Hurricane Child

by Kheryn Callender

  She doesn’t seem to notice, and maybe she really doesn’t, since she isn’t looking at anything or anyone but me. She asks me questions. She asks so many questions my head begins to spin. I’ve hardly finished giving one answer before she asks another, without pause or hesitation. Her questions remind me of one of those school games we used to play, when each team has to ask and answer as many questions as possible in the allotted time, and whoever has the most correct answers wins.

  “You don’t live on Saint Thomas?”

  “No. I live on Water Island.”

  “But then how do you get to school?”

  “There’s a speedboat I take every morning with a man named Mister Lochana.”

  “Isn’t a trip across the ocean every morning tiring?”

  “It can be, yes.”

  “Does it feel like your heart is split between two homes? Between Saint Thomas and Water Island, I mean?”

  I have to stop to think about this one, because I realize then that I don’t think of either Saint Thomas or Water Island as home. How can I? My mother isn’t on either island. I’m not expecting to think this, and before I know it, I can feel my eyes begin to sting and my vision become blurry as water leaks from my eyelashes. Kalinda sees, and most would be embarrassed to watch someone they don’t know so well begin to cry, and even I have to say that I probably would’ve looked away and pretended I didn’t notice, but Kalinda only grabs a napkin from her food tray and holds it out to me. She doesn’t ask another question. Only looks at me and waits for me to speak. But how do I begin to explain something like this? Having a mother that’s left me behind? Would Kalinda begin to accuse my mother of being a bad woman, the same way Anise does? Would Kalinda think I’d done something to deserve being deserted?

  She sees that I don’t want to talk about it. She smiles, but the smile has changed. It’s not secretive anymore. It’s knowing. I think she likes what she knows.

  I decide. Now is the time to ask. With my eyes still stinging and my nose all clogged, I say in a low voice, “Did you see her too?”

  She turns her head to the side and squints her eyes. “What do you mean? See who?”

  I stare at her. She just keeps watching and waiting and smiling.

  And I don’t believe her. She’s smiling at me like she’s playing a game, and I don’t believe her. I know she saw that white woman too.

  That day after school, Kalinda tells me she would like to show me her house, and even though Mister Lochana is usually waiting for me in the hot sun by waterfront as soon as the school day ends, I agree. We walk through Main Street, which only the oldest of old folks call Dronningen’s Gade. There’s a traffic jam longer than a slithering python, and I have to look where I’m going, because it’s easy to twist my foot on the broken cobblestone road. Tourists smelling like sweat and sunscreen swarm the street, standing desperately under the ice-cold air-conditioning of the jewelry stores.

  Usually, I hate this walk more than anything else. Too many tourists to dodge and too many blaring horns and too much heat beating down from the blazing sun with absolutely no shade. But with Kalinda, it becomes a walk I could happily take every day for the rest of my life. I can barely get over the excitement, the thrill, of having someone walk beside me willingly with a smile on their face, speaking to me as one friend might speak to another. Is it too soon to consider Kalinda a friend? I hope it isn’t too soon at all—that maybe she’s even begun to consider me a friend too.

  We reach the end of the crowded lane and walk to where the old market used to be.

  “Do you see that man there?” she asks. I turn to look, but there are too many men sitting under the shade of a mahogany tree. “That man is Mister Thompson, and he lives in my neighborhood and plays an accordion and sings into all hours of the night. He makes my auntie cuss rotten because he keeps her up, but I like to sit outside on the front steps and listen to him until I fall asleep right there on the concrete, but I have to wake up before my auntie or my dad does, so they’ll never know I left my bed.”

  “Why would you want to leave your bed to listen to that man play the accordion?” I ask, but then immediately regret it. Would she think I was being rude or mean? I have a way of asking things, a way of speaking—“combative,” Miss Joe calls it—because I always automatically assume everyone just wants to be in a fight with me, seeing that, so far in my life, most people have.

  But Kalinda doesn’t seem offended at all. She shrugs. “Have you ever heard an accordion play?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “They’re not the prettiest instruments to listen to,” she says, “but I don’t like that there are some instruments that are considered prettier than others. I feel like those instruments are always listened to. Like the guitar or the piano. But it isn’t fair that they should be listened to all the time, only because someone has decided they’re prettier. The accordion has just as much sound. It’s different than the other instruments. I like that it’s different. That’s what makes it important.”

  I can’t stop staring at her. “I think I might be the accordion.”

  She laughs long and hard.

  I can’t help but feel ashamed. I think she’s laughing at me. “Why’s that funny?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m only laughing because—well, I think I’m the accordion too,” she says.

  I still don’t see why this is funny—and I don’t think she could be any further from an accordion. “You’re not an accordion,” I tell her. “You’re something else entirely. You’re—you’re the violin,” I say decidedly.

  Her smile fades away. “Violins are so sad. I’d hate to be a violin.”

  Yet I know with absolute certainty that this is exactly the instrument that should be used to describe Kalinda.

  “And you’re not an accordion,” she tells me. “You’re a drum.”

