by Cherie Jones
Sergeant Beckles tells the constable to start looking for this Adan and get back to him.
He is interested, he says, in Adan’s side of the story.
Chapter 12
Lala
17 August 1984
Later that morning, Lala is grieving, puffy-eyed, at home, when she is visited by a short yellow policeman. Adan has anticipated this visit, and before he sprinted back down the beach toward the tunnels to hide, he held her head between his palms and barked at her about how she should respond, not even releasing her face long enough to wipe the wet from his own. Do not tidy the room, he has told her, a grieving woman cannot keep a clean house. Do not take too long to answer their questions, but keep the answers short so they are easier to remember. As much as is possible, he has warned her, look them in the eye so they will not think you are lying but do not stare, especially if the policeman who comes is a man. By the time the yellow policeman actually knocks, Adan is, she guesses, safely ensconced back in the tunnels, in a spot that neither he nor Tone has shared with her yet. Perhaps the same place he has been hiding since Baby was born. She looks around the room one more time, shaking her head when her eyes want to linger on a little Moses basket, made of rushes, that she had collected from the Salvation Army and then used to hold Baby’s cloth nappies and clothing. Her hands are shaking when she reaches for the door handle, her fingers stumble when she tries to release the bolt.
After the policeman cautions her, almost apologetically, because he has been trained to do so, and not because he believes that she has anything at all to do with her daughter’s death, Lala tells him what she thinks might have happened. He understands, he tells her, that she isn’t sure, that her daughter’s death is as much a mystery to her as it is to the police, just tell him as much as she can remember.
So she does. And when she is done he asks her the things he thinks she should also remember, the things she should have thought to tell him. Things like what time it was when she realized Baby was missing, things like whether she had heard or seen anything strange the night before. The policeman is accompanied by a woman who says she is from the Child Care Board. She has to make a report, says the woman, anytime a child dies in suspicious circumstances. It takes Lala a while to understand that the child who died in suspicious circumstances is Baby, that a report is being written about the death of her daughter. It is nothing to worry about, says this woman, but she also has a few questions. This woman is tall, so tall that it seems like she almost has to stoop to enter the house. Her smile reminds Lala of a necessary parting of the lips rather than a pleasantry.
The woman does not extend her condolences or ask whether Lala slept well, she asks other questions. She asks whether Lala breastfed Baby and does not appear worried when she says she thinks so, she often tried. She asks how long the baby slept each night and who would feed her at night when she woke up, Lala or Adan. She asks how many times per day Lala bathed her, how many times a night she changed her diaper. She asks if Baby ever made Lala angry, if she ever responded to that anger by smacking her. Even once. Lala tries to remember the answers the best she can, details like that are not particularly fuzzy, because in her mind they do not have to do with Baby’s death, with the fact her daughter is dead, but because she does not know why she is being asked these things, she worries about the policeman’s motives and the woman’s tone. She worries whether, should she answer with the first response that comes to mind, she will give them clues to other questions they should ask her, questions whose answers she has not yet rehearsed, questions that will lead them to answers that must remain hidden. For this reason and this reason only, she thinks long and hard before answering any of the questions they ask. For this reason only she matches the policeman’s expressionless stare while they wait for her answers, watching her turn the black velvet collar of her one good dress over and under and over again with trembling fingers. The woman does not appear sympathetic enough to ask her if she understands clearly, if she wants the questions repeated again. When they are done the woman lets herself out and the policeman asks more questions. Does she know anyone who would want to harm her baby? Anyone who would want to harm her? And when exactly did she realize that Baby was not beside her on the bed?
And where, he asks, was her husband?
The story flows out of Lala’s lips without stuttering. Her husband was away, says Lala, fishing with friends. Her husband has been away since before Baby was born. The policeman writes it down. And if he thinks her voice too steady for a woman who has lost her only child, her hands too skittish to suggest innocence, or that her eyes fail to sit properly on his, he doesn’t say so. He takes her statement in a cursive that he forms deliberately. He calls her ma’am. He asks her if she’d like to stop for a drink of water and says yes when she offers him one as well.
When he finally closes his small plastic-backed notebook and replaces it in his pocket, Lala walks him to the door and watches him walk down the steps. She smiles when he looks back at her, smiles again when his feet find the shifty, sandy soil at last, and he gives her a final wave, a deferential tip of his hat, before he disappears between the bow-legged squat of the farthest pair of coconut trees.
Lala waits to see whether he will return for a full minute before taking the steps herself, three at a time, almost buckling into a broken shin on the last few. It is only when she reaches the sand that she realizes she is sobbing, that she is looking around her wildly, like she knows someone might be watching her. She gathers her composure and looks around more slowly, but the only sound is the scrape and drag of the fishermen launching a boat into the water. They are too far away to be seen or to see her, and Lala flies to the left rear stilt, on which the house sags toward the sea. There is an arrangement of rocks there but she is too tired to recall whether they are in the order in which she last placed them. She starts digging with her hands, so fast that the sandy soil splatters up into her face, pocks her lips, salts her hair.
