I DROVE MY CAR DOWN THE FERRY’S OFF-RAMP, following the cars in front of me. Traffic moved slowly this morning, with much blaring of horns. February was the height of tourist season, and the hotels at the Cayaba harbour would be cluttered with visitors until early May. Sure enough, there was one of their massive cruise ships, just docked. Bloody thing was the size of a mountain, gleaming white as the mounds of the salt stacks in the distance, from the original Gilmor Saline plant.
By the time I was able to edge my car out of the harbour zone, I’d had to back up twice to find streets that weren’t clogged, and I’d witnessed three near-accidents as vehicles came close to rear-ending each other. The smell of exhaust and diesel turned my stomach. The noise was abominable. I drove past a big billboard that read, WELCOME TO CAYABA; HOME OF THE RARE MONK SEAL. The picture showed three seals frolicking in the surf—two adults and a child—as though seals hooked up in nuclear family units. At each corner of the image was a mermaid, exotically brown but not too dark. No obvious negroes in Cayaba Tourist Board publicity, unless they were dressed as smiling servers. The fish women sported the kind of long, flowing hair that most black women had to buy in a bottle of straightening solution. They had shells covering their teacup breasts. I would love to see the shell big enough to hide one of my bubbies. My first day going back to work, and already I was in a mood. Agway was probably eating Mrs. Soledad’s green banana porridge right now. Then she was going to take him for a walk, introduce him to the neighbours.
I turned onto St. Christopher Street, right into a traffic jam that went as far as I could see. Backside. St. Christopher Street was long, one-way, and lined with expensive “boo-teeks” selling all kinds of nonsense: lamps made of old rum bottles covered in glued-on shells (the shells were imported in bulk from China); neon bikinis no bigger than a farthing; a zillion zillion t-shirts, coasters, baseball caps, mugs, and canvas shopping bags, all imprinted with images of monk seals and mermaids and the Cayaba Tourist Board logo (“Cayaba; Our Doors Are Open”). This was the heart of what Cayabans called the Tourist Entrapment Zone. There was no turnoff for a while.
Traffic crawled. I tried to ignore the tourists clogging the sidewalks, the bright sarongs and Hawaiian shirts embossed with those fucking mermaids, the reggae music already blaring at 8:45 in the blessèd morning from every restaurant I passed. Why we had to import reggae? What the blast was wrong with tumpa?
Maybe Mrs. Soledad would take Agway to my almond tree. They could collect ripe almonds from under the tree. Eat them down to the bitter, fibrous part. Find rockstones and crack the almond shells open for the nuts inside. Would Agway like almonds? Maybe he knew them already; plenty of them fell into the water. Would he miss me? Mrs. Soledad had better remember that she wasn’t to take him near the water. Didn’t want him trying to jump in with that cast on his leg.
I hit the brakes; it was either that or hit the young white man who’d stepped into the road without looking. He was wearing only muddy surf jammers and rubber sandals. His shoulders and back were red as boiled shrimp. The colour offset the scrappy blond dreads hanging down his back. He gave me a lopsided grin and made the peace sign with his fingers. “No prahblem, mon; no prahblem,” he drawled in his best Hollywood Jamaican. “Cool runnings.” He staggered across the street.
“You not in Jamaica!” I yelled at him. Damned fool. Probably high. I was practically growling by the time I was able to turn off St. Christopher and continue to work.
When I got home, I would read The Cat in the Hat to Agway.
I parked in the staff parking, went in the back door, through Deliveries. Colin and, what was his name? Yes, Riddell. They were both loading up the bookmobile. Riddell looked up from the low, wheeled booktruck loaded down with that day’s bookmobile reserve requests. “Miz Lambkin!” He put down the box he was carrying and came over to me. Shyness froze my face. I cracked the ice into a smile. To my surprise, Riddell gravely took my hand and shook it. “I’m glad to see you back,” he said, “real glad.”
“Uh, thank you.” The true warmth of his smile was a balm. Made me shamed; I had barely remembered his name.
Colin had come up behind Riddell. He nodded to me. “Sorry for your loss, Miz Lambkin.”
“Thank you.” I released Riddell’s hand. The three of us stood there for a second in uncomfortable silence. “Well,” I said to them, “I talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay.” They returned to their work, and I scurried away. I’ll talk to you later. People say that all the time. Half the time it’s an untruth. We promise to come back so people won’t carry on bad when we leave.
You know how it is when you go back to your old school as an adult? How everything looks the same, but different? Children in the hallways and the classrooms, but not the faces you expect to see? The staff workroom was like someplace that I used to know. That clack-clack sound: Myrtle in her ever-present high heels. She wore them even more than me. David Stowar waved at me as he rushed for the elevator. He mouthed the word late. As usual. And he was sneaking a coffee up to the information desk, as always. I checked the schedule tacked up on the bulletin board. I had a workroom period for the first part of the morning. On the checkout desk after break. Good; I could ease into being back at work.
Mrs. Winter sat at her desk, her chair angled away from it. She had her foot up on one of the library’s wheeled stepstools, with a cushion from the Children’s Department under her ankle. She was pencilling names into a blank schedule grid. She gave me a look as frosty as her name.
My desk was a mess. Piled high with computer printouts of reserves that hadn’t been filled. I threw the strap of my purse over the back of my chair and got to work sorting.
“You still looking after that little boy?” asked Mrs. Winter.
“Last I checked, yes.”
“You didn’t leave him alone for the day?”
“He can’t be more than three, Mrs. Winter. You think I would leave a toddler home alone?” I started in on the other pile on my desk: damaged books and CDs that couldn’t be given to the patrons who’d reserved them.
“Beg pardon. It’s just that your mothering days gone so long now. Easy to forget how to do it.”
“Nope. Like riding a bicycle.” One CD case looked like somebody had dropped it into a mug of Ovaltine. “Or falling out of a tree.” I hoped Mrs. Soledad had remembered not to sugar Agway’s breakfast.
“Too besides,” said Mrs. Winter, “you had Ifeoma so young!”
“Mm.” I was sixteen when I brought Ife to Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward’s house from the hospital. The first time I had to change her diaper by myself, I cried for my mother. In those days, I had cried as much as baby Ife.
Now I was at the pile of sticky notes fringing my inbox. Most of them were reserves questions that staff members had taken from patrons.
Mrs. Winter scowled at her schedule, turned her pencil over, and erased something she’d written there. “It’s like the two of you raised each other,” she said.
“Mm.” Mr. Bailey wanted to know why his book on World War One heroes hadn’t come in. He was a war vet. He read only nonfiction books about soldiers. He’d been through every book we had on every war going, and was on his second go-round. I looked up his card number on my terminal, reserved that new biography on Desert Storm for him. He wouldn’t have read it yet. Millie Marshall wanted to know when we’d be getting the new Laurelle Silver novel. Laurelle Silver had died five years ago and there was now a team of six writers churning out breathless novels of sex and scandal amongst the rich and infamous under her name, yet they still couldn’t produce new titles quickly enough for Millie. I reserved a Kelly Sheldon and that new Carrie Jason novel for her; that’d hold her until Ms. Silver posthumously committed bad prose again.
Mrs. Winter held the completed schedule sheet out to me. “Chastity, pin this up on the board for me, nuh?”
“Calamity.” I stood and took it from her.
That chilly smile again. “You know how my head small, my dear. Can’t get my mind around everything you young people get up to nowadays. Changing your God-given names.”
The phone at my desk rang. It was David Stowar, calling from the information desk. “We need you up here, please.” There was a smile in his voice.
“Why?” Only librarians worked at the info desk.
“Just come, nuh? And make sure you don’t have any crumbs from breakfast on your shirt.”
“I had cocoa-tea for breakfast.”
“Well, no cocoa stains, then. Those don’t wash out for nothing. And come up here. Now.”
Mystified, I took the elevator up to the main floor. As I stepped out, I just had time to hear David say, “That’s her,” before I was surrounded by reporters. Camera flashes started to go off. I tried to put my hand up in front of my face. Someone took the hand and shook it.
“Sister Lambkin,” said the woman, “I’m so pleased to meet you. Such a selfless act on your part.” The woman looked a little younger than me. Probably dougla, with that flowing black hair and those full African lips. Speaky-spokey, too. Come from money. And wasn’t that a Chanel suit? In this heat?
Oh, shit. It was Caroline Sookdeo-Grant. Shaking my hand. “What selfless act?” I asked.
“You plucked that little boy from the waves in the middle of a storm—”
“Agway? But the storm was over by then. And he had already washed up onto—”
“You kept him alive until the ambulance arrived—”
“When I got to him, he wasn’t in any danger of being anything but alive.”
“And now that his family has perished in that tragic accident, you’ve taken him into your home. Such generosity, Sister.”
“How you even come to hear about me?” I asked her.
“Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant, Mrs. Lambkin, look this way, please.”
We looked that way. Sookdeo-Grant grabbed my hand again in one of those disturbingly firm handshakes. We smiled. “Your daughter told me,” she said. “Wonderful person. You must be very proud of her.”
The flash went off. By the time my dazzled eyes could see again, Sookdeo-Grant was being escorted out of the library. Passers-by were calling out her name. She stopped, shook a few hands, smiled a lot. Then she stepped into the back of a nondescript beige car and was driven away.
More flashes popped, and someone stuck a microphone that had the CNT logo on it in front of my face. “Just look at me, not the camera,” said the camera man. So of course, after that, I couldn’t see anything but the camera. It was a very big camera.
“Look this way, please,” said the reporter. She had that glamour that people get on them when they live their lives on television. “That’s good, Mizziz Lambkin. Now, tell the audience; how does Mr. Lambkin feel about you bringing an orphan into your home?”
“Mr. Lambkin’s dead,” I replied. “The funeral was last Saturday.” My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my skirt pocket. “Hello?”
“Stanley?”
“Well, there you have it, folks,” said the reporter into her microphone. The big camera was pointed at her now. “Not only did this brave woman throw herself into a raging sea to save a child she didn’t know—”
“Grandma, you really think a kite would work?”
“—she did so on the way home from burying her husband, who had tragically passed away that same day.”
