How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  “Normally I’d be walking with Betsy at this time,” the man explains after a while. “I’ve been waking up early anyway – although she’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mira replies. “She was lovely.”

  He looks like he is just preparing to walk away when she says, “I suppose one drink couldn’t hurt – a hot drink.”

  They chat on his patio, she still in her pajamas, he in his swim trunks. He says he has a gun – she should get one – and offers to show it to her, but Mira Whalen shakes her head. She is leaving in two days, selling the house, she tells him, there is no reason for her to get a gun now. Mira Whalen hears the beep of the buzzer as Rosa punches in the code and lets herself in. Today is her last day.

  Mira Whalen is just beginning to enjoy her coffee, to feel the gentle heat of the early sun on her hands and face, when a woman rushes onto the patio. The woman is bloody, an incisor seems half-gone, and the half that remains is partially obliterated by a pulsing purple lip.

  “I’m calling the police this time,” Grayson says, disgusted, and the slapping of his feet on the floor follows a derisory snort, as if he is annoyed by the sight of her, dripping blood on his sand-colored porcelain tiles. She isn’t crying. She sort of trembles through some sort of half-holler before she collapses on the tiles and stays there. Mira takes this to mean that she feels she is safe from what she is seeking to escape and sets about seeing that, as much as is possible, this is so.

  It is Mira who leads this woman inside, Mira who slides shut the glass doors that lead to Grayson’s patio and secures them, Mira who finds and pulls a string that drops a sisal blind to cover the door so that the outside is no longer visible. Grayson disappears for a moment and comes quietly back with a cordless phone, but when he speaks into it that he wants to report an assault it is Mira who almost jumps out of her skin.

  The woman whimpers. It sounds like No.

  “Don’t be silly,” he says. “I’m calling it in.”

  The woman starts to cry, to try to walk away. She pleads with Mira, silently, to stop him, but Mira is also helpless while Grayson talks into the receiver.

  “Yes, an assault. A man, I think, keeps beating the bejesus out of his – ”

  He glances at her ring finger.

  “ – his wife.”

  The woman is looking at the door, willing herself to get up.

  “I all right,” she says when Mira rises to help her. “I good.” It comes out sounding like thwud and the woman touches her lip, as if she cannot believe it’s been so badly battered that she now sounds like Elmer Fudd. When she stands up, Mira notes her skirt is so badly torn you can see her panties through it.

  “You’re not!” Grayson barks, and then he is back to the receiver again, giving the address of his big house on Baxter’s Beach. Mira Whalen knows that the giving of this address ensures that the police will come, and that they will come quickly.

  This woman is looking around the room, checking for noises, for points of entry that haven’t been taken care of. Mira listens to Grayson describe this woman to the police.

  “Was it someone you know?”

  Grayson pauses. “We’ve seen her before, one morning he chased her down here. I’ve seen the husband, too – ran back when he saw me coming, he did. Betsy used to bark at her whenever she saw her along the beach.”

  Mira watches the dark-chocolate woman gather her skirt like its flares are her wits, holding together the edges of the biggest rip in her fist as though this action will make sense of her situation.

  “Don’t call the police,” says this woman. “I all right. I going.”

  He stands in her way, in front of the blinds hiding the doors back to the beach. He keeps talking into the phone. He moves from side to side, maintaining his position each time she tries to move toward the door.

  “I have a daughter,” he says to Mira, post-description. “I have a daughter, and I’d be damned if I let a man treat her like this.”

  “No, not you,” he says into the receiver, rolling his eyes.

  Mira Whalen waves to Grayson, makes it clear that he should cancel the report, tell the police not to worry. The police here are useless, she says to Grayson, she knows they are useless. Up to now they cannot find who killed Peter – what makes him think they can help this woman?

  The woman starts crying, tears that run down her sullen expression in steady streams, without sound. Mira believes that she should hug her, so she goes close, stretches out her arms, lays them on her thick flesh, and pulls her close. She tells her that she should stay. Here, where she’s safe. She tells her that everything is going to be all right.

