty.

A week later, Dadda was in jail under suspicion of murder. That same day, I was taken from our house to go and live with Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward.

Three weeks after that, Evelyn stopped speaking to me.

I knew something that poor Agway was finding out: being an orphan sucks ass.

Evelyn lifted her stethoscope off Agway’s chest. She took the earpieces out of her ears and hooked them around her neck. “Apart from the bruises and the fracture, he’s actually pretty healthy,” she said. Agway was sitting naked on the examination table in front of her. She tapped the bowl of the stethoscope against her chin and smiled at him. “He has worms, but we can fix that.”

“Worms?” I shuddered. Dadda used to give me a dose of cashew bark tea twice a year, just in case I had worms.

“Intestinal parasites, really.”

“How he got those?” All our parents did it: senna pod tea, castor oil… A day’s worth of diarrhoea twice a year, just as a precaution.

Agway reached for the stethoscope. She took it off and gave it to him.

“Well, that’s the odd thing. Normally you would get those parasites from eating undercooked fish.”

Agway pulled on the rubber tubing of the stethoscope. He stretched it a good foot longer than its natural length. Gently, Evelyn took it from him.

Dadda would try to hide the taste of the cashew bark tea by mixing it with cream soda. I still couldn’t smell cream soda without gagging. “Hang on, undercooked fish?”

She made a face. “Yes. Or raw.”

Well, that made sense.

“God, what horrible people,” she said. “They wouldn’t even cook the food they gave him. I don’t say I wish anybody harm, but maybe it’s for the best that his parents, well.”

Agway pissed, completely unconcerned. The urine made a beautiful yellow arc in the morning light, heading straight for Evelyn’s smock. She danced away, grinned and shook her finger at him. From the blank look in his eyes, he didn’t connect her gesture with what he’d done. She patted his chest.

I took a fresh diaper off the folded stack of them that Evelyn kept in her office. Evelyn watched me diaper him. “You really want to foster him?” she asked

I nodded. “Thinking of it, yes.” I tried wrestling him back into the t-shirt they’d given him. He wasn’t interested. Blasted boy been practising wriggling with the eels.

“Children’s Services prefers them to go to whole families, you know.”

“I’m not broken, Evelyn.” Agway had managed to get his head and one arm jammed through the neck of the t-shirt.

She looked embarrassed. “Of course not. But they like families that come with a mummy and a daddy and two well-behaved children, preferably one girl and one boy.”

“Ifeoma was as well behaved as any normal child her age,” I told her.

“Who?”

“My daughter. The reason I left Holy Name.”

The tips of Evelyn’s ears went pink. “Right. Some of the girls told me why you didn’t finish out your final year.”

“I raised her well. All by myself.”

She gave me that nod, the wobbly “yes” nod that really means no.

I gave up on the t-shirt; pulled it off and hoisted Agway onto my hip. He immediately stretched up and tried to grab my hair, and threw a tantrum when I wouldn’t let him. I sat him back on the examination table to calm down. He stormed and slapped his hands on the table. “What a fuss and a fret!” I said to him. “Evelyn, I can look after one little boy.”

“I’m sure you’d be wonderful.” She broke my gaze, looked off to the right as though there was something to see there. Was it up and to the right for lying, or down and centre? She said, “There’s a proper procedure for doing these things, you know.”

I wasn’t going to beg Evelyn Chow to do me favours. In my mind’s eye I saw her at fourteen, dewy-perfect, looking up from her desk as I walked into class late, still sweaty from rowing the dinghy from Blessée to Cayaba and walking the two miles to school because I didn’t have bus fare. In my mind’s eye, she was flinging a swathe of beautifully groomed, glossy black hair behind one ear, giving me a breezy smile, and saying loudly enough for the whole class to hear, “Oh, there you are, Charity Girl! Been rowing around Cayaba in your old boat again?”

I tickled Agway’s tummy. He chortled and kicked. Evelyn said, “He’s so happy when you’re here.”

“Did you ever have children?” I asked her, curious. “Did you want any?” I didn’t ask her if she’d gotten married. That was a tender subject with me.

She didn’t answer immediately. “He’s not having a good time here, poor soul,” she said. “We’re only trying to look after him, but he doesn’t know that. We poke him with needles to draw blood, and it makes him so frightened. The X-rays, the ultrasounds; they terrify him.”

I nodded. “And he doesn’t understand about knives and forks, or many kinds of food.”

“Samuel—that’s my husband—is lovely. And no, we don’t have children. I look after children here at work every day, and Samuel has a whole side of nephews and nieces. That’s enough for us.”

“Oh.” She’d been a perfect girl, was now a perfect wife, and had a perfect life with no encumbrances.

“My job in a case like this is to consider the best interests of the child.”

And I was a broke, aging single woman living on an isolated island. “I understand.”

“When you’re with him, he isn’t so frightened.”

I looked at her. A ribbon of hope uncurled in my belly.

“So I just want you to know that I’ve told Children’s Services you can visit him as often as you want,” she said. “Until we find him a permanent home. Okay?”

And that was it. She would let me visit him to gentle him, but she would not let me take him. “Yes,” I answered. “Okay.” She was going to throw me only one dry bone. And, damn me, I accepted it. Calamity.

“You and your boys hanging out weekend coming?” teenaged Chastity asked Michael. It was only Thursday, but I was already feeling sorry for myself.

“Yeah, I guess so.” His newly breaking voice squeaked on the last word.

Michael and I had been tight for four years now. He knew when I’d first had my period. I knew when he’d had his first wet dream. But it was when his voice broke that something in me changed. I began to see him differently, to notice things I hadn’t before: how large his hands were, and how graceful; how his arms and shoulders were filling out his shirts. The smell of his sweat when he came to hang out with me in the stands after his class’s weekly soccer game made the secret parts of me twitch.

The jangle of lunchtime voices in the school caf screeched, bellowed, and roared all around us. Two stray dogs, rib-thin, slunk through the open-air caf, hoping for crumbs. Most of the students just ignored them.

I looked in my lunch bag. Dadda had put in some of the dumplings from last night’s dinner, and the stewed fish, spiced with pimiento berries and browned onions. Cashew juice, of course, in a little plastic bottle. And the yam left over from dinner, too. I didn’t feel for yam that day. I forked it onto Michael’s plate. He didn’t look up. He called the dogs over. They came, suspiciously, fearfully. At the table in front of us, Neil kicked out at one of the dogs as it passed. He got it squarely on the flank, but it made no noise, just staggered a little and kept going. The two hid under an empty table a little distance away, looking hopefully at Michael. I glared at Neil, who grinned at me, that broad, I’m-so-sexy grin that had all the girls writing him notes during class. I shook my head and rolled my eyes at him.

“What allyou going to do?” I asked Michael. He was scraping the ground meat out of his patty onto the floor for the dogs. He was on a vegetarian kick recently. “You see that new karate movie at the drive-in yet?” I could hear the edge of envy in my voice. My Friday night would consist of a waterbus ride back to Blessée with Dadda, then a few hours of homework. Afterwards maybe a solitary walk to the cliff in the dark of evening to smell the sea. And to watch it respire in the darkness, and to hope something marvellous would happen soon and save me from dying of boredom.

Lately, I’d been examining Michael’s every gesture, every expression, for a clue whether he was seeing me differently now, too. That pensive look: was he thinking about touching me? When he called me early on a Saturday morning, was it because he’d spent the night in a lather, thinking about me?

“Ey. Dreamboat,” I said. “You don’t hear I’m talking to you?” I managed to keep my tone light and teasing, like it used to be before Michael’s voice broke.

Michael still hadn’t said anything, or looked up. He was only chasing the yam round and round on his plate. “What wrong with you?” I asked him. He’d moved his feet away from the patty innards on the floor. The dogs were jostling for the scant two mouthfuls of meat.

Michael wouldn’t meet my eye. “Carlton.”

“You and he fighting again? You know it will blow over. Come tomorrow, you two going to be thick as thieves again. You and Carlton and Delroy and Ashok like the four legs on that dog, always running everywhere together.” There. That sounded like the old Chastity, nuh true?

There was a shriek from over by one of the big tables. Consuela and Gillian were having a food fight, using it as a way of drawing attention to themselves. They were like twins, both with high chests and taut thighs. “Fucking hell,” I said to Michael. “If Gillian’s skirt was any shorter, you’d be able to see what she had for dinner last night.”

Michael grimaced. “Chastity, I think I like Carlton.” Finally he met my eyes. The doubt, the fear on his face made my throat catch. “Like I supposed to like girls, I mean. Oh, God, what I going to do?”

