by Cherie Jones
When she starts awake, it is because she hears the scream again, from just outside the house, screaming so familiar that it pulls her from her dreams. She first heard this scream the night she birthed Baby and she understands what it must mean. She is surprisingly calm, is Lala. It is as if she has been waiting for this moment her entire life. She pulls on a pair of sneakers Grayson said belonged to his daughter, pats her passport in the back of her underwear. Lala is ready to run.
Grayson bursts out of his room as she is trying to solve the mystery of the locked door to the patio. He is wearing a pair of white briefs and a white unbelted robe and his ginger chest hair is climbing out of the rectangle the open robe makes.
“Stay inside!” barks Grayson. “Call the police!”
He is grumbling as he checks his gun. When he opens the door and runs onto the patio, the open robe flaps behind him like the cape of some great white superhero. She starts to run behind him, but Grayson locks the door from outside by punching some numbers into a box at the side of the door. This is when Lala feels the first swell of panic. She shouts at him but he is running toward the screaming, which has started afresh, and he does not seem to hear her. She bangs on the door but it remains closed.
From the lounge Lala sees the woman on the steps of the patio, writhing. The furrowed sand behind her shows that she has crawled there. It is the woman who held her, who told her everything would be okay, who lives in the house with the guard wall she recognized. It was the guard wall of the house at which she found Adan that morning Baby was born. This woman, Lala realizes, is the one who had screamed that night, whose scream had haunted her. The woman is bleeding and the blood is pooling beneath the beautiful wrought-iron railings. Lala weighs the possibilities for just a second before she understands what is happening, who has done this. She does not feel safe, even though she is inside. Lala finds a wooden block on the countertop in the kitchen, in which six knives sit sleeping. She unsheathes one and uses the block to break the glass of the door to the patio.
The woman is gurgling. It is an involuntary gurgling, like she is not aware she is doing it. Blood leaks from the side of her chest and has soaked her pajamas just there. Grayson is stooped next to her, trying to stem the bleeding with his balled-up white robe. She can stop, thinks Lala, she can make sure this woman is all right, not on the doorstep of death, not bleeding her last within sight of Baxter’s Beach. Or she can run, because running is the only way she will herself escape.
“Go inside, Lala!” barks Grayson, pressing the robe harder into Mira’s side. “Call the police.”
Lala is frozen to the spot, watching the bleeding woman with her own right hand welded to the handle of a sharp chef’s knife.
“Inside, Lala!” Grayson insists. “Press the red button on the keypad by the door – press it three times, then go inside and call the police and the ambulance.”
“I,” stammers Lala, “I – ”
Grayson leaves Mira’s side, starts to push Lala back to the glass doors, runs back to Mira’s side, strips back her robe and leans in against her bleeding chest. Lala stands by the doors and cannot move.
“Call them, Lala!” orders Grayson. “Call them now!”
Lala turns toward the house, runs inside, picks up one of the cordless receivers, dials zero, and tells the operator she needs the police and an ambulance. Right now, at the back of one of the big houses on Baxter’s Beach, the one with the white wrought-iron railings. And then she stands there, helpless, while Grayson beseeches Mira Whalen to stay with him, while he presses and pumps against her chest.
Lala wonders whether she should run. There is nothing she can do for Mira Whalen now, she thinks, Grayson is the best person to be with her, and if she stays she risks running into Adan, who she knows is the reason that Mira is now fighting for her life. There is no telling what Adan will do if he finds her here. In the distance, she hears the first howl of a siren and the decision is made for her.
She runs past Mira Whalen on the patio steps, past Grayson trying to save her, and she keeps running. Past the little gutter where, years ago, she’d met Tone. She rounds the corner of Baxter’s Beach and sees the slate-gray tarmac of the street, at the other end of which is Wilma’s immaculate little stone house, its cold and calculated neatness. She stays low, crouches by dunks trees, flattens herself on the ground at the first sight of the misty light of oncoming vehicles.
Lala decides she must get to the airport. It is the only solution, it dawns on her suddenly. She has the clump of money she has recently taken to wearing in her bra. She is dressed in one of Grayson’s shirts, pants he no longer wears, a pair of stretchy leggings and sneakers belonging to a woman she doesn’t know, and a headscarf that hides her missing clumps of hair. She does not have much money, she does not have a memento of her baby, a little bag of Baby’s clothes, perhaps, to dress a future sibling in, a little bangle to save in a box and give to a grandchild a generation ahead, she does not have a little blanket in which the scent of her baby still blossoms, a scent she can get lost in when she needs to have her near, to talk to, to apologize. But she has herself, she has her hands, she has the money to buy a ticket.
She has enough.