“The day before,” I said. “Only he wasn’t my—”
“For my science fair project, I mean? Remember?”
“Just a minute, Stanley.”
“For Cayaba National Television, this is Jane Goodright, reporting live from the main branch of the Cayaba Public Library.”
“But he wasn’t my husba—”
“Maybe I could tie a camera to a kite?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, eyeing the very large camera in front of me. “A camera’s much too big.”
“Thank you so much, Mizziz Lambkin. Please sign this release. It just says that you’re okay with us putting this little interview on the air.”
I took the pen she handed me, and struggled to sign the release and juggle the cell phone at the same time.
“A small camera, Grandma. A disposable. Only I don’t know how to make it take the pictures from up in the air…. Grandma?”
“Stanley, I call you back later, okay?” I handed the reporter back the piece of paper.
“But I need to decide now! I have to tell my teacher by next period what my project is!”
“All right, all right. I think a kite would work fine. Wonderful idea. Call me tonight and we’ll figure out how to do it. Okay?”
“I can come to the library tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ll be here. I have to go, Stanley.”
I snapped the phone shut and turned to tell the reporter the real story. She and the camera man were gone.
“I’m going to kill my daughter,” I said to David.
He looked like he’d had a vision. “That was Jane Goodright,” he whispered. “Standing not two yards from me.”
The info desk phone rang. David answered it. “It’s for you,” he said. I took the receiver from him.
“Calamity?”
“It just might be a calamity. For my wretched girl child, anyway.”
“Pardon?” It was Gene’s voice.
“Long story. Look, I not supposed to take personal calls at work. You could make this quick?”
“Okay. You know that rusty cutlass I had the other day?”
“Yes?”
“Well, I told you a little untruth.”
“Gene, I need to get off the phone.”
“I found it in the cashew grove. It has Mr. Lambkin’s name on the handle.”
Ah, shit. How to explain that? No, it was okay. I had Gene half-convinced the cashews had always been there. “And?”
David said, “You think I should have asked Jane Goodright out? I hear she not seeing anybody.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Gene. “The lab found traces of blood and tissue on the blade.”
I dropped the receiver.
AND WHAT A PIECE OF BUSINESS trying to find someone to watch Agway for me for a few hours on Thursday so I could spend time with Gene! Three days a week was all Mrs. Soledad could spare. Ifeoma was going to a meditation class, or something like that; Clifton and Stanley were going to Stanley’s weekly karate practice. When I had lived in the little apartment building on Lucy Street, and Ifeoma had wanted watching, my neighbour Maxine was more than willing to do it, especially if I kept her up to date on my adventures with my latest boyfriend. What had happened to Maxine? I had lost touch with her when I got the library job and moved into a bigger apartment.
I knew Ev wasn’t free. Wasn’t going to ask Hector. I didn’t know him well enough. And besides, I kind of had my eye on both him and Gene, so it didn’t seem right to ask him to babysit for me so I could go and pitch woo with the other guy. Oh, so lovely to have prospects again!
But I had to eat dirt to get Agway a babysitter, and I knew it. I dialled the phone.
“Hello?”
“Michael?”
“Yes, Calamity.”
Uh-oh. I knew that flat tone. He was going to milk my blow-up for every drop of juice he could wring out of it. “How you doing, Michael? Things good?”
“You have a reason to call me?”
Fuck. He was going to make this hard. I swallowed. “Well, yes.” Shit, this was like spitting out nails. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Michael, cut me some slack, nuh? I’m sorry I said those things to you, okay?”
“You said them to Orso, too.”
“Okay. My apologies to him, too. Michael, I need your help.”
“Ah. So you’re sorry because you need my help.”
“Yes, I… No! I just need someone to babysit Agway for a few hours.” Damn. That didn’t sound too good, either.
“Calamity, you can’t try to make it up to us just because you need a babysitter!”
I expected him to sound angry. I hadn’t expected him to sound hurt.
“I didn’t mean it,” I mumbled. “You know how my temper stay.”
“True that. And I have to tell you; five years without having to deal with your temper was five peaceful years.”
Now he was exasperating me. “You’re really so sensitive, Michael?”
“Of course. Don’t you know, that’s what we faggots are like?” he said bitterly.
I heard someone speaking to him. “Wait,” he said to me. “Hold on.”
I could hear the conversation, but I couldn’t make out the words. I could only sit there and feel bad.
Michael came back on the line. “When you need the sitter?”
I brightened up. “Six p.m.,” I replied. “I’ll probably be back home around eleven.”
More conversation with the other voice.
“Okay,” said Michael. “You’ll have a sitter.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. You always come through for me.”
“I’m not coming.”
“But, Michael, you just said—”
“I’m not coming. Orso says he can babysit for you.”
Michael’s fancy man? Alone with Agway? “But I don’t—”
“Don’t start with me, Calamity. You should thank your lucky stars he’s willing to help you after how you treated us.”
I had to ask. “Orso… he’s okay with children?”
“I don’t even want to think about what you getting at with that little piece of veiled contempt. So I going to pretend I don’t understand you. If you had ever made the time to get to know him, you would know that Orso is the eldest of six brothers and sisters. When his parents were working, it’s he looked after them.”
“He did?”
“Orso know about feeding times and reading bed-time stories and wiping runny noses. He know all that that I didn’t have no chance to learn.”
Ifeoma had never spent a single night in her father’s care. I wouldn’t allow it. Who knew what kinda carousing he was getting up to? I wasn’t going to put my baby into the middle of that.
“Orso say he will see you five-thirty sharp. And now I’m hanging up this phone. Good day, Calamity.”
The phone went dead. I put the receiver into its cradle. Back in the day, Michael and me could never stay on the outs for long. He would probably get over being upset. Probably.
GENE WAS COMING AT SIX. At five-fifteen, I still wasn’t ready. I had showered and bathed both me and Agway. I was powdered and perfumed, and I had tried on one outfit after the other, and none of them worked. The green blouse made my belly look too fat. The lavender dress with the roses on it was too dressy, plus I had to wear panty hose with it or my legs would chafe, and I wasn’t wearing no blasted panty hose in this heat. My arms looked too flabby in the striped t-shirt. And the black slacks just made me look old, old, old.
Agway was out in the living room, singing along with the theme song to his favourite television cartoon. When he didn’t know the words—which was often—he made them up. Shoulda been funny, but I was in no mood. Actually, I was in quite a mood. The four or five outfits spread out on the bed all looked like crap on me. I was getting sweatier and sweatier and more and more miserable.
Someone knocked on the front door. I reached for my bathrobe, but Agway was way ahead of me. I could hear his feet pattering as he ran to the door.
“Agway!” I yelled. “Careful! You going to trip! And don’t open that door without me!” Damned child had no native caution when it came to other people. Don’t know what his parents had been teaching him.
Sure enough, by the time I had the bathrobe on and had made it to the front door, Agway had opened it and was burbling happily at Orso. Orso was squatted down, talking back. “What is that you say? Yes, I’m very pleased to see you, too.”
Orso grinned as Agway threw himself into his arms. He stood, swirled Agway around in the air. Man and boy chortled. Then Orso saw me. “Excuse me, Agway.” He set the child down on his feet. “Good evening,” he said to me. He stood with his arms crossed, waiting.
He was wearing perfectly faded jeans, a stylin’ pair of leather sandals polished to a fare-thee-well, and an impeccably ironed navy blue cotton shirt that made his dark skin gleam. It just wasn’t right for a man to be so well turned out. Made me feel frumpy. And he was waiting for me to say what I knew I had to say. “Well, thank you for babysitting Agway for me. That’s really generous of you.”
“Mm-hm…”
Man, I hated backing down! I nerved myself up for my apology, but Agway was having none of this boring big people palaver. He kept chattering at Orso, tugged at his hand to try to pull him into the living room.
Orso smiled at him and picked him up. “Looks like he’s happy with you,” he said.
“I’m trying. It’s good having him here.”
“And you looked like you were about to say something to me just now.”
I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth. Twelve hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. “I’m. Sorry.” I opened my eyes. He still had that expectant look. So I said, “I behaved badly the other day.”
“True that.”
“I should have minded my manners,” I told him in a rush. “You and Michael were guests in my house.”
Orso had more hair to pull than I did. Agway was yanking on it now and pointing into the living room, urging him to come and see some wonderful thing or other. Orso laughed and disentangled his hand. “You not going to let me squeeze every last little drop of remorse from her, that it?” He put Agway to stand and took his hand. “Apology accepted,” he said to me. “For now. I tell you true, though; you on sufferance with me. Michael loves you so much he’ll put up with any nonsense from you, but I won’t let anybody speak to me like that twice.” Then he toddled off with Agway into the living room. I followed, speechless. Michael loved me?
In the living room, Agway dropped Orso’s hand and grabbed his latest toy—an old briefcase of Dadda’s—off the coffee table, and proceeded to demonstrate to Orso how he had learned to undo the clasp, and how well chunky Dumpy (didn’t) fit inside the slim briefcase.
Orso sat on the floor and got into the game with him, loading Agway’s toys into the briefcase and struggling to close it. That quickly became a game of tummy tickle, with Agway wriggling and laughing. Orso looked up and saw my expression. He stood up.
“Calamity, we need to get one more thing out of the way right now.”
“What’s that?”
“Men get me hot. Not children.”
My face warmed up, and it wasn’t no blasted hot flash, neither. “Okay,” I whispered, shame-facedly.
“Okay for true?” he asked.
My face never did hide anything very well. He sighed. “You know, you have the perfect good reference for me if you want one.”
“Who?”
“Stanley. He been at our house almost every Sunday for the past five years.”
Jealousy knotted up my belly. “So I hear.” I checked my watch. “Gene’s late.”
“That’s a girl’s prerogative.”
“If a narrow, dark-skinned man about our age knock on the door, that’s probably Gene. You could just tell him I’m dressing?”
“Cool breeze.”
I settled on the jeans and the green shirt. Sucked my tummy in and checked myself out in the bedroom mirror. Not too bad, if I kept the gut in. I got Agway’s snack from the fridge and took it for him. He plumped himself down on the floor to eat it.
