How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Martha used to scream this version at Mira when she discovered that her daughter was seating herself at the bar at Sam Lord’s Castle each weeknight and weekend, nursing a single martini until any one of the many businessmen who stayed there could be persuaded to buy her another one. By this time Mira sold perfume in the lone department store in town and painted her face with the samples from the makeup counters and flicked her hair and dreamed of being one of the women in the magazines she stole from the out-of-date stack in the book section. And she sat at the hotel bar with a few other like-minded girls and hunted.

  One Wednesday evening, after Mira Martineau has spent three hours at the bar of Sam Lord’s Castle with Peter Whalen, chain-smoking slender cigarettes with her bright pink lips in a tight white dress with padded shoulders that almost reach the end of her long chandelier earrings, laughing louder than his jokes deserved, he takes her to his room. It cannot be called a date exactly but Mira does not believe in waiting to go to bed with someone she wants to love her.

  In the first version of their story, this is the night that Peter sweeps Mira off her feet. In the second version, it is the night when he first receives what she can give in return for two diamond bracelets, a ruby ring and enough spending money in the month after she meets him to take a taxi to work each day at the department store and not even think about it. In fact, the waiting taxi outside the little stone house in Britton’s Hill is what starts Martha’s scoldings.

  Mira does not mind.

  For several months afterward, Mira surrenders to Peter’s kisses, returns his little muttered endearments, ignores the cloud of alcohol in which they are usually cloaked, and allows him to think that she is the one who had been caught. And soon after that there is a quiet conversation in his hotel room, with Peter trying, gently, to explain to the screaming voice on the other end of the line that he is sorry – so very, very sorry – but he has found the love of his life and will be seeking a divorce.

  You simply cannot know that what you have is not the love of your life, Peter explains to the first Mrs. Whalen, until you find the one you were made for and realize that everything that’s gone before is prologue.

  It suits the sentiment Mira Whalen suffers, looking at her empty house – that everything now is epilogue.

  * * *

  This last time the Whalens visited Baxter’s Beach it was because of the affair, to work on the love they thought they’d lost. Peter had bought the villa a decade before he’d met Mira, and resolved to retire there. His first wife had seen it and fallen in love and they’d traveled to the island as often as they could, renting out the villa for the nine months each year that they weren’t there. It was on an unexpected business trip when Peter was staying at Sam Lord’s Castle that he’d met Mira. Mira had visited the villa only after they were married. They’d returned with the children for almost three months each summer since then, more often if their schedules allowed.

  Maybe Peter had thought that he could change things by bringing Mira back to the place where they’d met and the comforts of what a life with him had brought her, including being able to live the best of the island life in the land of her birth. Maybe he’d thought that a visit to the place they’d met, with all its memories about how they’d fallen in love, would remind her why she’d been so wrong to have an affair, why risking it all was so stupid.

  Who can tell now? Peter is dead.

  This summer, they’d landed at the airport and Peter had stumbled as he dragged their bags off the creaking carousel in the arrivals area. She remembered how the hopeful smiles on the redcaps had fallen into cold indifference at the realization that this rich, white tourist would rather lift his family’s many cases himself than pay them a few dollars he could probably afford to wipe his ass with if he wanted to. She’d suspected then that lifting their bags was one of those things that Peter had done to help them all believe they were just an average family on a regular vacation. Lifting the bags supplied the illusion of being just a normal family doing normal family things. She’d watched him start to sweat in the parking lot with those bags. She’d watched how his skin reddened as if injured, how in the sunlit glare of the country where she was born his clothes started to stick to him, how his skin flushed as if infuriated and how hers started to deepen as if awakening from a sleep or sickness, as if nature was somehow coloring her in.

