Kalinda walks into the room, head as high as ever, taking her time smiling and greeting everyone in the room. She leaves me for last, but I know it’s only because she has the most to say to me. She takes someone else’s seat beside me and takes my hand and tells me that I would never believe what has happened.
“My aunt Hortensia marched outside in the dead of night to scream at the accordion player, and she tripped over me as I was sleeping out on the front steps, and so now both my father and my father’s sister are absolutely livid. What a turn of events. I never would have expected this to happen.”
Throughout the whole story I’m nothing but selfish, because I want her to go to her desk and find my gift to her. It’s like I’ve lost my voice, and her opening that journal is the only way I’ll ever have it back. I don’t know what she’ll say once she finds it. She might laugh at me. She might tell me I’m being silly. She might decide to never speak to me again. I remember the disgust she had for the two white women holding each other’s hands, and I think to myself that I’m a fool to ever hope Kalinda could have a different reaction for me. Kalinda squeezes my hand and gives me my smile and only leaves my side when Missus Wilhelmina marches into the classroom.
I’d already learned by now that I could try to come up with every possible outcome, positive or negative, and try to account for every scenario that’s currently playing in the infinite number of universes, and no matter what fate would find an outcome that I hadn’t been expecting at all. Kalinda doesn’t notice the present for the entirety of the class period with Missus Wilhelmina. She stands up for recess without the smallest glance. She looks over her shoulder at me impatiently, and so I hurry to follow her outside into the hot sun. We sit in the shade of the barren mango tree, not speaking at all about the ghosts or demons or spirit world that may or may not exist, even though I know this must be in the back of her mind as much as it is mine. Perhaps we’re only giving each other a break—a chance to pretend my journey into the spirit world will not happen—and we’ll be able to live happily ever after.
And when we come back in from recess a few minutes early just so we can get out of the sun, in Anise Fowler’s hand is the journal, out of its wrapping paper, open in the palm of her hand like a Bible, the hyenas crowded around her while she reads her scripture. She reads something, whispering with a grin spread across her face, and the hyenas split into an uproarious screaming fit of laughter. Then they quiet again and listen to Anise’s whisper, and the laughter breaks out once more.
I stand still, my heart pounding to the beat of a death march. Boom. Boom. Boom. Kalinda looks at me, putting her hand on the side of my arm, shaking it and asking me something, but I don’t know what, because all I can hear is that boom against my chest. Heat fills my eyes, but before it spills over and runs all down my face, I wipe them against the side of my arm and turn to her quick. “Let’s go back outside,” I tell her.
“But the bell is about to ring. Missus Wilhelmina—”
“Let’s find my mom now.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“It’s not the eclipse.”
“There has to be another way.”
Kalinda looks frozen, like she doesn’t know what to say. “Are you all right, Caroline?”
At the sound of my name, the hyenas transform into wolves, spinning in their seats. Anise gently closes the journal, done with reading her scripture for the day.
“Caroline Murphy,” she says.
Kalinda looks to me. “What’s going on?” she whispers.
“Caroline Murphy,” Anise says again.
“You should take a step away from her,” one of the hyenas says. It’s clear that she’s speaking not to me but to Kalinda.
Kalinda looks to me and to the journal Anise is holding. She’s already putting two and two together.
“You know what she thinks about you?” Anise says. The way she says it has Kalinda looking at me, hurt, like maybe I betrayed her in that journal. Like maybe I wrote horrible things about her, secrets or lies, because I’ve hated her all this time. I would’ve preferred that to what’s really in there in Anise’s hands right now. Anise’s grin is as sharp as a knife. “Or maybe you think the same way about her?”
I’m expecting the hyenas to laugh, but this is a very serious accusation. They look at Kalinda expectantly, waiting for her to answer.
“I don’t know what’s in the journal,” she finally says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her voice quiver in my life.
“Then come and take a look,” Anise says with a smile. I try to pull on Kalinda’s arm, to shake my head, plead with her by squeezing her hand, but I stop when I see the way the hyenas look at me, and when I see the way Kalinda looks at me too. Reprovingly. She might as well tell me in her adult voice to stop it, stop it now, stop acting like a child. She steps away from me and to the circle of hyenas, and she’s enveloped by them as Anise walks to her, holding the journal like it’s a sacrifice in her hands.
There’s silence, and salt stinging my eyes, though I won’t let the salt fall, and I think my heart must’ve stopped because I don’t hear it anymore now.
’Cause you’ll never love again.
Kalinda looks up from the journal, and I know she’s read everything on that page. She shuts the journal herself and steps out of the circle without looking at me and walks out of the room. There’s a moment of silence. And then the hyenas jump to circle me instead, all of them attacking at once, saying I’m going to hell and they should light me on fire now to get a head start, and Anise starts a game where they shove me like a ball, bouncing from girl to girl, until I trip and fall and bust my knee on the floor. Then Anise drags me up by my hair and the game starts all over again. And I let them play it, because I’m not sure anything else at all matters anymore.