Orso was watching a reality show. It looked like the one where bosses switched lives with their employees for a month.
I sat on the arm of the couch. “We just going to Mrs. Smalley’s; you know, the chicken place? You will call me if anything happen to Agway?”
“Yes, ma’am. And if I can’t get through to you on your cell, I will ring for the ambulance, the Fire Department, the Coast Guard, and hail any cute passing fishermen and beg them all to come find you.”
I couldn’t help it. I giggled.
“What time Agway goes to bed?”
“Seven, seven-thirty. I find if you turn the lights down around then, he will start to get sleepy.” Yay for diurnal rhythms. “I have some maami apple sliced up in the fridge. If he looking peckish, you could give him some for a snack. You help yourself, too, all right? Anything you want to eat. I curried some channa and beef, and there’s rice boiled, and ground provisions. And I’m babbling.”
“Nervous?” He’d stood and was looking through the bookshelves.
“Yeah.” I checked my watch again.
“About me, or about your date?”
I snorted. “You not easy, you know?”
Small, wary smile. “Take one to know one.” He slid two or three picture books off the shelf and brought them back to the couch.
“Probably about both of you. More about him, though.” I pointed at one of the books. “Cendrillon missing page five. Not that Agway can tell.”
That small smile again. “When you like this, I can see why you and Mikey used to be tight. He like us hot-mouth people.”
“You want the hot-mouth truth, then? I hate it when you call him ‘Mikey.’ That’s what I call him.”
“That’s all the bite you got? That was only ginger hot, not scotch bonnet pepper hot.”
I sighed. “You right. Losing strength in my waning years, I suppose.”
“Don’t fool yourself. Pepper sauce get hotter the longer you keep it. Agway, you want me to read you a story? Oh, I see you understand the word ‘story.’
” I went and got myself a shawl from the bedroom, checked my makeup for the umpteenth time. When I came back out, Orso and Agway were deep into a copy of Horton Hears a Who. Orso stopped reading when he saw me.
“You going to wear that blouse like that?”
“Like what?” I tried to look down over my bosom.
“Pull it out of the waist band lemme see?”
I did. He nodded. “That suit you better.”
“Thank you.”
Someone knocked at the door. Agway scampered for it, Orso after him. Agway got there first and opened the door. It was Gene. He’d just come from work, was still wearing his uniform. Hot. My nipples got pointy just looking at him.
He smiled at us. “Good evening,” he said. I introduced him to Orso, re-introduced him to Agway, who ducked behind my leg. Gene held out a new beach ball, uninflated. It was red and white. “For Agway. I could give it to him?”
Which made him Agway’s new best friend, even though Agway didn’t have a clue what the ball was.
“I won’t stay late,” I told him and Orso.
“Have a good time.”
AT EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, Mrs. Smalley of Mrs. Smalley’s Chicken Boutique had passed away gently in her sleep one night. Her grandson Kevin ran the place now, and he knew better than to change the name of the restaurant that had been a Cayaba tradition for so long.
Gene put the cafeteria tray with our fried chicken on it down on the table between us. “They didn’t have Pear Solo,” he said. “Shampa suit you?”
I nodded. I had to strain to hear him over the loud tumpa rhythms blaring from Mrs. Smalley’s speakers, the cash register staff yelling orders at the cooks in the back, the customers yelling orders at the cash register staff. The place smelled of hot grease, fried chicken, and pepper sauce. I loved it here.
Gene sat down and contemplated the plate on his tray: four pieces of chicken, about three potatoes’ worth of french fries, a tub of coleslaw, and two bottles of sorrel. “How you manage to eat all that?” I asked him.
“You should see me if I don’t. You think I’m skinny now?”
“Lean, not skinny.” But it’s lie I was telling. He was skinny.
A hot flash came and went. I scarcely noticed it in the heat from the restaurant stoves. But I did notice the balsa wood glider plane that appeared in the air near the ceiling of the restaurant and began spiralling down. “Excuse me,” I said to Gene. I stood, pushed my chair back, caught the plane by its body. Only a small boy sitting at a table beside his mummy seemed to have noticed. His mouth was hanging open. I winked at him.
Nine years old when I got the Pigeon glider. Not as fancy as Stanley’s; no motor or remote control. As I remembered, the wings and tail fins slipped neatly out of the body so it could all lie flat. I tucked the pieces into my handbag and sat back down.
“Everything all right?” asked Gene, busy shovelling coleslaw into his mouth.
“Totally fine. I just needed to stretch my legs out a bit.”
The small boy was tugging on his mother’s sleeve and pointing at me, but she was watching the latest Roger Dodger music video on the television, rocking her head in time to the music.
I bit into one of my chicken legs. The skin was crispy, and the meat was hot, peppery, and tender. The juice burst from it into my mouth. “Damn, I was hungry. I wonder what they put in the chicken to make it taste like this?”
“Ground allspice,” he said through a mouthful of coleslaw. “In the breading.”
“How you know?”
He grinned. “I’m an officer of the nation, ma’am. People have to tell me things.”
“Oh, yes? Well, I’m a citizen of the nation and it’s people like me you’re protecting, right? So tell me this, Officer; why you took the cutlass from the house without my permission?”
His look was sharp. “Not from the house. We were outside.”
“From my premises, then. Don’t try to twist words on me. Why you looking into my dead parents’ private business?”
His head came up. His eyes were narrowed. “Come again? I don’t exactly need your permission to do my job.”
“Uh-huh. You mean somebody re-opened the case? And your superiors put you on it?” I leaned across the table and hissed, “And was fucking me on my father’s funeral day part of your investigation?”
He flinched. “No, no, and no,” he said, shame-faced. “Besides, if they re-opened it, would be the police handling it, not the Coast Guard. Tell you the truth, I just got a mind to look into your mother’s disappearance. On the side, you know? In private.”
“You know how sad Mr. Lambkin remained, long after your mother left? Some evenings I would go there after school for lessons, and he would still be in the pyjamas he slept in all night. Sink full up of dirty dishes. Eating peanut butter right from the jar, with his fingers if he couldn’t find a clean spoon. Couple-three times I did the dishes for him and got him some cooked food.”
The old guilt. “Crap. I figured he was having a hard time. But in those days he wasn’t talking to me.”
“I not giving you static over it. After I lost touch with him for so many years? I’m just saying, it’s because of Mr. Lambkin’s coaching that I made it into college at all. It’s he why I have this job. So if I can use the tools the job give me to clear his name, well, maybe I owe it to him to try. But I will stop right now if you want me to.”
Christ. The food didn’t taste so good any more. “Not much hope of clearing his name now, though. Not with blood on the cutlass blade.”
He saw my face, and held out his hand for mine. I couldn’t find my serviettes. Oh, those awkward social moments; lick the chicken grease off and then put my hand in his? Put my greasy hand in his and hope he didn’t notice?
He quirked a smile at me and gave me a couple of his serviettes.
“Thanks.” I cleaned my hand. He took it.
“All right,” he said. “Look me in my face, now. You mustn’t fret.”
“But… on the cutlass—”
“I don’t even really know what it is yet. Might not be human.”
“The sample is old, and there was only little bit of it. It might have been contaminated with other things that were on the blade. They not sure whether it’s human or animal.”
It was like I could breathe again. “You think it might be animal?” His eyes were hazel. I hadn’t noticed that before.
“He used that cutlass for all kinds of things, right?”
“True that. Even to chop up the chicken for dinner. Mumma was always after him to wash it.” I almost told him about the sealskin. I hadn’t found the time or privacy to burn it after all. I decided not to borrow trouble. If the stuff on the blade turned out to be seal, I would cross that bridge when I reached it.
“Well, that’s most likely what it is.” He let my hand go, got back to his supper. “Nobody ever found a body—sorry—that might have been your mother’s. So maybe she just ups and left allyou that night.”
“Maybe,” I said bitterly. With my fork, I paddled around in my coleslaw.
“So, if you give me permission, I would try to find out where she used to go, who she used to hang out with. See if I can turn up anything the Police missed.” He smiled. “Be kinda nice to rub their faces in it. Up to you, though. I not going to do anything unless you say.”
He was on his third piece of chicken. Most of the fries were gone.
“Christ. Watching you eat is like watching a Hoover vacuum.”
He grinned and kept chewing. I opened my tangerine Shampa. In the years before the company specified that it was supposed to be tangerine, me and Michael used to try to guess what fruit the “real fruit flavour” on the label was meant to be. Lime? June plum? Shaddock? I took a sip of the yellow-green drink. No. Still didn’t taste a bit like tangerine.
“They were fighting,” I said. “Mumma and Dadda. That night.”
Gene didn’t seem to change his steady, focussed attack on the food at all, but something about him came fully alert to what I was saying. “Fighting? What about?”
“I don’t know, some big-people something. They used to fight every now and again.”
“He ever hit her?”
“No. He would strap me if I crossed him. West Indian tough love. But he never touched Mumma. He wasn’t that kind of man.” I laughed. “Though I think he would have lost if he had been foolish enough to take Mumma on. She was taller than him, and wider. She used to joke she could pick him up and carry him out of a burning building if she had to. But I don’t think it was completely joke.”
“They used to fight plenty?”
“No. Just every so often.”
“And what would happen then?”
“Mumma would threaten to leave. Dadda would tell her to feel free. Sometimes she would go out for a few hours.”
“To where?”
“I don’t know. For a walk, probably. To cool down. Little more, she would come back. They would talk. By next morning, they would be laughing and joking with each other again.”
Gene studiously poured ketchup on his fries in a spiral pattern. “Kiss and make up?”
I nodded. “I guess. But sometimes she would stay out overnight instead.”
He put the ketchup bottle down and looked at me. “A whole night?”
On the television, the music programme ended. Time for the news. Good. Now I would be able to hear myself think.
“Yeah,” I said, “a whole night. She would row over to the big island, stay with relatives. Sometimes two nights, till her anger blow over. Gene, what if you find out that he killed her in truth?”
His face crumpled. “I don’t even want to think about that. I want him to be the hero in my mind, you know? The man who made the world make sense for me.” He was silent for a bit. “But the truth is, if we find out he was guilty, nobody know but you and me.”
