Hurricane Child

by Kheryn Callender

  Ignored by everyone, I sit in my assigned desk and listen to the whispers around me.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “She looks wild.”

  “I hear she’s from Barbados.”

  It’s barely enough information, but I piece it together: Someone new is joining the class. Our school is so small that the last new student we ever had was about four years ago, and it was a girl who only came for a day, before she began to cry and sob and wail, snot dripping down her front and all, and she had to be picked up by her mother before recess even began, and we never saw her face again.

  Missus Wilhelmina steps inside then, and everyone falls into a church-like silence—they’ve all seen my bum smackings enough to fear her. Her expression is pinched today, like she’s walked into a room to discover a forgotten ham covered with maggots, which is just what happened over Thanksgiving vacation just one year before. She folds her hands in front of her stomach.

  “Class,” she says in her nasally voice, as though she’s smelling that rotten ham too, “we have a new student joining us. Please welcome Kalinda Francis.”

  A girl walks in. The heads swerve. I lean out of my desk to get a better look. I can barely see her between the first few rows. Even with Missus Wilhelmina standing there, the excited whispers break out again, and Anise says something that makes her group of hyenas howl. Missus Wilhelmina stands taller and straighter until the room quiets down once again.

  “Say hello, Kalinda,” Missus Wilhelmina whispers, tone dripping with disgust.

  All I can see are scarred brown knees and white socks and shining black loafers, but the voice that comes out nearly sounds like a grown woman’s—it’s deep and grave. “My name is Kalinda Francis, and I am twelve years old.” Kalinda might as well be speaking at a funeral, she sounds so serious.

  Missus Wilhelmina tells Kalinda to take a seat in the front row beside Marie Antoinette. It’s only then that I see her hair: thick locks, twisted and braided together and piled on top of her head so high it’s a wonder they don’t snap her neck! My mouth falls open at the sight of her, and I’m not the only one staring. If Kalinda notices, she doesn’t seem to pay us any mind. She takes her seat as she’s told and holds her head so high and proud that she reminds me of the paintings of African queens my mother left hanging on our living room wall.

  When Missus Wilhelmina turns her back to start her lesson, Anise begins to whisper from her second row. “I heard that Rastas don’t wash their hair, so they have caterpillars living in their locks. Did you hear that one story about that Rastafarian from Tutu? He had a horrible headache one morning, and so he went to the doctor, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him, so he went home again, but his headache just kept getting worse and worse, until finally one day he fell down dead! When the doctor looked at him again, he saw that a spider living in the man’s hair had laid a nest, and that it had burrowed into the Rasta’s skull to do it.”

  There are squeals and laughs all around. Missus Wilhelmina would usually whip around and clap her hands together and demand that the perpetrator stand outside in the hot courtyard for the rest of the lesson (unless it was me—if it was me, then I would get a walloping right then and there), but today she only continues to scratch her chalk against the chalkboard. Everyone looks to Kalinda, to see if she has heard Anise’s story about this Rastafarian, and what she will do about it if she has.

  Kalinda does not pretend she didn’t hear. She looks at Anise with interest. “I knew that man,” she says. “He was my uncle.”

  Anise’s eyes become big, and there’s a collective intake of breath around the room—but then Kalinda smiles and looks at the chalkboard again, and it’s clear that she was only joking, and the room erupts with giggles that Missus Wilhelmina finally can’t ignore. She turns around and hushes us all and stamps her foot until we’re quiet again.

  I decide then and there that Kalinda would make a great candidate for the first friend I’ve ever had. Anyone brave enough to stand up to Anise like that—well, maybe she’d be brave enough to stand up to the rest of my class too, and would realize that they were silly and mean, and the two of us would sit together for lunch every afternoon and walk to waterfront after school, and everyone would realize what a good a friend I am—so good that they’ll want me to like them too, and suddenly I’d find everyone talking to me and asking me and Kalinda Francis to join them at their lunch tables.

