“Good afternoon,” I say, and when she just looks up at me, I keep going. “My name is Caroline Murphy. I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for a Doreen Murphy. Doreen Hendricks. Do you know if she’s here?”
The girl shakes her head. I think she might be shy. This makes me feel shy too. I suddenly feel like Goliath must have felt the moment he realized he’d been beaten by David. I look behind me, and Kalinda is still standing in the yard. She nods her encouragement, so I turn back to the little girl.
“Do you know if she lives here?”
She nods. I’m about to ask her if she knows when my mother will be back, but before I can, a man comes out of a hall and walks toward us so quickly that for a moment I’m sure he’s one of the things that no one else can see. With him comes the scent of boiled plantain and lemongrass tea. I haven’t eaten anything but Vienna sausages since yesterday, so the scents make me feel a little dizzy.
“Can I help you?” the man asks. He puts his hands on the girl’s shoulders.
“Yes. I’m looking for Doreen Murphy.”
He eyes me. “You’re looking for Doreen Murphy,” he repeats slowly.
I nod, and I expect for him to say where I can find her, but he keeps looking at me. “You’re Doreen’s daughter,” he says.
I just stand there. I’m not sure what else to do or what to say. With the way he said my mom’s name, and the way the little girl just keeps looking up at me with her big eyes, I’m not sure that there’s anything to say. The man tells the girl to go set up the table, so she turns and runs, looking over her shoulder at me once before she disappears down the hall.
“Doreen wouldn’t want you here,” he says.
I feel my chest tighten. That’s a cruel thing for him to say. “I just want to see her. I just want to talk to her.”
“And say what?” he asks. He looks at me, and from the way he does, I think he might feel bad about his words. He isn’t being mean or cruel on purpose—only truthful. I can hardly blame him for telling the truth. “She told me she doesn’t want to meet with you if you ever end up coming here.”
It’s at that precise moment that a car comes up behind me and down the dirt path. The man clenches his jaw, but he doesn’t try to make me or Kalinda leave. The car door opens and slams shut, and a woman comes, holding a bag of groceries. She doesn’t notice me at first, but then she looks up and sees me and slows down.
Her face hasn’t changed. I think her voice must be the same too.
Why you wanna fly, Blackbird?
My mother drops the groceries and puts a hand up to her mouth, and her hair is exactly the way I remember it—soft and curly and shining brown in the sunlight—and I don’t know what to say or do. She walks toward me and puts her arms around me and holds me tightly, and that’s when I start to cry. I clench the back of her shirt and feel my chest shake and wish I could stop, because I would like to have shown her how much of a mature young lady I’ve grown into, but she’s crying too and smoothing down my hair.
She pulls away, wiping her eyes, and asks me to come inside. Kalinda stays standing there. She looks at me, and I know she doesn’t want to follow me—she would rather wait out here. My mother picks up the bag of groceries, and the man opens the screen and stands to the side. She tells me his name is Richard. The little girl is back by the door, staring at us, wondering why we were crying. My mother picks her up and kisses her cheek. I envy this little girl more than I would have thought possible.
My mother leads me into the kitchen with the plantain and asks me if I’m hungry. Richard makes me a plate of plantain and oatmeal, since the salt fish is still stewing. I eat quietly, staring at her nose, her cheeks, her smile. I hadn’t seen it before, when Kalinda told me that I resemble my mother, but I see it now. I see her in the same way I’ve seen my own reflection and stared at myself and barely recognized my own face—as if my bones had transformed overnight. She sits and sips tea and waits until Richard takes the little girl to the living room to watch cartoons. She smiles at me, and suddenly I can’t look at her anymore.
“You’re so beautiful,” she says. “You look exactly like my cousin Idris when she was your age.” She sips more tea.
“I always thought I looked more like my dad.” I still can’t look at her.
“You look like him too,” she says. “You have his long arms and legs. But those eyes—those eyes definitely belong to my side of the family.” She puts down her cup of tea. “I prayed for you. I prayed so hard for you, that you would be happy and be safe. I told Richard—I told him that I don’t think I would ever forgive myself if anything had happened to you. I know that if I hadn’t left, I would’ve made sure you stayed safe.”
“My dad makes sure I’m safe.”
She looks a little surprised that I’m defending my dad. “You’re right. He does. He loves you very much.”
I keep eating. I’m not so sure there’s anything else I’m able to do.
She smiles a little and looks down at her tea. “I know that I’ve hurt you.”
I don’t say anything to this.
“I never wanted to hurt you. That was never my intention, Caroline.”
I can’t stop the questions that come from my mouth—the questions that I’ve been wanting to ask for so long, questions that might as well have existed since the beginning of time. “Then why did you leave?” And “Did you stop loving me?”
She’s quiet for a long time now, and she takes a deep breath, and she isn’t smiling anymore. “I’m going to tell you, because I think you’re old enough to understand. I know you’ll understand that I love you, no matter what. I look at you and think you remind me of when I was young. I think we might be similar. I liked to be alone a lot when I was younger, and I think you might be like that. Katie’s more like her dad—she’s shy when she just meets someone, but get her talking, and she’ll never stop. But I think you’re a lot like me, so I think you’ll understand.” She’s quiet, because I can tell she doesn’t really want to tell me, and her eyes are still wet.