I stared at him and didn’t let my face change. Not one bit. Inside, I was wailing.

Michael’s top lip trembled. “You can’t tell anyone. Not one soul.”

“I won’t.” My mind was stewing. I didn’t know whether I was embarrassed for him, or embarrassed at myself.

“Please, Chastity.”

“For true! I won’t.” In Civics class just before lunch, I’d been trying on names, writing them in my notebook: Chastity Theresa Jasper. Chastity Jasper-Lambkin. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Jasper. Shame curdled the food in my belly and chilled my skin.

“Thanks.” Michael tried to mash the yam with one of the plastic forks from the cafeteria. The fork broke off in his hand. He cussed and threw the broken handle down on his plate. Stood up.

I touched his arm. “Michael.”

“What.”

“You know for sure?” My voice trembled. If he said yes, I was going to die right there, I knew it.

He frowned. Frisbeed his paper plate of food into the open garbage can a few tables away, alarming the dogs, who ran out of the caf. He got a shrieking round of overenthusiastic applause from Gillian and Consuela, who were both hot for him. He scowled at them, shook his head. “Don’t talk so loud. No, I don’t know.”

A chance, then. A tiny chance. “Why you don’t test it and see?” I asked him.

He shot me a look of pure panic. “What? You mad? Carlton would kill me. Then he would tell everybody.”

I didn’t point out that once he was dead, he wouldn’t give two shits who Carlton told. “No, not with him.” Carlton was a pimple-faced idiot who could only talk about cricket and girls. No way Michael could like him over me. Right?

I touched Michael’s hand. He jumped. “Test it with me,” I said.

“It’s menopause,” said Dr. Nichols. “You’re having night sweats, hot flashes.” He smiled. “Though it might help a bit to think of them as ‘power surges.’ ”

I sat across from him in his office, trying to understand what all those words had to do with me.

“So what I can do about it?” I asked him after a pause. I had some vague notions; stuff I’d heard on the radio and television but hadn’t paid much attention to. “Eat lots of tofu, get eight hours’ sleep every night, shit like that? This hot flash stupidness has to stop so I can get on with my life.”

Dr. Nichols blinked at me. He examined the perfectly manicured nails of his left hand—something he always did when he was stalling for time. He’d been my G.P. for thirteen years now. I could read him like a friend, almost. Mind you, is how long I hadn’t been to see him? Two years? Three? “The hot flashes will stop eventually,” he said. “My wife Miriam—”

“Cedric, how many years you been reminding me that you have a wife and her name is Miriam?”

He blinked at me some more, a hurt expression on his face. So many years gone by, and he still hiding behind Miriam’s skirts. And all I did that one time was bring the man some chocolate! And a card, and a new pen, for his old one had been skipping. And a houseplant for his office, to brighten it up a little. From then on, I couldn’t stop hearing about blasted Miriam. My blouse hadn’t been that low-cut that day. The ones I used to wear to the club would probably have made him faint.

I relented. “Beg pardon,” I said. “This business have me short-tempered.”

Cedric nodded. “You can expect irritability over the next little while.”

“Bet you nobody will notice any difference in me. So what Miriam have to say on the subject of menopause?”

“It made her irritable, too. She says she used to get so mad at the slightest little thing, it would feel like her head was exploding. And some people get actual headaches. And maybe bouts of rapid heartbeat. And flatulence. You might notice you’re getting some hairs on your chin, but the hair will be thinner on your head and… everywhere else. Weight gain, loss of libido, dry vagina.”

“I see. And depression is a symptom, too?”

“Well, yes…”

My shoulders slumped. “Lord, just strike me dead now and done, nuh?”

“Oh; and you might have irregular periods.”

“How you mean, ‘irregular’?”

“Some months it won’t come at all, some months it’ll come twice, and you might have breakthrough bleeding in between.”

“Hence the irritability,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.” Cedric wasn’t too quick to get a joke. I wouldn’t have enjoyed being his girlfriend anyway. “So what I must take to stop it?”

Cedric was scribbling on his little doctor pad. “To stop what?” he asked me.

“I know both of we getting old, but like you the one going doltish,” I grumbled at him. “What I must take to make all this nonsense stop?”

He frowned at me. “Nothing will make it stop until it’s ready to stop. You just have to wait it out. I can give you estrogen and progesterone to ease some of the symptoms, but other than that, you just have to give it time. Is a normal—”

“Yes, I know. ‘Normal,’ ‘maturity,’ all that shit. How long I going to be waking up drowning in my own sweat?”

“In some women, it lasts more than a decade.”

“To rass.”

“You make sure you take care of yourself for the next little while. Get enough sleep. Eat properly.”

“And eat plenty tofu. I know. Thanks.”

He wrote me a prescription for estrogen patches and gave me a glossy pamphlet. As I was heading out the door, he said, “Oatmeal compress.”

I stopped in his doorway. “And which one of my senescent body parts you want me to apply that to?”

“Miriam say it used to help her plenty. For the itching in her extremities.”

“Thank you, Cedric. Say hello to Miriam for me.”

So. Looked like I wasn’t finding again after all. Menopause explained the itchy fingers. And forgetting that the almond tree had always been there.

And Dumpy had been stuck down inside the couch, so he didn’t even count.

But what about Bare Bear landing on me from out of the sky?

Even when I had been convinced I was a finder, things didn’t used to come to me; I went to them.

Goose was walking on my grave. Symptoms of menopause: clammy feeling. I went into the mall to get a hot drink. But at the counter, I changed my mind. Not coffee; a mango smoothie. “With soy milk, please,” I said. Might as well get started on eating right.

While I waited in the line, I had a good look at Cedric’s pamphlet, The Best Years of Your Life. It pictured a slim, smiling white woman in a tasteful navy one-piece bath suit. She was climbing up a ladder out of a pool. She was about thirty-five years old, her hair in a perky grey bob that was obviously a wig; I guess to fool us menopause-addled women into believing that she was in her sixties, and that if we only used their fine product, we could look like that, too. An equally trim and dignified man waited for her on the pool deck. He was leaning back in one of two matched lounge chairs. He had a little touch of grey hair at each temple. A full head of hair, too; no male-pattern baldness for this fellow. He wore modest and nondescript swim trunks. I guess he was handsome, in a 1950s martini ad kind of a way. In fact, there were two martinis—his with a green paper umbrella, hers with a pink one—on the little table that sat between the two lounge chairs. It was all so perfect I could gag. Jesus. Death by connubial bliss. Apparently, if I took Cedric’s pills, I’d turn into a Stepford wife and get married to a Ken doll.

Though at least I’d have a man.

I wondered what Gene was doing right now. Bouts of rapid heartbeat. He hadn’t called. And fool that I was, I hadn’t asked for his number. Disturbing memory lapses.

The pamphlet had sections with titles like: “Life’s Next Big Step,” and “A Healthy Attitude.” I got my mango soy smoothie. I spied a free seat in the food court and headed towards it. A young man’s body glanced me, nearly knocking the smoothie out of my hand. He didn’t notice. He just kept walking, chatting with his friend.

Next I got mobbed by a tittering of young women, all tight jeans, short skirts, and straightened hair. They flowed around me, chattering. One of them dropped her change purse. “You lost something,” I said to her. She turned, searched her friends’ faces to see who had spoken. I waved the hand with the pamphlet in it. “Over here.” I swear she looked at everybody else before her eyes settled on me, not five feet away from her. I pointed to the ground. “You dropped your change purse.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” She picked it up and moved off with her friends.

I sat in the free seat, played both incidents over in my mind. No, she hadn’t looked at everybody else before she looked at me. She had looked at all the young people. I wasn’t quite real for her, or for the guy who’d bumped me. I kissed my teeth and sucked a big glob of the smoothie up through the wide straw. It tasted like ass. I crumpled the pamphlet up, stood, tossed it and the drink into the nearest garbage can. Then I dropped into the pharmacy. Turned out I didn’t have enough money to pay for the prescription. Liquor store for me; what money I had would stretch far enough for a flask of Cayaba’s good red rum. Dizziness, light-headedness, episodes of loss of balance.

My poor old red Mini Moke sat in the parking lot in her crumbling paint, looking nothing like the queen after which I’d named her.

And wait; was she listing a little to one side, or were my glasses dirty again? I peered through the specs, trying to find the right place on the tri-focals that would let me focus at that distance. See why I scarcely wore the damned things.

Motherass. Victoria was leaning, yes. The right back tyre had a flat. Shit.