  * * *

  Although she is unimpressed by the way the police have handled the investigation into her husband’s murder, Mira Whalen blames herself for its stalling. Despite repeatedly being shown binders thick with the plastic-protected mug shots of every robber the island has ever known, everyone who has served time for murder or grievous bodily harm, Mira Whalen has come up empty, has kept shaking her head No when English and local detectives alike asked her if she recognized any of these men from the night they were robbed and her husband killed. No other witnesses have come forward with information about anyone seen in the vicinity of Mira’s house, no gun has been found, there are no useful fingerprints, and DNA testing in criminal investigations has not been implemented yet. Peter’s killer remains a mystery.

  It had not made sense to the detectives that Mira Whalen would not remember the robber who had killed her husband. It had not made sense at all. Her statement said she had pulled a stocking off his face, so she should have been able to get a good look at him. But Mira Whalen does not remember the face beneath the stocking; she remembers only the hand that held the gun, and there is no registry of criminal hands they can offer her. They suggest counseling, tell her to call them if anything comes back to her – anything at all. But at this point Mira Whalen just wants to leave the island, just wants to take Peter’s ashes away with her and never come back. It is because she blames herself, however, that she agrees to look through the binder one more time, to stare into the face of every convicted robber, murderer, and violent offender that Baxter’s Beach has ever known.

  “You sure you ain’t recognize nobody?” pleads Sergeant Beckles. “Here, let me show you again.”

  She’d rung them to say she was leaving, to say thanks for all their help, just to be polite, and he’d asked her to come back, to take one more look. This is not protocol. Protocol would dictate that he wait for one of the detectives from Scotland Yard or the local CID before showing her the same binder they had borrowed from the Baxter’s Beach Police Station, but Beckles is not concerned with protocol. Beckles is concerned with showing the big-ups that a sergeant from a poor background with twenty years in policing can solve, with nothing more than his belly, a case that confounds them with all the fancy equipment and techniques they’ve brought from England.

  So Mira looks through the stack of photographs one more time before pushing away the weathered brown binder Sergeant Beckles has brought in. She shudders, although the room they are in at the police station is sweltering hot. Mira Whalen is seated on a little folding metal chair on which she cannot get comfortable. She looks around a large room with walls that reveal their many incarnations of color in patches of peeling paint. Uniformed policemen and officers in civilian clothing sit at a number of wooden desks, on the phone, rummaging in drawers, recording statements from victims and witnesses. Files and papers are everywhere and flutter soundlessly in the buzz of the station. Catalogues of crimes litter the surfaces of the desks, are stacked high on the motley crew of chairs, gather dust on the tops of rusty filing cabinets. Mira Whalen tries not to look too hard at the civilians like her, the people whose obvious discomfort demonstrates that they did not expect to be here, but she cannot help it. She wonders whether these people have also suffered at the hands of the robber who killed Peter.

  It is her fault, thinks Mira, that Peter is dea
d, that he has sacrificed his life to save hers. Peter was a man with everything who hadn’t given a thought to giving it all up for her, even though they had been quarreling about the affair, even though he had been sleeping in the spare room when she had screamed. He had still come running. And now she was a woman with everything she’d ever wanted, but she did not have Peter, or Beth, or Sam, or a child of her own, or a true friend she could call or a mother she could curl into and cry. And she could not even do him the honor of remembering the face of his killer.

  She didn’t expect to see the robber’s face in these photographs, she did not expect to see a mug shot that would trigger her memory – that was not why she came here. But Mira Whalen still leaves the police station in a stupor. She does not hear the policeman ask her whether she would like him to drop her home, whether she would like him to call someone to collect her, or a drink of water before going. Mira Whalen cries as she walks, stumbling along the street toward Baxter’s Beach.