It will not take them long to figure out what really happened, thinks Lala, it will not take them long to come back to arrest her. She has to be gone by then.
When she had first buried this tin, it was because she had harbored dreams of a vacation abroad, of saving enough to pay for a visa and a ticket and a place to stay and putting on a good dress and going to the airport and catching BWIA and going to America. The tin was emptied of the Christmas cookies she’d bought, and she’d started to fill it with fives and tens and twenties out of the US dollars she was paid by the tourists, the tips she was gifted for her neat plaits and clean parts and for making her clients’ hair look like Bo Derek’s in 10. The tin was what her thoughts turned to whenever she wanted something that seemed out of reach – a black velvet jumpsuit with shoulder pads and gold sequins for Old Year’s dancing, for instance, or a little motor car so she and Adan could drive around the island on Sunday evenings and buy ice cream and toot toot at Wilma when they saw her at the bus stop. Later, when she was pregnant, that tin had held a dream of a beautiful cradle for Baby, the means to call a carpenter and tell him to come and fix the leaky house so her new baby would never get wet when it rained, like she and Adan sometimes did. Although she’d hardly ever followed through to buy whatever it was she wanted, that tin meant that the means were always there, if she was ever presented with a justifiable emergency or a goal truly worth the expenditure.
But the tin is lighter than it should be when she finally lifts it free of the soil.
When she opens it, the tin is empty.
Lala makes her way back up the stairs with the unseeing eyes of a blind woman, holding the tin in her left hand, groping the wood for guidance as she ascends the stairs, stopping to remove the bright red lid every few steps up the precarious gradient to see whether there really isn’t anything in there, whether the pictures of a grand English garden and a horse and carriage and a liveried footman on the lid of the cookie tin really give way to nothing at all. She tells herself a moment later that she must be blin
d, that it must be this blindness that has fooled her into thinking the tin is empty. It must be this blindness that also refuses to reveal the little money in the hem of her wedding dress, the few dollars she rolled in a bag and stashed in the third spring her hand reaches from the hole on the left side of the mattress, the coins in the little paper bag shoved into that hole in the floor behind the closet. It must be a sudden blindness, because it cannot be that the money is not there. Or there. Or there.
Lala waits for Adan to come back, clutching the empty tin, wearing one of Wilma’s stolen dresses, with one of Baby’s pink frilly panties in her pocket. She has vowed to keep something of Baby’s on her every day for the rest of her life, but that does not temper her decision to kill Adan the moment he walks through the door. It is his fault that their baby is dead, it is his fault that she is hurting, and now it is his fault that she cannot escape, that the money she was saving appears to be all gone. The how of it never enters her mind – how exactly will she deprive her giant of a husband of his life? She is not a small woman, she knows she is solid, but she is still no match for a physique so finely honed by tough street living, by hours of practice on a tiny unicycle, by countless sprints to escape the long arm of the law.
She gets up, goes to the window above the sink, grasps a few fine hairs at the front of her scalp and starts to braid her hair, over and under, over and under until she has two fat corn rows on either side of her head that hide her bald spots, the bare patches of scalp where the hair that Adan once pulled out does not grow back. She has rubbed these patches with the pounded pulp of aloes, with warm coconut oil, with a poultice made of grated ginger and glycerin. The hair still does not grow back. Today, she folds a wad of toilet paper into a fat square after soaking it in garlic tea and aloes and grits her teeth and opens her shirt and places it over her nipple. There was a time when she would discover a bruise or a swelling or a flap of broken skin she did not remember getting and it would hurt her all over again. This is not the thing she is feeling now. What she feels now is relief. This is the day she accepts that she will either kill Adan or die trying. And with this acceptance comes a type of calm, a calm that frees her: she does not go and start to make breakfast so he can eat it if he comes back home from his hideout, she does not make the bed or tidy the bedroom, she does not hide the knife by the sink in the event that he is in a temper.
When his footsteps sound at the bottom of the stairs, the volume of his whistling amplified by lungs pumped full of crisp salt air, she approaches the door, slowly, thinking of Baby. She reaches for the handle. It is better, she thinks, to meet him at the top of the stairs, before he has the chance to come inside and trap her in this small room. At the top of the stairs, if they fight, he can fall from a great height.
She is thinking thoughts like these, thoughts of killing this man she married, when the door rattles and someone other than Adan steps in, flashing a badge at her.
This policeman is a short black man built broad and soft by a well-meaning wife. His bald head shines in the manner of one that no longer requires shaving. He looks as if he once had a jolly disposition, but too much exposure to the underbelly of life has left him only slightly bemused and matter-of-fact in the face of tragedy. His one condescension to style appears to be his jewelry – a heavy gold homemade link around his neck, assorted bits at his wrists and fingers, a tiny glinting bauble at the top of his right ear. It is this bauble that Lala fixes her eyes on while he talks, which he does in the nasal whine of children after inhaling the helium in balloons, a whine under which a laugh, the type that has nothing to do with humor, lies waiting.
