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Hurricane Child

Page 10

by Kheryn Callender


  Farther beyond the tourist shops are newly built condos that no one but celebrities from the States are rich enough to use. I heard that Oprah—the real Oprah—once stayed in one of those condos. From what my pa said, though, she’s the only one that’s ever stayed there. No one wants to stay in those condos.

  Right across the street are the housing projects, repainted to match the dull beige of the condos, with beautiful murals that were added to every single wall when the condos were built so when tourists and celebrities passed by the housing projects, they wouldn’t know what they were seeing.

  “How is it that those condos are empty,” Kalinda says, “and across the street they’ve got eight people in a room?”

  “I think I have an idea,” I say.

  “Let’s hear it, then.”

  “No one’s living in there, right? We should stay in there for the night.”

  “I don’t know if we should mess with those condos.”

  “Are you afraid?” I tease.

  “Yes,” she says. “If we mess with those condos”—and she pauses here for effect—“they’ll beat us till we bleed.”

  “They’ll do more than beat us if they catch us. They’ll throw us into jail.”

  “They can’t put us in jail,” Kalinda says. “We’re too young.”

  I hate being corrected. “You can go right on ahead and stay outside for the night, then, if you’re too scared.”

  “Not scared,” Kalinda says. “Just smart.”

  “It’s just for a night,” I say. “No one would even know.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re out of your mind.”

  I smile. “You don’t have to do a single thing if you don’t want to,” I say. “But me—I’ll be living like a queen tonight.”

  I turn away from her, pretending that I don’t care if she follows me or not. I don’t turn around when I hear her coming. We walk down the sidewalk, across the street from the housing projects. Keeping us out of the condos is the black iron fence with sharp spikes at the top. We pass by a security box right by the locked gate. The box is as big as a man, and the officer inside is being baked alive in his uniform. He shines with sweat as he fans himself with the pages of a book. He watches a cricket game on a little TV. We walk by him so slowly that he gets suspicious. He pokes his head out the open window. He isn’t a happy man, sitting in a small sweltering box, guarding an empty condominium.

  Kalinda and I speed up our walk. I look over my shoulder to see the security guard watching us until we pass the black gate altogether. The second we pass the sidewalk, he goes back to fanning himself and watching his handheld TV.

  “In here, quick,” I say as the second the security guard looks away.

  I take Kalinda around the corner and alongside the gate that leads into the unpaved field and trees and pipes that spill out to the ocean and isn’t covered with concrete. “He can’t see us here, right?”

  Kalinda scours the bottom of the iron fence. Finally she points out a hole that’s been dug out by an iguana. We get through easily with only a few scratches on our arms, and when we’re on the other side of the gate, we run until we’re sweating and we can’t breathe without bending over and putting our hands on our knees. I’m gasping for breath when I stand to see. There is an untouched stone path that takes us through the budding gardens that are well-kept for the people who don’t live there. Red hibiscus that iguana like to eat are small flames, and trees with flower petals falling with every light breeze make me feel like I’ve stepped into another world entirely.

  We bend low beneath the neatly clipped bush, listening for the footsteps of concealed security guards. At the end of the path, we take turns poking our heads out past the edge of the hedge’s leaves. When we’re confident that we’re the only ones there, we leave the path and walk into the courtyard.

  It isn’t like the church’s courtyard, with ancient cobblestones and bird droppings. This courtyard is a garden of grass and roses, a gazebo with benches and a sleepily rotating fan. No clouds in the sky, so the blue that is the color of the ocean reflects off of the leaves, turned honey by the yellow sun. The courtyard overlooks a dock. The dock is private for the condos. The water is clear, and we can smell its salt. Kalinda runs right through that garden and jumps into the sea. She sinks and floats to the top with a smile. I sit on the edge of the concrete dock, rough beneath my thighs, my toes scraping the edge of the water. I watch Kalinda swim and dive until I’m tired of watching. With my loafers in my hand, I walk through the garden. The path continues to the other end of the iron gate, but from where I stand, I can’t see the security guard anywhere.

