TURQUOISE. LAPIS. VIRIDIAN. I SHIFTED MY BOTTOM to a more comfortable position on the almond tree branch and tried to name all the blues and greens of the sea this afternoon. Cerulean. Teal. Indigo. I filled up my head with sea colours, and wondered what Agway’s words for them were.
“Look her there!” shouted a child’s voice, a boy’s. My heart hammered in my chest before I realised it could not be Agway. Stanley ran to the foot of the almond tree and peered up at me. He had to look into the sun to do so. No flicker of a second eyelid, though.
“Calamity, what you doing way up there?”
“Watching the sea.”
Ife appeared over the rise. Michael was with her. They joined Stanley, and the three of them stared up at me gape-mouthed.
“Everybody’s here now,” said Michael. “You going to come down and eat something?”
“Just one second.” I went back to my watching. The police and the Coast Guard had declared Agway missing, presumed dead. While in my care. Hector surprised me by telling them we had been coming to pay him a visit. Jade. Royal. Mint. “She takes people, you know?” I told them. “The sea does. And she never gives them back.”
I had had flash after flash, but no Agway came to me. Why would he? From the time he had jumped into that water, he wasn’t lost any more.
“I found the dump truck that Agway used to play with,” said Stanley. “Your old dump truck.” Stanley was crying. For Agway. Agway was alive and happy, but I couldn’t tell them that. Only Gene knew. I had to watch my grandson wrestle with the pain of a grief I couldn’t relieve.
I got off my branch and started climbing down.
“Careful,” Ife cautioned. Michael tried to help me the rest of the way down.
“Last man who tried to hold me up nearly sprain his back,” I said. I got down by myself and took Stanley’s hand.
“Come and show me where you found the truck,” I told him. After we’d walked for a bit, I said to him, “I meant to help you with your project. I never wanted to let you down like that. But I did. It wasn’t right, and I’m very sorry.” He looked at me, perplexed. “Maybe one day you’ll give me another chance.” A few more steps, and I said, “And your science fair project was brilliant.”
He smiled a little. “The bat was the best,” he said. “It was right down low, close to the water. But I didn’t sink the glider.”
We had to walk past the orchard on the way to the house. It was rioting out of control. Branches had extended themselves, looping into sideways knots and tangles that defied gravity. Every morning I found that new shoots had thrown themselves skywards overnight, to fight with their predecessors for light and air. The trees were clotted with blossoms and with fruit in all stages of development; in the early afternoon heat, the perfumed stench of both was cloying. Even the tiny saplings were bearing before their time. Overripe fruit fell constantly as we watched, to smash against others already on the ground. The unharvested cashew apples rotted within a day; the air below the trees buzzed thick with blue-bottle flies, drunk on fermenting cashew ichor. The trees bore and bore and bore. In the space of a week, some of them were already dying. The prodigious growth had started when Agway went from me.
Ife took Stanley’s other hand as we sidled past the mad orchard.
Men’s voices rumbled from the kitchen. Good smells, too: coffee brewing, fish, spices. I peeked in. Orso and Hector, cooking up a storm. I couldn’t face Hector just yet. “Where you found the truck?” I asked Stanley.
“In here.” He led me into the bedroom that had been Agway’s, and Dadda’s. The Aqua Man sheet I’d bought was still on the bed. Dumpy lay on the pillow. Stanley ran and picked it up, brought it, held out, towards me.
“It was under the bed,” he said. His face was crumpling into sadness again. I reached for the truck, but he cried out and threw it at me. He missed. It smashed through the window glass. I heard exclamations from the kitchen; chairs being pushed back; feet running in our direction. “Why you had to take him out on the water like that!” sobbed Stanley. “It’s your fault!”
“Stanley!” said Ife.
“No, let him say it. It’s the same thing all of allyou thinking, anyway.”
Stanley hugged himself and cried. I bent and picked up the truck, over the protests of my back and both knees. “Agway used to throw it like that,” I told Stanley. “Will you let me hold you?”
He threw his arms around my legs.
That wake nearly killed me. Then they could have just waked for two. Mrs. Soledad accepted many refills of white rum, and told stories about the cute things Agway had done that I had missed because I was at work. Stanley taught us Agway’s words for man, and boy, and goodbye, and told us that his name was—had been—Chichi. Silence fell when he said that. Three chi-chi men of a different kind right here in the room. I looked at the floor. That writer guy was right; God is an irony. When Hector, a catch in his voice, launched into the story about Agway eating raw shrimps, I excused myself and went out onto the porch. If I’d stayed in there any longer, I’d have broken and written myself a ticket straight to the madhouse by informing them all that Agway was a mermaid who had gone back to his home in the sea. So I sat and breathed, and watched the cashews ripen and fall, fall, fall.