“It’s difficult to be the person I am in this world. I had a difficult time, living with who I was before.”
I’m not sure what this means. “Who were you before?”
“I was a woman who was sure I didn’t have a right to exist in this world,” she says. “But now I know that I do. Just the same as anyone else. I have a right to exist and live and love and be loved.”
She takes a breath. “And so do you, Caroline. I want you to know that more than anything else.”
Hearing these words is like hearing permission to exist. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to hear this, and how important it would be to hear this from my mother. I can’t help but smile, hearing her say this.
But it’s not lost on me that she hasn’t answered my questions—why she left, if she’s stopped loving me—and these are the only things I care to hear about in the moment, the only things I can listen to her talk about right now. “If you wanted me to know this, then why didn’t you stay to tell me for all the time you’ve been away?”
“Because I couldn’t stay in that house anymore. Being in that house—it wasn’t because of you. Understand that it had nothing to do with you. It didn’t even have very much to do with your father. I was sad, Caroline. I was ill—sick, driving myself insane with loneliness.”
I was always with her. I tell her this.
“I know,” she says, “but it was a different kind of loneliness. A sort of loneliness I hope you never have to understand. I didn’t leave you and your father,” she tells me. “I’d tried to take my own life.”
I can’t understand these words, because I can’t understand why she would ever want to hurt me in the worst way I could ever imagine. I’m angry at her. She’s left me once before, but this—there would be no hope of her coming back to me, no chance that she would ever love me again. I’m furious at her for thinking of leaving me in that way. I’m angry at her for bringing me into this world, and then trying to lea
ve me here alone.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I don’t know if these are the last words she ever plans on speaking to me, but now I don’t think I would mind if they are.
“I was taken to the hospital for treatment for some time, and when I was released, I decided not to go back to the house with you and your father. I knew then that this wasn’t the life meant for me. I still know it now. Your father had Bernadette with another woman he loved, and I felt trapped. I couldn’t breathe. I left—traveled the world and saw such amazing things. Things I want you to see for yourself someday too, Caroline. And when I came back, I met Richard, and I hadn’t planned it at all, but I fell in love, and we got married. Katie is Richard’s daughter, so she’s my daughter now too. Katie is your stepsister.”
She watches me for a moment, her mouth opening and closing, like she isn’t sure if she should continue speaking or if she should wait for me to say something now.
“Do you love Katie more than you love me?”
“Love can’t be measured.”
“It can be when I’m your daughter.”
“I love you very much, Caroline.”
“Then why aren’t you living with me? Why aren’t you with my dad? Why are you with a new family?”
“I just wasn’t happy. I didn’t love your father, and he fell in love with another woman. I just wasn’t happy.”
I haven’t finished eating yet, and my mother once taught me it was wrong to waste good food on the plate, but I ignore that now and stand up from the table so fast that the chair almost falls to the ground. My mom takes my hand before I can run.
“I’ve thought of coming to see you countless times,” she says, “but I worried for myself—for my own health, worried that coming back would trigger something—and I worried about you too. I didn’t want to hurt you.” I yank my hand away from hers, and she lets go, but I stay standing at the table. “I’ve seen you,” she says. “I’ve seen you on Main Street and crossing the street to the church to go to school and whenever you’re walking past Frenchtown to get to waterfront.”
We’re quiet for a long while, and I hear rain lashing against the window, and my mother’s new husband has turned on a radio. I can hear it faintly in the background. It says that the tropical storm is moving faster than anyone has really expected, and that it’s quickly escalating. My mother tells me that she loves me, that she never stopped loving me.
Her new husband comes into the kitchen and invites me to stay a little longer, just to get to know everyone a little more—Katie wants to play board games with me, he says, but she’s too shy to ask—but I can’t imagine anything more painful than sitting here and pretending that my mother still loves me, that I’m a part of her new family, when in fact I’m only here because she and her new husband pity me. I tell them I have to go. Richard tells me he’ll drive me home, but I tell them no, and I run out before anyone can say anything else.
If you’d only understand, dear.
When I race out onto the porch, screen door slapping shut behind me, I see that Kalinda is no longer standing where I’d left her, and something about this is not so surprising, because part of me wonders if she’d ever really been there at all.
Nobody wants you anywhere.
I run down the dirt path and back into the street, paved ground so hard it sends shock waves up my legs and into my knees, and I hear someone calling my name, and far down the road I see a woman dressed in all black, but I don’t stop running, even then.
The streets are near empty. Men playing their dominoes are gone, and someone’s come and untied that dog from its chain. It’s started to rain harder, the kind of lashing rain that stings when it hits your skin. Rain soaks me through even more than when I was in the ocean. And it’s hot too—the unbearable kind of hot that makes it hard to breathe, and the wind blows into my face so hard I have to close my eyes, then it dies down, then it starts blowing again, like the island is breathing. One car comes by, slows down, and the man in the driving seat sticks his head out and yells at me to get home, I shouldn’t be out in the street like this when the storm is coming. He drives on. Another car passes and stops, and a woman asks me if I need a ride, and when I lie and say my house is on the corner, she nods and keeps going.
