Hurricane Child

by Kheryn Callender

  “I’ll begin over here,” I tell Kalinda, who nods and goes to the opposite end of the tiny office, and I begin looking through books and papers, but of course nothing about my mother is there. Miss Joe will be back any moment. Maybe this isn’t worth the risk. I stand straight and look at her desk. I go to it, and standing atop is a row of many photo frames and many smiling faces of Miss Joe throughout the years: one black-and-white picture of a girl-child version of Miss Joe standing in a somber crowd of other young girls; one brightly colored photo of an older Miss Joe holding a toddler on her hip on the sand of a beach; another of her standing tall and proud in her graduation uniform; and one yellowed photo of two young women, only slightly older than me, and one of them is undoubtedly Miss Joe, and the other is just as clearly my mother.

  I hold the photo. Kalinda comes to stand beside me. “Who are they?” she asks. She’s sweating, either from the heat or the exertion of rushing through books and files.

  I hold up the photo and put my finger on the glass, leaving my fingerprint in a smudge. “That’s my mom.”

  Kalinda takes the photo with a smile. “She’s beautiful.” She looks at me again. “You look like her.”

  My heart blooms like a flower in my chest. “I don’t.”

  “You do. You have her nose and her eyes and her brows.” She hands me back the photo in its frame.

  I didn’t realize Kalinda had studied my face so closely. I’m suddenly shy and can’t look at her properly.

  “Why does Miss Joe have a photo of your mother?” she asks.

  “They were best friends,” I tell her, and almost add, and they were in love. “I’ll keep this,” I say.

  “You’ll steal it? Won’t Miss Joe notice?”

  She probably will, but I don’t have a photo of my mom. She never took any for my dad and me, and though this isn’t the face I know, it’s still her face. “She might, but I don’t care. I want to keep it.”

  Voices come down the hall, one of a woman complaining about something we can’t hear, and I know immediately it’s Missus Wilhelmina and Miss Joe returning.

  I take Kalinda’s hand and we rush out the room quick as lightning, but they’re already so close that they see us, and Missus Wilhelmina yells and screams and tries to run after us, but we run so fast back to her classroom that she isn’t able to follow or see where we’ve gone. By the time she returns, we’re already sitting in the classroom, sweating with the rest of the class, though no one else will have known it was from running. The second we exploded into the room, Kalinda begged them all to lie for us and say that we have always been there, and though no one likes me, they all like Kalinda, and so the entire class agreed.

  Missus Wilhelmina walks back in and immediately comes to a stop beside my desk. “Where were you, Miss Murphy?”

  “I was always here.”

  The class hesitates, and then Anise agrees loudly. “She was always here stinking up the room.”

  They all laugh.

  Missus Wilhelmina looks confused. She crosses her arms. “I would’ve remembered you being here. I even thought to myself that you were not.”

  I force on the most confused face I can muster. “I was always here, Missus Wilhelmina.”

  Everyone else nods their agreement. Missus Wilhelmina frowns at me until she goes to the front of the classroom.

  “Two students were seen running from Miss Joe’s office.”

  Everyone gasps and eyes swing to Kalinda and me, but no one says anything.

  “Nothing was taken, but if these students are ever found, believe me and God, they will not be coming back to this school. Do you hear me?”

  We all murmur, “Yes, Missus Wilhelmina.”

  She looks pleased and so begins her lesson once again. Neither Kalinda nor I dare to look at each other for the rest of the period.

  I’m home, laying on my back on my bed, holding the photo in its frame high above me. The frame is silver and rusted, with the paint scraped away from its edges. The color of the photo is brown and white, and it’s yellowed with old age. My mother and Miss Joe are posing together, their flowery skirts flaring out around their knees, and I see that Miss Joe’s are swollen, and that my mom’s knees look like round rocks sticking out from her skin, just like my own. They stand side by side, their hands folded together in front of their stomachs as proper young ladies should place them, but their smiles aren’t genteel and poised. They look like they’re about to burst out laughing and they’re trying their best not to. Seeing them like this, I don’t know whether I want to laugh or cry myself.

