Hurricane Child

by Kheryn Callender

He sighs. “It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love us, Caroline.”

  “No. It means she doesn’t love you.”

  “Now, you don’t mean that.”

  No, I didn’t mean it, but I’m more angry than tired now, and I don’t feel like telling him the truth anymore.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” he says. “You know that?”

  I decide to grace him with a glance. He takes my hand and doesn’t let go even when I’ve looked away again. “What happened?” I ask. The curiosity is too much not to ask.

  “Mister Lochana found you washed up on shore,” he says. “He thought you had—well …” he says, looking away. “He got me and we brought you to the hospital.”

  “Then that’s the second time Mister Lochana has rescued me,” I say—but I think of the woman in black, waiting for me beneath the waves.

  My father doesn’t say anything for some time. He only sits and holds my hand. “Your mom and I both love you very much. We made mistakes—but we tried to do the best we could.”

  “I know.” And I do know. I know he tried, and he’s still trying, and he’ll still make mistakes sometimes, because he’s a human being, and I’ve learned now that this is what human beings are always destined to do. Including me. I tell him that I love him, and he smiles like that’s the best news he’s heard all day and puts an arm around me and kisses the side of my head. He tells me that my mother has come to visit a few times. He asks me if it’d be all right, if she came in to see me. I tell him absolutely not—it would never be all right. He just kisses the side of my head again.

  I stay in the hospital for an entire two days before they allow me to leave once again. The island of Saint Thomas has been battered. The ten-dollar ferry is in the middle of the road, and palm trees have fallen to the side. People walk in the street, cleaning up clutter. My father has tied his blue boat to waterfront. He hasn’t touched that boat in over one year and six months now. It bobs up and down with every passing wave. We step onto it, and he rows me across the clear blue water, the way he used to when I was a child. I think I might still be a child now, after all.

  Our house is still standing, the same way it always has been. Maybe the storm couldn’t see us here on Water Island either. We go inside, and absolutely nothing has changed, which is disappointing and thrilling all at the same time. My father tells me that my mother has called again. That she wants to reconnect with me—be a part of my life.

  “Well, she shouldn’t have left my life at all.” That’s what I say to that.

  My father only nods like he agrees.

  I’m eating breakfast at the table when my father sits down beside me with the mail. He opens each letter individually, and my heart begins to beat faster despite itself, even though I already know there won’t be any postcards in the pile. My father picks up one letter, then pauses—and stretches out his hand to me.

  “It’s for you.”

  I look from the letter to him, then reach out to take it carefully. This is the first mail I’ve ever received. I think it must be a practical joke. But then I read the corner address, and see that the letter was sent from Kalinda Francis from a town in Barbados.

  I hold the letter with shaking hands.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” he asks.

  I almost shake my head and hand the letter back to him. How easy that would’ve been, to not have to read a single word sent by Kalinda Francis. But instead, I nod and scrape my chair back and excuse myself from the table, walking to my room and closing the door. I open Kalinda’s letter and read it quickly first, eyes flashing over her jumble of words, before going back to the beginning once again. The letter says:

  My dearest Caroline, I’ve agonized over the way I left you, but I couldn’t bear the thought of saying good-bye. I was too afraid. Will you ever forgive me? I’m back home with my mother and my seven siblings. My father has continued his carpentry. My mother claims that she will never let me leave her sight again. This makes me happy, and it also makes me so happy that you’ve been able to meet your mother again. This was at least a happy ending, wasn’t it? I so wish that ours could’ve been a happy ending as well. But maybe it still can be, one day. I love you, and I will continue to love you forever, and even if we never see each other again and when we’re fully grown adults and I have married someone else, I’ll think back to the time I spent on Saint Thomas and fell in love with Caroline Murphy. I hope you can think of me in the same way, and when you remember me, you only think about how you’d fallen in love with Kalinda Francis. But even as I write now, I can’t help but think that it would be an atrocity to let our ending come like this. I’m on Barbados, and you’re on Water Island, but we’re both still alive. Think about how amazing that is, Caroline. An infinite number of universes and an infinite amount of time, and we were able to meet each other. We could have been born millions of years apart, but we were able to meet each other and fall in love. That’s a true miracle, isn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t have to end this way.

  I’m not surprised by any of these words. I expected her to tell me that she loves me, and that she misses me, and that she wishes she were still on Saint Thomas, and that she was sorry. She couldn’t bear the thought of saying good-bye. She was too afraid. But she hopes she will one day see me again.

  Will you write to me, Caroline?

  I nod, and fold the letter neatly, and put it on my dressing table. I’ll have to find a lot of paper and many pens.

  My father tells me at dinner that my mother has called for me again.

  “Can’t she realize I don’t want to speak to her?”

  “But she wants to speak to you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “She loves you very much, Caroline. She made a mistake. She wants you back in her life.”

  “It’s too late for that now, right?”

  My father doesn’t answer. He can’t look at me.

  “Isn’t it too late?”

  “I told her to come over,” he says.

  I get up from my chair and walk to my room and slam the door shut and lock it. My father doesn’t even try to ask me to come back outside. I hear voices, and I hear my mother, but I stay right where I am.

