The little boy was standing on the floor of his room, feet wide apart, holding on to the leg of the crib for balance. There was a nurse bent over him, shaking a finger at him. “Bad! You mustn’t get out of bed, understand? You’re sick!” The nurse turned as we came rushing into the room. “I’m sorry he disturbed you, Doctor,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
There was a thick plaster cast on the boy’s leg. They’d diapered him. With his plump body, the diaper gave him the appearance of a tiny sumo wrestler. He’d been crying. Would he let me pick him up?
“Evelyn, it’s okay for him to be putting weight on that leg so soon?”
“Yes, if it’s not hurting him. It will help him put down new bone tissue.”
All I needed to hear. “Come to Auntie Calamity,” I whispered. I reached my arms out to him. He stretched his out to me, his palms wide. Yes, he did have webbed fingers. Then he dropped down onto his hands and tried to walk to me, bumsie in the air. Like the blue girl had. Must have hurt his leg to do that, for he lifted it in the air and started crying again. I rushed to him and picked him up, ignored the twinge in my lower back. I cradled his frightened little body to me. He immediately put a thumb in his mouth. With the other hand, he grabbed my ear.
“Ow!” I tried to pull his hand away, but he wouldn’t let go. He had reached for comfort, hard, with both hands. If my heart had been melting for him before, it was like butter in the hot sun now.
“Look how easy he went to you! You got to be his mummy!” said the nurse.
“No.” He didn’t belong to me. Yes, said my heart. Mine.
“Odd, that crawl,” Evelyn said.
“Maybe they kept him somewhere where he couldn’t stand all the way up,” Gene told her.
“Please don’t tell me that. I don’t even want to imagine it.”
“He’s had a long day,” I said. I pulled myself tall and officious. Maybe they would go for it if I brazened it through. “He’s coming home with me, right?” Child needed someone to mother him, not a hospital bed in a lonely room.
Gene said, “No, I…”
Evelyn frowned. “To your home? No, my dear. That’s not how we do things.”
Chuh, I thought. Go ’way with your stoosh big island self. And what was this “my dear, my dear,” like she was my bloody mother? After me and she were the same age.
“He has to go into custody till his parents are found. Isn’t that right, Mr. Meeks?”
“Yes. Quite right. We’re looking for them. Going to want to talk to them about this boy’s injuries.”
Damn. “But I can visit with him today?”
“If you really want to,” replied Evelyn.
That would have to do. Gene glared a “good day” at me, and Evelyn left to finish up her work. I sat on the chair beside the bed. The boy had fallen asleep in my arms. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to him. I tried to see the insides of his knees, but he stirred. I couldn’t bear to wake him. Besides, he felt good in my arms. Not like I had anywhere to go.
By the time the little boy woke up mid-afternoon, everybody at the nurses’ station knew my name, where I worked, how old I was; hell, probably my bra size and all.
The child lay on his back and looked around him. He had a puzzled frown, and tear-tracks down his face. I went to his crib. They’d put the slats up to keep him from falling out. “Think I’ll remember how these blasted things work?”
He stuck his thumb in his mouth and stared at me. When small children look at you like that, it’s like they’re seeing right into your deepest heart.
Took me some fiddling, but I finally was able to lower the slats at one side of the crib. He’d raised himself up on his elbows to look at me. His legs were spraddled, so it was plain to see the marks on his inner knees and on the ankle without the cast.
Gently, I sat beside him on the bed. I licked my thumb and used it to wipe away his dried tears. And still, he just looked.
I reached to touch the marks on his knees, but an orderly bustled in, wheeling a food cart. I pulled my hand away. “Lunch time!” she chirped. She parked the cart, checked the boy’s chart at the foot of his bed. “Ohmigod,” she said. “He the boy who nearly drowned last night. Nuh true?”
“Yes. This is him.”
“God bless. God bless.” She hauled out a wheeled table from behind the door, and put his lunch tray on it. “The nurses could feed him,” she told me.
I pulled the tray towards me. “No. I will do it.” Mine.
She nodded. With a final “God bless,” she pushed her cart out of the room.