  Beth and Sam had been happy that day. They’d talked excitedly about the beach, whether a swing the gardener had looped over a branch on the tamarind tree last summer would still be there, whether summertime friends would be around this year, whether Rosa had made them mauby or fish cakes or conkies wrapped in banana leaves to welcome them. In the car they could hardly keep still and she’d found herself wondering what the driver thought of them, whether he thought them exuberant or impolite. Peter had sat in the front seat and focused on the road and she’d watched him in the rearview mirror and wondered why he had allowed his broad shoulders to be tamed by a suit particularly inappropriate for hot weather.

  “At last, the sunshine brings a smile,” Peter had said, and she had nodded to acknowledge that he was trying and to show him she appreciated that, at least. But for the rest of the ride there was no sound other than the chattering of the children and once, when she looked up, the driver was staring at her in the rearview as if wondering whether she was always this quiet, and she had stopped herself from engaging in chitchat with him to fill the silence.

  These are the memories that Mira Whalen’s mind alternately clutches at and pushes away during the day, when she is not trying to remember if she has brushed her teeth that morning, and whether all her molars were still there and the right size when she woke up.

  Chapter 9

  17 August 1984

  Sam’s ghost confronts her at 2:50 a.m.

  His face is bright and bug-eyed in the blue-tinged incandescence of a fluorescent bedside lamp now burning all night, every night since the murder. Once upon a time she’d thought she could never sleep with the lights on.

  It’s his arm this time.

  “It’s been bleeding all night,” he says.

  She dresses his pale, smooth skin. There is no blood. With dull scissors she cuts pieces of gauze from the roll beside the bed. Places them in layers on the spot he is pointing out. Sticks on bits of masking tape. Her eyes sting. It is the facetiousness of fate that he has woken her on one of the few occasions that she was actually sleeping.

  “You forgot the medicine,” Sam whines.

  “Sorry, honey.”

  She takes it all back off and does everything over again after rubbing the spot with the entrails of an empty tube of Neosporin. His big, bright eyes peer at the new patch. Since the murder, he has imaginary sores almost everywhere. And every time Rosa manages to convince him that one is better, he finds another gaping wound in the middle of the night and wakes Mira to dress it for him. The gauze is almost all gone.

  While she works, he chatters.

  He expects that Dad will be okay, says Sam, peering at the new dressing, he wasn’t afraid of dying. He wasn’t afraid of pretty much anything.

  “Of course, honey,” Mira Whalen offers. “Dad was very brave and very smart, and he is somewhere watching over us.”

  “You mean like heaven?”

  Mira nods.

  “Dad doesn’t believe in heaven,” says Sam Whalen. “He says there is nowhere that people go and watch over us after they die.”

  “Dad could be wrong,” says Mira Whalen, gently.

  “Mom says there’s no heaven, either.”

  Mira thinks of the first Mrs. Whalen meditating in an ashram somewhere and decides to say nothing. Somehow it still seems like a slight when she discovers things that Peter and the first Mrs. Whalen have in common – memories she does not share, ideals she does not subscribe to, the glib dismissal of a heaven she firmly believes in.

  “Dad will be fine,” says Sam Whalen.

  Sam seats himself beside her in the chair, but he f
idgets; unable to get comfortable, he eventually returns to the floor and stares at her.

  “Will you be fine, too?”

  Mira Whalen nods because she cannot bring herself to lie through teeth she hasn’t counted yet.

  Sam slips back into sleep on the tumble of bedding on the floor, stretched out beside his sister. Mira rearranges her limbs in the chair beside the bed. She cradles a cricket bat she has promised herself she will wield if the robber comes back, watches the empty bed complete with three flecks of her husband’s blood rusting in a corner of white Egyptian cotton. She runs her hands over these spots that Rosa’s eyes have obviously missed. She smells her finger, starts to talk to him, moving her lips as she whispers apologies. She tells him that she and the children have rehearsed how they will flee if the robber comes back again, that they now have code words to signal to one another that something is wrong. Peter does not answer. As she rubs the flecks they grow bigger before her eyes until it seems like the blood is on her hands and the bed looks the way it did the night Peter died, when she had dragged him there from the floor because she did not know what else to do. Before Rosa came, before the police came. Suddenly she is heaving, her chest is tight and she thinks she hears the robber disable the new padlock Rosa has had fitted on the service gate. In her mind she hears this robber lift the latch and start up the driveway on large, padded feet.