  I return to school, and nothing has changed there either, except the fact that Kalinda is gone, and I am now alone once more. Anise takes particular pleasure in this. I’d made the mistake of thinking that perhaps we’d grown closer, and were no longer enemies, since she was not torturing me for the past week—but perhaps she had only stopped because of Kalinda. Now that Kalinda is no longer here, everything goes back to the way it was. Anise begins talking loudly about me, the smelly sinner, and in class often asks Missus Wilhelmina if I should even be allowed to go to this school. Missus Wilhelmina always agrees that sinners should be expelled, but says it’s out of her control, most unfortunately.

  The group of hyenas laugh along with Anise, as always—but I can’t help but notice that Marie Antoinette isn’t laughing. Not one bit. She doesn’t even break a smile. It comes to the point where, one day passing by her lunch table, I hear Anise ask, “What is wrong with you, Marie Antoinette?”

  And she doesn’t answer, of course, because that’s another thing that hasn’t changed—Marie Antoinette still won’t say a single word—but sometimes, when I catch her staring at me, I think she has much more to say than anyone else around.

  After Kalinda, I find it difficult to come back to sitting in complete silence. My loneliness will sooner kill me than the ocean will. So finally, I must give in. I accept Miss Joe’s invitation to eat lunch in her office.

  She has cleared some piles of papers and books from her desk, though the photos in their frames are still in their line. “It was getting a bit too messy in here, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I decide it’s more polite not to say anything at all. I eat my food quietly, still angry at the woman sitting across from me, but happy that at least I’m not sitting alone.

  “I heard from Doreen that you vi
sited her,” she says.

  I look at her. “You still speak to her?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “Remember? We speak on birthdays and every Christmas. It was my birthday last weekend, you know.”

  I don’t even want to wish her a happy birthday. She smiles at me, waiting. I cut my eye and sigh. “Happy belated birthday.”

  “Why, thank you, Miss Murphy,” she says. She dips her spoon into a container of chicken dumpling soup, swimming in grease. She slurps. “She told me it was a difficult time. For both of you.”

  “A difficult time, for her? She isn’t the one that got abandoned.”

  “It’s so easy to be self-involved when you’re young.” She laughs. “Don’t look at me like you want to kill me, now. I can’t help the truth. You don’t know anything about your mother’s hardships. She made many mistakes, yes—there’s no question in that. I’m not defending her choices. But I can understand them.” She turns her head to the side, and I feel like I’m in a classroom. “Can you?”

  She leaves me with that question for the day, and I roll it around in my mind all night and well into the morning too. When I go to her office the next day for lunch, I expect her to ask it again, and I’m ready with my answer—prepared to say that I do understand, even though I don’t agree with any of it, even though I’m still angry at my mother for everything. But Miss Joe doesn’t even ask. She tells me to speak to her about my adventures leading up to finding my mother instead.

  So I tell her everything. About looking for evidence, and even about sneaking into this very office, because something tells me she already knows about her missing photograph anyway. I tell her about Kalinda, and the journal that Anise found—about us running away and the condo. I tell her about the woman in black.

  “The woman in black?” she says.

  “Yes. That’s what I call her.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  That’s what I do. “She’s been around since I was a young child.”

  She nearly laughs. “You’re still a child, Miss Murphy.” Her smile fades. “And you believe in spirits, do you?”

  I almost tell her Kalinda’s warning—that the spirits will hear her calling their name—but I stop myself. There’s much more in this life to fear than just spirits, and if I let fear rule my every move, I will become nothing more than a little ghost child myself. I want to be brave. I want to live the life I was given. So what if the spirits hear us call their names? Let them hear it.

  “Yes. I do believe in spirits.”

  Miss Joe is thinking hard about something. “What do you think of the woman in black?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I thought for a long time she was a demon. I thought she’d stolen my mother at first. She scared me. I thought she wanted me dead.”

  “And now?”

  I think of the ocean, the darkness—feeling her there with me. The bubbles as large as my mom’s head, the coral scratching my knees. The shadows of my bedroom when I’ve told myself I don’t matter enough to be in this world. Rocks digging through my shoes as I run through wind and rain, black chasing me through the storm. Sitting patiently on my father’s boat, moon eyes gazing at me, like she’s always been there, and always will be. A memory I did not know I had comes to me. Beneath the waves, sucked beneath, the feel of her warm grasp. She pulled me from the sea. She’s always been with me. She’s always protected me.

  “You believe in spirits,” Miss Joe says, “but do you believe in guardian angels?” She smiles at the look on my face. “I think there’s always something out there watching over us—making sure we’re safe and loved. You’re very lucky, Caroline.”

  This is the first time Miss Joe has ever said my given name, and that makes me nice and surprised—but even after the lunch bell rings, and well through class, and back on the speedboat with Mister Lochana, listening to him speak about the days when he was a little boy and working on his father’s farm, I can’t stop thinking about the woman in black. My own spirit, watching over me. I stare beneath the waves, half expecting to see her now, though I don’t.