Kalinda won’t look at me for the whole of the day, and when Missus Wilhelmina tells us to go home, she leaps out of her seat and walks so fast she might as well have run right out the classroom door. Anise stays behind, waiting for me in the courtyard. She and the hyenas march behind me all the way to waterfront, telling me to get ready to burn in hell, and that I’m disgusting, and that I shouldn’t even be alive. I’m starting to think that they might be right. When the woman in black wavers in the corner of my eye, I don’t even look her way.
The next morning, I don’t get out of bed. Mister Lochana will wonder why I didn’t come to him, and my father will get a phone call from Miss Joe tonight, hearing that this was my third strike and that I unfortunately have been expelled, but I don’t care. I sleep like the little white girl slept in that fairy tale for what feels like a hundred years.
When I wake up, the sun has already set and is beginning to rise again. I leave my house and walk out into the yellow sun, walk and walk and walk down the road. Like she’s waiting for me, Bernadette is sitting right there in a guava tree. She looks like she’s a little girl ghost. She swings her legs back and forth, and while they swing I could swear both her hands are on backward, as are her feet.
“Why you can’t just stay away from here?” I ask. She just keeps swinging her legs. I pick up the biggest stone I can find and throw it. It misses her head by a good foot. I wish I could say I meant to miss, but I don’t think I did.
“I came here to meet my father, but now I have to go home again.”
“Why would I care about something like that?” I ask.
“Because your father is my father.” And when I don’t say anything, she adds, “We’re sisters.”
“What?”
“You’re my big sister,” she says. “I’m your little sister. That’s what my mom tells me.”
“Your mom’s a liar.”
She jumps down from the tree and opens her mouth and lets out such a scream that I’m sure the gates of hell are ripping open. I slap my hands over my ears, and she keeps screaming and screaming.
“Shut up!” I yell, but she pays me no mind. She takes a big breath and starts her
screaming all over again, tracks of tears and snot running all down her face. Anyone would swear I’d tried to kill her mother dead instead of called her a liar. I can’t take it anymore, so I turn on my heel and race up the white road to my house.
My dad comes back just when the frogs start to make their noise. He steps inside the house and stumbles a bit when he catches me sitting alone in the dark. He doesn’t say anything as he walks inside and turns on the light and drops his keys on the countertop with a clatter. He comes back inside and sniffs as he kicks off his shoes and leans back in his chair and unfolds a three-day-old newspaper.
“Your principal called me at work,” he says. “She wanted to know why you haven’t been at school. I told her you were sick.”
I know I should thank him. He’s probably expecting me to thank him, apologize, and explain what happened. Or maybe he’s expecting his little rebellious Caroline tonight. Maybe he thinks I’ll start to yell and scream and cuss him out. Instead, I say something he isn’t expecting at all.
“That little girl down the road said I’m her sister.”
He looks up at me. Sniffs again and turns the page of his newspaper. “That’s true.”
I think about that story Kalinda told me, with the spot of rage anyone felt if they ever walked through it in the library in Barbados, and I wonder for a second if maybe that ghost got to me now from all the way across the sea—but no, that rage is coming from me, so violently that maybe when I’m dead this very spot will become the same, and anytime anyone walks through here, they’ll wish they could see their father dead.
Mine starts to cry now. I never really expected to see such a thing in my life, but that’s what he’s doing: He’s sitting there and crying and pretending he’s not, as he keeps holding up the newspaper. His hands are shaking and his eyes are filling and I tell myself I’m so angry that I don’t care, he could cry himself to death and I wouldn’t care one bit, but my heart starts to ache too, and then my eyes start to sting.
“Is that why she left? Is that why my ma left us?”
He can’t even speak or nod or shake his head, so I ask again where my ma is, and he opens his mouth and says it so quiet I almost don’t hear the words: “She’s here.”
It should be a relief, and for a minute it is—my mother wasn’t taken by the woman in black. She isn’t trapped in the spirit world, and I won’t have to travel through the eclipse to become stuck there for the rest of my life too. But then the questions start to come. How long has she been back? If she’s back, why hasn’t she come to me? Why hasn’t she come back home to see me? Even if she never wants to see my father ever again, I have done nothing wrong to her. If she’s back in the Virgin Islands, then she should have come to see me and take me away with her so we can start a new and happy life together.
My father only told me that she’s here, in the Virgin Islands, on Saint Thomas—not that she’s alive. I can only think of one explanation for why my mother hasn’t come back for me, and that explanation requires her to be six feet under the ground.
My father doesn’t have to force me to go to school the next morning. I need to get out of the house so that’s what I do. Anise and Marie Antoinette and their friends are waiting for me. Anise starts to yell I shouldn’t go to this school because it’s a Catholic school, and sinners shouldn’t attend Catholic schools, and she says too that I shouldn’t be allowed into the church, because that’s no place for sinners either, but today there’s too much on my mind for me to even listen. Maybe it’s my blank stare—that I’m looking past them, staring at the little dead girl that looks like my sister standing in the middle of the courtyard. I don’t respond. I don’t even look their way. Anise just becomes quiet on her own, and they stare at me silently like I’m a dead girl too, laying in an open casket as they all march past at my viewing.