Epilogue
Tone wakes up the following morning in Baxter’s General. As soon as he wakes he realizes that he is handcuffed to the bed, that two armed policemen are seated near him on the ward. Sergeant Beckles comes to tell him that he is under arrest for the kidnapping and murder of Baby Primus. The doctors expect to discharge him this morning, says the sergeant, and he will take him to the police station after that and book him in.
Tone’s head is hurting him, his mouth feels full of cotton he cannot expel by opening it, by swirling his tongue around to wipe his teeth. His back is sore and his belly is bandaged. Tone says that he is not a murderer. The one man he might have killed is a Mexican man whom he met when he was fifteen years old and never saw again. He could have killed that man, says Tone – he dreamed about killing him, about breaking his neck or strangling him until he begged for mercy – but not another soul, he swears it.
It does not matter. Sergeant Beckles considers the case closed – he recites Tone’s rap sheet of violent assaults occasioning actual bodily harm, his previous stints in prison. He will take Tone’s statement as soon as he can get a doctor’s confirmation that he is lucid, says Sergeant Beckles, and don’t waste his time with anything but the truth. He already knows about Lala, says Sergeant Beckles, he already knows about the two of them. Just tell the truth. Many a man has killed for a woman, Sergeant Beckles tells him, he wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last. And Sergeant Beckles thinks of Sheba, the one woman he thinks he might kill for.
At the mention of woman, Tone thinks of Lala, wonders where she is, if she has heard of his arrest. He smiles ruefully at the thought that he is back to dreaming of her again, dreaming of her humming while he is not free, but he is comforted by the knowledge that Adan cannot hurt her, he cannot hurt her ever again. Within hours he is hustled from the hospital into a waiting police car. It is while he is inside this car, with policemen to his right and his left, before and behind him, and his head is throbbing wildly at the sound of screeching sirens, that he catches sight of a BWIA jet just lifting into the sky.
Tone raises his hands to touch the image of that plane in the window of the police car. He touches his fingers to his lips. He sits back in the seat of the patrol car.
He smiles.
Acknowledgments
There comes a point in the production of anything, when you realize how many shoulders you have been afforded to stand on, how many collective experiences have been brought to bear on the development and enrichment of your own. I could not have written How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House or finally witnessed its publication without:
Ivy, Elise, Violet, and Pearl, and all the ancestors who remain with me and guide me (still).
My parents and my children, for whom the publication of Mommy’s book s
till ranks a distant second to what she will be cooking for dinner, so that my return to the kitchen is the real delight.
Wendy, Belinda, Chris, Kei, Professor Jane Rogers, John Milne, George Jackman, Joyce Stewart, Samuel Soyer, Christopher Chung-Wee, Cecile Gittens, and every other English Literature or Creative Writing teacher who has taken the time to help me learn about this particular type of alchemy.
My (always willing) readers – Lornie, Heather, Lisa, and Andrew Armstrong, and supporters, especially Wale, Tracie, Robert, Jeremy, Ayesha, Pet, and Hazel.
The Vermont Studio Centre (and, in particular, my 2015 cohort), the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and my very special group of Bajan bards – the Writers’ Ink posse, especially Esther, Linda, and Sharma, who are always ready with community and critique.
Clare, who first believed, and whose strength and acumen keep me in awe, and all the team at Aitken Alexander.
Imogen, Amy, Yeti, Antonia, and the wonderful team at Tinder Press, who’ve been so patient and welcoming. Iris, Julia, Judy, Miya, and the rest of the teams at HarperCollins Canada and Little, Brown, USA, who ensured I felt at home and at ease. And those who started the journey with me and with Lala and who still cheer from new paths and places, including Geffen and Leah, who shared my passion for Lala’s story, a love for anything vintage – and the possession of a pop-down cellphone (miss you!).
Housecat, for more than I can ever express in words.
Thanks, all.
About the Author
CHERIE S. A. JONES was born in 1974. She received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 1995; a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine, Trinidad, in 1997; and was admitted to the Bar in Barbados in October 1997. Cherie won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 1999. She won both the Archie Markham Award and the A. M. Heath Prize at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. She still works as a lawyer in addition to her writing.
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Copyright
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
Copyright © 2021 by Cherie Jones.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover images by Shutterstock
Epub Edition JANUARY 2021 Epub ISBN: 978-1-4434-6042-2
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-6041-5
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: How the one-armed sister sweeps her house : a novel / Cherie Jones.
Names: Jones, Cherie, 1974- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200330314 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200330373 | ISBN 9781443460415 (softcover) | ISBN 9781443460422 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR9230.9.J66 H60 2021 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LSC/C 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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