  I want to know what the photo feels like—want to touch it, because then maybe that’d mean I’m touching something my mother has touched, and want to smell it, because maybe it somehow still smells like my mother too, like the scent of her perfume. I pull and tug the back of the frame until it creaks open, and then slide the photo out gently so it won’t tear. The paper is surprisingly rough, and the photo smells like mothballs—not like my mother at all.

  I flip it over, and on the back are yellow stains and cursive writing in pencil that has almost faded away. I hold it close to my eyes to see more clearly. It says: Doreen Hendricks residence, 5545 Mariendahl, 19th of September, 1974.

  I run my finger over the writing. 5545 Mariendahl? I flip the photo over again, and see that they’re standing in front of a house that looks to have a short roof and wide windows, and though I’ve never seen this house before, I’m willing to bet anything that its address is 5545 Mariendahl. And I don’t know for sure if this is where I can find my mother—but I also know it’s the only clue I have.

  The next morning, I walk out before the sun is in the sky, when it’s still hidden behind the green hills, and the clouds are pink and the birds have just started to sing their songs, and I walk to the guava tree to find Bernadette. She isn’t there, swinging her legs or grinning with her too-big teeth, so I keep walking the road until it takes me up the hill and back down again. The little house where she was living is empty now, its windows so black it’s like no one ever lived there at all.

  The photo is still in my hand. What was I going to do? Ask Bernadette if she knew of this house? Go there myself, if she told me yes, that’s where my mother could be found? If I walked up to this house today and knocked on the door so it would swing open and reveal my mother standing there, looking down at me like a stranger, I’m not sure I would have anymore a reason to stay alive. If my mother opens the door, and she can’t tell me why she hasn’t come back for me in all this time, I think I really might as well just let myself die. Nobody but my mother has ever loved me, and if she doesn’t love me anymore, I have not a soul on this Earth that cares anything about me. No one cares about someone like me, and no one cares that I’m angry about that either. Might as well be the crazy man screaming at everyone around him, or might as well not exist at all. And so I think maybe I really don’t belong to this world. Now, that’s a lonely thought.

  When I come to school, I sit alone in the classroom with my head bent low. The photo is still in the pocket of my skirt. No one has anything to say to me today. Anise Fowler and her friends leave me alone. I don’t even feel their stares. This is a strange and unprecedented thing, but I wonder if it’s because of the way I’ve stared blankly past them, and because of the way Kalinda asked them to help me just yesterday. We’re not friends, and never will be, but maybe now we’re not quite hated enemies, either.

  Someone stops beside my desk, and I look up to see Kalinda. She doesn’t look like she knows for sure what she wants to say to me.

  “Good morning,” she says.

  I tell her good morning too.

  She stands there, the expression on her face pained. She looks like she doesn’t know if she should stay or run away. Finally she opens her mouth. “Have you found anything?” she asks. “Anything about your mother?”

  I don’t want to tell her the truth. If I do, then we’ll have to go to 5545 Mariendahl Road together, and I’ll have to see my m
other opening the door and looking at me without any love in her eyes, and then once we’ve found her, Kalinda won’t have any reason to speak to me anymore. I grip my hands and shake my head.

  She still stands beside me. She rocks back and forth on her heels and her toes. “I tried to imagine myself not speaking to you at all today,” she says. “I’d come here planning to ignore you.”

  This hurts my heart more than I can bear, so I look away, expecting that she’ll take her leave. But she stays where she is—even continues to speak.

  “But the second I arrived and saw you, I knew that I couldn’t ignore you, no matter how much I tried.” She pauses for a long while before she asks, “Would you like to take a walk with me after school?”

