by Cherie Jones
“Relax, I am not going to hurt you.”
He runs his fingers along her neck and hmmms below his breath.
“You have some nasty bruises there,” he says, “but I don’t think anything is broken. Who did this to you?”
Lala doesn’t answer.
The woman with the floppy hat and jeweled sandals looks at him and he at her and then they both look at Lala.
“Do you want to go to the hospital or the police?” the woman asks quietly. Lala shakes No and accepts some water in a wineglass from the blond-bristled hand. There are perhaps no other kinds of drinking glass in this villa. Lala’s mind is racing. The man says, “Drink slowly – your throat must be sore.” And she is not sure whether he means from the swelling or the screaming.
When she hands him back the wineglass and stands up to leave the patio, she notices that a single fly has already found Betsy’s body, that soon there will be others. Lala is thinking about the police. If these people call the police, it will just draw more attention, she is thinking. It will just give them cause to ask her more questions about Baby. She does not need policemen asking her more questions about Baby. She needs to get away from the police, from Adan, from these people, from this beach. And in order to do that she must seem as if she isn’t running, from any of them. When she finally runs, decides Lala, it must be a run that will take her to another place entirely, a place from which she will never return. Where can she run to, now? She cannot run to Wilma, whose house will not feel like a harbor. She cannot run to Tone, who has no place of his own to take her, no totem strong enough to keep her safe from harm.
She looks out at the sand beyond the patio and sees her baby, whose image then melts into a crab, scampering off the sand and toward her feet.
Soon Lala is sprinting again, back to where she came from, and this time the blond-bristled hand cannot hold her.
* * *
“I sorry, Lala,” Adan tells her that evening. “You know I sorry.”
She is wrapped in his big, broad arms and her face is tickled by the hair on his chest and he is talking to her above her head so that she has to imagine his repentance etched across his features.
“Is just . . . Baby gone and I, I couldn’t save she, Lala. I couldn’t save she after you drop she.”
He kisses the top of her head, strokes the hair from which her braided extensions had once been forcibly removed. She has stopped plaiting it in styles that cover the bald patch where he yanked out her hair by its roots. It is hard not to flinch when his hands reach that spot, it is hard to pretend that she has no memory of that hurt, even if she cannot remember what was the issue that had led to it, but Lala does not flinch, she does not shy away from those hands in her hair.
“I know, Adan,” she says. “Is all right.”
“I can’t even get the money to bury Baby,” says Adan. “I can’t even get she bury.”
Lala’s thoughts return to her tin, but she says nothing. It makes no sense to bring up the tin and how its contents could have helped to bury Baby. It makes no sense to agonize in her own mind about how the money in that tin could have helped her now.
“I going help, Adan, it have more people coming to get braids, I going save the money to bury Baby.”
He shifts restlessly, he stops stroking her hair so that she wonders where his hands are, what exactly they are doing.
“We need more than you little money,” says Adan. “Baby deserve a good funeral, a proper send-off . . . is not she fault that . . .”
And then he is weeping, sobbing disconsolately in a way that stuns her, a way that she has not heard since they met, a way that makes her unsure about whether she should lift her head and look at him or wrap her arms around his torso or tell him again that he is okay, that they will both be okay, even though she knows this is not true. She stays still, barely breathing. She does not hold him. She does not look.
A soft rain starts to fall, the kind that leaves little spears on the windows, like arrows pointing out the direction of the wind. He cannot do another job on the beach, explains Adan when he is calmer. The police are on high alert since the white man was killed, more of the inhabitants of the houses have hired security guards, some have fitted their guard walls with barbed wire, a few more have surely by now also purchased guns.
A job in the village is unlikely to get him the money he needs for an undertaker, unless it is a commercial job, and he can’t do that type of job alone. There is just this job with the weed, says Adan – that is the only way he can think of to get the money to bury Baby. He could ask Tone what he think about this new thing with the weed, but he can’t get Tone to come and meet him and talk about it. Tone ain’t no real hustler, Tone was always just a soldier, grouses Adan, just waiting for Adan to tell him what to do. He pauses, clears the hoarse from the back of his throat.