  A new student. It’s like a dream, almost, to be seen by someone who has never looked at you before, someone who is not the same thirteen classmates you’ve had all your life, someone who is not your teacher or a parent, someone who does not know who you have been and has not already decided who you are, or what you will become. It’s more than a chance to create a new identity. It’s a chance to really become someone else—or, perhaps, to really become myself.

  And for me, it’s the only chance I’ll ever have.

  But halfway through class, I see Anise write a note and slip it to Kalinda. Kalinda turns, surprised, and reads the note, then smiles and nods. An invitation to eat lunch with Anise, Marie Antoinette, and the other hyenas, no doubt. I shouldn’t be surprised. There’s no way they would ever let Kalinda sit anywhere else after that scene. Even if Anise doesn’t like Kalinda or any other Rastafarian, it’s clear that everyone in this school will soon want to be Kalinda’s friend, and so Anise must get to her first. Before I know it, the first chance I’ve ever had at making a friend is gone before the first class period has even ended.

  I see the things no one else sees. As I’m walking to the cafeteria, out the classroom and into the courtyard, there’s a white woman standing in her nightgown, standing across the yard, away from a crowd of fuzzy black hair and green-and-white uniforms, and the closer I get, the more I see that they’re all standing around one person—Kalinda. The white woman is watching Kalinda too, but the next second I blink and she’s gone and there’s nothing but a dead rosebush standing where she was.

  Students are speaking around Kalinda loudly, buzzing with anticipation, and whenever there’s a break in the noise, I can tell even from where I stand, it’s because Kalinda is speaking. I want to hear what she has to say. Her voice is so serious, so grave, I’m positive that anything she has to say must be important. She’s probably the one and only person in this entire school we all need to listen to.

  I hesitate by the doorway. I want to join the group, stand with them and listen to what Kalinda is saying, but Anise and Marie Antoinette and others are also gathered around, and I don’t know what they’ll do. If they’ll say something that will make me feel ashamed in front of Kalinda, if they’ll immediately let her know that I’m the most hated girl of this school, warning her to never speak to me so Kalinda Francis will start to look at me with disgust too.

  The group lets out one long, hard laugh, and I decide that it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I walk to the group and stop behind them, standing on my toes to see inside of the circle. Kalinda has let down her locks out of their twists to show just how long they are. They reach the back of her bum!

  I must have gasped, because the next second, Anise looks at me, and her face turns into such disgust that it’s clearer than ever that she thinks I never should’ve been born.

  “Hasn’t something started to stink?” she asks Marie Antoinette, who looks around in confusion, until she sees me and then nods. She chooses to say this specifically, because just a few months before, it became apparent that a horrible smell had begun to ooze from my skin, so much so Missus Wilhelmina one day pulled me to the side and told me that I need to wear more deodorant.

  Anise has already tortured me enough by reminding me of my stink whenever I get too close, and now when she says this, I’m not sure if it’s because it’s true. The others around her see me, and then pinch their noses and wave the air in front of their faces impatiently, and there’s Kalinda in the middle of all of them, looking right at me. I begin to wish that I’d never been born either.
I turn on my heel and try to walk slowly, like I don’t care that they’re all staring after me and laughing, like I don’t care one bit at all.

  Visitors come to Water Island. I see the things no one else can see, but I’m not sure anyone else can see the visitors too. They take a house that’s on the other side of Water Island’s brown hill. Water Island has a scarred hill, big brown scorch mark shining like a giant leech, because one day during Carnival almost seven years back, fireworks went off over the Saint Thomas waterfront and exploded right above us, even though fireworks were only ever supposed to explode over the sea. My mom was still home, and she wanted me to go to bed so if the fire came for us, I wouldn’t see death coming—but my dad took my hand and together we went out to see. I was five years old, and I thought the sun was falling down. I fancied myself brave, because I was standing my ground and looking that sun right in the eye.