  The children know the drill. As soon as she shakes Beth she jumps up and reaches for her shoes, Sam grabs his shirt and a flashlight, and Mira her purse and the bat. They run as rehearsed, down the front stairs (because robbers rarely enter through front doors) and onto the beach, then the boardwalk. They run holding hands, silently, and every so often she and Beth have to bear Sam’s weight when he cannot keep up. While she runs, she calculates the odds of the robber realizing they’ve escaped and coming after them, trying to tackle them before they can get help.

  Mira Whalen does not stop to call the police. In the almost four weeks since Peter’s murder, Mira has come to the conclusion that the investigation into his murder is beyond the capability of the local police simply because they have not yet found his killer. For this reason, she did not factor them into the escape plan she is now executing. Gathering the children and running at the first sign of an intruder gave them the best chance to avoid a fate like Peter’s, decided Mira, because to run would be better than to wait for the Baxter’s police.

  When they burst through the doors of the 24-hour convenience store, the quiet order of the shelves of bright boxes and transparent bags stops them cold. A sleepy guard stares at them – a wild-haired white woman in pajamas and two pale, emaciated children with wide, frightened eyes – and decides this is unusual enough to ask what is wrong. He pulls them inside, locks the doors, speaks into a walkie-talkie until a manager comes running from the back office, a middle-aged man who has had this happen to him before. Mira Whalen shifts from one foot to the other as she waits, peeping through the glass doors of the convenience store every few words, to ensure that they have not been followed. The manager takes her in – she is a tall, thin woman whose shoulders and hip bones jut awkwardly through her clothing. Her lank, unwashed bob falls in greasy clumps just past her ears. Her huge hazel eyes are sunken and ringed with shadows. She is shaking.

  “Is all right, Markley,” says the manager. “Open back the door.”

  “But sir . . .”

  Markley stares at Mira Whalen and then at his manager’s almost imperceptible nod. Markley unlocks the door and the manager shows Mira Whalen and the children to a tiny office just off the alcohol aisle. The office smells of coffee and a half-eaten bowl of pudding and souse sitting on a wooden desk without drawers. He moves the bowl aside, gestures for them to sit down, and dials the number for the security company from the card Mira Whalen keeps in her pajama pocket. Then he calls Rosa, who has made Mira promise to ask a person she can trust to call her if anything goes wrong, no matter the time of night or day.

  Mira huddles with the children in the manager’s office while the security detail confirms to the manager that nothing is amiss at her house – the lock on the service gate is in place, the house is free of trespassers intent on doing harm, there are no signs of intrusion, the only door open is the one Mira Whalen used to make her exit onto the beach. Markley is new and particularly unsuited to security work, so he is still being gallant – he pops his head around the corner of the office and offers to accompany Mira and the children back home himself and seems surprised by the manager’s barely restrained “Chhttttt! Chhttt!” that dismisses the idea before it is even fully expressed. The manager is not new and has lost the warm civility he wore the last three times Mira and the children burst into his store in the middle of the night.

  “Nobody ain’t in you house, ma’am,” says the manager when he hangs up the phone. “Okay? Not a fella in you house.”

  “But I . . . there was a . . . I heard him, I . . .”

  Mira is looking around beseechingly, as if there are others within earshot who can be persuaded to believe her.

  “There ain’t nobody there,” the manager concludes firmly. “I understand how you feel, ma’am, but there ain’t nobody there.”