“Tone acting funny to you, Lala?”
“Tone?”
“Yeah, man acting sketchy couple months now; you ain’t notice how funny he acting when he come around? Even before Baby come, I was to ask you if you ain’t notice.”
“He acting the same as always to me,” Lala says softly. “I ain’t notice nothing different ’bout him.”
It takes her great effort to keep breathing normally, but Adan does not let on if he thinks anything amiss. He eventually unfolds the embrace within which he has wrapped her and says he is going out. He can’t just lie down and relax when Baby can’t even get a decent funeral, says Adan, in a way that sounds like an accusation, he is a man, and as man he going and figure out how to pay for the funeral she deserve.
Lala watches him stand, put his shirt back on, shove open the door and step into the damp air. She stares at the door for a long time after he has gone. She shivers. She doesn’t have much time.
* * *
When Lala answers the door half an hour after Adan’s exit, her face is masked with the mourning she believes it ought to wear – the innocent kind – in anticipation of the police again. Adan would not be back so soon, he would not knock, and she is not expecting anyone else.
In the way of all people guilty of extreme sin, the proof of her wrongdoing has started to be mirrored everywhere: in the number of times she has heard or seen the word murderer since she held her dead baby in her arms on the beach, in soap-opera plots, on the front page of newspapers. She is haunted too, by the body of her daughter – in the soulful eyes of a crab in a hole on the beach, in the cries of a little baby a client brings to sit next to them while Lala does her hair, a baby who stretches her feet in her pram until her bootie falls off to expose Baby’s triple-jointed toes.
She is convinced also that supernatural beings are conspiring on her daughter’s behalf to make her understand that she will pay for her part in her death. She understands that it is a wicked duppy who placed the pink-labeled can of formula she found sitting in the cupboard, just behind a few cans of beans, because she knows she has thrown out all of Baby’s milk. It is this duppy – or another, equally malevolent – who infuses the peculiar sound the paper bag of flour makes when she is making dumplings and it hits the floor with the same sound she heard when Baby was dropped. There are demons, she knows, who sprinkle the house with the smell of the Cussons baby powder she often dusted around Baby’s neck and chest, although she is certain there is no one in the house besides her and she is not using baby powder.
Her guilt seems to sit on her, so that she is sure that others must immediately recognize her hands are not clean, that she is at least partly to blame for her daughter’s death. And this is why she is expecting the police to come back to arrest her, why she masks her face when she answers the door, because only a face free of guilt can assist her if it is that dark policeman on the other side of the knocking.
But it is not the dark policeman. It is Tone.
“Why you come back here again?” is what she howls at him, even as her face crumbles and she weeps her relief. She is still howling as he holds her, kissing her nose right there on
the step, kissing her forehead, licking the tears from her cheeks, patting away her relief as she cries, “Why the fuck you keep on coming back here?”
Chapter 19
Mrs. Whalen
19 August 1984
Rosa is not having it. She is not tolerating any more nonsense. All of this pining not good, says Rosa, she can understand the loss, yes, but you ain’t the only body who ever lose. It is terrible, yes, but you have to get up, get out, start over. God take Mr. Whalen, him didn’t take you. While she is saying this Rosa is stomping around in the dark of Mira Whalen’s bedroom, flinging back the blackout curtains until the room is flooded with blinding sunlight and Mira Whalen cannot see anything but the faint shadows of the swinging flaps of skin beneath Rosa’s upper arms projected onto the far wall. Up until today, Mira Whalen has forbidden her to do anything but change the bed linen, and Rosa seems determined to make up for lost time. Rosa is picking up the bedding off the floor. Rosa is clearing the bedside table of glasses of stagnant tap water and empty pill packets and crinkly Kleenex stuck into position by Mira Whalen’s snot. Rosa is replacing the cordless telephone on the stand so that its red eye is relit and Mira Whalen feels again like she is being watched. Rosa is putting on top of the wardrobe the cricket bat that stands between Mira Whalen and death, almost out of her reach entirely.