I sputtered on my Shampa. He said it so calmly.
“But we couldn’t do that!” I said. “We would have to let the authorities know!”
Some of the spark came back. “Sweetheart, I am the authorities.”
“Not you one! Not all by yourself!” My heart was thumping at that “sweetheart,” but this was more important.
Gene gave me a long, measuring look. “You something else, you know that?” He sounded bemused. “You cuss like a sailor, you have a temper like a crocodile, but you more honest than any judge I know.”
My face was heating up. “That not any virtue to speak of. The honesty, I mean. Only backtracking. I do it because my first impulse is to lie.”
“How you mean?”
“You ever try being a nineteen-year-old single mother in this country?”
“Nah, man. Maybe when I retire.”
I threw a serviette at him. He laughed.
“Serious, though,” I said. “A teenager on her own with a three-year-old on her hip, and no baby father in sight. Try renting an apartment. Getting a fucking bank account.”
He shrugged. “All legal. Nothing to prevent you.”
“Man, you know better than that. Or is what kind of officer of the law you are?” I was waving my Shampa bottle around in the air to make my point. I kissed my teeth, put down my bottle. “Nineteen is in between. You can’t drink booze yet, but you old enough to have a child walking and talking. Try to get a driver’s licence, they either want to know where your husband or where your parents. And when you can’t produce either, you going to wait till you drop while they check every friggin piece of i.d. you have, and call your job, and verify your signature. You ever try waiting in a bank line-up with a three-year-old?”
He laughed. “Yeah. I can match you there.”
I realised I didn’t know plenty about him. Cool breeze; he would get his grilling later. “People have a way to judge you. That’s all I’m saying.” Remembering those times was making me grumpy.
“True that. But what it have to do with being honest?”
For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I remembered. “Oh. That. Sorry. Forgetful nowadays. I just mean that I got good at lying. I would tell people my husband working in foreign. Or that Auntie Pearl was my mother. Sometimes I even pretended that Ifeoma was my little sister.”
Sometimes I would pretend I wasn’t Ifeoma’s mother.
I managed to keep talking. “But then my conscience would start pronging me,” I told him. “And I would take back the lie, but sometimes people will get on so bad when they find out you tricked them that it would have been better to just leave them ignorant. So now I try to tell the truth right off the bat. Stand tall, look people in the eye, and tell them about me. If they going to make trouble for me because of it, best I find out one time, so I don’t have nothing more to do with them.” But my little girl had heard me telling people that she wasn’t mine.
“And how you figure that’s not a virtue?”
I gave an embarrassed laugh. “Because sometimes I still tell a lie, and have to take it back afterwards.”
He wasn’t paying attention. He was looking at the television. I turned to see what was so absorbing. The announcer was saying:
“… race heated up this morning, when prime minister Garth Johnson and minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Affairs Guinevere Poon announced the date of the ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open the new Gilmor Saline, Incorporated, plant that has recently been completed on the island of Dolorosse.
“Last year, reduced restrictions on foreign investment in Cayaba made it possible for the Johnson government to lease the small island of Dolorosse to Gilmor Saline. The U.S.-based company, which has operated a salt production factory on the main island of Cayaba since 1955, has created artificial salt ponds and constructed a second factory on the southwest coast of Dolorosse.”
The shot cut to Johnson at his press conference. He was saying:
“Cayaba citizens deserve a high-quality standard of living—”
“Damn right!” a woman from another table burst out. The woman with her shushed her.
“—to provide well for their families. That has been and will always be my priority for this country. For more than five decades, Gilmor Saline has been a key partner with the government of Cayaba, providing employment for a significant proportion of the Cayaba population. This new venture between us is a tangible demonstration of the exemplary cooperation that exists between Cayaba and Gilmor Saline.”
“As part of the agreement between Gilmor Saline and the Cayaba government,” said the announcer, “the corporation will provide three new, state-of-the-art waterbuses to increase service on the ferry route, and is currently building towers and installing antennae on Dolorosse to boost cell phone reception for Dolorosse residents.”
“That’s the part I like,” I told Gene.
“Opposition leader Caroline Sookdeo-Grant was on hand for comment. She applauded the increased employment that the second plant has brought and congratulated the prime minister in that regard. She also joked about the apparently strategic timing of the ceremony, which will take place just three days before the upcoming election. But speaking on a more serious note, Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant also had a caution for the prime minister.”
Now we were seeing Sookdeo-Grant at the press conference, with the noise and bustle of people milling around her. She said: “Cayaba should be moving very carefully in any dealings we make with foreign multinationals or accepting more foreign aid. The FFWD demands that we reduce trade restrictions as a condition of lending us money. This allows foreign multinationals such as Gilmor Saline to grow unchecked in our country, forcing small farmers out of business. What will happen to the independent small salt farms on Dolorosse and the other islands? Will they be priced out of business? Forced to seek work in the Gilmor Saline factory for minimum wage?”
“Tell them!” shouted an old East Indian man sitting alone with the paper and a Banks beer.
“Mr. Ramlal, hush, nuh?” said Kevin Smalley’s wife from over by the cash register. She pointed at the television. “Listen.”
The announcer was saying, “Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant says that should her party win the upcoming elections, it intends to implement programmes to foster small business growth.”
The din in the restaurant got worse as people began to argue.
“And in other news…”
Gene still watching the blasted television. “Like that tv have you hypnotized,” I said. He just pointed at it with his chin.
“Opposition party leader Mrs. Caroline Sookdeo-Grant paid a visit today to a remarkable woman.”
Crap. It was me on the television, looking stunned and shaking Sookdeo-Grant’s hand.
Gene said, “You know, I just had a feeling you were a remarkable woman.”
“… leapt into the rough seas off Dolorosse on Sunday, to save the life of a little boy in the water.”
In the restaurant, a woman called out, “Look her there!” She was pointing at me.
The announcer said, “Mrs. Lambkin, a recent widow, had buried her husband only the day before…”
I put my head in my hands. From inside my handbag, my cell phone started ringing.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE. Six. Today Alexander Tremaine counted six monk seals in the Zooquarium where five were supposed to be. But Crab Cake was not one of them. She was missing. Alexander closed his eyes. She would be back in a few days. They always were.
And the hell with the incident report. Management had never responded to a single one of them.
Alexander made a note to get in extra seal chow. Heaven only knew how many seals would be in the enclosure tomorrow.
“WOI.” Hector threw down the sandpaper and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He was sitting on an upturned bucket in the back yard, fixing up the tricycle like he’d promised. “I just need to tighten up that back wheel now, and put on a coat of paint.” He was sweating in the hot sun.
“I really appreciate your doing this, you know?” I poured him a glass of pineapple juice from the frosty jug I’d brought out, with plenty ice cubes. He pushed the container of fried ripe plantain that he’d brought with him closer to me.
“Don’t mention it. It’s a good thing for Agway to have.”
Hector was being friendly enough, but a little cool. Hadn’t been smart of me, going off on Michael and Orso like that with Hector to witness it. I was working hard to regain lost ground.
Agway brought his sippy cup back for more. Without the sea to cool him off, the heat was making him weary and fractious. I’d put a blanket down for him just inside the kitchen door where he’d be in the shade but I could still keep an eye on him. I tried again to offer him some plantain, but he pushed my hand away. He had his own snack.
Hector sucked down about half his glass one time and helped himself to some fried plantain. He opened up the paint can and got back to work.
I munched on some of the plantain slices myself. A flock of spoonbills flew over us. Hector watched them. “They kinda pale,” he said.
“Those must be the ones from the lagoon. No shrimp there to make them pink.”
Hector shook his head. “You impress me.”
“What? Why?”
“Plenty people wouldn’t know that it’s shrimp that gives the roseate spoonbill its colour.”
“Stanley knows.”
“I not surprised. They say the fruit don’t fall far from the tree. Ifeoma has a mind like yours, too.”
“Ife? Yes, she’s pretty smart. And curious. Just flighty-flighty.”
“Very smart. And pretty. Cayaba is something else, you know? Everywhere you turn, something else precious and rare.”
Not looking at me, he smiled. Lawdamercy. This time, the heat I was feeling wasn’t from no hot flash.
He glanced inside the kitchen, and his face took on an expression somewhere between horror and disgust. “Calamity, what is that child eating?”
“His afternoon snack. Shrimps.” Tailor-sat on the kitchen floor with his bowl, Agway was happily tearing each shrimp out of its cuticle shell with his teeth, chewing it down, and swallowing the yellow matter out of the head. He had a growing pile of empty shrimp shells on the floor beside him.
“He eating them raw?”
“Apparently he likes them like that.”
“Well, best he eat his fill now,” he said. “The day might come soon that you have to watch how much fish you eat from Cayaba waters.”
“Why?”
He pursed his lips like he was trying to make up his mind about something. “You could keep a secret?” he asked.
“Man, you asking a Yaban if they know how to be close-mouthed? This whole country would collapse if people didn’t mind whose business they talk.”
Ruefully, he said, “So I coming to find out. All right. You know I’m trying to figure out how Mediterranean monk seals come to be here.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not the only thing I’m doing. You shouldn’t tell anyone, you understand? There might not even be a problem. Don’t want to frighten people before we know for sure.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just blasted well tell me, nuh?”
“I’m spying on Gilmor Saline.”
“You kidding!”
“No lie.”
“Why?”
“They might be dumping their bittern illegally.”
“Their what?”
“Bittern. That’s what get leave behind when you manufacture salt. Every pound of salt give you a pound of bittern. And bittern in high levels is toxic. Gilmor Saline supposed to dilute it three hundred to one with water and pipe it way out to sea. We think they releasing it strong just so into the waters around Cayaba.”
“Oh, shit.” The water the sea people lived in. I took Agway’s bowl from him, though he’d already finished the shrimps and had curled up on his blanket to nap. “I should make him vomit them up?” I remembered the sound little Ife had made when I put my finger down her throat.
“Nah, man. Would take plenty plenty bittern to make him sick. It’s edible in reasonable amounts. It’s what they use to make tofu.”