  Helicopters came and dumped buckets of seawater on the hill, so my mom and my dad and I stayed alive, but by then the house on the very top of the hill was burned and the man who lived there had died. My mom said that children are children because they know nothing about death, so I guess that day I stopped being a child. They left the skeleton of his blackened house behind as a gravestone. It stayed there until the hurricane took that away too.

  Water Island is supposed to be a part of the United States Virgin Islands, but we were never sainted like Saint Thomas or Saint John or Saint Croix, and so everyone forgets we exist. People have forgotten about Water Island since the days when there were slaves. Since no one remembered Water Island was right there beside Saint Thomas, slaves escaped to Water Island to be free. They didn’t have to hide whenever a boat filled with white men passed by because those men never even looked their way. I guess some of the slaves started to believe that the island was magic—magic so no one could see its hills except the people who already knew it was there. No one knows who the magic belongs to, but it’s stayed all these years, so I’m invisible whenever I’m on Water Island too, and that suits me just fine. Nobody ever looks my way anyway.

  The house on the other side of the brown hill has been available for rent since before I was born, but since Water Island is always forgotten, no one has ever come to stay there before. I notice those visitors on the ferry docks, down the road from Mister Lochana. It’s a girl with her mother. She’s younger than me by years, and when she sees me, she doesn’t look away. She has my pa’s nose.

  The first night the visitors are on Water Island, I go for a walk so I can see them in the house they rented behind the hill. Before I can even get close, that girl sees me from the porch. She watches me good until I leave again.

  The girl with my dad’s nose starts coming down the road. She has skin that’s honey brown like my dad’s too. She’ll just stand in the shade of the kenep trees, watching me whenever I leave for Mister Lochana’s. I don’t say anything about her to my dad, but one day she’s standing directly outside my house. Her legs are covered in red mosquito bites, and her teeth are too big for her mouth.

  “Hello,” she says. “My name is Bernadette.”

  I decide that I don’t like Bernadette very much. “Why would I want to know something like that?”

  “Your name is Caroline.”

  Now she has my attention. “Who told you that?”

  She doesn’t answer me. She continues to stare with her eyes that seem to get bigger in her face, like inflating balloons. She leans down to scratch at a mosquito bite.

  “You shouldn’t scratch,” I tell her.

  “But it itches.”

  I just cross my arms. She tells me her birthday, which is the same day my mom left me to travel halfway across the world one year and three months ago, and that she came here to meet my father, who she says is also her father. I run away from her before she can think of another word to say to me, slamming shut the screen door so hard it bounces open again.

  Inside my house, I keep looking at my dad, expecting him to say something about the visitors—but he just keeps sighing like he’s a man who knows that death is coming, just a few more years, nothing he can do about it now.

  “Daddy,” I tell him, because I always call him Daddy to his face so he’ll think I love him more than I really do, “who is the girl who moved into the house behind the hill?”

  He sighs again, like me being in front of him is bringing death even faster. I don’t think he wants to speak to me about Bernadette.

  “Daddy,” I say again, “do you know where my ma is?”

  This makes him look at me in a way I’ve never seen him look at me before. Like I am no longer the little girl he would toss into the air and catch again, or the little girl he would perform magic tricks for, holding a ball in his hand one second and then revealing an empty palm the next, or the little girl he would take out on his boat so we could get lost in the sea and the stars. No—now he looks at me like he has realized I am no longer a child at all. This is a realization I had many years ago, when Water Island was set on fire, but I’ve never showed the truth to him before. I’m showing it to him now. Just by asking him such a question, I can see that my pa has realized I’m not a little girl.

  I ask him again. “Where is my mom?”

  My mother always sent us postcards of the cities she had gone to, so I never had to ask where she was—it was written there for us to see. After the postcards stopped coming, I was too angry to ask. But I’m asking now—again, a third time, to be sure he’s heard me. “Where’s my mom?”

  Except this time, I’ve also added a word I should never use when speaking to my father, not when he’s the man that’s partly responsible for my existence, the reason I even get to be here speaking and breathing. He slaps my cheek with a quickness and looks just as shocked as I do, and in that moment I decide I want nothing more to do with my father—nothing more to do with him ever again.