Ife came outside and sat beside me. She said, “Don’t watch the news for the next little while, okay?”
“I can just imagine what they’re saying about me.”
Her dress was shapeless as usual, but this time it was a stylish shapeless, in a nubbly indigo silk that brought out her colouring. Even her sandals were pretty. “You looking good,” I said. She raised her eyebrows. I ignored it. “Like breaking up with Clifton is suiting you?”
She looked down at her hands. “It has its advantages.” She wasn’t wearing her wedding rings. “But I still miss him. Half of me wants to work things out with him, and half of me wants to leave.”
“Something I never told you.”
“What?” she asked, her tone wary.
Push on, Calamity. “You right; I didn’t want to have you.”
Ife pressed her lips together and made to stand up. I was doing it all wrong. I took her hand. “Please wait, Ife. Just hear me out.”
She sat back down, her face unhappy.
“Over the months of carrying you,” I said, “I got used to having you right next to my heart. Could put my arms around you any time I wanted. Then time came I had to push you out. Finally got to meet the prettiest baby in the world.”
She gave me a sad, surprised smile.
“And looking after you was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Plenty of times I hated it. Plenty of times I wanted to stop. Give you up for adoption. Something.
“But then I got to know you. A mischievous little girl with a curious mind. A dreamy, impatient young woman who was always looking for magic. Fuck. I’m not saying this right.”
“I think I’m kind of liking it,” she replied. “Keep trying.”
“I didn’t start out loving you. I had to learn to love you. It was like an arranged marriage, you know? Only not.”
She was half-laughing now. “You say the strangest things, Mummy.”
“Calamity. And I not finished.”
“What else?”
“I had to learn to love you for who you are. About half the time I screw it up.”
Obsidian glint to those eyes. “Go on.”
“So from now on, I want you to tell me right away when I get it wrong. Don’t save it up for thirty-eight years.”
She took that in, and nodded. “Sound good,” she said. My spirits started to lift. “But one pretty speech not going to fix it.”
I bit back the ready barb and waited for her to finish. “You have to walk the talk for a while before I’m going to trust you,” she told me. “You on sufferance.”
“Christ. You and Orso been comparing notes, or something?”
She nodded. “Something like that.” We watched the cashews fall. Ife said, “You know, I never told you the wish Dadda made at the wishing tree.”
“Not sure I want to know.”
“He wished for Mumma to forgive him and come back. He said even if not for him, that you had suffered enough.”
Then she hugged me and went back inside. She still wasn’t wearing a bra.
So now Granny decide to get rid of the devil baby. She yank it off her shoulders and she throw it hard as she could. She pitch that devil baby into the sea. And the minute it land up in the water, the devil baby start to laugh, and to swell: big as a pumpkin; big as a grouper fish; big as a whale, and then bigger. That devil baby turn into the devil woman of the sea with her blue skin, and her sharp teeth, and her long, long arms for dragging ships down. “THANK YOU, GRANNY, DO,” the devil woman say. “FOR YOU JUST GIVE ME EXACTLY WHAT I WANT.” Her voice make Granny’s ears ache.
Then the devil woman fling a handful of gold pieces at Granny. One land on her face; till her dying day, you could still see the mark. “FOR YOUR TROUBLE,” the devil woman say. And she dive down to go and wait for a ship for her dinner. Granny hear her laughing all the way down to the bottom.
I crashed gratefully down onto the lounge chair out on the porch. “I’m so glad everybody gone home, I can’t tell you!”
“Sound like it wasn’t fun.” Gene gestured at the plate in his lap. “What is this I eating?”
“Ackee and saltfish. Some Jamaican thing Hector make.”
“It’s strange. Like if scrambled eggs was a vegetable.”
“He still vexed with me. Hector.”
“Yeah, I could see that. I wouldn’t brook nobody speaking to me like that neither.”
“Duly noted, Mr. Meeks.”
He put the half-finished plate of food down on the floor. “I have to run. Working tonight.”
“You want a lift down to the dock?”
“Sure.”
I got an idea. “All right. Just hang on a second.”
