Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  The Manions were still up there, and I saw the gray square come out of Jasmine Manion’s bag. More furtive about it since our reaction in the truck. She opened the book, closed it, pointed toward where I’d just left the group by the lookout. Scowled all the way down into her shoulders. Her husband put his hand on her back, then turned away. It was hard for me to imagine the two of them whispering at night in their shared resort bed about the book, the name Cruffey, the landfill. Or maybe he was just shouldering out anything with the word plantation on it just like everyone else on this island. Except her, great-grandbaby of a woman telling tales of island birds in Wisconsin. And except me.

  With that map, maybe she could see more than any of us. First time I ever wanted to have tourists’ eyes. See what one of them saw.

  When I saw the AYS coming back up toward where I was standing, and me with the almost empty bags to show for my invented litter duty, I ran back down the path just slowly enough not to be noticed.

  When I went to put the empty bags back, I saw Lem behind the fence getting lectured about something by Claudia’s assistant. I saw him notice me over the guy’s shoulder. Swimming in his eyes the mix of resentment and interest and willingness and maybe pity, too, I’d gotten used to. Like I was one of the bottles he managed to empty during slow days behind the fence: clutter he made himself. Clutter he both regretted and didn’t. Worse than useless—bringing Claudia’s assistant. Regretted, then, this time. I rolled and rolled the garbage bags together until they were compact as a fist, easily hidden in case the assistant spotted me, too.

  When the guests came back down, I waited for them to change and head out to the pool before I got started cleaning the rooms in the B wing. Took just a few days for me to figure out the guests’ schedules enough to know when to clean or not to clean their rooms. Once this new group went to the pool, they seemed to stay there until the next meal, so I could get the whole wing done without sneaking in and out.

  But: a thud as I was scraping the sheets from their edges in B4. Almost made me jump onto the bed. When I turned around, Katelynn was standing there crying, with the little boy wrapped around her like a backpack strapped on the wrong way. Reminded me of the way Christine’s little Jamal wrapped himself around her after she’d worked a shift at Miss Patrice’s store immediately following her maid shift.

  The nanny was definitely crying, not just watery-eyed from a hangover. The boy was dropping crayons through his fists and watching them fall. His shorts still dusty from sliding through the landscaping. With her sniffling into his shoulder, face red as her scalp, couldn’t even detect the pink triangle on her forehead anymore. Her whole storytelling face absorbed by this crying one.

  “Sorry. Excuse me. I was just coming in—coming back, because... Excuse me.”

  I could feel my eyes stretching toward her. “It’s me. Katelynn, it’s Myrna.”

  “Oh!” She half laughed nervously. “Yeah, oh, right. Murna. Hey. How’s it going?”

  The door to the room was still open, and I watched for anyone else in the hallway. Talking this way with a guest, in her room when she was there, too, of all things. (Let alone that eating feeling inside me, wanting to ask what she knew about the book.) But she was sobbing now; seemed all I could do was ask her what was wrong. I walked around her and sealed the door first.

  She put the boy down, and he busied himself collecting the stuffed animals I’d just tossed off the bed. His eyes were his mother’s eyes—their eyebrows had exactly the same arch and the identical taper you couldn’t help but notice; his soft curls dark like her hair but also streamed with a lighter toffee brown: the only sign of his father I could find in him.

  “The AYS—she said the word I don’t think I’d ever heard someone called outright before. Definitely not a kid. And she said it to Nathan.” Crying his name.

  The story I heard later from Lem, who was in the storage room behind the gift shop when it all happened, mirrored just what she told me. Kid wandered from the lobby into the gift shop, knocked over a stack of hats before she could chase him down. AYS working the gift shop muttered, but the nanny could hear her.

  Lem told me what he’d heard: Who let that little nigger in here? When I told him how Katelynn had stepped around it in telling me the story, we both half snorted, half shrugged at the shock that had deepened her eye sockets. “B4 was crying shocked,” he said.

  Katelynn’s flip-flops rolled backward over a crayon, and she plopped onto the naked bed. I handed her a tissue from the box on the dresser. Other hand reached to square the new awaiting tissue.

  “I was gonna buy my mom something from that gift shop. But now there’s no way I’m doing that.”