How the hell I was going to get home? Maybe I could call Ife. Then I remembered that the bus stop was just on the other side of the parking lot. And there was the bus, only half a block away from the stop. I started to run. What had possessed me to wear heels today? But I’d been walking, running, dancing in high heels since God was a boy. I moved faster.

The bus was nearly to the stop. God, I thought, please don’t make me miss it. I threw myself into an all-out run in my stilettos. A sleek Mercedes had to slam on the brakes to avoid me. I landed hard on one foot, and felt the heel of my stiletto give. Shit. My best pair of shoes. The driver glared at me and smoothed back her perfectly pressed hair. She wore her sunglasses on her head, so fucking fashionable.

The bus was at the stop. I shouted, “Wait, please, driver!” and continued the fifty-yard dash. Thank the heavens for short slit skirts. The legs might be fifty-three years old, but they were good legs. Running was showing them off real nice, so long as I made sure not to wobble on my broken shoe. The bus driver stayed put to watch my thighs in action, and that gave me time to run up the stairs. “Thank you,” I said to him, trying to look fetchingly windblown, when what I really felt was good and winded. He put the bus in gear and drove off. Victoria’s one good headlight eye looked at me mournfully as I pulled away.

“I just going to catch my breath,” I said to the driver. He gave my legs one more look and nodded. I found a seat and rummaged around in my purse for the fare.

Only a few coppers in there. I’d paid for the smoothie with the last of my money. Shit, shit, shit. When I left the mall, my plan had been to drive to the cambio to withdraw some cash to pay for the waterbus home. I still had a few dollars in there until payday. When Dadda began to sink, I’d started working part-time at the library so I could be with him more. Money was tight.

Maybe the driver would forget me. I scrunched down small in my seat and tried to disappear. The bus rocked and belched on its way into town. I would just sneak off at the nearest cambio, get some cash, go home.

The bus stopped, in between stops. The driver leaned out of his seat and turned around to look at me. “Lady, like you forget you have to pay to ride this bus?” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. An old man in one of the side seats stared at me, his eyes avid, waiting to see what I was going to do. A little girl in a St. Rose’s school uniform snickered.

I thought I was going to dead from shame right there. “I just…” I said, stalling for time. I got up to go and talk to him so he wouldn’t have an excuse to shout any more of my business right down through the whole bus. Maybe I could persuade him to carry me as far as a cambio and wait till I got some money out. If I had any money in there. I even owed Mr. Mckinley for the grunts I had bought from him two weeks ago.

“Chastity!” called a voice from the back of the bus. “Calamity!”

Lord on a bicycle; it was Dr. Evelyn Chow, witnessing how badly I managed my affairs. I sighed as any chance I’d had to take Agway home with me evaporated. I must be was born bad-lucky.

Evelyn bustled up to the front, waving her purse at me. “Renny,” she said to the bus driver, “it look like you catch my friend here without any change for the bus?”

“She have to pay, Doctor,” he said.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” she said to me. “I always have extra tokens.” She fished in the change purse and dropped one into the fare box. Renny nodded and drove on.

“Thank you,” I whispered to her.

“Not at all, not at all. Come and sit with me then, nuh?”

“Yes. All right.” She’d paid the piper, she got to call the dance. I would bloody well have to sit with her. I fell in behind her as she made her way back to her seat. The St. Rose’s school girl was still laughing behind her hand. I lifted one side of my lip at her, doglike, to show her my teeth. She gasped and stopped her stupid giggling. Good. She reminded me of Jane Labonté from my school days. Jane could make me feel bad just by looking at me. Make me feel like the common class poor relation. In high school, she and Evelyn had paired up to make my life a hell.

“Let’s sit here,” said Evelyn. She pointed to two empty seats side by each. I slid in beside her.

“I’ll pay you back,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry about it. How come you’re on this bus? The waterbus is the other way.”

“Yes. I was going back home, but my car broke down,” I said. “I was just trying to get to a bank machine, and forgot I didn’t have bus fare on me.”

“Well, that’s an inconvenience! Where’s your car?”

“In the parking lot of the medical centre.”

“Oh, there’s a lovely restaurant in the mall there! Really good Mediterranean cuisine. Have you ever been?”

“No, can’t say I have.”

“Expensive to eat there, though. My husband likes to go there of a Sunday evening, but my dear, I have to say I prefer a beer and a fish and chips at Mrs. Smalley’s Chicken Boutique any day.”

“You do?” My lord. I had a sudden vision of the proper Evelyn Chow in her white lab coat, sitting at one of Mrs. Smalley’s brukdown tables with a Red Stripe beer at her left hand and a heaping plate of the house’s fresh fried grunt fish in front of her, sucking the flesh from the bones.

“How was the little boy when you left him?” she asked.

“Fine. Sleeping.”

She looked at me. “You’re worried about him. Don’t fret; we’ll find someone qualified to take care of him.”

“I’m qualified. I’ve raised a child of my own.”

She patted my hand. “I’m sorry, Chastity. I just think it would be too much for you to take on.”

“But—”

“You and I not getting any younger, you know.” She smiled. “Time to slow down now.”

“Arawak Court!” yelled the bus driver. The St. Rose’s school girl got off. She stood on the pavement and watched the bus pull away. As she came level with me, she stuck her tongue out at me. I flashed a silent snarl. Of course she’d waited until she was safe. Little spring chicken with her high bust and her tight thighs.

“Friend of yours?” asked Evelyn.

“Something like that.” The bus was following the coast road. I stared at the blue strip of water. Agway’s home.

“You’re quiet,” said Evelyn.

“ ‘Quiet here on this rock; sitting still and thinking,’ ” I quoted. Bad bookworm habit of mine.

“ ‘The Cayaba Fairmaid.’ ”

“You know that story?” Evelyn had surprised me for the second time in five minutes.

“We did learn it in school,” she reminded me.

“Yes, I know. But most people seem to forget about it afterwards.”

“You know the one about the blue child?” she asked me.

“I kinda remember it, yeah.” Now she was a folklorist, too? She seemed more the ballet and art cinema type. “Old lady finds a blue devil baby in a hole, the baby tries to force her to do something, I forget what. Old lady throws the baby into the sea, thinking that will drown it.”

Evelyn nodded. “When the blue baby hits the water, it grows huge, turns into the devil woman of the sea who drags ships down. That’s what the baby had wanted the whole time; to reach the sea.”

Huh. That story had quite a different cast to it since my experiences of the past few days. Now I would be willing to bet that it was a fictionalized story of somebody else bucking up with a sea person.

“When I was young,” said Evelyn, “I used to wish that the oldtime stories were true.”

“You did? You never told me.”

“You would have laughed after me.”

“No, I wouldn’t have.”

“Yes. You would have. Your mouth hot now, and it was hot then.”

I decided to make nice. “All right. Maybe I would have.” I was busting to talk to somebody about the sea people, and I hadn’t heard from Gene. I had been like that from since; when I learned something new, I had to tell somebody, anybody. But I had to lead Evelyn to this gently. “It’s interesting, you don’t find, that we have all these stories about devils living in the sea?”

She shrugged. “Sea kill plenty people in the history of Cayaba. It make sense the devil would live in the sea.”

Shit, how to get her to think this through? “You know the legend about Captain Carter?”

Her face brightened. “Yes. Such a beautiful love story.”

“I guess. Except the lovers throw themselves into the water and die.”

She kissed her teeth. “You have to have a litte romance, man. The story says they transformed.”

“They adapted to living in the sea.”

“I suppose you could think of it that way.” She looked out the window, checked her watch. I was losing her.

“When I was a girl,” I said, “I used to try to figure out how I could go and live with the dolphins.”

“Oh. Well, that’s different. If you were going to remain an oxygen breather, the rest is pretty easy.” She sat up straight, started counting off on her fingers: “Extra body fat like whales and seals have, to protect the organs from the cold.”

Check. Agway was fat as mud, just like his daddy, and the little blue girl. “What else?” I asked her.

She thought a little bit. “They would need broad ribcages.”

Check. “Why, though?”

“To make room for lungs with a lot of surface area; they’ll be going under the water for long periods, so they’d need to be able to hold extra oxygen in their lungs. And their lats and delts—these muscles here, in your upper back—would be hyperdeveloped, to help with swimming.”

“So their arms would change, too?” I couldn’t help coaching her just.

“They wouldn’t have to. But it would be nice if their limbs were relatively short. More streamlined for swimming. Oh! I just thought of another one!”

She was practically jigging in her seat. We used to compete in school for who could answer Teacher’s questions first.