Dumpy was still on the floor in Dadda’s room. I fished it out of the broken glass.
In the night air, the rankness of the cashews was less. But you could still hear the gentle plop of fruit after fruit throwing itself from the branch. The sickle moon looked fresh and clean, wearing one coy wisp of cloud.
I let Gene into the car. We headed for the dock.
“Mrs. Winter gave me bereavement leave.”
“Ouch.”
“Who knew she had a heart?” I pulled up at the dock. “You have a few minutes? You could take me out a little way in your boat and then back?”
“You mean I get to spend a few more minutes with you?”
“Sweet-talker.”
“My middle name. Come.” He opened the car door, but before he got out, he took a shaky breath and said, “You know that night, when I found you?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
Gene had gotten my half-hysterical phone message about Agway’s mother being alive. He came rushing over right after work to find us both gone, and me not answering my phone. He dashed back to the dock, thinking he’d go out on the water and search for us. He’d found me lying on the dock in the rain, half-dead from hypothermia.
“As I laid eyes on you on the dock the other night, I hear a big splash, like something went into the water.”
“I know. I told you what happened. And if you tell me I was hallucinating, I swear—”
He shook his head. “I think I saw shapes swimming away under the water.”
“Fuck me! A part of me been wondering if I didn’t just make it all up. So I wouldn’t feel guilty about letting Agway fall over the side.”
“But I saw them too. Never seen them alive before.” His smile was soft and wondering. “What a miraculous world, nuh true?”
We went out in his launch. When we were out of sight of Dolorosse, I yelled, “Right here!” over the sound of the engine. Gene cut the power and we rocked in silence on the sea. I held Dumpy in my hands one final time. Then I dropped it over the side. Drop your scarf in the water. I blew a kiss after it.
She couldn’t say how she did it; for her safety, she’d never tried to describe it to anyone. She liked to think it was a bit like how it might feel when a baby pulled at your breast with its hungry mouth to make the milk come. But she didn’t know that sensation. To her, it was like letting go finally when you’d long been wanting to piss, and feeling the hot wetness splash out of you and keep coming like it would never stop. It was like that, and yet it was nothing at all like that. Bring us home, she begged, of Uhamiri, of her gift; as she tried to keep her balance it was all getting confused in her mind. She was a sluice, and power surged through her. She tried to guide it as it flowed. It was like holding back the seas with a winnowing basket, but the dada-hair lady shaped her power as best she might.
It was the strongest flow she’d ever felt, frightening in its force.
The boss man was yelling orders in the shouting and the screaming and the running about, but few were listening. His two desperate eyes made four with the dada-hair lady’s own. If she were a Momi Wata, he’d be foolish to stare at her like that. She stood tall and looked right back at him.
The first thing that happened was that any of her people still standing fell to the decks. Not her; she remained upright. She nodded and smiled. “We are leaving now!” she shouted in Igbo, for those who could understand. Some of those raised up a cheer, which became a high piping. The people were changing! That startled her. But the ocean strength of blood would not be held back. The dada-hair lady accepted it. That is how it would be. Then let it be.
The people’s arms flattened out into flexible flippers. The shackles slipped off their wrists. The two women who had been chained to her flopped away, free, but the dada-hair lady remained unchanged and shackled. The little boy in her arms was transforming, though. He lifted one hand and spread his fingers to investigate the webbing that now extended between them. Some of the people who had been forced back into the holds were making their way out, now that their shackles had slid off. The ship was so far tilted that they didn’t have to climb; just clamber up the shallow incline that led to the hatch.
The people’s bodies grew thick and fat. Legs melted together. The little boy chuckled, a sound she’d not heard from him before this. The chuckle became a high-pitched call.
The people’s faces swelled and transformed: round heads with snouts. Big, liquid eyes. Would she not change, too? Was this Uhamiri’s price?
The sailors had been dodging them, too terrified to pay attention to what was happening. Many sailors had already leapt over the side. A mast snapped and crashed down, killing sailors and destroying more of the ship. The weight of the mast pulled the ship over even further on its side. The captain rushed to the cracked stump and yelled, likely for an axe to cut the mast free. He was ignored. The ship began to go down. The captain glared at the dada-hair lady as though she were responsible. He braced himself against the stump of the mast, pulled out his pistol, and shot at her. The jerking of the ship threw his shot wide. He started picking off her people, one by one, even as they grew thick, protective coatings of fat and fur sprouted on their bodies. “Over the side!” the dada-hair lady yelled at them. “Go into the water!” The sound became a deep, urgent bubbling noise. The dada-hair lady was changing too. Uhamiri would not abandon her!