“Thank heaven for that.” I put the shells into a plastic bag and threw them in the garbage.
“Mightn’t be anything to worry about,” Hector said. “In fact, the salt plant is good for wading birds; they eat the brine shrimp and so on you find in some of the evaporation ponds. But Gilmor can’t pump toxic levels of bittern too close to shore. You know the fishermen been complaining from since that the fish getting scarce? Your Fisheries Department been checking it out, and it’s true. Thirty percent reduction in some stocks.”
“Shit. You find out whether they dumping it for true?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Composition of the water around Cayaba is normal one day, and too high in bittern the next. The outlet pipes from both processing plants lead to deep water like they supposed to. But still the fish stocks going down. I been trying to find out if it’s affecting the seals. And I can’t get a good count on the blasted things to save my life! Different numbers every three days. Making me crazy! Nothing wrong with my instruments. I using the same procedure I use every time. Worked in Turkey, worked in Hawai’i. It’s just a simple census! Should be easy!”
He took off his t-shirt and mopped his brow with it. He had the kind of tubby barrel-body I liked in a man. And skin that made you want to lick it. I poured him some more pine drink. “I don’t know much about you,” I told him. “You have a poor, long-suffering wife waiting on dry land for you while you spend your nights out on the water watching the seals?”
He glanced at me, kept painting. “No wife,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Or girlfriend either.”
“Oh.”
“My ex-wife remarried last year. I guess she got over me faster than I got over her.”
“Oh!” Nothing to worry about, then. I poured myself some drink, shifted over a little closer to him. Was I even his type? Was I coming on like some of them old women trying to pose as twenty-one? Damn; this used to be so much easier.
He looked into my eyes. Hah. Bet you I knew what that sultry gaze meant. We were playing on my court now. He said, “You not easy to figure out, you know.”
“Lady has to keep some mystery about herself.”
“I see the side of you that’s smart, and generous, and funny. The side that could sing ‘Jane and Louisa’ together with a stranger, just to keep a scared little boy from being more scared.”
I sketched a mock bow from the waist up. “Thank you, sir. I do my best.”
“Well, don’t dig nothin’, but you have kind of an ugly side too, you know.”
But wait. “How you mean?”
“Well, the way you talked to Michael and Orso.”
Play it light, Calamity. “Oh, that!” I said with a guilty giggle. “I really went overboard, nuh true?”
“Yeah.”
“Hormones,” I said. “You know how it is with women sometimes.” Let him think I meant my period.
He didn’t look up from his painting. “Those were some rahtid hormones.”
Chuh. Man barely out of little boy short pants, and he scolding me? Second wrong note he had hit. Three strikes and you out, Mister. All right; for that behind, I’d give him four strikes. “Hector, I can’t tell you how sorry I am I subjected you to such a scene.”
“Not just me. All of us.”
Watch it, son. You easing towards number four. “Yeah. And now I’m just embarrassed, you know?” Coy it up, warm him up. “Sometimes I’m not so very smart after all.”
He nodded! The bastard man nodded! “You been really nice to me, Calamity. Inviting me to visit, introducing me to your family. I would like for you and me to be friends.”
“Mm-hmm…”
He looked unhappy. “So I need to speak plain,” he said.
I had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Go on.”
“You see,” he said, “this thing not joke in the Caribbean. I learned the hard way to keep my distance from people who have a problem with me being bisexual.”
It’s like somebody threw cold water on me. I froze right where I sat. “What?”
He gave a regretful shrug. “When I heard how you talked to Orso and Michael the other day—”
“You’re gay? Just like Michael?”
He looked perplexed. “You really didn’t understand the joke the rest of us were making the other day? I like men and women. Mary and Joseph. True a little bit more Mary than Joseph nowadays, though that have a way to change.”
Stupid, stupid, Calamity. Shame. I blurted out, “And I just ate from the same dish as you?”
And for the first time, I saw Hector Goonan get angry. He jammed the lid back onto the paint, hammered it on with the handle of the brush. He slammed the lid back onto the container that the fried plantain had been in. “Let me just take this back with me then, since my contaminated lips touched it.”
I stood up. “I don’t know why you getting on so bad,” I said, my voice trembling with fury. “It’s not you who got lied to.”
His hands were shaking as he put away his tools. “I never lied to you. Who have ears to hear will hear. I said it right in front of you only a few days ago.”
“And how I was supposed to understand that two-faced chat the four of you were doing?” I hated the tears running down my face, hated the weakness they showed.
He stood up. “You know, you don’t make it so easy for a person to speak plain.” He headed round the side of the house towards the front yard. I followed him.
“You’re sick!” I snarled at him. “Can’t even make up your mind. Going back and forth from women to men, spreading diseases!”
He stopped so suddenly I almost ran into him. He turned to face me. “Actually,” he said in a low, dangerous voice, “I know I’m not sick. Get tested every year, use barrier protection. I bet you money you don’t do the same.”
The memory of Gene’s naked cock sliding into me betrayed me. Words stuck in my throat.
Hector saw my face fall. He kissed his teeth. “I thought so,” he said. “So it seem to me that you’re the one who stand a chance of putting your lovers at risk, not me. It’s people like you why I make sure to use latex. You tell you last lover yet that he should get tested?”
And he slung his bag over his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked away.
I found my voice. “Faggot!” I cried. He kept on walking. I followed. “Anti-man! Dirty, stinking, lying hen!” My voice cracked on the last word. I was crying so hard that I had trouble getting my breath. Everywhere I turn, another one of those nasty men, thiefing away any joy in my life. It’s like somebody curse me.
What right he had to be angry? I was the injured party! Me!
On the big ship one of the sailors who brought them the thin pap that was their only food was an Igbo man. He joked that the whites were cannibals who were going to eat them. It could be true. Why else truss people up like chickens for the market?
Every few days the sailors would open the hatch, cursing and holding their noses against the smell. It was the only time when the people got a glimpse of sky, a sip of fresh air. The sailors would remove the dead and dying. The more that died, the more space for those remaining. The dada-hair lady was heartsick at the relief she felt when another body was removed. The Igbo sailor described how they threw the dead bodies over the side, how large fish with sharp teeth were following the ship now, waiting for their next meal.
After a lifetime of a misery she could never have imagined before this, the sailors came down one day and took them out of the hold, those who could stand. So long the dada-hair lady’s eyes had been yearning for the sight of the sky, but now the light pierced them like knives. Fresh, cool air to breathe made the dada-hair lady feel almost drunk.
The men had been brought out of their section of the hold, too. So thin they were, and weak-looking! The dada-hair looked at her own arm. Yes, the flesh had wasted.
The sailors sluiced them down with buckets of salted water. The water made her shiver. The salt stung the chafed skin on her wrists and ankles where the shackles rubbed.
There was a child near her, maybe eight years old. She hadn’t seen him before. It’d been too dark in the hold. He dragged two empty shackles where his fellows should have been. He shook and blubbered with his fear, and wailed softly in his language. The dada-hair lady didn’t know what he said, but “Mamma” would be a likely bet. She knelt. Her two shackle-mates had to kneel with her. She took the boy in her arms. He came, wriggling his way in among the chains binding her wrists, hungry for loving touch, his tiny body like chicken bones wrapped in skin. He had weeping yaws on his legs.
The sailors doused everyone with oil, signalled for them to rub themselves down. The dada-hair lady rubbed oil into her skin, and into the little boy’s. It made them gleam, as though they were healthy. “Maybe they’ll throw perfume on us next?” joked Belite, who had lain beside her in the hold. She was a young Arada woman. They were Igbos and Ewes and Aradas in that place. Different languages, different ways, but they had been learning each other’s speech in the long dark misery of their days.
The scrawny boy fell asleep in the dada-hair lady’s arms.
There were tree branches floating in the water, birds perched on the sails. There was a shadow on the horizon. The white man who looked like the boss man was conferring with another, looking at a sheet of paper. They pointed at the shadow and babbled their nonsense talk. They frowned, and the sailors near them looked nervous. Was that land? She had to do something soon.
Truth was, she hadn’t reckoned what she was going to do. All she could think was poison. For them all to take poison to shunt them into the world beneath the waters.
If she were at home, and free, she could easily have found the ingredients to make a strong dose. But she had nothing here, only the chancy power of the blood in her, and starving on the ship, she hadn’t been bleeding. But some few days ago, their rations had been increased. Now she was only constantly a little hungry, not half-fainting her days through from starvation.
A flurry in the water beside the ship caught the dada-hair lady’s eye. Efiok—the Efiok whose place in the hold was two souls over from hers—she saw it, too. She looked to the dada-hair lady, jerked her chin in the direction of the disturbance in the water. The dada-hair lady moved a little closer to the edge.
At first the dada-hair lady could see nothing. Then her soul leapt in her breast; a head, grey-brown with curious black eyes, staring after the ship! Had one of their band jumped, then?
Then the person dove down into the water. The dada-hair lady had only a brief glimpse of its body slipping bent as a sickle forward into the sea. It was cylindrical, curved, and fat with good food. Sea cow? Seal? At home, the older people sometimes talked about sea cows who lived in the coastal waters, how you shouldn’t look directly at them, lest they drag you down to the depths with them for your presumption. The dada-hair lady had never seen one up close, but the fishermen described them: they stole fish from their nets. Momi Wata, thought the dada-hair lady respectfully to the thing she’d seen, beg you please take a message to Uhamiri for me. Tell her we need her help here. Tell her I am hers. I pledge to always faithfully be hers, but please would she help us now, before we land and the white people eat us. The dada-hair lady peered at the water, but she couldn’t see any sign of the sea cow, or whatever it had been. Her heart ached for what she’d promised: the women who were called to serve Uhamiri remained barren.
But she’d made her plea, and her pledge. The dada-hair lady held the boy’s small shivering body and whispered in his shell of an ear, “Soon. Something will happen.” It must.
Agway tried to go on tippy toes to reach for the kitchen sink, but the cast was cramping his style.
“I know what you want,” I told him. “Let’s set you up first, all right?”