She said, “This one would be really cool, okay? You know that webbing between the fingers and toes? Like Agway has? All humans have that in the womb. If our mermaid people never lost it, it would help them swim better.”

“Uh-huh…”

“Eyes! Really big eyes. It’s dark down there. Nictitating membranes would be so cool! Imagine being able to have your eyes closed and open at the same time! I don’t know what function those patches on the inner thighs would have, though…”

Her eyes opened wide. She put her hands to her mouth. “Oh, my God!” she blurted through her fingers.

“Courtice Plaza!” announced the bus driver. The bus clattered to a halt.

“This is my stop,” I said. “I pay you back the bus fare tomorrow, all right?” I stood up and headed for the door, my heart going powpowpow. Please. Please.

She grabbed her purse and ran to catch up. “I’m getting off with you,” she said. “You can’t just ups and leave me with this idea you put into my head.”

“What idea?” I chirruped at her over my shoulder. I stepped down off the bus stairs and right onto the broken shoe heel. Miracle I didn’t twist my ankle.

“Good night, ladies,” Renny called out.

A soft evening breeze was blowing. There was the overpowering ice cream smell of frangipani blossoms from somewhere, and the sky had that look of evening turning into night; like someone had poured black ink into blueing and was stirring it.

Courtice Plaza was in front of us; a small, three-storey shopping centre built around a courtyard. The designer said he’d had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in mind when he constructed it. Looked more like one of those Escher drawings, with staircases leading every which way. Confused the eye. I could never remember which level the cambio was on, and which set of stairs would lead me to it. I hobbled up to the plaza. A woman with matted hair and tattered clothing sat on the grass verge. She was barefoot. The bottoms of her feet were black horns of callous. She spied us.

“Please, lady, do,” she said to me. “Beg you little money. I ain’t eat from morning.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have any.” It was the God’s truth. I didn’t have one red cent.

“Please, lady,” she said again.

“Here.” Evelyn gave the woman a bill.

“Thank you, lady. Bless you.”

We went on. I stopped and dithered around a bit, looking from one entrance to the other. Evelyn dithered right alongside me.

“That little boy,” she said. “It would be incredible.”

“What would?”

“It’s just possible; an isolated archipelago like this. An evolutionary branch…”

This sort of looked like the entrance I wanted. I began up the stairs. Evelyn followed.

“It worked for Darwin,” she said. “The finches, you know?”

“The library archives are full of reported sightings of mermaids off Cayaba,” I said. “Newspaper clippings, people’s diaries from long ago.”

We passed a fancy women’s clothing store. It was lit in screaming pink and yellow neon. The skirt on the mannequin in the window was so short that even though she was plastic, I felt embarrassed for her.

Time was, I could have gotten away with a skirt like that.

We rounded the corner, and there was the food court, and the cambio. I made for it. Evelyn stood beside me while I punched in the numbers. She was almost vibrating, she was so excited. “You knew this whole time, didn’t you?” she said. “About the child, I mean.”

“I don’t know, I just suspect. Could be wishful thinking.” Nothing in the chequing account. “But I think I bucked up another one like him when I was a little girl.”

“You lie!” Wide-eyed, she grabbed my arm. “When? Where? Did you talk to it? How come you never said?”

I stopped and looked at her. “At school, you mean? To whom?”

“To your friends,” she replied. Then, “Oh.”

I didn’t have to tell her that she and I hadn’t yet met when it had happened. All is fair in war. “Anyway. I was there last night when they brought his parents out of the water. I saw the daddy. He had the same adaptations as Agway.” I tried a cash advance on my credit card. It laughed in my face. I didn’t even bother to check my savings account. It had always been a joke. Savings accounts were for people with something left over to save. I took a deep breath. “Evelyn?”

“Yes?”

“Can you possibly lend me the money to take the waterbus back home, please?” The words hurt coming out of my mouth, like spitting out glass.

“Oh! Yes. Of course.” She dug in her purse and I looked away, ashamed.

“Wait a minute,” said Evelyn. Her hand was still in her purse. “Where you said your car was?”

I sighed. “At the mall by the medical centre.”

“So how you plan to get to your house when you reach Dolorosse?”

“Walk.” In my high heels, one of them broken. Over the rocky ground.

“And how long that will take, Chas… Calamity?”

I shrugged. “An hour, maybe.” More like two, and massive blisters on my feet, shoes on or off.

“No, that won’t do.” She snapped her purse shut, linked her arm through mine. “Come along.” She began walking me back through the mall.

“What? Come where?”

“Why are you walking like that?”

“I broke my shoe. Evelyn, I have to get home.”

“And I will take you home. Let me just see if Samuel’s finished work yet.” She pulled a phone out of her purse, hit speed dial.

“Samuel? Hello, my love. Surprised you’re at home at all. No, I’m at Courtice Plaza. I’m with a friend. No, I…” She giggled. “After you know I don’t have eyes for anyone but you. Listen; you can come and get us? Me and my old school friend Calamity. We have to take her home to Dolorosse.”

I knew that tone so well. Had heard it a million times in the school cafeteria as Evelyn organized her posse to do just what she wanted them to. I pulled my arm out of hers. “You don’t have to take me anywhere. Just lend me the waterbus fare. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” I had no idea how I was going to do that, but never mind.

“What?” Evelyn asked me. Into the phone, she said, “Hold on a minute, nuh?” She took the phone away from her mouth. “Calamity, we’re going to take you. All right? End of story.”

Anger was like a red mist in front of my eyes. She started to talk to Samuel again. I turned on my heel and walked away from her. Maybe a passer-by would lend me waterbus fare.

“Calamity!”

I ignored the sound of shoes tap-tapping behind me. I headed for one of the exits.

“Calamity!” She caught up to me, put her hand on my elbow. I yanked it out of her reach.

“No, Evelyn. You can’t order me about. You’re not queen of the schoolyard any more. You can’t always have your way. Go home to your beloved Samuel and leave me alone!” I could feel my eyes springing water. Somehow, the blurriness made the garish micro minis on the mannequins in the clothing store look even more shameful, if that were possible. I was to the steps, making my way down with that careful, crabways movement that old women in heels adopt. When had I become an old woman?

“Calamity. I’m sorry.”

I stopped. She was standing at the top of the stairs, cell phone dangling from one hand.

“Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry I was so awful to you.”

Good thing I was holding on to the bannister, or surprise would have pitched me down those stairs one time. “When?” I asked, milking it.

“Just now. I should have asked you if you wanted a lift. But Samuel says he’s willing to take you, and we—”

Her words were music. I wanted more. “When else?”

She drew herself up. “How you mean? I said I was sorry.”

“Not sorry enough.” I kept clanking down the stairs.

I heard her give a deep, shuddery breath. “Calamity, come back here! You stubborn as any mule, you know?”

I spat the words at her over my shoulder. “That’s a change. You used to say I was as ugly as a mule.”

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she screamed, her voice weepy.

I kept going.

“All right, then! Jesus. In school.”

I stood still a moment, puffing. It was work to walk down stairs nowadays. I used to run up stairs like I was ascending to heaven. And Cedric had just told me it was only going to get worse. “In school what?” I said.

“I was horrible to you in school, all right? I been thinking about it ever since I saw you the other night. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said all those awful things. I’m sorry I egged my friends on to make fun of you. I’m sorry I super-glued your locker shut.” She snuffled.

“I don’t know where your necklace went, Evelyn.”

She crossed her arms and looked away. “Huh. Well, I don’t know about that.”

“It was only a game we used to play, anyway! Sometimes I got lucky.”

“You told Mr. Baldwin where to find his calculator. You found Ahmed’s maths book behind the tennis court. You found Ulric’s tobacco pipe. But the one time your best friend asked you for help, you wouldn’t. I still don’t understand why. That was my favourite, my birthday necklace, with the moonstones.”

“You lost your necklace a few weeks after Mumma disappeared.”

“So what?”

I sucked my teeth. “Think, nuh? My mother got lost at sea. What you suppose happened to her?”

“That she probably fell out of her boat somehow and, you know, drowned.”

If she’d even gone out to sea that night. “And what you think her body would have looked like if it had been found?”

“Bloating, necrosis, morbidity.” The doctor’s training had kicked in. “Extremities nibbled away by… oh.”

“Exactly. You think I wanted to find my mother’s body in that condition?” Or chopped to pieces? I thought. “So I stopped the finding game. Completely. And it went away. Even if it was only luck why I found things, I turned it off. I’m a blasted luck repellent, let me tell you.”