The gift roared through her. She threw the boy from her, into the sea, just before her arms became flippers. She swelled large as an ox. She flopped to the deck, landing heavily beside one of the white sailors. He went even whiter as he saw her alter. He backed away, pulling at his pistol as he tried to get it free of his belt.
The dada-hair lady started working her body clumsily to the ship’s railing. Others of the people were already there, levering themselves up and over, into the sea. The splashing, the shouting, the strange animal calls; all was confusion, and the gift was burning through her so hard she could barely see.
The captain roared at her and took aim again. The dada-hair lady lumped her heavy body against the ship’s side. She reared up against the railing, which creaked with her weight. The changed people who had made it into the water were swimming clumsily away from the ship, learning the use of their new limbs as they worked them.
A shot winged by her ear. The dada-hair lady looked back. A few of the people lay broken on the deck, shot midway through the change. The dada-hair lady’s heart broke to see that Belite was one of the dead, but she had no time to stop; the captain was taking aim again. She tumbled herself over the side. As she fell towards the welcoming sea, a bright pain exploded in her foot. With a belching roar, she splashed into the water, and down. She looked. A thread of blood followed her down, trailing from her flipper. The captain had shot a hole clean through it. The frightening wound and the salty sting of the sea searing it made the dada-hair lady gasp. She took in water, coughed it out again, flailed with her new front limbs. Blood. She had to be giving blood to the earth in order to find a thing lost. But now she gave her blood to the sea. She had asked Uhamiri to bring them home. The gods almost never gave you exactly what you’d asked for.
Where was her boy? There! He must be that one, that little one, who swam so vigorously towards her, pushing his way through the other sleek, fat bodies. He came. She nuzzled him, urged him with her flipper to swim on ahead of her. Driven by the sound of the ship cracking apart and the danger of falling debris, she followed, learning her limbs as she went, trying not to faint away from the pain of the injured one. The sea was blue and held them on its breast. They were no longer lost.
And with that, the dada-hair lady felt the gift leave her. Not stop, as it had every time before; leave. She had used all her blood power to bring the people home. They were bahari now. The sea was where they would live.
By the time I pulled the car up to the house, fingers of fog were stretching through the air. Jumbie weather. Mischief weather, swirling all around me. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. I got out of the car, locked the door.
From out in the fog over by the road, someone called, “Calamity? It’s you that?”
“Mrs. Soledad?”
“You all right, child?” She sounded suspicious. I could see her a little more clearly now. She had someone with her. As they came closer, I saw who it was. Mr. Mckinley.
“I’m fine,” I said to them. Began to say, “Never better,” but with Agway gone only a few days ago, that would sound wrong. I bit it back.
Mrs. Soledad was wearing a pretty flowered dress. Her greying hair hung down in front in two long, girlish braids that went nearly to her waist. On her head, she was sporting a leather peaked cap; purple to match the flowers on her dress. She had it turned backwards. And was that lipstick on her lips?
Mr. Mckinley’s khaki pants were pressed. He had one button open at the neck of his plaid shirt, to show just a little bit of chest hair.
“How come allyou out on a night like this?” I asked them.
“Little bit of fog not going to hurt us,” replied Mr. Mckinley.
Mrs. Soledad reached out and pinched my arm.
“Ow!” I yelped, pulling it away from her.
“You’re real,” she said.
“Yes! What you do that for?”
Mr. Mckinley chuckled. “Jumbie weather. She not taking any chances.”
“Too right,” said Mrs. Soledad. “Thaddeus and I just taking the night air.” She reached for Mr. Mckinley’s hand. He took hers gently, like a gift, and shot her a shy glance.
My brain was looping, on input overload. Mrs. Soledad and Mr. Mckinley were having a hot affair. And on top of all that, Mr. Mckinley’s first name was Thaddeus. Who got named Thaddeus nowadays?
Under his arm, Mr. Mckinley had his battered yellow tackle box. How could the two of them be seeing each other? He was probably a good fifteen years younger than she. And how he could take his fishing hooks out on a date?
“Heavy rain this afternoon,” I said, making small talk.
Mr. Mckinley nodded. “True that. Glad I wasn’t out in the boat.”