  And in front of me are the condominiums. There are five in all, and the main one—the one I’m sure Oprah Winfrey stayed in—stares down at us with its beige paint and white trim, gold handles for the glass French doors. Sweeping staircases lead to the upper level, which has a balcony and white wicker chairs.

  I run up the stairs and go to the doors. I’m not surprised when they’re locked. I can see Kalinda swimming beneath the glass waves. There are windows on either side of the door. I yank one up, and then push on the mosquito screen behind it. I push hard enough that the screen falls to the floor with a clatter.

  I climb inside. The white tile is cold beneath my feet. I smell dust and dried paint. The walls are yellow, to match the sunshine, and there are couches bigger than my bed. The couches face a television, so wide it almost covers the entire wall. I grab a remote that’s neatly placed on the glass coffee table and throw myself on a couch that squeaks beneath my bum. I flip through movie stations, hundreds of them. I watch until I hear a knock on the door.

  I jump; I can’t help it, and I don’t like the way Kalinda laughs at me, her head poking through the window. I get up and open the door for her. She walks into the room and gestures at the TV. “These are all the stations my father won’t buy.” And she walks away, down the hall, opening each door and oohing and aahing, until she opens one door and calls the Lord’s name in vain. When I follow her to see what she’s staring at, I can’t help but call the Lord’s name too.

  The bedroom is as big as my house. It has a ceiling so high I feel like I’m in church, and the one bed has see-through sheets covering it so it shimmers in the light of the window. Kalinda runs to that bed so fast that when she lands, she bounces high into the air. I follow, and we jump and bounce on the bed until I fall off with a thud that shakes the whole room. Even I have to laugh, rolling around on the floor.

  When our laughing gets quiet, we stay still, staring at whatever it is we’re staring at. I’m staring out at the ocean. I can see the green mirage of Saint John. Closer to Saint Thomas is Water Island. I can see it just fine from the window. If I look hard enough, I can probably see my house too, and see the window that looks into the kitchen, and see my pa sitting at the table, waiting for his two women to come home.

  Night is coming. I can tell from the way the sky starts to turn colors like a kaleidoscope. Night is when the cruise ships begin to leave. I can see them at Havensight Dock, backing away from Saint Thomas slowly. It’s peaceful, watching them, until the horns go off like sirens, so loud they hurt my teeth. The walls and floor shudder, and Kalinda and I both cover our ears. When the horns stop, we’re still there with our hands covering our ears, and we laugh at each other. And I think suddenly that if I love Kalinda, maybe there’s a chance Kalinda loves me too, and maybe we could share our first kiss together—maybe she could even become my wife—but I get too scared to even mention such a possibility, and instead we smile at each other in the quiet.

  We get hungry, so we go downstairs to the kitchen to see if Oprah left any good food behind. The cabinets are only filled with hurricane food: cold Vienna sausage, stale crackers, and gallons of water.

  “There isn’t anything else?” I ask. I always get a little bad-tempered whenever I’m hungry.

  “I’m afraid not,” Kalinda says.

  We pop open the cans and put them on the living ro
om floor in front of the TV. The TV is the only light, because bulbs haven’t been put into the lamps yet and the sun is now long gone. It starts to get cold once the sun is down and the trade wind kicks up from the Arctic over the ocean and comes right into the condo. Since Kalinda is still wet from her swim by the docks, she starts sneezing and coughing. We watch white people on the TV screen for a while, but even the movies with guns and fast cars and explosions get boring after a while.

  “My auntie and dad are going to be so pissed,” Kalinda says.

  I don’t know what my pa will do. My ma was the one to discipline me, and depending on my crime, I had a good idea of what my punishment would be. Bad grades meant no television; not eating my dinner meant no dessert. Talking back meant a slap across the mouth, but I never liked talking back to my ma that much when she was around. I liked listening to her when she told me to do something—wash the dishes, clean my room—because I liked the smile she had for me when I was done. When she left, my pa tried telling me to do the same things, but he didn’t have a smile for me at the end of it, so I stopped doing what he said.