“No!” says Mira Whalen. “No, you know you’re not to touch that . . . no!”
But Rosa shoves the bat a little farther back so that it is completely hidden from view.
“No?” asks Rosa. “No?” But all the while she keeps working and rousting: the empty bottles of fine rum, the mugs in which cocoa has clotted and coalesced into a sticky brown gel that myriad spores of fungi now call home, the tear-stained photos of Peter hastily shoved under the bed so that the children wouldn’t catch Mira Whalen looking and get upset.
You is not the first God make a widow, you is not the last.
Rosa is coming for her and tugging the robe off of her back and saying that it smells worse than the people Rosa serves meals to at the Salvation Army on Sundays after church. Rosa runs hot water and she says, Come here and sit in this here tub and let me clean you up, and there is something in her face that preempts the firing Mira Whalen wants to give her. This something will accept nothing but surrender, so Mira Whalen gets into this tub and lets Rosa scrub her skin and her hair and lets the steam poach her insides and sear her skin and decides that she will determine tomorrow whether she will fire Rosa or not but she knows she will not because a new person would not know her and they would not remember Peter and the children might not love them.
Rosa is not gentle with the scrubbing, she does not check whether the water is just the right degree of hot, she does not brush gently around the teeth that Mira Whalen bares for her, in deference to the tender gums that hold them there. Rosa rubs the loofah like she is scrubbing stains from a floor that will not let them go and Mira Whalen is sweltering and her skin feels like she is being stung by a thousand wasps at once and her back is turning red where the loofah has lashed it but she does not shriek the way she wants to, she whimpers instead and she is at ease in her whimpering because Rosa ignores it.
You need to get outside, says Rosa, you need to come back to life. God take Mr. Whalen, him didn’t take you. You think he would want to know you pining away like this?
Mira Whalen closes her eyes. Just yesterday she had ventured outside, just a little walk on the beach, and had seen the neighbor’s dog die, had seen a woman too terrified to report an assault she had suffered. Mira Whalen did not think she could muster the energy to go outside again. Mira Whalen didn’t think she could muster the energy for anything.
If only she had someone, she thinks, someone she could call, other than Martha, who would come and sort everything out for her. But she doesn’t have those kinds of friends in Wimbledon. Even after six years, the friends are all still Peter’s.
Rosa tells Mira Whalen she need to hurry up make funeral arrangements. She tells her it has been a whole month – she need to call back the people who been calling, the police who call to tell her the autopsy is finally done, the body can be released, the head-doctor who want to know why Mira Whalen miss the appointment this morning, she need to sort out the little children, the poor peeny children, is not their fault them father dead. The mother call yesterday, Rosa tells her, she Rosa Omarilla Watson tell her that Peter dead and she should come for her children. Right away she should come for them. Don’t look at me that way, says Rosa, is the gospel truth I telling and Mrs. Whalen know it. Somebody have to tell her that pining away in the dark all day not going change anything, and God must be did decide it might as well be her, Rosa Omarilla Watson, ’cause she is the only body like them telling Mira Whalen that this is bare foolishness she doing. Mr. Whalen already dead, she plan to kill herself too? She call her Mr. Watson, says Rosa, and he coming right now to take Mrs. Whalen to the appointment with the head-doctor. Right now he coming, says Rosa, right now self.