I carried him into the bathroom and got the fancy neoprene cast protector out of the cupboard under the sink. The hospital had given it to me, and it was a wonderful thing. Back in the kitchen, I sat him on the floor. He watched gravely as I covered his cast with the cast protector, attached the air bulb, and pumped all the air out.
“Now you ready to go.” I took all the breakable dishes out of the sink and lifted him up onto the counter so he could sit with his feet in the sink. “Here.” I gave him the soap and a cloth. With a serious look, he turned on the tap, dabbled his feet in the water, and set about washing the dishes. He loved doing it. He’d make some woman a wonderful husband.
Not like certain men, playing Mr. Sensitive but all the time having it both ways.
I peeled and grated raw Irish potato into a small pot for porridge for Agway’s breakfast. I tossed in a cinnamon stick, filled the pot with water and put it to boil.
Stringing people along until they make fools of themselves.
I put two eggs on to boil for me, and started frying up bacon for me and Agway. It was the one kind of meat he would tolerate cooked.
Getting vexed at people when they go off on you. I turned the bacon over and over in the pan, trying to scrub the image out of my mind of me sweet-talking Hector when all the while… but it kept popping up to shame me.
Foul-smelling smoke was rising from the frying pan. I was turning burnt bacon with my spatula. “Shit!” I twisted the heat dial to off. It came away in my hand. I screamed and threw it out the open window. “He can just go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut!” I sobbed.
“Flying fuck,” repeated Agway with perfect diction as he poured water from a bowl over his lower legs. He even got the L right. He’d been having trouble with the letter L.
“Oh, great. Just don’t say that in front of Evelyn tonight, all right?”
Screw the bacon. I boiled another egg. I could persuade Agway to eat an egg if I mashed it and put enough butter in it. I puréed the porridge in the blender, added milk and a dab of butter. Threw my eggs onto a plate with a mound of salt and black pepper beside them, and buttered couple-three slices of harddough bread for the two of us.
I was scraping his mashed egg into his bowl when I heard a rustle behind me. Agway had climbed down off the counter. Even with the cast, the damned boy was agile as a mongoose. He had fished the eggshells out of the garbage and was holding them wadded in his fist, except for the one he was chewing.
“Agway! Bad!” I flicked the broken eggshell out of his mouth. “You mustn’t do that! You understand me? No playing in the garbage!”
He already knew when I was telling him he had done wrong, but I could see that the poor soul couldn’t understand what I was scolding him for. I sighed. “I can’t wait for you to learn more than seven words of English.” I washed his mouth out and found a way to close the garbage can that he couldn’t figure out; not yet, anyway. I sat him at the table and persuaded him to eat his egg, spoonful by spoonful, out of the spoon, not with his hands. That battle came to a draw.
What did Hector looked like when he…? I got a mental flash of Hector and another man (who looked a bit like Michael) touching, hugging, their lips meeting. I shut the image down quickly. It mocked me. It looked too much like my secret, voyeur fantasies.
I needed some distraction from this black mood. I took us out into the living room and put on an old DVD: A Shark’s Tale. As each movie finished, I fed another one into the player: Sukey and the Mermaid, Lilo & Stitch VII, In the Time of the Drums.
Eventually I got up and began tucking books away. I cleaned up a bit. Place needed to look good for Evelyn’s visit this evening.
While Agway was preoccupied with a movie and his toys, I set up a card table on the porch with one of the stacks of Dadda’s papers on it. He had more documents stashed everywhere in the house. Sorting his life was going to be a job and a half.
Then I hauled Agway out to the front yard and showed him how to use the tricycle. He got the trick of it, and pretty soon he was zooming around the yard, hunting down the tiny green lizards and yelling as he did. I just prayed he wouldn’t actually catch any of the lizards; with his love of raw food, I didn’t want to see what he would do with it. I flipped through Dadda’s papers. Old water bill receipts: toss. Credit card information: keep, so I could cancel them.
“Child, come away from my tomato plants!” Blasted boy hadn’t learned yet that the green ones gave him a bellyache. His nappy needed changing, too. I plucked him off the tricycle he’d just deliberately crashed into my tomato plants. I took him up onto the porch and stood him on his feet in front of me. He had a saggy diaper, dirt on his hands and knees, more smeared across his face, and little tomato seeds drying around his mouth. “What I going to do with you, enh?”
He tried to go back down the porch stairs. “Wait, hang on!” I grabbed him up by his middle and took him, kicking, into the bathroom.
Using the toilet as a bench, I sat with him in my lap, stripped off his diaper and wiped him clean. He was beginning to get the hang of toilet-training. He didn’t like having a dirty nappy.
I tossed the soiled toilet paper into the bowl. “You want to flush?” I asked him.
He grabbed the handle on the toilet and yanked on it with all his weight. Then he leaned over the bowl to watch the magic. He was fascinated by the toilet, where you could make water run on command. Twice now I’d caught him trying to climb into the bowl. When he wasn’t doing that, he was flushing it, over and over.
Good thing I’d been too lazy to take the cast protector off. One less step to do. I changed into my bath suit, grabbed two towels, and ran after Agway, who had scampered out of the bathroom, clonk-slap on his one bare foot and the one with the cast on. I caught up with him in the living room. “Tuck!” he protested as I took him back out to the yard.
“You can play with your truck later. I have something else for you right now.” I set the sprinkler on Dadda’s miserable excuse for a lawn, and made sure I could see it from the porch. I turned it on to “oscillate.” Agway’s eyes got round as the moon when he saw the water come out. Soon he was dashing back and forth through the water, naked as any egg, screeching with glee. He used his all-fours wolf lope. That leg must be healing, if he could do that. I played catch with him in the sprinkler for a while, then I left him sitting under the sprinkler shower, trying to pull up lawn grass by its roots. I was exhausted. Not even lunch time, and a whole day ahead of me of Agway being rambunctious. I returned to the porch, dried off, and kept going through Dadda’s things.
Mortgage papers for the house on Blessée: keep, for nostalgia’s sake; the insurance money done spend long time ago. Card Chastity had given Dadda for his thirtieth birthday: toss; and stop sniffling. Then a legal-size document. The paper had aged to yellow.
I leafed through the dog-eared sheets. There was a section that described a business plan. Apparently, Dadda had wanted to grow cashews and sell and distribute cashew products. Train local workers, expand the production to other islands. Big ideas. Clearly didn’t go nowhere, though.
I turned to the final page. Lender’s line signed on behalf of the FFWD by Messrs. Gray and Gray. The borrowers’ line was signed by Dadda and someone else. I peered at the signature. To rass. Mr. Kite! So they had known each other from before, then. Maybe that’s why he’d been so ready to take Dadda in? Best I call Gene and tell him, nuh true? Could be important.
Chuh. I wasn’t fooling myself. I just wanted an excuse to call him. I reached for my phone and dialled his cell.
He answered the phone with a gruff “Yeah?”
My heart gave a little leap when I heard his voice. “It’s Calamity. I’m not interrupting anything?” I asked, straining to figure out what the noises in the background were.
“Hold on; too much static.” After a few seconds, I heard generic street noises. “Okay,” he said. “I’m outside. Who’s this?”
“Calamity.”
“Wow. You calling me. Usually I have to do the calling.”
I flushed. “I just found something.”
“What?”
“Dadda and Mr. Kite knew each other from before I was born. I just found papers for a loan they took out to start cashew farming and processing in Cayaba.”
“Awoah.”
“I thought they only met when he rescued Dadda from the docks here right after the hurricane. I wonder what happened to the business?”
“Businesses fail.”
“I’m going through all Dadda’s papers now. Maybe I’ll find something that will tell me.”
“Maybe.” He sounded preoccupied.
“You busy? I can call another time.”
“Nah, man, no need for that! Okay. You have my full attention now.”
But he still didn’t volunteer any information. I recognised what he was doing; had done it myself sometimes. Keep somebody at a distance by telling them as little about yourself as you could get away with. Paper over it by being friendly, but play your cards close to your chest. “Gene, what you and I really doing any at all?”
“How you mean?”
“We seeing each other? We not seeing each other? We friends, we booty-calling, what?”
His laugh was relaxed and open. “That’s all? Well, tell me what you want us to be doing here.”
“And you will go along with whatever I want, is that it?”
“No, you not getting off that easy. Because after you tell me what you want, you have to ask me what I want.”
“You strike a hard bargain, Mr. Meeks.”
“Okay,” I replied. I was all nerves. Suppose I was misreading him same way I’d misread Hector? “I not sure what I want,” I told him. “I been thinking maybe I should keep things simple for a while. We were supposed to be doing anonymous funeral sex, remember?”
“That? We did that already. I crossed it off my list long time. You still keeping it on yours?”
I laughed. “Maybe. It had a certain appeal.”
“You can’t be anonymous twice in a row, you know.”
“Not with the same person, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just like to tease. Truth is, I not sure I have any business dating anybody right now. The heart kind of tender, you know?” I pushed Hector out of my mind.
“Good,” he said, and my spirits sank down even deeper into the crab barrel. “Because I learned long ago not to get involved with anybody who in a big life transition. You have grieving to do, and your life to start over.”
Relief made me giggly. “And a new child to look after. Don’t forget that.”
“You can handle that one,” he said. “I have every confidence.”
“And once I’m done… transitioning, then what?”
“Then we’ll have to see, nuh true? You going to be a whole different person. Maybe you won’t find me interesting any more.”
“And we can still keep company till then?”
“If you want to.”
“I want to.” I was smiling so broadly it was hard to talk.
“Tell me,” he said, “why you call me about Mr. Lambkin and Mr. Kite? I thought you didn’t want any poking around in your parents’ past?”
“It’s your fault, you know. You got me interested, and now it look like I can’t leave it alone.”
“You free Monday night?”
My heart made a little leap. “Pretty sure, yes. Why?”
“Maybe I could come and see you?”
“Yeah, man.” I smiled. The day was looking bright all of a sudden.
Mr. Lessing was coming down my gravel road with a kicking and wailing Agway under one arm, and carrying the tricycle in the other hand. Shit. When the backside the boy had left the yard? “I have to go,” I told Gene. I hung up the phone and went to greet Mr. Lessing. He put Agway and the tricycle down. Agway ran into my arms, complaining. I picked him up. He grabbed my ear.