  She watches me, waiting for my response, but I have no words—I only know suddenly that I want to take her hand, and so I do. I take her hand with my sweaty palm, and her fingers feel burning hot in my own, like she has a fever, and she immediately tugs her hand away from mine, surprised. I’m surprised too, that she wouldn’t let me keep her hand in mine—and I feel the shame even hotter than the sun—but Kalinda doesn’t say anything about it. She instead points behind me to a store, and we walk into the fresh, air-conditioned store that sells seashells for earrings and thin tie-dyed dresses that make me feel like I’m under the sea with all the swirling colors of fish and coral and clear blue water and seaweed.

  “Do you like any of these earrings?” she asks me.

  I don’t actually like jewelry very much, but I’m afraid to tell her this, especially after she’s taken her hand from mine. Will she think I’m strange, that I’m a girl who doesn’t like jewelry? Maybe, since she’s said she likes accordions, she won’t mind.

  “Which one is your favorite?”

  I hesitate. “I don’t like earrings very much.”

  She seems surprised. “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like earrings. But I think that’s okay. Do you like any of these shells?”

  I point out one shell that is flat and has waves and looks like a fan, with a soft pink underbelly where a pearl might have once been found. “I can’t buy this for you,” Kalinda says, “but I’ll try to find a shell that’s even better than this one.”

  This will be the second gift I’ve ever received from someone who is not my mother or my father. I think it might be a gift of pity, because she knows I have no other friends. I know immediately I want to give something to her too, though I have no idea what. I decide I’ve never had such a good time before in my life, but then I feel guilty for thinking something like that, after all the good times I’d spent with my mother.

  Just as we’re walking, I see two women holding hands. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen two women holding hands like that. Girls my age, like Kalinda and me, hold hands all the time to show that they care for each other. (I realize with a pan
g that perhaps Kalinda didn’t want to hold my hand because she doesn’t care for me at all.) But grown women, even older than Miss Joe and Missus Wilhelmina and my mom? I’ve never seen anything like that before.

  The two women are both white tourists and old, with sagging skin and too-short shorts showing off their blue veins. People turn their heads to stare, but those two women don’t seem to mind at all. They just keep on walking and holding hands and smiling at one another.

  Kalinda sees them holding hands. “Disgusting,” she says. “They can’t see they’re both women?” She laughs. “Does one of them think that she’s a man?” She laughs again.

  My heart falls. I don’t know why it would. Maybe because I would like to hold Kalinda’s hand too, and I know now that we never will—not in the way these two women do. I’d thought, since she’d said everything she did about Mister Thompson and his accordion … but maybe that was a silly thing to think.

  I make myself laugh. “How can they not? I can see they’re women, just by standing all the way over here. How can they not know they’re women?”

  But Kalinda’s past laughing now. “I think it’s gross. It’s wrong.” She says it loudly, just as we pass the two old women still holding each other’s hands, as they pause to look at jewelry in a window. One woman hears and looks at me and Kalinda with a frown, but not the sort of frown Missus Wilhelmina has for me when I’m in trouble—but the saddest frown I’ve seen from an adult. Like she might begin to cry right then and there.

  She’s still looking at us when I tell Kalinda, “I agree.”

  Kalinda gives me a smile that warms my chest, but I look back to the older white woman and have to look away again, because I see she’s even closer to crying now, and a part of me would like to join her.

  Kalinda’s house is past Main Street and beside a large cemetery. Whitewashed cement blocks carrying the dead are stacked on top of one another, building a graveyard city that’s bleached like bones in the sun. We pass the children’s grave with the overflowing brown and crispy flowers, fluttering in the wind like cockroach wings. I keep my hands behind my back, since the ghosts of children have been known to bite off fingers, or so I’ve been told.

  Kalinda tells me a story. “When I was six years old, I watched a girl die. We were in church, and she collapsed in the pew, and her father held her and her mother screamed and a man who had once studied medicine rushed to her, but before he even reached her, it was too late. That was the day I stopped being a child,” she says. “Adults—my parents, my teachers—they look at me and see a little girl who knows nothing about life and death, someone they need to protect … but now that I’ve seen death with my own eyes, they have nothing to protect me from anymore.”

  When I look at her, for a moment it feels like I might as well be looking at a mirror, and not even that, because I feel like I know her more than I even know myself.

  “There was once a man that lived on top of the hill on Water Island,” I tell her. “He died in a fire, after fireworks exploded above him. When I learned he died, I stopped being a child too.”

  Kalinda nods at me, agreeing that neither of us are really children anymore. We’re not adults either, because adults have forgotten how to live, and I know Kalinda and I have not. Adults wouldn’t understand something like this—that Kalinda and I are neither children nor adults. They only look at us and see two twelve-year-old girls, and so think we know nothing about life or death. They assume we have nothing but innocence. I think we must be closer to being alive than adults. They’ve been alive too long to remember the passion of life. And Kalinda and I, maybe we’ve been alive too long too, and the only animals on this Earth that really understand life are the insects that are born and mate and die within seconds. They’re really the ones that understand it all.

  As we walk, I realize there are now two things that Kalinda and I have in common: the reality that we are no longer children, and the fact that we can both see the things no one else can see.