She was crying, the tears glowing neon, reflecting the stores’ lights. She had always been able to turn those tears on and off at will. She sniffed. “I was jealous of you, you know,” she said.

“What?” I took two steps back up the stairs.

“I was. So envious I hated you sometimes.”

“What the fuck did you have to be jealous of me for?”

“They let you climb trees. They bought you toy trucks. You know how bad I wanted a Johnny Lightning Plymouth Duster?”

She saw my blank look.

“Hot Wheels! The Plymouth Duster was acid green.”

“Ah.”

“And you could swear!”

“Not in front of Dadda. Mumma didn’t mind. She thought it was funny.”

“Both my parents minded. Ever had your mouth washed out with soap?”

I screwed up my face. “No.”

“Daddy only did that to me once. He never had to do it again. To this day, I can’t stand the smell of Pears soap.”

“So you got your mouth washed out with soap. My mother died, Evelyn. Ran away from me and Dadda and got her damned self drowned. You made my life in school hell for five years because your parents wouldn’t buy you a toy car?”

“When you wouldn’t help me look for my necklace, I thought you’d stopped liking me.”

“Not then, no. But you sure made certain I hated you afterwards.”

“I’m sorry.” She was sobbing outright now.

“Oh, stop it. It’s not your fault Mumma disappeared. But it is your fault that you were being a jealous, selfish brat who couldn’t look beyond her own spoiled self long enough to see how I was grieving.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

My feet hurt. I sat on the stairs, sideways so I could still see Evelyn. Her tears slowed a little. She watched me cautiously. She looked bloody pitiful. “So,” I said, “you were jealous of me because I could get away with saying ‘fuck’ every so often?”

She sat too, at the top of the stairs. “And because you lived in such a cool place, and your parents let you climb trees, and you got to row to the mainland in your own boat.”

“Whenever I had to do that, it felt like my arms were coming out of their sockets by the time I reached the mainland.”

“Yes, but you got to do it. Mummy drove me everywhere, made me sit properly in the car in my proper little dresses with my knees properly together. Proper little China girl.”

“Oh, poor you.”

“You don’t give a damn, do you?” She hit the word “damn” shyly, like someone unused to saying it.

“No, I don’t. I don’t because of you putting mud in my hair, because of you getting everyone else to call me ‘Charity Girl,’ because of watching you get everything: all the nice clothes; all the nice lunches; all the nice friends.”

“Yes, if you think of it that way, I guess I wouldn’t care about me either.” She shuddered.

“Lots of people cared about you. You had all those friends. The teachers loved you. Your parents loved you.”

“And I never once climbed a tree, or rowed a boat to one of the out islands.”

“You never rowed a boat because you never had to. Poor little rich girl.”

“Rich little poor girl.”

“Well, that was original! What the rass you would know about being poor?”

“Nothing. And what you would know about having to be perfect all the time, to be good in Home Ec and Maths? Nothing.”

“They expected me to be good in all of them. And they were both right in the same school with me. They knew everything I did. So don’t give me that shit.”

“Huh.” It was part rueful laugh, part sob. “You right, you know? No wonder we were friends.”

“Used to be friends.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop it. You wearing it out.”

She sniffed again, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “God, that’s unhygienic,” she said. “If the nurses saw me, they would be horrified. Calamity, you don’t have a tissue or something I could use?”

I sighed and trudged back up the few steps towards her. “Here.” I pulled out the pack of tissues I carried in my bag and handed it to her.

“Thank you.” I sat on the step below while she cleaned up.

“Whatever happened to your father?”

“Dadda? Dead. A few weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

My belly grumbled. I hadn’t eaten since lunch. Food was at home.

“What was it?” she asked. “Your father, I mean.”

“Lung cancer.”

She handed me back the packet with its remaining tissues. “That’s a hard way to go.”

“It’s why I’ve been living on Dolorosse. I was looking after him for the two years before he died.”

“Just you?”

“He only had me.”

“They never found—”

“Mumma? No.”

Silence.

“Well,” she said, “can I?”

“Can you what?”

“Call Samuel. Take you home.”

Silence. I looked down at my toes in their pinching, cracked-heel shoes. Those shoes had cost me half a month’s salary.

“Goddamned baby Jesus on a tricycle in frilly fucking pantaloons.”

“That means yes?” She tried a tentative smile.

I met her eyes. I did not smile back. Hers faded. “Let’s go, then,” I said.

She nodded and got her cell phone out again.

Michael sat on my single bed, his whole body tense as a spring. I stood on the floor near him. I sucked in my lower lip, then remembered Dadda saying he could always tell when I was nervous, ’cause I tried to suck my bottom lip right off. Michael glanced at me, gave a shame-faced giggle. “Look at the two of we,” he said.

I smiled at that, though it felt like a school of tiny fish was making sport in my belly. “Yes, look,” I replied. I sat on the bed beside him. “Dadda still in town. Going to a fancy restaurant with that woman from the post office. They tell me they ‘on a date.’”

“That’s sweet,” whispered Michael. In his lap, his hands were shaking.

“It’s revolting. Dadda have no business dating.”

Michael pulled back and looked at me. “What, you want him to stay alone forever? Five years now your mother’s gone.”

I didn’t want to think about it. “He not coming home till late tonight,” I said. I reached to touch Michael’s shoulder, but overwhelmed by a sudden terror that he might think I was starting anything, I smoothed a section of the bedsheet instead. Michael and I had always been easy physically with each other, hugging and holding hands. But this was different. Staring at the faded paisley pattern on my childhood bedsheets, I said, “I don’t know what to do now.”

Michael barked with laughter. “God, you’re asking me? Ain’t this was your idea?”

I sighed. It came out trembly. “I know. But—”

“You’re a girl, Chas! I always thought I would do this with a man first.”

“You did? Always?”

“Yes.”

“But you never told me.” I always hoped I would do it with you.

“I never told anybody.”

Even-steven, then. I never told you my secret, either. My throat was constricting. I swallowed around the obstruction. “You want to not do it, then?” Please, I thought. But I didn’t know which: please yes or please no. I didn’t dare look at Michael’s face, so I concentrated on a point below his chin. There was a vein jumping in his long neck. My eyes grazed over his body. I could see a bit of his chest where his white school shirt was open a bit at the collar. He was propped up on his elbow, one hand lightly covering the other. His hands were wide and strong, the nails buffed. Even in his tailored school greys, it was obvious that his legs were hard and shapely. He was a calypso of muscle, style, and grace, and he was beautiful. Too beautiful for me.

“Let’s—” I blurted out, intending to call the whole project off.

“I want to do it,” he stammered at the same time.

Well, that was that, then. I pulled my eyes up to make four with Michael’s. He was looking at me gravely, his face ashen. “Like you frightened, too?” I asked him.

A rueful smile. “What you think, girl?”

I reached for his shoulder, instead found my hand settling in the warm hollow high on his collarbone, between his shoulder and his neck. He shuddered. He sat up with a jerk, his face rushing in towards mine too quickly. His lips were pursed for a kiss. It looked silly, and terrifying.

My brain shut down. I closed my eyes, made to kiss him back. Our foreheads met with a clunk.

“Ai!” yipped Michael. “Ow, man!” He held his head and laughed, looking sidewise at me. I put my palm to my own aching forehead and laughed along with him. The release of tension only made me even more shaky than I’d already been, but laughter; that was familiar. That we could do together. We giggled, then chuckled, then roared till we were both helplessly weak. Our arms tightened around each other. We were lying in each other’s embrace. How had that happened?

I gulped. I looked up at Michael. “Lewwe try that again, nuh?” I said. I didn’t pay any mind to how my voice croaked out the words.

“What, the head-bumping part?” he asked with a broad smile, which vanished when he followed it up with “or the kiss part?” His voice broke on the word “kiss.”

“The kiss,” I whispered. I put a hand on the back of his neck. It was warm and slightly oily, the way flesh gets after a day in the tropical sun. His neckbones pressed into the flesh of my hand. Skinny Michael. I pulled his head slowly towards mine. He moved with the touch, leaned in close, stared at me with a look of wonder. So close I could count all his pores. No. I wasn’t going to burst out laughing again. This was too important.

His lips and mine touched. Warmth of lips, my eyes crossing as I tried to keep them in focus. A giggle threatened to erupt from my throat. I closed my eyes. That was more romantic anyway, wasn’t it? Why didn’t all the blasted sex books tell you the important details?

I was so busy trying to deal with each new sensation that I nearly missed it when Michael’s tongue came fluttering nervously against my closed mouth. Startled, I opened my lips a little way, let him in. His tongue tasted warm. That was the only way to describe it. Warm and friendly and muscular and basically harmless. I touched it with my own.