“I find him down by the Corrolyons’,” said Mr. Lessing, “pedalling that tricycle like jumbie was on his tail.”
“All the way over there?” The Corrolyons lived about half a mile away.
“You going to have to watch him, you know? That’s the sea road he was on.”
“I was watching him.”
Mr. Lessing only nodded. I gave him a grudging thank you and took Agway inside. I locked the front door and the back. Suppose a car had hit him? Suppose he’d reached the water? My heart sank as quickly as Agway would if he fell into the sea with a cast dragging him down. “Poor baby,” I said to him. “Your home is here now. And I going to do my best to make it a good place for you to live.”
I would have to put a fence around the yard, with a strong lock on the gate.
EVELYN SHOWED UP right on time that evening. She was wearing a cotton skirt in beige, A-line, with a tasteful lace trim at its hem. A matching t-shirt. A crocheted cotton shawl, cream colour, as were the espadrilles on her feet. She’d pulled her greying black hair back into a loose bun, let some tendrils of it escape artfully to frame her face. Damned woman was as bad as Orso; always made me feel like I had yampie in my eye corners and stains on the knees of my jeans. “Come in, nuh?”
She slipped off the espadrilles, left them on the mat outside the door. I showed her into the kitchen. “I running late,” I told her. “Still haven’t shelled the peas.”
“Don’t worry. I not in a hurry.” We were still bashful and awkward with each other. Probably would be for a while.
Then she spied Agway. She tossed her wrap onto a chair and squatted down under the table beside him.
“Hello, precious,” she said. “You remember me?”
Agway handed her one of the plastic mugs he was playing with.
“Thank you, my darling. What you want me to do with this?”
And for the next five minutes, the two of them built towers of plastic mugs, laughing when they collapsed. When she clambered out from under the table, her skirt was wrinkled and most of her hair had come loose from its bun. She was still chuckling. “Well, he looks happy,” she said. She gathered her hair, knotted it, stuck the clip back through it.
“Yeah, man. He’s doing good here.”
“Seem he’s in good hands. You got me convinced, anyway.”
I let out a relieved breath. “Then I rest my case.”
She smiled. “Same thing you used to say back in school.”
“True that.” She had laughter lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. So strange to be seeing Evelyn’s face, but on a middle-aged woman.
“And you were such a tomboy,” she said.
“I know. Always getting into trouble.”
She sat on a chair at the table and started shelling the congo peas I had in a bowl there. I gave Agway a handful of the peas in their pods and joined her in shelling the rest.
She said, “Remember the time you went up on the roof of the school?”
The black tar that had melted in the noon-day heat, sticking to the soles of my shoes. I smiled. “Dadda used to call me ‘Calamity Jane.’ ”
That’s where you took your new name from, then?”
“I guess so. I never really thought about it before.”
“And is what made you go up onto the school roof?”
“I just wanted to see what I would see.”
Sitting on the floor, Agway was cracking open the peas pods and eating the hulls. Raw green peas were scattered all around him.
I hadn’t had a chance to see much up on the school roof. A loose gable came away in my hands and nearly sent me tumbling three storeys to the ground. “Almost killed myself that day. Good thing that little ledge was there, just below the overhang. Got my feet on it in time, held on to the edge of the roof, and started screaming for help.”
“Ulric said his heart nearly jumped right out his mouth and died flopping at his feet when he looked up and saw you hanging there.”
The school janitor. So many years I hadn’t thought about him. Grumpy old black man, or he had seemed grumpy to me then. But the strangest things could make him smile; a little lizard cupped gently in a curious child’s hands, for instance.
“Ulric was giving me instructions the whole time he was putting the ladder up to come and get me. ‘I want you to breathe slow and even, Chastity, you hear me? Breathe strong. And use them muscles that you got. You good as any boy when it come to climbing. Hold on, girl, hold on; I coming.’ ”
Mumma had come to the principal’s office when he had sent for her. She saw me with my skinned-up hands and my school uniform fouled with tar. With her mouth, she’d scolded me, but with her body, she was holding me tightly to her, checking every limb to make sure I was all right, patting my face, arms, and legs and looking at me love, love.
And I’d looked back at her wearing her cafeteria staff uniform—a hideous dark grey polyester dress—with her hair in a net and a smear of flour on her face, and I’d been ashamed. I’d pushed myself out of her arms and snapped, “I’m all right! You have to come outside in your work clothes and make everybody see you?”
Her face had closed up tight. She stood, swiped some of the flour off her face with the heel of her hand. “Thank you for calling me,” she said to Principal Cramer. Then she left the office without saying another word to me.
That had been on a Friday. On the Saturday, she was gone for good.
I shook the memories off. “You want some wine?” I asked Ev. “I have red.”
“That sound good. It in the pantry? I could get it.”
“All right.” I took up the bowl of shelled peas and put them to cook in the pot with rice and creamed coconut. Agway was nodding off, rubbing his eyes.
I opened the wine Evelyn handed me and poured her a big glass. “You not having any?”
“Soon. I just putting Agway to bed first.”
“YOU NEVER LIKED THE NAME Chastity, nuh true?” asked Evelyn. She prepared to tuck into a plate of peas and rice, and dry-fried fish with seviche sauce.
“No. Maybe my parents thought giving me that name would make me meek and biddable. It didn’t go so.”
Evelyn tasted the fish. “God, this is good. Janet never cooks anything like this for us.”
“Janet?”
“We have a helper who comes in during the days. She makes dinner and leaves it for us for when we get home. Maybe your parents just wanted to give you a name that would keep you safe.”
“Chastity?” I rolled my eyes at her.
“So that when the boys started sniffing around you, you would try to live up to your name,” she teased.
I snorted. “And you see how well that worked. Fifteen years old, and me and Michael un-chastitied me one afternoon after school.”
“Michael? Your good friend Michael?”
“He same one.”
“He’s your baby father?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But the two of you didn’t stay together?”
“It didn’t work out. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Imagine that. You and Michael. Fifteen years old.”
“I guess I was precocious.”
“No, my dear. I beat you to it. Thirteen and a half.”
I goggled at her. “You?”
She chuckled. “Me. Whose parents never let her out of their sight.”
“Steven Baldwin. In the girls’ bathroom after school one day, before Mummy and Daddy picked me up.”
I sat back down and looked good at her. “Steve? The one with the big mole on his forehead?”
Evelyn frowned. “I thought that mole was kind of sweet. Made him look intellectual.”
“And you did it in the bathroom?”
“In one of the stalls. Standing up, girl! We could hear Ulric moving around in the hallway the whole time, vacuuming. Knew he was going to come in soon to clean the bathroom. When Steven was about to, you know—”
I poured us more wine. “Evelyn, you’re a doctor. You don’t get to say, ‘You know.’ ”
She giggled. “I do when it’s me having sex I’m talking about. Old training dies hard. When it’s other people, I get to use words like ‘engorgement’ and ‘ejaculation.’ ”
“So that’s what you’re trying to tell me? That when Steven was about to come… what then?”
She was actually blushing. “He pulled out,” she said softly. “It ran all down his leg, leaving this sticky, drippy trail on his school uniform pants.”
I laughed.
“As he was, um, coming, he was trying so hard not to make any noise that he roared into the side of my neck.”
She was smiling, stroking the place on her neck as though she was touching a lover’s skin. “In the hollow,” she said, “right here so. I still remember how his voice felt, vibrating through my collar bone.”
When Michael came, he’d thrown his arm over his eyes. I guess that way, he didn’t have to see me. I could really pick ’em.
“Steven had to shinny out the window when we heard Ulric opening the door. He didn’t even have time to zip his pants back up.”
“Christ on a cracker. And you thought I was brave.”
“Hormones, man, hormones. Make you do madness.”
Only they had thought to at least try not to get her pregnant. Pulling out was a risky method, but at least it was a method. I cleared the empty dishes off the table. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about Agway being a sea child?”
She looked embarrassed and waved it away. “No need, man. We could do that any time.” She stood. “Listen, I don’t like to eat and run, but Samuel going to be here soon.”
“I know. I was late with dinner.” I frowned. One mention of sea people and she was hurrying out the door?
“I could visit your facilities?”
“Sure. Just down the hall, first door on your right.”
“I could peek in and see Agway, too?”
“Of course.”
She was gone for so long that eventually I went looking for her. Door to the bathroom was open, nobody inside. Puzzled, I went to Dadda’s bedroom. Quietly, I pushed the door open a crack. Agway was splayed carelessly on the bed, sleeping the sleep of someone with a clear conscience. Evelyn was bent over him, her ear close to his face. What the hell? I opened the door and stepped inside. Evelyn put a finger to her lips when she saw me. She indicated that we should go outside.
Agway exhaled a long, shuddery breath. He stirred, but didn’t wake. I checked that he was sleeping comfortably. I planted a kiss on my fingertips—the two webbed ones, for luck—and transferred it to his forehead. Then I went with Evelyn into the living room.
“Do you know his breathing is interrupted while he’s sleeping?” Her face was really serious.
“Yeah. But he always starts again. I’m getting used to it.”
“Calamity, just now he stopped breathing for nearly two minutes. I was about to start rescue breathing when his own kicked in again. I’m scheduling a sleep clinic appointment for him tomorrow.”
She was frightening me. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know until I check. But that pattern looks a lot like sleep apnea.”
“And what that does?”
“Causes sleep deprivation, can contribute to stroke. If it isn’t treated, the patient is at risk of cardiac arrest while he sleeps.”
“Heart attack?!”
“It mightn’t be anything. Just bring him in tomorrow night, about eight o’clock. He’ll have to sleep in the clinic so they can test him. You can stay the night with him. That way, he won’t be frightened. But keep an eye on him tonight, you hear?”
“Shit.” I sat heavily on the settee.
We heard the popcorn sound of gravel under car tyres. Samuel had come to pick Evelyn up. At the door, we hesitated for a split second, then hugged each other goodnight. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Whatever it is, we will handle it.”
The second they had driven away, I went back to Agway’s room. I watched his chest rise and fall, rise, then stop. My heart hitching in my throat, I counted off the seconds. At one minute, I was about to shake him awake when he coughed and started breathing on his own again.