I jump into a taxi that only has one other passenger, and when I jump off and don’t pay, the driver doesn’t cuss me. Mister Lochana isn’t waiting for me on waterfront with his speedboat, so I get on the ferry to Water Island, which the ferry workers are saying will be the last ride for the day, since they’ll need to anchor their boat at the dock and hope the boat doesn’t end up in the middle of the road. Those workers don’t cuss me when I don’t pay, either; I guess because there’s a storm coming and no one wants to cuss out a child right before a storm, else spirits will come and get them good.
I don’t go home. I go walking down the road, streams of water running down like rivers, and keep walking through the mangroves, rain pelting against the tops of the trees, brown water swirling around my legs and water sloshing to my knees. My boat is right where I left it, floating upright and waiting for me, ready for the journey.
You ain’t got no one to hold you.
Don’t know where I’ll be going now, but I’m going to let the water take me there.
You ain’t got no one to care.
I lie down in my father’s boat and rest my hands over my chest like so, and close my eyes, to listen to the water and the wind, and I think maybe this is really where I belong after all. Nowhere else wants little Caroline Murphy.
Boat starts swaying and rocking to and fro, and the rain hits me hard and cold, so much so the water runs up my nose and stings my eyes and I can’t breathe, so I get scared I might die, and just as I’m gasping and sitting up, I see the boat has been drawn out to the ocean, farther than I even really wanted it to. The waves are swelling with every second, and the black clouds in the sky fall down all around me. I can’t see the lights of the island anymore. My heart is beating fast. I try sticking my arm into the water to paddle back, but I don’t even know which direction to try and go in. I lean over too far and one wave comes and sucks me into the sea.
It’s dark and quiet. Can only hear a beating in my heart. Spots of light shine through the gray water, specks swirling all around me. I can’t see anything. I can’t see the bottom. I try swimming for the top again, but another wave crashes down on me. I try reaching for the boat, but it’s gone in a split second, gone so fast it might as well not even exist at all. My lungs are burning, and if I could cry I would, because my legs and arms are tired from all the kicking. Now I’m going to die. I’m going to die, and I’m going to leave my father behind. He won’t have anyone anymore. Maybe that’s what makes me the saddest of all.
Even light stops shining through, and everything’s so dark that I almost don’t see her. And there’s my woman in black. Waiting for me like she’s been waiting my whole life. Come like she’s ready to take me away now. Nothing I can do about that. I just close my eyes.
I can breathe. My throat feels raw whenever I do, but I still take in one long breath and let it out slowly, savoring the feeling of air in my lungs. There’s yellow light pressing against my eyelids. I open them, and I see I’m in a bed that’s not my own, in a room of white walls and one single window with open curtains and a closed door.
My father is there, but he isn’t looking at me. He’s sitting in a chair with his head resting in his hands, bent over like he’s been that way since the day I left. Maybe I let out air a little differently than before, because something catches his attention. He looks up and stands up, and for a second it looks like he isn’t sure if he wants to cry or hug me or slap me, and maybe it’s possible for him to do all at once, but he doesn’t do any of them, so I tell him that I’m sorry. He nods and pats my hand uncertainly, like he still doesn’t know if he wants to hit me, but then he finally wraps his arms around me and holds me tightly and shakes as he cries like a little boy might cry in his own mother�
�s arms. His voice rumbles low, like he hasn’t spoken in years, and he tells me never to do that to him again, before asking me if I’m feeling all right, if I need anything at all, and saying that I should never do anything like that ever again.
I tell him I’m fine about a dozen times before he believes me, even though I don’t know if I believe myself. I’m too afraid to ask my father what I think might be the truth. That I might have actually died, and that he’s a figment of my imagination in a personalized heaven. Though maybe it’s a little much to think I’d actually be in heaven.
I decide to tell him the truth. “I went to see my mother.”
“I know,” he says. “I got a phone call from her. She said that you’d found her.”
“You knew she was here.”
He doesn’t answer me. I wish I could be angry at him, the way I know I should feel, but I think I’m just too tired to feel much of anything. My lungs are still burning, my throat raw, and my legs and arms are the sorest they’ve ever been.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He swallows hard. “I didn’t think you’d understand—didn’t want to scare you. She mentioned she told you the truth,” he says. “She tried to hurt herself, and she needed the space, but I … I thought it might be easier to say she’d just left us than to explain everything. I’m sorry. I should’ve told you the truth.”
We sit in quiet for another long while, partly because I have too many thoughts swirling through my head to grasp one and put a voice to it, and partly because my throat still hurts too much anyway.
“How was she?” he asks me.
What sort of question is that? How in the world could I ever answer something like that? “I don’t know,” I tell him. “She seemed happy.”
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