His breath was coming faster. A small moan vibrated up from his throat, entered mine. I was getting damp inside my panties, I could feel it. Was that okay? Would it disgust him? Frozen, I kept kissing him, not knowing what to do next. He smelt faintly of sweat, a good smell. His face filled my field of vision. I fumbled with one hand until I found the buttons of his shirt, started to undo them. My hand descended until it touched his belt. That meant I was close to… I jerked the hand away.

Michael sighed, took his mouth from mine. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. With a determined look on his face, he put his hands to my waist. He undid the belt that cinched my school uniform. I thought my heart would explode, it was beating so quickly. “You want me to take the uniform off?” I asked him. He nodded, still not looking me in the face. I stood, pulled the pinafore over my head, let it fall to the floor. Even in the warm air, my legs pimpled from the chill of being uncovered. My fat legs. Some men liked them that way; I knew that from the comments I got when I walked through the streets of Cayaba. But some didn’t like it. I sat quickly back on the bed, so that the tails of my white blouse gave me some coverage.

Michael sat up and yanked his shirt open. But he hadn’t undone the very last button, the one below the level of his belt. It popped off and flew across the bed. He tried to smile at that, his face a rictus. I just looked. I couldn’t stop myself. Michael and I had been swimming together many times. I’d seen his chest before. This time, the sight of it made my mouth dry. Before I could think about what I was doing, I unbuttoned my own shirt and drew it off. At the bottom edges of my vision I could see the white flashes that were my cotton panties and bra. I was a little, raw girl, trying to do something big.

Michael wouldn’t look at me! He snapped his own belt open, undid his fly faster than I could see. He lay back on the bed, lifted his hips and pulled the pants down to his ankles. He was wearing snug briefs, bright blue. The contrast with his brown skin was lovely. Legs akimbo, he struggled to get the pants off his feet. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I guess this gets easier with practice.” He threw me a stricken look, and I remembered that we might never do this again. But surely we would with other people? Now I felt too awkward to try to explain what I’d meant.

Michael finally had the pants off and deposited in a bundle on the floor. He sat on the bed beside me.

“Michael.”

“Mm?”

“Take your socks off too.”

When we were done with our experiment that afternoon, Michael lay beside me, still shivering. He looked up into the ceiling, stared at the empty white space as though there were something there to see. He’d drawn my thin blue cotton sheet over his middle. There was barely space on my narrow single bed for the two of us. I tried to lie beside him, wanting his warmth, but taking care not to let my body touch his. He didn’t respond. I curled around my own belly, feeling my skin cool. I tried to take in the unfamiliar feelings of having been entered by another person (my private explorations with an empty, conveniently shaped deodorant bottle had felt more under my control), of having felt my internal spaces shift to make room for a new presence. Of the stickiness on my thigh, fast drying to a powdery glaze. Tried to decide whether I’d liked it. “Michael?”

“Shit!” He sat up suddenly, nearly tumbling me off the little piece of the bed I was cotched on. I reached a hand to the floor to steady myself.

“When your father coming home?” he asked.

“Late, I told you.”

“He might change his mind. I have to go.” He was on his feet, already had his briefs on, his shirt. He was stepping into his pants as he talked.

“But—”

“And I have homework to do, girl.” He perched on a corner of the bed, far away from me, started putting his socks on. He flashed me a brief, bright grin that went no further than his teeth. “Trig, you know? Blasted Mr. Pape. He’s going to take up the assignment in class tomorrow.”

I sat up, reached for my dress. “Let me walk you to the dock, then.”

“No, no, no. It’s all right. Don’t fret yourself.”

“But…”

He was out the door before I knew it, still buttoning up his shirt. I watched him run along the rocky road, his book bag tucked under his arm. He held it tighter than he had held me.

I stared at the fleeing flag of his white shirt until the dark swallowed it up. “You Make Me Feel Brand New” was playing on the asinine pink radio Dadda had given me two years before. When the song got to the lyrics “Precious friend, with you I’ll always have a friend,” I yanked the plug out of the wall. I sat on the bed and blinked until my eyes were no longer brimming. I got up and pulled on a smock top and my favourite jeans—wide-legged elephant pants in a soft brushed cotton. Then I went and made myself a quick supper. I had homework to do, too.

Next day when I went into the caf for lunch, Michael was already sitting at a table with his guy friends, talking and laughing. He saw me, but I looked away. I found an empty seat at the other end of the cafeteria.

Evelyn’s husband Samuel picked us up in a Beamer, tastefully grey, that did not so much drive as it floated silently through the streets of Cayaba. I was used to bumping and grinding along in my rattletrap old Victoria. Samuel’s car glided as though there were no gravity. The ride was so smooth, I could barely tell up from sideways. I felt a bit queasy.

Samuel was a quietly handsome light-skinned black man, his features vaguely familiar. His temples were a distinguished grey, and he reeked of money. I wondered if he gave a smooth ride too. I gulped down my queasiness.

“So,” he said, looking at me through the rear view mirror, “you’re a librarian?”

“No, a library supervisor.”

“Chuh,” said Evelyn. “Probably no difference. Chastity was always so modest.”

“I get paid many thousands of dollars less a year than a librarian,” I told them. “Was too busy looking after Ifeoma to get the Master’s degree. Couldn’t have afforded it, anyway. I would have had to go abroad to study.”

The conversation went dead. I seemed to be good at making that happen. But pretty soon we were at the waterbus docks. Dealing with the business of paying our fare and navigating the car onto the waterbus kept Samuel busy. Evelyn looked out the window and drummed the fingers of one hand on the dash. Once the waterbus was underway, I said, “Samuel, thanks so much for rescuing me, eh?”

“It’s all right, man. Don’t mention it.”

Perfect gentleman. “I’m just going to stand by the front.” Never mind I wouldn’t be able to see anything in the dark. But it was a relief to ease myself out of that silent car and step into the night air and the sea breeze. Evelyn’s gaze after me was wistful, but she didn’t say anything. When I pushed the car door closed, it snicked shut with a quiet, solid thump. You had to slam Victoria’s doors to get them to close properly. The sound she made was like dropping a tyre iron, and was usually accompanied by flakes of rust snowing down onto the ground.

I moved around the other cars parked on the waterbus. Not too many at this late hour. The wind slid cool, delicious fingers along my scalp. I made my way to the front of the boat and stood there. The boat’s running lights threw a widening, disappearing triangle of yellow onto the water. Outside of that, there was nothing to see, only endless dark. The prow of the boat pitched and jumped over the waves, occasionally spraying a fine mist of water over me. I looked down, tried to imagine sea people stroking through the water. I shivered. I hated night swimming.

Off in the distance was one of the Gilmor Saline barges, heading for the other side of Dolorosse. These past few weeks, the amount of dust blowing around Dolorosse from the construction was a lot less. The plant would be officially open for business soon, the week before the election. Don’t tell me that Johnson hadn’t planned it that way to make himself look good.

We were coming up on Dolorosse. As I got back into the car, Samuel turned to look at me. “When we get there, you have to direct me to your house, all right?”

He had a really warm, friendly smile. It was hard to keep hating him just on principle. I smiled back. “All right.”

We drove down the gangway onto Dolorosse. The car took the gravel lanes of Dolorosse with the same mute grace with which it had handled the streets of Cayaba. “Left here,” I told Samuel, directing him between the two silk cotton trees which arced towards each other on either side of the road.

“They look like people holding hands,” he said. “The trees, I mean.” So he had imagination, too. Another point for Samuel.

Evelyn was craning her neck all around, seeing what she could of Dolorosse in the dark. “You know,” she said, “I’ve never been here. And after the hurricane, I just didn’t have the taste for making the trip.”

“Dadda told me that a lot of Cayabans stopped coming out to the islands after that hurricane.”

“Good thing, too,” Samuel said. “Gave the seal population time to get their numbers up.”

“Now you sound like Hector,” I told him.

“And who’s Hector?” Evelyn had a sly, knowing kind of tone to her voice.

“Strange man from the university.”

“A handsome strange man?” she asked playfully.

“If you like that type.” I did, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “No, he’s a biologist. Marine biologist. He’s studying the seals. Lives in a little launch on the water all day and night, watching them through a scope and making notes.”

“That sounds romantic,” said Evelyn.

“Seals are all he can talk about.”

“Oh.” She looked back out the window again. Shame on me, bad-mouthing poor Hector. But I didn’t want Evelyn getting too nosy.