  “We should go to bed,” Kalinda says. “We’ll have a long day tomorrow.”

  We turn off the television and climb into bed. Kalinda is still wet, so the dampness spreads from her and onto the sheets so, before long, I’m shivering too. Kalinda notices. She takes me into her arms, but since her skin is cold too, we do nothing but shiver together.

  When I wake up, it’s to a voice. I think Kalinda has woken up before me and turned on the TV, but when I open my eyes, I see that she’s still asleep, turned over and with her arms covering her face from the light coming in through the balcony doors. I sit up to figure out where the voice came from. I freeze when I see the security guard. It’s the same one who’d been sitting in his hot box. He must have been going from condo to condo to make sure that the iguanas didn’t manage to get in.

  He stands at the door, yelling and cussing us good. “You want to go to jail, eh?” he asks. “You want to go to jail!”

  Kalinda wakes up not a heartbeat later. When she opens her eyes and sees the guard, she gets out of bed carefully, eyes on the security guard’s baton, which is gripped in a meaty hand.

  “You’re coming with me,” the guard says over and over again. He stands in front of the doorway, and the only other way out is by jumping off the balcony and into the garden below. When Kalinda and I look at each other, we only have a second. We run at the guard and push him so hard that he lands on his back. Kalinda grabs my arm and pulls me out of the room, but the guard grabs her ankle. She falls hard to the ground. I double back and jump so I land on the guard’s stomach. He yells out and grabs me by my knees with his sweaty palms, but lets go when I kick him in his nose. He screams that I broke it—that I broke his nose—and Kalinda and I run, yelling at the top of our lungs, past our mess of empty Vienna sausage cans in the living room and down the stairs and out into the garden.

  “We have to go to the hole,” Kalinda says. I know she’s right, so I start off for the black iron fence. Kalinda runs faster than me and gets to the iguana hole first. There’s a yelling. The security guard, hand over his bleeding nose, stumbles down the stairs and makes his way toward us.

  Both Kalinda and I dive through the hole, scratching ourselves up on the rocks and getting my shirt and skirt caked with dirt. Kalinda rushes forward and jumps onto a taxi, and she grabs my hand and pulls me up. We look back at the black iron gate and the condos. The security guard has just reached the fence.

  It takes us a moment, but when the taxi reaches waterfront, the two of us start laughing. We laugh so hard that we get tears in our eyes. The other passengers just watch us all the way into the countryside.

  The wind is stronger. The sky is gray. Water begins to fall to the ground in great big plops. The woman driving the taxi stops under a swinging streetlight, and me and Kalinda jump off without paying. She calls out to us, but she doesn’t cuss us like I thought she would. She tells us to get home soon.

  “There’s a tropical storm coming,” she says. “Haven’t you heard?”

  Kalinda and I stand on the side of the road, and the water begins to fall harder, soaking my shirt and lashing my face. She takes my hand.

  “Are you nervous?”

  I nod.

  “Are you scared?”

  I nod again.

  She takes a deep breath. “I am too.”

  “Why would you be scared?” She wasn’t the one meeting her mom for the first time in over a year.

  “I’m scared because I have something to tell you,” she says. She takes my other hand. “I’m sorry for the way I hurt you, Caroline.”

  “You already said that you were sorry.”

  “It hurt me, to see that I was hurting you. And more than that: I was afraid of the truth.”

  I don’t let myself breathe or speak. If I do, I’m afraid Kalinda will blow away on the breeze. It’s only because Kalinda watches me like she wants me to speak that I make myself say, “And what is the truth?”

  She looks at me like she isn’t planning on saying it, because I should know what the truth is, and maybe I should, and maybe I do—but then she decides to say it out loud anyway. “I feel the same way about you too.” She’s still holding my hand, and I don’t know what to say, but I’m also afraid that she’s going to let go, so I grip her fingers in mine even tighter. She keeps speaking. “I was afraid to, because I’ve been told it’s wrong, but you’re right—I don’t want to think that way, just because someone said it’s so. I know the truth. I love you.”