  Chapter 30

  Tone

  5 September 1984

  Tone wakes up to a new face. It is one of those faces that make him want to scream Jesus Christ, Joseph, and Mary. Anybody who thinks this hustle is easy, that men like him are lazy, has never had a day of getting up to a face like this. He peeps at the woman again, starts trying to figure out how to get out without having to see that face come alive. It looks to Tone like one of those silicone Reagan masks Adan sometimes wears to look like the fucking President when he is robbing. No matter who you are, what you really look like, you put on that mask and you look like the President of the United States of America. But when you take the mask off, it melts and wrinkles like jelly, sits in a corner of the room like a spirit that shed its skin and left it to await reinhabitation, next time it might be ready to do something sinister. Adan had told him that Lala hated that mask and what it represented. Adan had told him that recently, when he needed it for a job, he suddenly couldn’t find it anymore, he had been forced to use one of his wife’s cheap pairs of stockings instead. These women, Adan had groused before spitting, they think they know how to fix everything that want fixing.

  Tone realizes now that they are in a nice room – a penthouse suite, from the looks of it, all chrome and marble and discreetly tinted blue glass from floor to ceiling. He hadn’t paid too much attention the night before when he had stumbled back here with his client. The place is beautiful, but with the AC on it is also very cold; it makes him feel like he could have died.

  He considers turning his back on the woman and staying a little longer under the covers without having to see her face, but he is afraid that any small movement will wake her. He knows this kind of woman. The cocaine has become so much a part of her that she has assumed some of its superhuman powers – the ability to hear a pin drop from a mile away, to feel the slightest movement during deep sleep, to stay awake for thirty-six hours straight, to sleep for a week without dying. Should he move a muscle, this woman will awaken, because in her sleep she can hear the ticktock of his mind, and the moment he thinks to sit up, before he actually moves an arm or a leg, an alarm will go off inside her head and she will swing bolt upright, see him there, remember last night, look around to make sure she has not been murdered and is waking up outside her own dead body, look around for her purse to make sure she has not been robbed, look over to the bedside table for evidence of even a smidgen of powder left over from last night, and – not trusting her eyes – lean over to test the surface of the table with her tongue instead.

  Tone decides that stealth would be silly. It is possibly the boldness of this decision that causes the woman to keep sleeping as he dresses, makes himself a cup of hot water for breakfast, counts the three crisp US hundred-dollar bills the woman placed in his pocket before pulling on his baggies. Ugly or no, this is one of those women who knows how to pay him so that it never feels like he is taking her money in exchange for sex. In unspoken deference to this story they share, he refrains from counting the money until the mornings after, when she is still sleeping, when the after-sex talk about taking him to meet her children and grandchildren becomes as absurd as the thought of doing anything but getting as far away from her as possible.

  He lets himself out by the service entrance, thinks about checking in on Lala and Adan, and thinks better of it. He swallows the sour spell of fury he feels when he thinks of Adan, the bitter spit of guilt that sometimes keeps him away. He will see him tonight for the job, he needs to stay level, unbothered, like the Tone Adan remembers from before he married Lala.

  It’s his own fault, thinks Tone. He knew about Jacinthe, what he knew was why he’d brought her. And now look.

  Tone climbs onto his Jet Ski, revs up and into the blue, skirting the early swimmers for deeper water. A white man is waving at him, an old white man in black shorts. This white man does not want a ride on the Jet Ski, this white man wants to give him a note he says is from Lala. The note says she wants to meet him in the tunnels at the entrance he knows about. Now.

  When he sees her busted lips, her eyes swollen so far shut that she has to throw her head back to look at him properly, he understands for the first time that he will never be rid of the Thing. That it will never leave him. The moment a tear squeezes past that eye swollen shut and glitters across the blue and purple bruises on her face, the Thing is there with him, threatening to make him forget himself entirely.

  She tells him everything – about Adan asking if he was behaving strangely, about his intention to return to the big house, about Sergeant Beckles’s questions, about her leaving. She talks with the dust dancing on the shards of light coming through the limestone ceiling, like the fairy dust Cinderella dances in before she disappears.