“Why he studying the seals?” Samuel asked over his shoulder.

“You asking me? We don’t talk much about that.”

Evelyn couldn’t resist. “What you talk about, then?”

Stuffy in here. I needed some fresh Dolorosse air on my face. “Samuel, how you roll down the windows in this fancy car of yours?”

“The little green arrows in the door,” he told me. “Up is up and down is down.”

“And never the twain shall meet?”

Evelyn giggled at me. I pushed the “down” button, inhaled the cool, salty breeze. You would think someone with enough money to run a car like this could keep the air conditioning going.

Ant crawling up my bare arm, I could feel it. I slapped it off, only to feel another one on the outside of my right thigh. Inside my panty hose? I rubbed my hand over the spot to squash it. But then there were more, crawling up my shins, down inside my blouse, the back of my neck; more than I could sweep off with my hands. “Shit!”

Evelyn looked over her shoulder. “What happen?”

By now I was doing a strange dance, trying to rub the ants off me from everywhere I felt them crawling. “I think you have ants in your car, Samuel.”

“What? Evelyn, you left a raisin bun in the glove compartment again?”

“No. That was only the one time.”

The tickling was driving me mad. “Stop the car, please. I need to get out and brush them off.”

Samuel pulled the car over and stopped. I hopped out. But all I rubbed my skin, slapped at the tickling places, the sensation wouldn’t stop. “Jesus!”

Evelyn opened her door. “Can you see them?”

“The ants? In this dark? No.”

Now Samuel was leaning over into the back seat, searching for ants by the light of his cell phone. “I don’t see anything here,” he said.

The little feet had stopped crawling all over me. I waited a second, then said, “It’s all right, Samuel. I think I got them all.” He and I checked the back seat before I got back in, but not a thing we could find. “Let’s just go,” I said to him.

He got back in the driver’s side. “I’m so sorry, Calamity.”

“But you don’t have to apologise. There’s nothing in the car. I wonder where they came from?”

“Maybe you picked them up from the waterbus?” Evelyn asked me.

“Maybe.” I slipped my shoes off. After all day in the sweaty panty hose, my feet were itching.

“Make a right here, Samuel.”

Now my hands were itching, too. I scraped at one hand with the nails of the other, switched. Christ on a crutch—don’t tell me I was allergic to ants now. “Just follow this bend around to the right,” I told Samuel.

My heart was pounding, my body feeling trembly inside. “Evelyn?”

“Ah?”

“You carry anything like Benadryl on you?”

“No. Why?”

“Nothing much. The ant bites just making me a little itchy. A left, Samuel.” The itching promptly got so bad I had to fight not to claw at my hands and feet. “A right here, Samuel.”

Thank heaven, the itching was easing up. It was almost gone now. Looked like I’d be all right.

The air in the car was thick and close. Heat blossomed in my chest and swept upwards to my head. Sweat broke out on my face. I panted for air, trying to do it quietly so Evelyn and Samuel wouldn’t hear. I leaned over and turned down the other window. Evelyn glanced briefly back at me. “Samuel,” she said, “turn off the air conditioning. I think Calamity prefers the night air.”

The air had been on all this time? “You sure the air conditioning is working?” I asked them. “Make another right, Samuel.” I fanned my face with my hands, parted my knees to let some air get to my thighs. “Woi,” I said. “Hot night, you don’t find?”

“Oh!” said Evelyn. “How about we keep the air on and the windows open? Believe me, I know how the Change of Life can be.”

The Change. Knowledge landed on me like a sack of bricks. “Shit. You’re right.”

“Pardon?” said Samuel.

Bare Bear; Dumpy; the almond tree; every time something had shown up, I’d been perishing for heat and scratching those two fingers.

“Calamity?”

“It’s menopause. That’s what’s doing it.”

“Well, don’t be ashamed, my love. It’s nothing Samuel hasn’t heard from me, plenty times.”

“Samuel,” I said, “it’s the next left.” What had manifested now? And where? Must have been something big, to be putting me through all this.

We passed Mrs. Chin’s place, and Mr. Robinson’s little store where he sold candles, eggs, and so: basic items for people who didn’t want to make the trip to the big island just to get one or two little things. I was still gasping a bit. I stuck my head out the window, sucked in air, pulled at my damp clothing. What I saw up ahead brought on chills. “Samuel, you’re going to make a right at that… thing there in front of us.”

He peered at it. “What that? Some kind of sculpture or something?”

“It’s stones. Big, flat rockstones piled on each other. The island children made it.”

“How sweet,” Evelyn murmured.

In fact, only one island child had made it, because there’d been only one child in those days. Me. That sculpture came from Blessée. I’d built it over the days of one long summer to mark the border of our property. I’d pretended the yellow-blue brown girl from the sea was helping me, hauling rocks alongside me, and urging me to come and swim when we got too hot.

It was me. Every time I had a power surge. I shuddered, not burning up any longer. Chilled.

We were coming up to the corner; around the bend was Dadda’s house. Behind my ribcage, my heart was splashing like a drowning man in the sea.

“Chastity?” said Evelyn. I didn’t correct her. I was back in small-girl days. Chastity was the right name. “You didn’t tell me your father had started up the cashew farm again.”

He hadn’t. My skin pimpled at what I saw out the car window.

Our cashew grove. From Blessée. Resurrected.

“I didn’t think to tell you,” I murmured as we passed the fence, the mass of trees that had once been neat rows, but which Dadda had neglected until the seeds they’d dropped had spawned a cashew jungle, battling with their parents for light and air. Casuarina pines ringed the orchard as they had when I was younger, to protect the cashew trees from the wind. The spiny casuarina leaves rattled in the slight breeze, like the coco broom Mumma used to use to sweep any dead leaves away from the orchard, so we could better collect the fallen fruit. There it all was in front of me. I thought I was going to be sick.

“You cool enough now?” Samuel asked. I saw his concerned face in the rear view mirror.

“Never better,” I told him, trying not to let my teeth chatter.

There was the house in front of us. The Dolorosse house, thank God, not the drowned one. I let out a shivery breath, then another. “That’s it,” I told them. “There’s no real driveway. Park anywhere, except over there.” I pointed. “I have some tomato bushes coming up.”

The car drifted silently to a place in front of the house, off to one side. Samuel turned it off. It was scarcely any quieter than when it had been running. We sat in the dark as the engine ticked down. A thought unfurled in me like ice water poured into my veins. Dadda. Mr. Lee said the dead don’t stay quiet.

“Calamity?” came Samuel’s cultured voice. “You want us to see you to the door?”

“Don’t you be so polite,” Evelyn chided him. “I want her to invite us in.” She turned to me. “Just for a little while, please? I know it’s late. But you and I still have to talk about children from the sea.”

“Isn’t that a brand of tinned tuna?” Samuel said with a chuckle. Evelyn play-swatted him over the head.

If Dadda was back, what was back, exactly? What shape was he in? I didn’t want to move out of the car.

“Calamity?” Evelyn was facing me in her seat, kneeling in it like an eager young girl. “Please? Only if you say yes. Otherwise we will just see you to the door and leave you alone. You and I can talk tomorrow.”

Leave me alone? With a jumbie walking somewhere there-bout? Not a rass. I leapt out of the car, yanked Evelyn’s door open. “No, no; come on in. Sit and have a drink with me. Please.”

I led them to the front door, my skin prickling the whole way. The cashew trees shushed the night. Mumma used to tell me that the sound they made was their way of reminding bad little girls to go to sleep when night come. So many nights of falling to sleep with the crash of the sea coming in one window and the whispering of the cashew grove from the other.

I unlocked the door and threw it open wide. It banged against the wall and rebounded. Samuel stopped it with his hand before it hit me in the face. I reached inside, swiped my hand over the light switch and pulled it back outside before anything unknown could touch me. The hallway light was dim when it came on. I kept meaning to change that bulb. Its dusty yellow light revealed the narrow space, cluttered with two and a half pairs of my tennis shoes, a towel from the last time I’d had a sea bath, and a stack of books I kept meaning to return to the library. Good thing I didn’t have to pay overdue fines. “Come on in,” I said to Samuel and Evelyn. I picked up the towel as I stepped in ahead of them. If Dadda’s jumbie came at us from the darkened house, I could throw the towel round his head, or something. Did a jumbie need to be able to see to grab you? I went on into the house, my protective towel wrapped around my hand and held before me.

“Everything okay?” Samuel asked.