  Kept eyeing the door, my voice hushed below the humming of the air conditioner. Pulled the curtains closed, just in case. Thought maybe through the wall to B5 I heard the chirpity-chirp of other guests talking and the cling-clang as someone lifted closet hangers on and off the rack.

  “Nathan,” Katelynn said, and he popped up next to her knee, bopped a stuffed parrot in her face and caw-caw-ed. A chuckle in her crying. She hugged him with one arm and swiveled her fingers through his curls like it was something she always did. He picked up his blanket and put one corner over her shoulder, a comfort. Made me see how long she’d been caring for Nathan. Not just hired for this trip.

  Did she know about the book? Had Jasmine Manion told her about it, even shown it to her? Had she read it? Soon as I sat down on the opposite bed, ready to find a way into asking, I jumped right back up as if I’d been burned. Like my brain had tilted for a minute—from “at work” Maid who could touch guest beds only with working fingers to inland scavenger incubating questions. Thought I saw a silhouette pause behind the curtain, out by the path to the pool, and held my breath, hoping Katelynn wouldn’t choose now to say my name.

  Management had their way of asking guests how they were being treated by the staff that let them see if the AYS were getting to know the guests enough and if the custodial staff was getting to know them too much. If someone mentioned me by name...

  “Don’t tell Mrs. Manion. Promise?”

  Took me a second to realize she was talking to me. I shook my head. Of course not.

  “Could you—I don’t know. Talk to the AYS from the gift shop?”

  I wanted to stare at her until she talked herself out of that question. “OK” was all I could say.

  I turned, but just halfway, eyes down the way I’d been taught. “Would you like me to finish cleaning the room now or when you are through?”

  She seemed a little calmer now that Nathan was distracting her and didn’t seem to notice my ending the conversation. Color draining out of her face like the tide retreating.

  “Huh? Oh, now, I guess. I guess Nathan’s OK, so I’ll take him back out to the pool. His mom’s in the art studio painting. Until dinner, I think.”

  Art studio? Claudia kept one guest room empty so she could invent whatever space a guest asked for. Resort promised dreams just waiting for the dreamer. Sleeping island awakened by their landing on the key.

  “OK,” I said again. My chin moved as if it would bore a hole in the carpet. I didn’t know if I’d get another chance to ask about the book. Ghosts slithering back into the densest haulback. I kept looking down until the door slapped into place. Stood like a stone listening for footsteps outside the window. Remembered the weight of the rag in my pocket.

  I started hearing around the resort that the renovation would begin for real after the banquet the next night. I didn’t know yet what that would mean for me, but I was already exhausted. Waited for Claudia or anyone else to fill me in on what else my late afternoons and evenings would turn to.

  First thing I had to do while the guests went to dinner was clean up the art studio Claudia had set up for Jasmine Manion. Her canvases lined up against the wall: A painting of the Portuguese shampoo bottle she’d found on Junkful Beach. Another of the mitten she’d found, that one with a backdrop of the sand, the sun: everythi
ng a blinding yellow except the muddied mitten. A painting of the magazine-square-turned-sunset-sketch from Lionel’s house. And a crosshatching of black lines that I looked at for a while before I recognized it was a close-up of Troy’s sculpture. My brother’s re-vision of someone else’s monument re-created by this woman’s memory and paintbrush: layers and layers of unsettled sediment. (Could I fit that canvas under my skirt? Drop it at the landfill or file it facedown with the discarded books under our table?) No paintings of a map. No evidence of a quest, inland or otherwise. The sensibility of its maker? I didn’t feel like an art historian who could figure that out. Just someone who’d been at Junkful Beach with the maker because we both needed Lionel’s truck that day.

  Before I got back to the clipboard of banquet chores Claudia’d left with Lem for me, I was to clean this space. Tomorrow it might be a pedicure and massage room or a yoga studio or again an art studio with blank canvases, pristine.

  The door opened, and Hebbie was standing next to me. Sent in with a mop she handed to me. She nodded at the canvases. “Guess one of ’em biked all the way to Junkful, huh? At least they’re not painting postcards.”

  Hadn’t let myself be alone with her in I didn’t know how long. After school we used to lie on our backs at Junkful Beach squinting at the sky together.