  Days go by where I don’t speak. I will not answer my father when he tells me good evening after I’ve returned home from school. Missus Wilhelmina is glad for my silence in her classroom, and the other students were never speaking to me anyway. I only ever bother to nod my head politely to Mister Lochana in the early mornings. We zoom across the clear water, and overhead the birds fly, and there are sea turtles too, drifting through the clouds.

  As a deaf man might have better eyesight, or a blind man can hear so much more, I feel an extra sense growing. One where I can know another person’s thoughts or feelings without them ever having to open their mouths. Such as when the sunlight glints in Marie Antoinette’s yellow hair, and Anise looks at her with the anger of a cat being woken from a nap, or when Missus Wilhelmina stares out the window while we do our quiet reading, and she looks as though she might be a bird that can take flight at any moment, escaping into the endless blue sky. I decide that I like my silence, and that maybe I should run away to become a monk so I will never have to speak to anyone ever again.

  But then Miss Joe calls me into her office during lunchtime that very day, and I know she’ll expect me to break my vow.

  “How are you doing today, Miss Murphy?” she asks.

  I don’t speak.

  She turns her head to the side inquisitively over her tall pile of books. It almost looks like she’s a child who decided to build herself a fort. “Are you all right, Miss Murphy?”

  Here, I nod my head.

  She takes a breath, her shoulders raised into a shrug. “Well, I must say, I’m worried about you. You seem to be a very lonely little girl.”

  She might as well have spit in my face. This is such an insulting thing to hear that I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything to say anyway, even if I were letting words out of my mouth.

  I expect her to go on with her insult, to explain why she thinks I’m a lonely little girl (even if she is right)—but instead she takes another breath. “I know your mother.”

  And here, I’m not proud to say, I break my vow—immediately, without even a pause of hesitation. “What do you me
an, you know my mother?”

  “Doreen Murphy,” she says. “Doreen Hendricks, when she was little. Would you like to hear more about her?”

  I nod. I don’t need to be silent to see the salt that begins to shine in Miss Joe’s eyes.

  Miss Joe calls home to let my father know that I’ll be going to her house for dinner tonight. She drives a red pickup truck, and in the back are bundles of fruit she picked for herself: kenep with juices leaking from the pits, and mangoes that remind me of miniature suns, and brown plantains so brown they look rotten. She lets me sit in the front of the truck, and the broken leather scratches my thighs, and the seat stuffing spills out and tickles my skin. Miss Joe turns on the radio so old people’s music begins to play, and she sings along loudly so I don’t feel like I have to be polite and start talking about stuff that doesn’t matter. She reaches behind her and pulls out a sliver of sugarcane and hands it to me, and her eyes smile at me, though her lips just keep on singing their tune.

  The sugarcane is sticky, and I chew it so hard that it hurts my teeth. Cars race by, zooming in front of Miss Joe, and usually taxi drivers would cuss and throw up their hands whenever a car zooms in front of them like that, but Miss Joe just goes on singing her songs. She turns a corner and drives into a market that makes me roll up the window to keep out the stink of dead fish. Miss Joe points out the woman standing in the shade of the post office and tells me she is ninety years old, and for a second I think she’s the woman in black, her skin is so dark, but no—she’s just a woman hiding from the sun.

  And then it hits me, what Miss Joe said. Ninety years old? I can’t even imagine being twenty, let alone ninety, and I’m already positive that I won’t live past sixteen, because I’m more than sure that this world will never let me live to an important age like that, and everyone will have to come to my funeral and cry about how they treated poor little Caroline Murphy, and beg my spirit for forgiveness (which I’ll give out of the mercy of my heart)—but maybe in the same way that I can’t imagine being ninety, this woman looks at sea turtles and thinks she cannot imagine being two hundred years old, and maybe the sea turtle looks at our islands and thinks he cannot imagine existing since the beginning of time.