“Sergeant Beckles, ma’am,” he says, without greeting, when she is startled by the sight of him in the doorway. “Now tell me again where you was when you realize the baby was missing?”
Chapter 13
17 August 1984
These is the reasons why you baby dead:
The first baby, the one you throw away when you was still by Wilma because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have it and it didn’t seem real until after you swallow the pills and something lumpy fell out and you flush it and Adan, who buy the pills off a pharmacist who sell people every kind of medication even without a prescription, say you shouldn’t worry because it probably only a few weeks growing and not a real baby at all but that didn’t help and getting rid of a baby you don’t want must most certainly be punishable by losing a baby you do want because God say you do not get to play God.
Being rude to Wilma when you was there because she is still your grandmother after all, and she take you in and raise you up after your mother die, even if she beat you if Carson look too hard, even if you couldn’t have friends over or go to parties or fairs or have a Walkman or listen to soca because Wilma, for her one-part, is not a bad person and she still take you in even if you had to sleep in the little old outhouse in the yard, just like your mother did, while she and Carson sleep in the stone house, even if sometimes at night you used to look out the window and see her there spotting a flashlight in the direction of the outhouse just to make sure you were not in there with Carson or sneaking out to look for another man.
Stealing. Fruits from the trays of the vendors in the market, money from Wilma’s purse when she let you in the house, Wilma’s makeup and creams, Adan’s place as the breadwinner of the household and the assorted hearts of several men.
Because, despite your best efforts, you are just like your mother.
Chapter 14
17 August 1984
At the bottom of the steps to Adan’s house is a patch of coconut trees – big trees with ricketed trunks that curve away from each other and find their way back to themselves at the bases of skirts made of fronds. These are not the trees of postcards, not the type you tie your hammock to and lie under with a good book and a rum punch. These trees throw shadows with claws onto the steps and sometimes, when the wind is high, they throw coconuts you have to dodge for fear they could kill you. The fronds of these trees are home to centipedes that fall out while dreaming and land writhing on the steps to Adan’s house. When they land, these centipedes do not climb the remaining stairs to the house, they are too wise to head for the inside of this dwelling. Instead, they speed back toward the coconut patch, hoping that Adan does not see them first. The carcasses of the ones he has found litter the steps and Adan has instructed Lala not to sweep the skeletons up, so that their carcasses can be a warning to any of their kin bold enough to approach the inside of his house, where his cutlass sits waiting beside their bed. It is the same cutlass he used to cut coconuts for her while she was pregnant, the one he holds to her neck on bad days, when she could decapitate herself by the simple act of exhalation. Lala remembers how, while pregnant, she had marveled that Adan had never cut himself with this cutlass while climbing these coconut trees, how when he had jumped out of the tree and back to the ground and scalped a nut to present her with the cool, slightly milky, sweet water, his smooth skin was never scraped or swollen. He had never been stung while in the tree. Not even once. You could assume that a man is not really a bad man, thinks Lala, when even nature never sees fit to punish him.
It is near the perimeter of this patch of trees that Lala watches Sergeant Beckles stoop when he finishes interviewing her. When he straightens again, he is holding a little yellow bootie in his hand. This bootie is spattered with dirty sand but it is clearly a yellow bootie and it clearly matches the dress Baby was wearing when she was found. Lala jerks her head from the window, flattens her back against the inside of the house, does not dare to breathe. She cannot see the sergeant, but she knows that he is looking back at the house, at the very window from which she watched him leave. She knows that he is wondering if he should broach the steps again, ask her a few more questions, remind her that she may need to come down to the station to give a statement. But when she does not hear the door again, when there is no knock to signal that he has come back to question her further, she does not feel relief. She feels, more than eve
r, that this investigation will not end well for her, that everything is falling apart, that the only thing she can do is leave.
But where can she run? And how?
That whole day Lala does not venture out to braid hair. She waits for Adan. She waits until nightfall, when the beach is blanketed in dark velvet and the sky is spattered with rhinestones that glint at her through the window. She waits and she waits and she waits and Adan does not come home and Lala finally falls into a sleep full of dreams in which, inexplicably, she loves him, instead of killing him, in which he escorts her into the carriage on the cover of the money tin and where, inside that carriage, Baby is alive and cooing in her bassinet. She dreams dreams in which Baby’s hunger is sated by her heavy, hurting breasts.
But then she wakes up and realizes that Adan still has not come home and she is no longer pregnant or nursing and that Baby is still dead. She realizes that today could be the day Sergeant Beckles comes back to arrest her, that right now they could be watching her under cover of the coconut trees, and Adan is still nowhere to be found.
Lala suddenly cannot stand the sight of the coconut trees. It is a gray and windy day and missiles from the nearest tree strike violently as she stands by the window, crashing into the side of the house with thunderous cracks, telling her that it is repulsed by its own fruit. Adan has always hated coconuts and had arranged, prior to Baby’s birth, to sell what Lala did not devour to Coyote, who hustles them to tourists, tourists who remain delighted by the tropical colors of the little neon straws he sticks inside the soft jelly at the top of the nut.