  I’m surprised. I look to Anise, who has her back turned to us. I’m not sure I trust this. Would it be possible that Anise convinced Kalinda to play a cruel game on me? That she’s only pretending to be my friend again? “Why?”

  “Because we need to talk,” she says. “I have some things to say to you.”

  I’m afraid. I don’t want to know what she wants to say, or whether she even speaks the truth or not. But I nod my head anyway, unable to really look at her. I stare at the air over her shoulder instead. She turns on her heel and returns to her seat, and doesn’t say a single word to me for the rest of the day—not until I find her waiting for me on the church’s front steps.

  “I thought we could walk to the beach,” she tells me as she starts the walk. “I haven’t been swimming in a very long time.”

  I wring my hands together. “I don’t want to swim,” I tell her.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid of the ocean.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I remind her of the day I fell off Mister Lochana’s speedboat and nearly drowned before I’d even had a chance to fully learn how to walk.

  “Well,” she says, “I won’t let you drown.”

  She keeps walking, like that should be enough. Who knows? Maybe it is. In fact, I decide that, yes, I’m safe when I’m with Kalinda, and if it turns out that this really is nothing more than a cruel game, then I’ll have nothing else in this world at all, because right now, I think she is the only other person I can trust besides myself.

  We walk and walk and walk, all down through town and past the graveyard and over the long strips of paved road where mirages shimmer in the sun. The sky has gray clouds blowing in from the west, and with them comes the smell of rain and a heaviness in the air, but Kalinda doesn’t seem to care. She just keeps on walking. She doesn’t speak to me. She only walks with such a focused look on her face that I think she’ll just leave me behind if I don’t keep up.

  When we get to the beach, sand spilling onto the road, she doesn’t waste any time. She takes off her shoes and socks and places them neatly in the shade of a palm tree and runs straight for the water. I do the same, hot sand burning my feet, and follow her. She leaps into the waves and comes back up again, her locks flying with salt water everywhere. I stop where the water crashes onto the sand, foaming up around my toes, trying to suck me back out again.

  She stands in the water. Stands like she’s a queen of the spirit world. Kalinda doesn’t belong here. I know that for sure.

  “Come,” she says. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

  I wade into the waves after her, the cold winter water lapping up against my thighs and my sides, making my school uniform stick to my skin. Kalinda takes my hand.

  “I’m sorry for the way I treated you,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say automatically, even if it isn’t true.

  “I’ve thought long and hard about our friendship, Caroline, and I realized that I miss you too much to lose you. I still want to be your friend, if you’ll let me—even if what you feel is a sin.”

  There’s pain mixed with joy that strings around my heart, caging it in so it can only beat a low thump—pain that she does not love me as I love her, pain that she thinks my love for her is a sin … but joy that she considers me her friend once again. It begins to rain, lashing water against our skin and making the sea splash into our hair, and even then we just stay in the water together. “I’d love to be your friend, Kalinda.”

  When we leave the beach, she takes my hand and walks me to waterfront, and stands there and watches me leave on Mister Lochana’s speedboat. I think about how I hope she can do that every afternoon—walk me to waterfront and say good-bye and watch me as if she’ll stand there until I’ve returned in the morning again. And then when we’ve both gotten old enough, maybe she can get onto Mister Lochana’s boat with me, and we can go to my home together, and she can live there with me until I’ve returned in the morning again.

  The next morning, when I walk into the classroom, I expect to see her sitting in her seat, eagerly waiting for me in the same way that I’m eagerly waiting to see her, but she isn’t there.

  You ain’t got no one to hold you.

  And she doesn’t come, not even when the school bell rings. She’s never been late before, and others have noticed too. Heads turn to her empty seat. Missus Wilhelmina walks into the classroom and stands in the center, right in front of the blackboard, and announces that Kalinda won’t be a student here anymore.

  You ain’t got no one to care.

  That her family is taking her back to Barbados now.

  And she promptly begins her lesson for the day.