The child informed me of something or other. “You think so?” I replied, improvising. I took his hands, spread the fingers to see the membranes again. So strange! But not unheard-of, Evelyn had said. I peered into his eyes. They just looked like eyes to me. He pulled his head away and spoke again, sounding frustrated this time. I felt foolish, inspecting a lost and injured child, looking for what? Gills? Scales? Jesus. Had to stop fooling myself. The sea didn’t have people living in it. Somebody would know what language he spoke. Somebody would find his parents, or the remnants of them.
I took the lids off the containers on his tray. I picked up one of the dishes and a spoon. “Well,” I said to him, “look like you and me can’t palaver. So let me introduce you to the joys of grape Jell-O.”
The spoon seemed to be a complete mystery to him. He opened his mouth wide for it, all right, but then he clamped his corn-kernel baby teeth down on it, hard, and refused to let go. Either his parents had made him eat with his hands, or his brain was abnormal, like his body.
Gently, I tried to tug the spoon free, but he kept it in his teeth and tossed his head back and forth like a puppy’s. Surprised a laugh out of me.
And then he did something precious. He giggled; a liquid, happy noise. My heart lifted to see that he could feel joy. The parents hadn’t quite broken him, then.
The Jell-O was not a success. After that first, accidental mouthful, he wouldn’t swallow any more. He just screwed up his face and spat it out. Next try, he wouldn’t even do that; he pulled away from the spoon I’d put to his lips and twisted his head from side to side. “If Ifeoma had been this fussy when she was small,” I said to him, “she would be bony like one stray dog now.”
I had better luck with the applesauce. Got a little of it into him. But the real hit was the porridge. He swallowed the first spoonful and immediately opened his mouth for more. And the minute I looked away, distracted by a nurse who’d come to check on us, he had the bowl up and overturned on his head. The long tangles of his hair were slimy with porridge.
They gave me a basin of water so I could wash the mess out. Ignorant of his cast, he tried to climb entirely into the basin. God knows what kind of deprivation they had been keeping him in. He was new to everything. It was like having a baby again and discovering the world again with him. He drew me in like a sponge draws water. I swear a current flowed between us, warm and fluid.
I towelled his head dry; as dry as that mess of dreadlocks would get. Some of the trash in it had been tied there; pieces of shells, mostly. How anybody could do that to their child’s hair?
His gurgling chuckle sounded like “agway, agway.” He gazed up into my face like I had all the lovely secrets of the world written there. He whimpered if I tried to go from the room. I didn’t mind. I stayed.
As far as he was concerned, his bedsheet was a toy. He clambered around in it and twisted and turned until he was practically mummified.
“No, Agway,” I said, unwinding him. Looked too much like the seaweed he’d been wrapped in on the beach.
He kept pulling his diapers off. Didn’t bother him to piss and shit right where he was. “Someone going to have to toilet-train you,” I told him, “before it’s too late for you to learn.” And milord, that hair. I was itching to wash it. Fine if his parents wanted to be Rastas and smoke ganja and make their hair grow wild like any rats’ nest, but it wasn’t right to drag a child into it.
>
Little more time, he began to reach for his injured leg and wince. I rang for a nurse. She had a look at him, then brought him some liquid painkiller in a dropper.
“Not baby aspirin?” I asked her.
“No. Could kill them.”
“You lie! That’s what I used to give my daughter when she was little.”
“Me, too. Nobody told us different.”
“She liked the taste of it too bad.”
“Yes. You have to keep those things away from them.”
Agway got the hang of the dropper pretty quickly. I guess it was sort of like a nipple. He startled at the taste of the first drops of the medicine. The look on his face was priceless.
The nurse pulled the dropper away. Playing stern, she shook her finger at him. “Don’t spit it out, now,” she said. We made encouraging faces at him, mimed taking medicine from the dropper, pretended it tasted good. He screwed up his face, but he finally took it all. “That’s a good boy,” crooned the nurse. She patted him on his damp head and left. He whimpered again. His leg was still bothering him.