“Good thing, too,” said Mrs. Soledad. “Otherwise, who woulda bring me another blanket to wrap my feet in?”
He smiled at her. “Best way to spend a rainy afternoon. Warm in bed, with one blanket sharing between the two of we, and the rain going prangalang on your tinning roof.”
“Was like young married days all over again,” she said softly.
Mr. Mckinley coughed. They both looked at the ground, but that didn’t hide the big grins on their faces. They had been in bed together, in her house, listening to the rain. I didn’t know them at all.
“You coming to the protest tomorrow?” asked Mrs. Soledad. “Going to be a lime and a half.”
“I going to try,” I said guiltily. I intended to sleep in tomorrow.
I shooed them off to continue their walk. Even when the fog started to make them difficult to see, I could still hear the companionable rise and fall of their conversation and their laughter. Seem like everybody had somebody for company. I thought about calling Gene, but I stopped myself. Never went good when I tried to force-ripe a relationship. Same thing with Evelyn. I sat on the warm hood of the car and breathed in the milky night. When the fog had me wreathed in cloud, I went inside to bed.
ALEXANDER LET HIMSELF INTO THE SEAL PEN, just to be sure. He looked in the water, in the caves. He picked up the sodden piece of paper he found in one of the caves and inspected it. Then, calmly, he let himself back out, locked the high gate—not that it seemed to make any difference—and walked the grounds of the Zooquarium until he found Dennis. “Come and see something with me, nuh?”
Dennis looked baffled, but he followed Alexander back to the seal pen.
“How many seals?” said Alexander.
“No seals in there, sir.”
“Not a one?”
“No.”
“It’s not just me imagining it?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He handed Dennis the yellow foolscap sheet. It was one of the flyers that had been pinned up everywhere for a few days now. The workers’ co-op people were staging a protest at the new Gilmor plant this morning.
Dennis flattened out the soggy sheet as best as he could. “What this is?” he asked, pointing to some marks on the paper. You might get marks like that if you dampened a nugget of seal chow and scraped it on the paper. “Look like writing,” said Dennis.
“You think so?” Alexander replied in a weary tone.
“Yeah, but half of it wash out.”
“True that.” They both stared at the flyer. If you used your imagination, the smudged marks could look like “BACK SOON.”
“I considering becoming a drinking man,” said Alexander.
IT WAS THE SCENT that woke me up next morning. Right in my bedroom with me, the strong smell of the sea.
I sat up and looked around. Something on the floor. My eyes were still blurry with sleep. I reached for my specs and put them on. Between me and the bedroom door was a pile of bladderwrack as high as my shin, and so fresh it was still wet. On top of that was a slit, L-shaped tube of white plaster, half-dissolved, but recognizable as Agway’s cast. Lying on sea grape leaves beside that was a pile of fresh raw shrimp, a good five pounds of it. The heads were still on.
I picked up my cell phone and went to check the rest of the house. Out in the hallway, I nearly tripped on Dadda’s old duffel bag. I’d put it in my closet until I could get around to burning the sealskin inside it.
But the bag was empty. I combed the whole house looking for the skin. I ended up in Dadda’s room. There was the window Stanley had broken when he threw Dumpy. I’d swept all the broken glass out of it, taped plastic over it.
The plastic was torn.
The empty pane was plenty big enough to let a person through.
I let out a whoop. “You see why I live in Cayaba?” I asked myself. “Never a dull moment.”
Ife was in charge of arranging Sookdeo-Grant’s appearance at the protest with a group of opposition party supporters. She had been fretting about all the details for days now.
I double dog dare you, Mummy.
I called Ifeoma’s house. “Hector, it’s you that? Awoah.” I let that sink in, then said, “Put Ife on the phone for me, please?”
Ife came on the line. “Mummy? Something wrong?”
“Not a thing. I’m as right as rain. So, where exactly this protest is? Yes, I know it’s on Dolorosse, but where? You have enough water for everybody you looking after? Bottled water? Good. You have ice? No, don’t worry. You doing good. I will stop off at Mr. Robinson’s on the way and get some bags of ice. How you mean, how come? I can’t come and show my daughter some support? You could use a extra cooler? And you have food? Only patties? That not enough. I going to make a big pot of curry shrimp. See you at ten, then? Okay.”
I hung up the phone and went to the kitchen for a bowl big enough to hold five pounds of shrimp. “If allyou ever find any snapper,” I announced to the empty house, “I would be very grateful.”