  In the tight space they stand in, they are side by side, he and Lala. It feels wrong to squeeze in front of her the way they did so very long ago; it feels wrong to face her, to look into her face while she is relaying what Adan said. What he did.

  “He say he going back,” she confirms. “He say he going back and kill the lady that see him. He shoot the man, Tone – he say he shoot the man.”

  Tone is worried. He knows Adan is a robber, but as far as he knows, Adan has never killed anybody. Adan asked him to hide him in the tunnels because a job had gone sour, but he’d never mentioned a murder. Tone is pounding the side of the tunnel with a piece of twig he pulled from aboveground on his way into the tunnel. He is thinking that he has shared the existence of these tunnels with Adan, suggested them as a possible route to transport weed brought in from St. Vincent on fishing boats, to get to town. He is asking himself whether, based on his reluctance to show him the shortest route from shore to city, Adan will decide to explore the caves himself, whether he could be doing that now. He is not speaking but his brow is furrowed, like he is focusing his eyes on the same problem his mind is puzzling over.

  “I think he really going kill me this time,” sobs Lala. “I can’t stay here no more, Tone. I can’t stay in truth.”

  The twig hits the side of the tunnel a little harder, its bark starts to shed to expose the yellow fiber underneath, the floor is seasoned with bits of stem, dying in the dust.

  “He not going kill you,” Tone declares, “not in truth.”

  Lala does not reply. She reaches her hands to the neckline of a dress with fine filigree collar tips and tears it until her neck and then her chest are exposed, and she turns sideways, into a few slivers of light. She is deep plum where the pointed tip of the umbrella has bruised her.

  “Why you choose that man, Lala?” Tone accuses. “Why up to now you ain’t left he?”

  “He is my husband,” says Lala. “He ain’t just a man to leave him so.”

  “Ohhhhh,” Tone feigns understanding. “Well let your husband kill you, then.”

  “I was saving to leave him . . . He take my money, Tone, he thief it, I was going to run, I was going to catch a plane, I – ”

  “You is a child that he could just take you money so?”

  Lala
understands this, what Tone is saying. She understands that he must question her in this way about Adan, because it saves him the hard questions he would otherwise be forced to ask himself.

  She cries as he scolds her, and when the sun changes position and the dust can no longer be seen, they are silent.

  “Shhh.”

  He says he will fix it. He will get her the money for a ticket. He gives her the money he has made from the German woman and promises more in a few days. She can take a plane, go somewhere big, if she doesn’t know somewhere he has a brother in the Big Apple, she can get lost somewhere Adan will never find her, and maybe one day he will come, he will come to the Big Apple and find her. But it will all take time. A ticket is nothing much, but a place to stay, enough to keep her until she can get a job, try to sort her status, these things will take time. She will need as much money as they can gather. He will need a few days. Can she survive a few days so he can get her some money? Maybe she can stay somewhere else, other than the house, she can stay somewhere else and wait for him. It can’t be by his mother because Adan comes around sometimes looking for him, but if she can only find somewhere . . .

  She says it is okay. The people in one of the big houses on the beach have told her to stay there, in a white man’s basement, until things cool down and she can do whatever she needs to do next. Or they could go to the police.

  She shakes her head No. If she does, the police might ask more questions about Baby and she cannot answer any more questions about Baby. Tone nods. What happened to Baby is another one of the secrets that bind them.

  Chapter 31

  The incident with the orange starts with thanks.

  “Thanks,” Lala tells Grayson through a pulsing purple lip, after she has left Tone in the tunnel, after she has walked the beach and burrowed into bushes at the sound of a voice like Adan’s, after she has returned to Grayson’s door in the same strange dress she left it in and has told him she will stay with him until she works out what will happen next. Grayson beams his approval, he tells her he was afraid she would not have come back, he tells her to come in, sit down.