  When Mira Whalen is still staring at the manager, stupefied, even after he has explained that there is nothing at all to worry about, the manager calls Rosa again and they wait until Rosa comes through the glass door and talks softly to her boss, as if she is speaking to Mrs. Whalen from a very great height indeed. When they have finished, Rosa asks Mira Whalen if she took her medication before going to bed and Mira Whalen says she cannot remember and Rosa offers to take the children home with her to get some sleep and, before Mira can refuse, Beth says yes, please, she wants to go with Rosa, and she curls into Rosa’s heavy-handed hug and starts to sob. Mira Whalen struggles with the choice but she decides that, ultimately, Beth will probably be better off with Rosa, whose little wooden house she has seen. No robber will want to rob that house, thinks Mira Whalen, the children will be safe there. She imagines Rosa sleeping with them on the big iron bed her husband will be booted from. She imagines Rosa tucking them into the crooks of embraces pillowed by soft, jiggling fat. She says yes, the children can sleep there.

  Rosa’s husband is waiting outside in a bright blue Datsun with a sheet of sheer plastic bag for a back windshield, neatly secured with tape all around the edges in a manner that suggests a situation of relative permanence. He is listening to a cricket match being played in Australia, but he gives his wife all of his attention as she explains that the Whalen children will be spending the night with them. When she finishes, Rosa does not wait for any indication of her husband’s agreement and he does not seem to think one is necessary. Rosa’s soft arms, exposed to the elements above a skirt pulled up above her breasts into a sort of dress, ushers Beth and Sam into the back of the car. The husband smiles one of the all-teeth smiles of the locals in the tourist brochures, and nods at Mira’s hesitant expression and assures her that it is perfectly okay for the children to spend the rest of the night with his family, no problem. Mrs. Whalen can come too, says Rosa’s husband, if she wants to. Mira shakes her head and says no and her voice trails off because she cannot find a reason why not and somehow it feels like a reason is necessary and he smiles again, as if he is saying that this, too, is okay. And something about his openness to everything is so unnerving that she turns away and she hardly feels Rosa’s gentle pats on her back, hardly hears her assuring the security guard that her madam is just a little tired but no, she does not need a taxi, she will make her way home by herself. And Mira confirms she will, as soon as she has done her shopping. The children are driven away and Beth does not look at her from inside the plastic windows of the bright blue Datsun. Mira Whalen walks back inside and suddenly she is alone in the quiet of the store because Markley has gone to see after a drunken tourist couple who are stumbling toward more local rum. She starts to wander the aisles.

  The 24-hour convenience store is a recent a
ddition to the beachfront. Several years ago, Mira and two other makeup attendants from the department store used to patronize the club upstairs because it was always full of tourists and the younger inhabitants of the luxury villas that faced the better end of Baxter’s Beach. In those days the convenience store was a Chinese restaurant with red paper lanterns and GUANG DONG in gold lettering above a mural of a dark-haired lady in a square dress. Not too long after she’d married Peter and become an inhabitant of one of those luxury villas herself, the restaurant had closed and not too long after that, a convenience store had opened instead. The GUANG DONG sign had gone but the geisha had remained, unperturbed by the new FAST MART CONVENIENCE sign in the shadow of which she stares at its shoppers with the same coy grace with which she had welcomed the patrons of the restaurant.

  When Peter was alive, in the times when they first came for three months a year to Baxter’s Beach, there was no all-night convenience store. In those days they used to laugh if they had forgotten to ask Rosa to add citronella candles to the list of groceries she bought in the supermarket each day because they knew they would be mauled by mosquitoes after turning in. They used to sigh and say, This is how it is on a small island. And although it was inconvenient not to have options for late-night shopping, it reminded them of why they thought this was a good place to call a getaway in conversations with friends. It was a good place to unwind from the stresses of London life. It was a good place to try for a baby.

  Now vulgar neon lights advertise the store’s 24-hour status and at night the beachfront is perpetually ablaze with colored lights in which the whores stand haloed. And you can buy citronella candles, cigarettes, and The Economist at 3 a.m. What they had sought refuge from had found them.