“Never mind, babbins. The pain will stop soon.” I gathered him up, took him to the armchair over by the window. I sat in it and rocked him. “The pill bottle was on my bed,” I told him. “Rita and Sharmini and me used to work in that gift store down by Post Road. I can’t remember the name of it now. Selling all kind of stupidness to the white people, you know the way; dried coconuts carved into monkey heads, shit like that. Anyway, Rita and Sharmini came over to my apartment the Friday night for dinner. They had a case of Banks beer with them. By the time we finished eating our buljol and I put Ife to bed, we were three sheets to the wind. I found a radio station playing tumpa. We turned it up loud. Pretty soon we were dancing around the room, laughing and carrying on. Ife just slept. She was used to my carousing.”
Agway made a little sobbing sound. He laid his head against my chest.
“Next morning,” I said, “I had one motherass hangover, you see? And all I could find in the apartment was a half-empty bottle of baby aspirin. I took about six. Went to the kitchen for some water to wash them down. Found a Banks beer left in the fridge, so I opened that and drank it instead.”
Agway put his thumb in his mouth and stared up at me.
“Don’t look at me like that!” I said. “I was only nineteen! I just turned my back for a minute!”
I rocked him. “When I got back into the room, she was sitting on the bed, eating down the aspirin. No safety tops in those days. Such a big grin she had on her face, so proud of herself. She offered me the bottle with three tablets left in it. She wanted to share the pretty sweeties with me. Child always had more heart than sense.”
Agway sighed. He tangled his free hand in his own hair. What was this obsession with grabbing onto hair?
“I called the doctor. He told me to stick my finger down her throat to make her throw up, and if that didn’t work, to go to Emergency quick. It worked, though. She heaved up a little orange ball of baby aspirin.”
Agway’s thumb fell out of his mouth. He took a long, shuddering breath, held it forever, then let it out. Poor thing was deep asleep.
And it was now evening. Time to leave him. I wanted my dinner. My stomach was so empty, my belly button was trying to kiss my backbone.
I took him over to the crib and laid him down in it. He never woke. I pulled the thin cotton sheet up around him and kissed his cheek. I put up the railing. My hands remembered how to work it now. I’d slipped right back into the groove, like three decades hadn’t gone by since Ife had been this small. “I going come back tomorrow, babby.” I reached in and patted his good leg. My hand touched the calloused knee. I jerked my fingers away. Then, curious, I touched the rough spot again. He didn’t wake. The spot was rough and scraped my fingers till I ran them the other way. Then it was smooth. What callous felt like that?
I tiptoed out of the room. Fry bake for dinner. Yes. With butter. And saltfish. Telling Agway that story had put a taste for saltfish in my mouth. And maybe some callaloo for Dadda. His mouth was too soft nowadays for fry bake.
I stopped where I was in the hallway. Rewound my mental tape. Deleted the thought about callaloo. Love them or hate them, people get hooks into you. When they leave, you have to take the hooks out, one by one.
I went to the nurses’ station. The nurse who’d brought Agway’s painkiller smiled at me. “Heading home?” she asked.
“Yes. I going to come back tomorrow.”
The nurse consulted her clipboard. “No, Children’s Services is transferring him tomorrow.”
“So soon? To where?”
She gave me a sympathetic look. “The home where they send orphans. On Gracie Street, by the old post office.”
Oh, great. A baby detention centre. “How long they going to keep him there?”
“Couldn’t tell you, you know. Probably till they find his parents or a foster home for him.”
“I can foster him,” I heard myself saying. Crap. What the behind was wrong with my brain? I didn’t want to foster nobody.
“They have official foster parents. You can’t just volunteer to take a child so.”
“That’s all right, that’s just fine,” I said. “Sure he’s in excellent hands. So good night, enh?”
“Good night.”
I made a relieved escape towards the car park. No way I wanted to mind a three-year-old at this stage of my life.
AND WHAT A PIECE OF COMMOTION when the waterbus reached Dolorosse! Coast Guard and police cars lining the strip of grass around the ferry dock. Light from must be a dozen flashlights dancing over by the low cliff beside the waterbus dock. Men’s voices shouting from over there. Yellow police tape blocking off the edge of the cliff. What in blue blazes…? I drove down the ramp, pulled up beside the little covered plaza where pedestrians could wait for the waterbus.