This is how Mira Whalen comes to be chug-chugging downtown in the back of Rosa’s husband’s plastic-windowed Datsun, in clothes that sore her skin and are, to her surprise, now two sizes too big. Mira Whalen is aware that her outfit has been put together by a 300-pound domestic who prefers to wear cheap polyester skirts in bright colors that she has purchased from the itinerant vendor and pulled up over long breasts she leaves braless. Mira Whalen understands that this means she must look like shit, but she doesn’t know because she hasn’t looked before leaving. Mira Whalen looks now, while Rosa’s husband is listening to cricket and the drone of the commentary is just the type of silence Mira can settle into. She is wearing a satiny emerald-green jacket with shoulder pads, a yellow skirt and white satin pumps and stockings, and underneath Rosa has dressed her in new black lace panties because she says that you must wear new, fresh, clean panties to a doctor’s appointment, even if this is not a doctor who needs to examine anything under your skirt.
* * *
13 January 1983
Peter Whalen had a thing about panties. This is how he came to know that Mira Whalen was having an affair – her panties had told him. Mira had come back to the house in Wimbledon late one night when Peter had, extraordinarily, made it home from work early. He’d bought her excuse about a late hair appointment, but then he’d turned playful, started to relieve her of her clothing and her handbag had dropped and coughed up a rolled-up red lingerie set he’d never seen before. Mira Whalen hadn’t been particularly inclined to lie about how she came to be carrying around a soiled red lace corset, matching panties and stockings, so she’d simply whispered Sorry and steeled herself for the worst. As it happened, the worst part of what had come next was not how her husband had raged, but how he had cried.
If she’d been able to talk to Peter about what had caused the affair, she’d tell him it was nothing he had done. Rather, it was her body’s stout refusal to carry his baby. The third miscarriage was, she thinks now as the Datsun crawls through the traffic on the tiny streets toward town, the start of everything. This is what she would tell Peter if she could speak to him, if he was here sitting beside her, if she was finally able to have that conversation with him about why she had spent her afternoons astride a twenty-year old art student with a penchant for older women in tarty red lingerie.
* * *
3 September 1982
She is hosting Sam’s fourth birthday party when a wine-soaked strawberry slips out of her. This is baby number 3, the subject of three months of constant prayers God has chosen not to hear. They are in the middle of the party, she is in the middle of the lawn, handing out loot bags, when she realizes what is happening, asks a clown to hand out the rest, and makes for the bathroom. In the bathroom, she does not cry. She decides against telling Peter until after the party, she decides to make a brave face for little Sam and returns to the loot bags. It does not make any sense going to the hospital right away, she already knows what the doctors will say and she does not want Sa
m’s fourth birthday to be associated forever with this. She spends the rest of the afternoon organizing the piñata and showing harried moms with squirming toddlers to the bathroom and fetching punch for the clown who is of decidedly bad humor as he waits in his top hat for the time slot for his show.
It is only after they have waved goodbye to the last guest and Peter has returned Sam to his mother’s Victorian terrace, where he will have another birthday party tomorrow, that Mira Whalen tells Peter what has happened and is taken to the hospital.
After she is no longer pregnant, and she is at home and brooding, Peter is the same as he always is – he brings her cups of cocoa in bed, he rubs her feet and sings her love songs while she cries, he breaks the news to his friends and those neighbors she can’t bring herself to greet at the door. But although Peter does all these things, something cracks within her. It is something that did not crack when Martha said, on being told she was pregnant with baby number 1: “That poor woman, you getting pregnant so soon after Peter left her.” It is something that did not crack with the demise of baby number 2 but it cracks now, a tiny fissure she does not immediately notice, which yawns, over time, into a chasm she tries to fill with shopping trips, maniacal workouts at the gym, too much alcohol at the wrong time of day – and an art student named Fred, for whom she sits naked in response to the ad he placed for an artist’s model. Fred paints her in his flat, in fat, round strokes and bright, bold colors that she takes to mean he sees her as the mother she so desperately wants to be. It is because of how she thinks he sees her that she agrees to stay a few minutes for coffee after her sitting one evening, it is why she agrees to go with him to a jazz club on an evening when Peter is again working late. It is because of all this that she finds herself in Fred’s bed one lazy Wednesday afternoon in December, with the icy cold glaring at them through the windows, wearing nothing but Fred and a fleece blanket he must have bought in a thrift shop.