  Kalinda is gone. My mother is gone. I have no friends. I am all alone again, as it seems I always have been, and always will be, except for the woman in black, who I know will never leave.

  I don’t even wait for the school day to end. I slip out of my seat and find myself in front of Kalinda’s house, shouting her name. “Kalinda! Kalinda!” There’s a rush of wind that carries my voice away, so I scream louder. “Kalinda Francis!”

  Finally the door opens, and Kalinda stands on her porch above me like she wants to know who in the world could possibly be shouting like the devil. When she sees it’s me, she doesn’t look completely surprised. She’s only a little surprised. She leaves her porch and walks down the stairs where she says she finds herself sleeping at night, and opens the gate and stops right in front of me.

  “I wasn’t planning on saying good-bye like this,” she tells me.

  “You mean you weren’t planning on saying good-bye at all!”

  “We had our good-bye yesterday.”

  “Yesterday can’t count if only one person knows they’re saying good-bye.”

  She seems to think about this for a moment. A hard breeze makes her locks swing through the air. “Maybe so,” she finally says, “but I thought it might be less painful this way. I hate saying good-byes, you know.”

  For a moment, I can’t even look at her. I’m so furious that my hands are shaking. She said so many things to me, and she knew that she was leaving, so all those things were nothing but lies. I turn to the side so I can stare at her house instead. “When are you leaving?”

  “In two days.”

  “Then we have two days to find my mother.”

  She gives me a funny look. “I can’t help you do that,” she says.

  “You made me a promise.”

  “Things have changed. I have to go to Barbados.”

  “I expect you to keep that promise.”

  “There’s a storm coming, you know,” she says.

  I did not know, but I don’t care. I was born of a storm. Storms don’t scare me.

  “We’ll both be in trouble,” she says.

  I do know this, but I don’t care about that, either. I’m always in trouble.

  Kalinda has run out of reasons to stay. I’ve finally turned back to her, and she’s looking at me now too.

  “Please,” I say, so quiet I don’t think she’s even heard me.

  But then she nods. “Okay. But if we’re going to go, we have to go now.”

  That works just fine for me.

  We don’t
bring any clothes or any food. Kalinda doesn’t go back upstairs to her house, because if she does, then there’s a chance she won’t be able to leave again. So the two of us start walking right there and then.

  I take out the photo, which now has a permanent home in my pocket, and as we walk I show it to Kalinda so she can also see its back.

  “Fifty-five forty-five Mariendahl, nineteenth of September, nineteen seventy-four,” she reads. She flips it over and stares at the photo. “Is this where you’ll find your mother?”

  “I think so,” I tell her.

  “I think so too,” she says.

  We will go to 5545 Mariendahl, but the sun is getting lower in the sky, and the mosquitoes are coming out to find us, and Kalinda says that nighttime is when the spirits will come out to find us too. Night is when the angriest ones come around, ready to get their revenge on anyone who is still alive. She says we need to find a place to hide, and then we will go to 5545 Mariendahl Road in the countryside first thing in the morning.

  She takes us down to Havensight Dock, the dock where cruise ships let tourists on and off. Cruise ships pass by Water Island every morning. Their horns are my alarm clocks. At night, their lights glow like a thousand little suns. They are moving cities, the glass and steel compacted onto a single boat. Surrounding Havensight Dock are shops filled with tourist souvenirs: T-shirts reading I CAME, I SAW, I TOOK PICTURES! ST. THOMAS, USVI and photos of naked women on beaches and postcards with men with long locks, even longer than Kalinda’s, and chickens. I think that I once saw Mister Lochana on one of those postcards, and sometimes Oprah the donkey is featured too.

  We walk through the stores, ignoring the angry eye the shopkeepers give us. They don’t like too many locals in their stores when they are trying to sell to tourists, and they hate children still in their school uniforms who aren’t going to buy anything at all. They watch us good until we leave.