Mr. Lee was outside his booth, pacing up and down on the plaza! I almost didn’t recognise him; I only ever saw his head and his chest. He came towards the car.
“Evening, Mr. Lee.” I held up my waterbus pass for him to see.
“Evening.” He held my car door open for me. He wasn’t paying any mind to whether I had my pass or not. He kept glancing over his shoulder to what was going on at the cliff.
“What happening? Like somebody get hurt?”
“Somebody get dead.”
“What?” I peered around him. Over by the cliff, a man was preparing to climb down a rope lowered over the side. It’s a wetsuit he was wearing? I couldn’t see for sure. “Somebody fell over the side? Who?”
“Don’t know yet. They still trying to get whoever it is out of the water.”
“Lawdamercy.” I made it almost to the yellow tape, Mr. Lee jittering along behind me, before a policewoman stopped us.
“Step back, please.”
“But who it is?” I asked. I craned my neck. An inflatable dinghy was bobbing in the water. Three people in wetsuits inside it. The Coast Guard logo shone from its side.
“Just step back, please, madam.”
Blasted woman wouldn’t let us get any closer. Me and Mr. Lee fell back a few feet to where an empty ambulance was parked. He had his arms clasped around his narrow upper body. He looked a little shivery. “You all right?” I asked him.
“I don’t like to be near the dead,” he said. “You ever been to those little islands over there?” He pointed out over the sea.
What that had to do with the dead? “You mean like Dutchie and St. Cyprian’s? They off limits.” Except for the official boat tours. Those islands were monk seal mating grounds, and the seals were Cayaba’s cash cows.
Mr. Lee smiled. “You ever know ‘off limits’ to stop young boys? They didn’t used to guard them so well when I was small. Me and my friends had a way to row over to Dutchie after school. Collect booby eggs, roast them over a fire.”
“Awoah. Nowadays they fine your rass if they catch you with a booby egg.”
“And if Johnson get back in
power, he going to turn it to a jail sentence. Anyway, the boys and me stopped going after a while. Shallow water out there, rocks jooking up. Those rocks tear up a slave ship once.”
“Yeah, yeah, and the ghosts of drowned slaves haunt the islands to this day, blah, blah. I read the brochure.”
He hugged himself more tightly. “All right then,” he said. “I won’t tell you what me and Tommy Naya saw out Dutchie way that day. But I don’t like to be near the dead. They don’t stay peaceful.”
My skin pimpled. I was never going to hang out with Mr. Lee again. “You don’t have to stay, you know. You must be done work for the night.”
He gave me a sheepish grin. “I want to see what going to happen.”
So we kept each other company.
Who knew rescue work was so boring? I found out about Mr. Lee’s bad back, his cousin in the Philippines who was a lawyer, and the best way to cook bitter melon. He knew I had a daughter. He even knew her name. “Yeah, man,” he said. “After she been visiting you here for so long now? Sometimes while she waiting for the waterbus, she will get out the car and come talk to me. How she going with her Neurolinguistics course?”
“All right,” I said. So Ife and Mr. Lee were friends. Me, I only knew his name because Dadda had told me it.
There was a hollow shout from down at the base of the cliff. A couple of the policemen ran to look over the edge. “Like something happening,” said Mr. Lee.
Our Cerberus was still guarding the way, but she was more interested in what was happening behind her at the cliffside. She had her head cranked over her shoulder to see better, so she didn’t notice when we snuck around in front of her and went to the other side of the cordoned-off area. It was darker over there; maybe we’d be able to get closer.
“Come under the tape with me, nuh?” I said to Mr. Lee.
“You better not,” came a low voice from the darkness at our feet. Mr. Lee gave a little yip of fear, bit it off quickly.
Jamdown accent. “Hector?” I said, peering into the shadows.
“Yes.” Hector stood up from the ground to his full height. Mr. Lee grabbed my arm. Hector stepped out where we could see him better. This time, the wetsuit had bright blue panels contrasting the black ones.
The New Moon's Arms Page 8