As soon as Kalinda walks into our classroom, I’m on my feet and by her side and ignoring all the stares that follow. I can only see her face.
She’s not looking at me, but she doesn’t try to push past me as if I don’t exist, the way she acted two days ago—the way I thought she would this morning too. Relief threads its way through me. Kalinda mumbles a good morning.
“Good morning,” I say to her. I take in a sharp breath. “My mother is on island.”
Her eyes snap to me. “What? How do you know?”
“I have a sister who told me, and my father finally admitted it, and now that she’s on island—I have to find her.”
She nods, then looks past me, noticing the faces that are turned in our direction. She swallows and looks away again. “I’ll speak to you after school.” Then she goes to her seat and does not turn to whisper anything to me for the entirety of the school day.
Kalinda is waiting for me after school, like she promised. We walk through town, and at first I think she’s bringing me to her house, but we keep walking right by. I shouldn’t be surprised. She will probably never invite me to her house ever again.
“I’ll help you find your mother, because I know that’s the right thing to do,” she tells me, “but I don’t know if I can be your friend.”
The pain that spreads through me is paralyzing. I stop walking.
“Is it because of that letter?” I say. I try to think of something—anything—to say about that letter. “It was just a joke. But then Anise found it, and she—”
“I know that’s not true,” she says.
I quiet myself.
“It’s wrong for one girl to feel that way about another,” she says gravely. “You know that, don’t you, Caroline?”
I could cry, my spirit hurts so bad. “That’s what I’ve been told, but I don’t believe every single little thing anyone tells me.”
“You’re a Christian, aren’t you? Don’t you believe in God?”
“White people once used the Bible to say that we should be slaves.”
“What does that have anything to do with this?”
“Everything,” I tell her. “It means we should think for ourselves. Decide if something is wrong just because someone says it’s so, or decide it’s right because that’s how we feel.”
She looks me over, up and down. “I wish I could think the same way.” And she keeps walking, and I’m not at all sure what she meant by this, but it leaves my heart stuttering.
“And so your mother is back on island.”
“Yes” is all I tell her.
“Well? You must know more. What’s your plan now? I can’t help you if all you know is that she’s on this island.”
And it looks to me like Kalinda doesn’t have any patience to help me find a plan, either. If I tell her that I don’t have one, she might just walk away from me right here, right now, and never speak to me again. It isn’t lost on me that somehow all my wishes were granted: My mother is on island, and Kalinda is here too. There is still a hope, a chance, that Kalinda might someday return my feelings, and I’ll have the unending joy of being able to love her, and being able to have my mother.
If she’s still alive. If she isn’t now trapped in a graveyard.
I rummage through my mind and come up with an answer quick. “I need evidence that she’s still alive, and if she’s still alive, then I need to know where she is. My dad is hiding that from me. And now, Miss Joe is too.”
“What will you do?”
I think of my dad’s room. Even though he caught me, I managed to get through a lot of his closet, his drawers—enough to see that he didn’t really keep papers there, no letters or documents that would prove my mom was still alive, or that she was still in contact with him.
I decide it right then and there. “I want to spy on Miss Joe,” I tell her. “She’s hiding something from me. I want to know what it is.”
Kalinda is good at hiding her expressions and emotions, as adults often are. If she’s surprised or upset hearing this, she doesn’t show it. She only nods.
“Then I’ll do what I can to help,” she says.
Breaking into
Miss Joe’s office isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, seeing that she always keeps her door wide open for anyone to come in, even when she isn’t there. The problem is that she is always there, or it seems like it that morning as she sits and reads her newspaper and eats her hot cereal. Kalinda and I have already missed one full class with Missus Wilhelmina, and when she asks where we are, the other children will say they never saw the two of us at all this morning, since we have been hiding in the empty classroom that’s directly beside Miss Joe’s office, staring through tiny holes in the wall, and when Missus Wilhelmina hears that, she’ll immediately call our homes, only to hear that we’ve left as we were supposed to (or hear it from Kalinda’s anyway, since no one will be at my home to answer the phone), and so the search will be on. We don’t have very much time, and I’m nervous that if I’m caught, this really will be my third strike, and Miss Joe will send me home just as she promised, away from the first friend I’ve ever made and quite possibly the love of my life, and away from the one chance I have to learn the truth about my mother.
Finally, Missus Wilhelmina comes right into the office, just as I thought she would, and my heart drops—but instead of my name coming from her mouth, she throws up her hands and complains that one of the overhead fans has broken, and she and her class of students are destined to die of heatstroke if they’re forced to sit in that classroom any longer, so Miss Joe heaves a sigh and stands from her desk to follow Missus Wilhelmina away. I look at Kalinda and she nods. This is our only chance.
We leave the empty office and run into Miss Joe’s room. The mountains of teetering books, the scraps of paper that seem to be flying in every which way, the mess itself—I remember what Miss Joe’s office is like, but I never until this moment understood how incredibly packed it is with papers, and how impossible it’ll be to find anything at all. Maybe this is why Miss Joe has no qualms about leaving her door unlocked. She knows thieves won’t be able to find anything anyway.
Hurricane Child Page 8