“Oh, yes. Never better!” My voice was so bright, it was blinding. I reached around the entrance to the living room with the towel-wadded hand and flicked the light on. I stood bravely in the entrance, barring Evelyn and Samuel from going in until I checked it out. I looked around. Unless he was hiding behind the sofa, Dadda wasn’t in there. And by the end, he hadn’t been agile enough to crouch down anyway. But the skin on my arms was still horripilating. I took a surprised Evelyn by the hand and marched her into the living room with me, Samuel following. Nothing leapt out at us, smelling of the crypt. “There,” I said to them. “That’s all right, then. Cashew liqueur, anyone?”

They looked at me a little uncertainly. “Yes,” said Samuel. “That would be nice. Just a small one for me. Driving, you know.” Gingerly, they both made to sit on the settee. I managed to retrieve a dirty bowl with three half-exploded popcorn kernels in it before Samuel sat in it.

“I’ll get you your drinks,” I told them. I turned towards the kitchen. Its darkened doorway hunkered at the other end of the living room. The light switch for the kitchen was well inside the doorway, by the fridge. “Evelyn,” I said companionably, “you want to come in the kitchen with me? To powder our noses, or something?”

She stood up. “Don’t you powder your nose in the bathroom?”

“You, maybe. I like the light better in the kitchen. Natural. Kinder to our aging features, you know.”

“But it’s nighttime,” she told me. “It’s natural dark, not natural light.”

I didn’t reply. With my be-towelled hand, I gently pushed her on ahead of me. She stumbled into the dark kitchen. Lord forgive me, I waited about half a second. When I heard no screams of terror, I found the light and switched it on. “Samuel?” I called out. “You still okay out there?”

“Of course,” he called back. “Mind if I look at your books?”

“No, man. Go ahead.”

I opened the doors of the cupboard where I kept the glasses, looking for the crystal ware. “Evelyn, you think you could get the liqueur out from the pantry for me? It’s that door over there.” I couldn’t face another dark room just now. “Look for a big green glass bottle on the shelf just in front of you when you go in.”

“Sure, man.” She let herself in. “Where the light switch?”

“You see the pull chain hanging down? Should be right in front of you.”

She exclaimed. I was at her side before I thought about it. “What, what?” I asked.

She was standing safely in the doorway, staring amazed at row upon row of jugs, jars, and bottles filling almost every shelf in the ten-foot-high pantry space. Holy. Fuck.

“Calamity, what is all this?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “if I remember, the jars have in cashew fruit jelly. The bottles have in cashew liqueur. The jugs is cashew wine.”

“Your father made all this, or you?”

“Me? No. Was Dadda.”

“He kept doing it even while he was sick?”

“Uh-uh,” I said, staring at the bottles, “the cashew farm went down with Blessée.” Too late, I remembered that the cashew farm had reappeared outside the door. “I mean,” I said, “he was too sick to do plenty. All this is remaining from when he left Blessée. They almost wouldn’t take him with everything he wanted to carry.”

She smiled. “Remember how nice those roast cashews used to taste? Your father would bring them to school in those little rolled-up cones of newspaper. They used to sell them in the cafeteria.”

“And is who you think roasted all those cashews with Dadda and rolled them up? That was what I did come the weekend. That and homework. Helped to stretch the paycheque.”

“Oh. I’m sorr—”

“Stop it.” I took the bottle of liqueur from her, poured some of it into each of three glasses. I gave her one glass. She followed me as I took the remaining two into the living room.

Samuel turned from the bookshelf, a book in his hands. “Peter Pan?” he said.

“Where?”

He grinned. “The Change really making you forgetful, I see.” He held the book up. “From your own bookshelf.”

The torn dust jacket—Chastity never could keep those undamaged. It was mine, all right. I gave Samuel his liqueur, took the book from him, handed him my glass as well.

Old possessions have a life to them. That book felt so much like itself in my hands, so much Chastity’s copy of Peter Pan and Wendy and nobody else’s that I nearly wept. I inspected the bookshelves. “I have The Borrowers too,” I said, “and Return from Last Man Peak.” At least I did now. Or again, or something. More of my rediscovered treasures, come sailing back to me on the seas of a night sweat.

“Children’s books?” asked Evelyn. Her curious eyes took in Dumpy in his place of pride on the coffee table, and Bare Bear sitting in a corner of the settee. “Oh! Look, Samuel!” Evelyn plumped down onto her knees. From under the coffee table she pulled out an ancient Magic Slate. The grey sheet of plastic was creased and rumpled. Great. Now she thought I was in my second childhood. “So long I haven’t seen one of these! Calamity, where you find these things?”

“Oh, you know. You’d be surprised where things turn up.” I took my glass from Samuel. “To you and yours,” I toasted them. Then I knocked back my drink in two burning swallows. Evelyn and Samuel sipped theirs.

“This liqueur is nice,” Samuel told me. He and Evelyn sat on the settee.

“Yes, Dadda was good at making it. You want some more?”

He raised one eyebrow, but only replied, “I’m still working on mine for the moment, thank you.”

Evelyn peered down the corridors leading to the rest of the house. “How long it takes you to get to work from here?”

“Forty-five minutes in rush hour; an hour if the waterbus late again.”

“I see you have running water—”

“Jesus, Evelyn. It’s not the Dark Ages out here, you know.” But I couldn’t be boasty like that. “Cell phone service not too good sometimes. And the electricity could be sometime-ish.”

“But the land line works?”

“Yeah, man. Why?”

“And how many bedrooms you have?”

“Ev!” Samuel said. “Why you fasting up yourself in Calamity’s business?”

“Three,” I replied. What was she after? I wanted to play the game out. “Mine, Dadda’s old room, and the guest bedroom.”

“You have plenty activities outside of work? You come home late in the evenings?”

“No, I’m home a lot. Couldn’t take on anything much while Dadda was dying. Cut back to part time at the library.”

She nodded, took another sip of her drink, then swallowed the rest of it almost as briskly as I’d done. She stood up. “Samuel, you ready to go?”

He gave her a surprised look. But he put his mostly full glass down and stood.

“Dolorosse has a day care?” Evelyn asked.

Oh, fuck me sideways. Was this cruel Evelyn, or repentant Evelyn? “No,” I said, “but Mrs. Soledad from over the way used to stay with Dadda for me when I was at work.”

“She know how to look after children? You trust her?”

“She and her husband ran an artisan salt farm and raised three boys and a girl, and none of them in jail, and none on the street. She cared for Dadda like he was her own. Why?”

“Come into the hospital tomorrow and apply to be a foster parent. I’ll give my recommendation for the little boy to come and stay with you in the mean time.”

“You will?”

“Provisionally, you understand. If it doesn’t work out, they might still find him another home.”

I was stunned. “How come you changed your mind? This isn’t more of your guilt, is it?”

“Not a bit of it. Not where a child is concerned.” She looked around. “You have the time, and the experience, and the space. You have toys and books for him to play with. He trusts you. And I have a feeling he might like to be close to the sea.”

All I could do was gape at her. She smiled. “And this way, I can come and visit him and you both. Make sure you getting on okay.” She grinned at the look on my face. “Maybe talk about fairy tales coming true,” she said.

Samuel looked baffled. “I don’t know what going on with the two of you, Calamity, but I’ve learned never to come between Evelyn and her schemes. I’d advise you not to even try.” He took her hand. “Come on, darling. Let me take you home from a long day of playing the rescuing angel. Calamity, my dear, thank you for your hospitality.”

“You’re welcome.”

As I walked them to their car, Evelyn said, “Tomorrow I’ll send Martin around from the mechanic’s to the hotel to get your car and fix that flat tyre.”

“But I—”

“You’re going to need a functioning car now that you have a child to look after all the way out here. If you can’t pay for it now, I’ll tell Martin to run you a tab. There’s a stipend that comes with being a foster parent, you know?”

“There is?”

“You can pay Martin out of your first government cheque. I’ll vouch for you.”

I was too dazed to even wave as they drove away. The Beamer disappeared down the path, leaving me in the whispering dark with the cashew grove.

And the jumbies. It took me a while to get up the courage to go back inside.

“Keep your part of the bargain now,” said the devil girl. “Pull me up out of this hole.”

So Granny did that. The devil girl was slippery. Her skin was a deep blue, like the water in Blue Pit, the bottomless lagoon. And she was heavy for so! Granny managed, though. But before Granny could stop her, the devil girl shimmied up onto Granny’s shoulders, wrapped her legs around Granny’s neck, and tangled her long blue nails in Granny’s hair. “Carry me to where you living, Granny; beg you do,” said the devil girl.

And she squeezed her legs tighter around Granny’s neck.