I got myself a t-shirt of Dadda’s. I would sleep in that. Or rather, I would stay awake in that. I climbed into bed and lay beside Agway. Even in his sleep, he tried to reach for my hair. I had already started growing it for him. I pillowed my head on my other arm and prepared myself for the alert half sleep of a mother with a sick child.
“In this morning’s news: it appears that the current government of Cayaba is moving to institute nationwide austerity measures as part of an agreement being negotiated with the FFWD. The general terms of the agreement with the American corporation of the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development were contained in a secret ‘progress advisory’ drafted in Washington last week by Samuel Tanner, economic advisor to prime minister Garth Johnson, and Angelica Gray, the CEO of the FFWD. The advisory report, leaked to opposition leader Caroline Sookdeo-Grant by an anonymous source, was published in this morning’s edition of the Cayaba Informer. The agreement was apparently solidified in advance of the deadline for the Cayaba government to reach an accord on an economic management strategy with the FFWD. Under the terms of the agreement, China and a group of other creditor banks are slated to help Cayaba to repay past-due interest exceeding $750 million on loans from the FFWD.
“Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant has called on prime minister Johnson to confirm or deny the existence of the agreement. In a press conference called today, Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant said, ‘A few days from now, the citizens of our country will be casting their votes to decide the leadership of this nation. It is therefore incumbent upon the prime minister to come clean about his party’s plans for our future so that Cayabans have full information in order to decide how to vote.’
“At this time, there has been no response from the office of the prime minister.”
Stanley came running over to the library checkout desk where I was working. “I found one!” he said. “Come! Come and look!”
Myrtle of the sky-high heels was working the desk with me. She smiled when she saw him. “Go on,” she said. “Not busy here right now.”
“Thanks.”
I took Stanley’s hand and let him pull me towards the computer terminal he’d been using. He pointed at the screen. “I could make a kite! And attach a camera to it, and take pictures of Cayaba from the air!” He took me through a Web site about home-made aerial cameras.
“All right, so what you need to make this wonder?” I clicked on the link that said “equipment.”
Stanley’s face fell when he saw the list. “It’s too hard.” His shoulders slumped. “I think I’m just going to help Hector make a seal cam. He said I could.”
My hackles rose at the sound of that name. “No. I don’t want you having anything to do with Hector. You’re not to talk to him any more.”
“But why?”
“He’s not a nice man. You don’t need to be messing around with him and his seals. I’ll help you do this project. Look like a breeze.”
Man, what a lie. What the hell was “Picavet suspension”? And where would I find an anemometer? I grabbed some scrap paper from the box of it beside the computer terminal and started making notes. “We going to need a digital camera,” I told Stanley. Maybe we could make the anemometer.
Someone touched my shoulder. Gavin. “Next shift,” he said. “I’m relieving you.”
“Already?” My eye fell on the clock in the corner of the computer screen. Just past five p.m. I leapt to my feet. “Shit. Stanley, I have to run!”
“But—”
“I have to get home on time so Mrs. Soledad can leave. I can’t be late.”
He pouted. “All right.”
“Good boy.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Call me tonight, all right?”
His face had gone sad. I squatted down so I could look him in the eye. “This is going to be the best science project in the whole parish. You hear me, Stanley?”
He glanced at me, looked back down at the floor. “Yes.”
“You’re going to blow everybody else right out of the water.”
Again a glance, a little more hopeful now. “Even Godfrey Mordecai?”
“Why? What Godfrey Mordecai doing for his project?”
“A robot.”
“That’s all? Stanley, I used to make robots for fun. Out of shoeboxes and silver paint.”
He brightened. “For true? And yours were voice-activated, too?”
“Voice-activated?”
“Yes. Godfrey Mordecai’s robot is going to have wheels, and it’ll be able to go backwards and forwards, but it’s only going to go when he tells it to.”
I gulped. “Yes, my love. Your project is going to make Godfrey Mordecai’s look like dog doo-doo.”
That got me a big grin. “Okay!”
I kissed him goodbye, waved at Myrtle, went downstairs for my purse, and fled out the delivery exit. Wasn’t till I got home that I remembered that Agway and I were going to sleep at the sleep clinic tonight. And Gene was coming over. Looked like this menopause thing could make you forget your own blasted name.
I called Stanley and talked to him a bit about his project while I tried to prepare supper for Agway. I kept eyeing the clock. When I heard the knock at the front door, I swear my heart started a drum roll. I told Stanley I’d talk to him the next day.
Not only was Gene still in his uniform, he was a little bit sweaty, too. Loved that smell.
Agway and I didn’t have to be at the sleep clinic until eight p.m. If I put him to sleep at the regular time, maybe he would doze through the waterbus ride and I wouldn’t have the drama from him that I’d had the first time. So when he started looking sleepy around six-thirty, I put him to bed.
Then I took Gene and a blanket out to the back yard. After a few minutes, I realised that Cecil had been right about the dryness. I would have to buy some lubricant tomorrow.
I’d expected an argument about the rubbers, but Gene never said a thing. When I pulled it out of my jeans pocket, he just put it on and then pulled me on top of him. Like Cayaba men had modernised while I wasn’t paying attention.
We lay on the blanket and humped each other silly by the light of the stars and the fireflies. If my little boy turned out to be sick, that would be another challenge to take on. But right then, lying naked in the outdoors with my head on a man’s chest and my nipples crinkling in the breeze, life was good.
And busy. Only a few minutes later, I waved Gene goodbye, then put myself, Agway, and our overnight bags into the car. My plan worked like a charm; Agway didn’t really wake up until I took him into the bright lights of the clinic waiting room.
“OKAY. I have the results,” said Evelyn. I was sitting in her office. Agway was on the floor, playing with the bead maze she kept in there.
I had fretted all night on the hard hospital bed, watching Agway sleep with electrodes attached to his scalp. “What’s wrong with him?”
She frowned. “We couldn’t find any malformations in his sinuses or anything that would cause obstructive sleep apnea.”
“So he’s all right?” I crossed the two joined fingers.
“I don’t know.”
“How you mean?”
“Obstructive sleep apnea is the most common kind. Would have been fairly easy to treat. So now we are looking at whether it might be central sleep apnea.”
“Which is what?”
“Obstructive sleep apnea is mechanical. Something physical literally obstructs the normal pattern of breathing, causing the patient’s muscles to relax before he or she can inhale properly. The obstruction could be in the sinuses. Being overweight can cause it too. Agway doesn’t have any of that. He’s plump, but not exceedingly so.”
“The body fat keeps him warm in the ocean.”
She looked uncomfortable.
I shrugged. “So, what about the other kind of apnea?”
“The central kind? It’s neurological. The right message isn’t getting from the brain to the muscles that make breathing work. The patient inhales all right, but has trouble exhaling. Once Agway began to dream, he would stop breathing from time to time, for up to 110 seconds. He would inhale, but he wouldn’t exhale.”
“So, central sleep apnea, then.” I was frightened.
“You would think so, yes. But he has some anomalies.”
Worse and worse. “How you mean?”
She leaned forward. “His heart rate should have been going up when he stopped breathing. Instead, it went down. He displayed vasoconstriction in his extremities. The blood flow to the core of his body increased. None of those things is consistent with either kind of sleep apnea.”
Oh, God. Agway was really sick. “What’s wrong with him?”
Now Evelyn looked very upset. “I only know of one phenomenon which produces that reaction in humans.”
I sat up straight, squared my shoulders. “Tell me.”
For a few long seconds, she didn’t. Then she said: “Bradycardia, peripheral vasoconstriction, blood shift; facial cooling triggers it. Now, Calamity, I don’t want you to make too much of this, okay?”
“Just tell me!”
“It’s how mammals respond to being submerged in water. It’s called mammalian diving reflex,” she said unhappily. “You see it in seals, dolphins, whales, otters. But human beings can do it too.”
I was on my feet before I knew it. I barely heard the chair crashing to the floor. Agway, startled, looked up to see what I was doing. “You see, you see!” I crowed. “I’m right! He is a sea child!”
Evelyn shook her head firmly. “You have to stop saying that! I have to walk careful right now, Calamity. Samuel’s coming under fire for signing that agreement with the FFWD. I can’t be associated with anything or anyone irregular.”
“Irregular. I see.”
“Besides, you ever think there might be another explanation? You found that child half-drowned. You ever stop to think what a nightmare that was for him?”
“Well, yes, but I—”
“You told me he cries when he sleeps! You ever think he might be having nightmares? Enh? Nightmares about drowning?”
Oh, lord. I hadn’t thought that. He’d been snagged in seaweed, at the mercy of the waves. Even a sea child can drown.
“He dreams he’s drowning again, and mammalian diving reflex kicks in, just like it kicked in when he fell into the water during the storm. It doesn’t need cold water, you know. Experienced divers can initiate it with the right kind of breathing.”
Agway had been looking from one to the other of us as we argued. He had no idea what all this palaver was about; he just knew that the adults were fighting. “We’re scaring him,” I told Evelyn.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not just you.”
“The thing is, it’s a lovely idea that he’s some kind of marine human, but if the wrong people hear you going on about it, all of us stand to lose. You, me, Samuel. I could be forbidden from practising medicine. You could lose Agway. And Samuel—well, he might lose his job anyway.”
Worry had made her features haggard.
I nodded. “All right. I’ll act normal.”
“Thank you.” She glanced at the clock on her wall and stood up. “I have to go on rounds now.”
“Yes. Near as I can tell, he’s healthy. Physically, anyway. Emotionally, I’m not so sure. I’m going to set up an appointment here at the hospital, for a child psychologist to assess him.”
“I can look after him!”
“I don’t doubt that. But I should have done this from the start. I’m ashamed of myself that I waited so long.” She gave me a little smile. “Don’t worry. This is what’s best for Agway.”
In the doorway, she stopped and turned back. “And since we’re talking about what’s best for Agway, I want to do something about those skin patches. Should be an easy day surgery. Quick laser treatment, then he’s back home to you. I’ve scheduled it for this Thursday.”