  When I get home, my father is sitting on the sofa. He’s been home much more since I almost drowned in his boat. He is holding a photo of Bernadette and a letter with large cursive handwriting from the little girl. My father says that when she came here to meet him, he was too afraid to introduce us but that Bernadette will now come to Water Island every summer so I can get to know my half sister even more. I’m surprised, because I realize that I would like this very much, and I realize that I would like something else very much too.

  “Daddy,” I say, and when I say this word, it really is with love this time.

  “Yes, Caroline?”

  “I’m ready to see my mother again.”

  He doesn’t hesitate to pick up the phone.

  The door opens, and there she is. My mother walks into the house that had once been her home, wearing a blue dress, with her hair brown and curled. She looks like she might as well have never left.

  The first time I saw her, I didn’t want to look at her, but I do now. She looks even older than I remember her, and that makes me sad, and she has laugh lines and wrinkles around her eyes, which makes me happy too.

  She smiles at my dad and asks him how he is, and they have a boring conversation about work and the weather, in the way that adults feel like they always must, and then my dad looks at me to make sure I’m all right before he decides to leave us alone. He walks outside to stand in the road. I sit on the chair opposite my mother, who sits on the sofa. I feel like I’m the parent, about to reprimand her. She sits with her hands pressed together.

  She tells me that she works in the post office, and that her mother, my grandmother, passed away of breast cancer seven months before, and that Katie won’t stop asking about me, keeps on asking to see me. “She’s really a sweet girl.”

  I clench my hands together. “I’m not sweet at all.”

  “No,” she says. “You’re not. But that’s what I love about you. I’m not sweet either. I think you got that from me.”

  “I’m not like you. I would never leave my own daughter.”

  “That’s the problem with growing up, Caroline. You’re not sure what you will and won’t do anymore.”

  I’m so angry I could cry. I am crying a little, but it’s embarrassing to cry in front of her, and it makes me even angrier, because she’s the reason I’m crying in the first place, and I don’t want her to know how much she’s hurt me—that she’s cut right into me, and that even after this past year, even when she’s gone on to love a new daughter and have another family, I’ve just been cut and bleeding and trying not to cry.

  “I love you. You have to know that.”

  And what frustrates me most is that I do know that.

  She gets a little quiet, then says, “I spoke to Richard, and we—Caroline, we’d love it if we could be in your life. I know that isn’t fair to ask, since we decided we wouldn’t be, but if you can forgive us—that’s more than I deserve, but I hope you can forgive us. Katie would love it too. I know this isn’t the family most people have, but we love you, and I love you so much, and that’s all that a family needs, really. I’d love to be in your life, if you’ll let me.”

  She’s watching me, and I’m sure her heart has stopped dead in her chest. She waits for me to speak.

  “Why do you love the song ‘Blackbird’?” I ask.

  She watches me. “What?”

  “The song. ‘Blackbird,’ by Nina Simone. Why do you love it so much? When you were home, you would sing it all the time. You never stopped singing it.”

  She wipes her cheeks. “Oh, I—I don’t know.” She pauses to think. “It captured how I felt at one time in my life, perfectly. It was the song for one era of my life. But that era has passed now. I can look at that time and listen to that song and appreciate that this is what I’ve come from—but I can also recognize how I’ve changed. Does that make any sense?”

  It’s scary, b
ecause it makes more sense than I ever thought it would. I nod. “Yes.”

  She doesn’t understand at first, so I say, “Yes, I’d like you back in my life again.”

  I haven’t seen the woman in black in a long while. Not in a few months, in fact. It used to scare me, even thinking about the chance of seeing her—but now when I think about her, I can’t help but feel a peace surging beneath my skin. I still don’t really know who the woman in black is—if she’s my guardian angel, if she’s an ancestor from my past or my future—but I know that she’ll always be with me. That’s the most important part of all.

  Days and weeks and months pass, and I’m now in a new era of my life. Nothing about it is perfect, but things have changed so much, and suddenly I’m thirteen years old and I’m in my last year of school in the church with Missus Wilhelmina and Jesus hanging on his cross, before I have to start high school in the countryside.

  Anise Fowler moves to a different island, and the pack of hyenas slowly separates, and suddenly I find that I’m sitting at lunch tables where there are other people. I’m not sitting with them, but I’m sitting near them, and that’s different too.

  One day I walk into the cafeteria and see Marie Antoinette sitting alone. She’s sat alone the last few times I’ve seen her. I can’t help but wonder why. I walk across the cafeteria, loafers sticking to the yellow tile, until I’m right in front of Marie Antoinette. She looks up at me and stares.

  “Can I sit here?” I ask.

  She nods.

  I sit down, my tray clattering. I don’t eat. I just sit and watch while she sits and watches me. “Why don’t you ever have anything to say?” I ask.

  She gives me a confused look.

  “You never speak,” I say. “It’s like you’re mute. You refuse to say a single word.”

  “That’s because no one’s ever listening,” she says. It’s the first time I’m hearing her voice, and it comes out loud and strong and powerful, like she’s a second away from beginning to yell. I almost fall off my seat in surprise. But she only smiles. “You don’t talk very much at all either, you know.”