  She continues to talk—tells me how much the letter really meant to her, that she’d taken the journal home to read it over and over, and how she would like nothing more than to marry me too, one day when we’re old enough. I’m still not sure if I can completely believe her, but I see the way her eyes watch me with all the grave seriousness of the entire world, and I know she means every word. I could almost cry.

  Kalinda tells me that we have to keep moving, before it starts to rain, so we climb the steep hills and jump over gates and barricades and walk through the yards of abandoned houses, whitewashed and glowing under the blinding sun, still shining through the clouds. My leg gets caught on a wire as I climb over a fence, cutting me sharp. Kalinda doesn’t notice, and I decide not to tell her. We walk down the street, my loafers sinking into the moist dirt. Guinea grass and brush slices my shins. Cars pass by. Kalinda and I walk silently side by side.

  We’re in the countryside, with the hillsides that go up and back down like roller-coaster rides, and from where we can see all the islands spread out before us like we own the entire world. Missus Wilhelmina would say that it’s blasphemy to think something like that, when clearly the world belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. We can see black clouds moving in fast from the east, so we speed up our walk.

  I have trouble remembering what day it is. It’s been one full night since my father has seen me. I know he has to be worried, and I do feel very bad, but I need to go to 5545 Mariendahl Road, or I’m afraid I’ll never want to try to find my mom again. I’ll just let myself sink back into the life I had before, and I’ll decide that I don’t need to find my mother anymore, because I’ll simply be too afraid to try, so I need to do it now, before I decide to never attempt to find her again.

  We walk into the back roads and into a neighborhood hidden by brush, where a dog is tied up to a tree with a chain and some men sit on the corner playing dominoes, slapping the pieces on the board and cussing at each other as they laugh, and a broken-down car sits rusting under the sun. I look at the house numbers until I reach the one that might have my mother inside. The house has a white wall and a gate and an empty driveway. I stand there, looking at the house, and the fears come back again. The fears that she’ll take one look at me and ask why I’m here. That she’ll tell me she stopped loving me even before the day she left. I stand there and look at the door. It looks to me to be the most evil door in the world. It seems
like any other front door, but there must be an evil spirit hiding inside of it, and once I open the door, that spirit will send me through the threshold and right into the pits of hell. I’m not at all sure what to do with a door like that.

  We stand beside each other. I can hear Kalinda breathing—taking long breaths, like she’s trying to calm herself. She almost looks as nervous as I am.

  I unlatch the gate and walk down the path and knock on the door. I hear footsteps, and the door opens and there’s a screen in between me and a woman with her braided hair tied in a bun. “Yes?” she says.

  “Good afternoon,” I say. “I’m looking for a Missus Doreen Murphy.”

  She gives me a look. “Doreen? The only Doreen I know is a Hendricks.”

  My heart hammers. It’s true—she’s here, she has to be. “Yes, that’s the same one.”

  She shakes her head. “That’s my cousin. We grew up in this house together when we were children, even though we lost touch some years ago. May I ask who you are?”

  Cousin—if she’s related to my mother, then this woman who I’ve never laid eyes on before is related to me too. “I—” I begin, but I don’t know what to say. How do I explain that she’s my mother, and that I’m her daughter?

  “We have a gift for her, from her old friend Miss Joseph,” Kalinda says, stepping forward.

  “Loretta Joseph?” The woman raises her eyebrows. “Now, that’s a woman I haven’t heard from in years. Well, you’re close enough—Doreen didn’t move far. Just walk over the hill there, you see? And to the right of the mahogany tree splitting the middle of the road is a white house standing on its own, and a garden of yellow flowers. It’s hard to miss it. You’ll see.”

  We thank her and turn to leave, but not before the woman tells us to make sure we hurry. “The storm’s supposed to be here before the sun sets. Best get home as quick as you can.”

  We walk up the hill, granite road turning to dust and mud and weeds, and turn down the path to the right of the mahogany tree. Standing tall before the brush is a white house with a garden of yellow flowers, and standing on the porch is a little girl. She’s small, maybe five or six years old.

 

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