  I want to ask her again. I want to ask her for the truth this time, and tell her that I know she’s lying, and demand to know why she’s lying about this, when it’s so clear that we both looked up in the cafeteria, both looked in that woman’s direction, and for a split second, Kalinda had fear in her eyes, because she had seen something no one else could see.

  But what if it isn’t true? What if it’s my own mind playing games with me, and not Kalinda? What if she’s not lying at all, and she really didn’t see anyone there, and she would have no idea what I was talking about if I dared to ask her? I’d make such a fool of myself, and I’m already lucky enough as it is, that Kalinda decided to speak with me and walk with me and invite me to her home. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to a classmate’s house before. If I insist that we speak about this again and again—well, I don’t know how Kalinda will react. Tomorrow I might find myself sitting alone in the cafeteria.

  No. Best to keep silent about this.

  We come to her house, which is in a neighborhood where men slam dominoes on a rickety table under the shade of a yellow mango tree, and where the roads are lined with rusting cars missing their tires. Her concrete house is missing its paint, or maybe it’s just been that long since anyone painted its walls.

  The inside is missing its furniture as well, except for a single chair and a little table that doesn’t even reach my knees. Halls break away from the room, which is where all the furniture must be. There’s a man who I think must be Kalinda’s father sitting in the living room, which doesn’t have a TV, and he’s bent over an ornate chair leg growing from the block of wood that stands on a square of plastic and wood shavings.

  He sees us, and we say good afternoon, and so does he, but then he goes back to his carving, and I wonder why he doesn’t ask me for my name or say that it’s nice to meet one of Kalinda’s friends. Does Kalinda bring new friends to the house so often? I feel a pinch of jealousy. But then Kalinda does something with her hands so it looks like she’s pointing and then twisting her fingers, and he nods again, and Kalinda smiles and walks on down the hall to where her bedroom must be. Every door we pass on the way is closed, until we reach the door at the end of the hall. Kalinda pushes it open, and I see that her mattress is on the floor, but she has the most beautiful dressing table, and her nightstand looks like it’s made from gold. Kalinda sits on the edge of her mattress and tells me her father hasn’t built her bed frame yet, though it’s next on his list.

  “He makes beautiful furniture.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that.”

  We sit in silence for some time. I try to think long and hard about what to say to Kalinda. I don’t want to tell her how excited I am, how overjoyed, that she’s chosen to be my friend, to the point that I would like to hold her hand in the same way the two white women walking down the street did, because then I think Kalinda wouldn’t speak to me anymore. But then I’m not really sure what else to say, because it feels like there’s nothing that can be said until she understands how I feel about her at this very moment.

  “He can’t hear,” Kalinda says.

  I’m confused. “Who can’t hear?”

  “My father,” she says, before she launches into a story of how her father’s greatest dream had once been to be the best guitarist of Barbados, playing in his local band and singing soca and calypso, but when he was eighteen his disease near took his life and succeeded in taking all his hearing, so he had no choice but to find a new dream. “That seems like a most difficult thing to do. Finding a dream alone is hard. I’ve spent many days wondering what my own dream should be. But I’m not sure I have any dreams yet. Maybe my dream is to find a dream. Find something to live for. Can you imagine, doing all that work to find something to live for, and then being forced to find another dream at the end of it all?”

  This is such an interesting thing to say that I’m intimidated into silence. Kalinda intimidates me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I really am still just a child, while Kalinda is the only on
e who isn’t a child anymore. It’s enough to make me wonder if Kalinda is even really from the same mundane world I was born in.

  She smiles at me. “Do you have any dreams, Caroline?”

  I might as well be mute, like Marie Antoinette and the Chief, because I don’t say anything for a long time, and I can’t think of anything to say for as long a time either, but Kalinda doesn’t speak and doesn’t look like she plans on speaking until I give her an answer. At first this is even more nerve-racking than if she’d been watching me impatiently, wondering whether she’d chosen a fool for her newest friend—but then her open stare and knowing smile lets me see that she doesn’t mind at all, and she’d be happy sitting with me for the rest of the afternoon in silence, if that’s what I chose to do.

  “My mother,” I finally say. The words come from my mouth without me even thinking of this as the answer. “I want to find my mother.”

  She seems a little surprised. Her smile fades away and she sits straighter, her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, like she’s sitting in church. “Where did your mother go?” she asks, so quietly she might as well be whispering.

  The words are too painful to say aloud. I feel a burning in my throat. I’m too ashamed to look Kalinda in the eye.

  She puts her hand on top of mine. It’s still warm. I know she doesn’t mean to take my hand in the same way the two women earlier did, but it’s still comforting, after she’d yanked her hand away from mine before.

  “You don’t have to be afraid to tell me,” Kalinda tells me. “You could admit that you were sent to hell and you escaped, and I wouldn’t have any judgment toward you.”

  I believe her. I’m still afraid, though, because I think I might have more than enough judgment for myself. It feels like I’ve done something so horrible that my own mom had to get up and leave me. I take a breath and speak the words: “One year and three months ago, my mother left home.”

  Kalinda is nodding, her hand still on top of mine. “Why did she leave?”