  Her hair was striped more than usual, the maroonish highlights pinker than I’d ever seen them. The sun had made her more girlish, while the shade of the inland had scraped lines into me like the swelling veins of an elder. But an elder going in instead of keeping out. We talked only about the banquet.

  “I don’t know—they want some of us to be acting something out with the boat staff,” she told me, packing her bag. “It sounds really, really weird. We’re supposed to wear sheets but not like the usual stuff. They want us to run around the pool wrecking everything and screaming and stuff.”

  Sometimes Hebbie could be a little bit naive. It all didn’t sound quite right.

  She pulled one of the canvases toward her to see the one behind it: something brown and bony lined with snow. “You know what that is?”

  A voice behind me: “It’s a pinecone.”

  With her glasses dwarfing her eyes, it was as if Jasmine Manion were looking at me from down a very long road. She picked up the cloth bag of paintbrushes she’d left behind. Her other bag, the palm tree bag, was slung across her body like armor. She considered her canvases, altered their order, switched to her storytelling mode.

  “I used to make these paintings of parts of our house, and then we’d find places to hang them where’d they’d sort of show you what was waiting for you around the next corner of the house. That just seemed so funny to us. I’d hear my husband laughing from downstairs when I’d hung a new one upstairs. We stopped showing them to other people who came over, though, because they didn’t get it.”

  The way she described their house with all its corners to turn, it sounded big as part of a hotel: mazelike hallways, stuffed furniture the size of cows parked all over. Pretty much all I knew of her husband was the pinch-of-salt motion he made at the screen of his phone, his clove-and-talc aftershave, the way any time of day he was yawning and stretching, his hands almost reaching the ceiling. Figured he spent his days slumped in their overstuffed chairs. Tried to picture them laughing together. Maybe he did things to surprise her, was the one who’d set up the sideways bookcase in her shop; maybe he’d watched her walk it with half his mouth smiling in the same direction as his cowlicks.

  Hebbie laughed but not her real laugh, and Jasmine Manion smiled and then was gone again. I’d taught Hebbie that “at-work” laugh, back when she was still thinking she could hum inside the gate.

  “Anyway, Myr,” Hebbie said, gathering her non-maid voice back. Her lids sunk heavy with the day behind her. Voice sleepy and young. “You know my brother’s back on the island visiting?” She waited for me to say something in response, anything. Then she quit waiting. “All right, then, just telling you. I can’t help it if your ma sees him.” And she left.

  The end of her day but not the end of mine. I wiped my sweaty palms against my apron and felt an itch to have my waiting-fordays machete in my hand. That night after work, no matter how tired I was, I would get back to it.

  When the late shift finally came to an end, I distracted Lem as he locked up the maintenance supplies so I could swipe one of the flashlights from his crew’s stash, and I found a way to bind it in my apron, so the guards wouldn’t see it when they checked my bag. Someone had left a bottle of bug repellent on a table by the pool, and I’d snatched that, too. No matter how bleary-eyed the chemical cloud made me feel when I sprayed myself, I knew I’d need it this time of night.

  My heels knew exactly how much ache there was between the exit from the resort’s gate and the entrance to my own path. But before my feet had logged even close to the number of steps, a car rumbled to a slow crawl next to me. Sunset insignia spray-painted on the door. I kept facing the direction I was walking.

  A prickly voice through the open window: “Hey there. We’re practicing for the banquet.”

  Even just out of the corner of my eye I recognized the driver and the passenger: two members of the boat staff who each took turns as Columbus when Max was sick or on vacation. I could picture them both pulling on the undersized felt hat and the oversized gold rings. Gleeful backup captains. I wasn’t positive of their names. Matt and Taylor, I thought, or something similar. I was sure they knew only my uniform.

  “Don’t know anything about it,” I said. Walking, walking. “Off duty now.”

  “But we need maids to run from us,” one of them said, laughing.

  It was hard to see their facial expressions in the darkness, but I didn’t want them to see my flashlight was swiped from the resort, so I kept it rolled up in my apron. I kept walking, knowing just where my inland trail would be when I got to it, where my machete was planted. Awaiting, expecting. The car kept rolling alongside.

  Then it stopped, and they got out. I heard a bottle shatter against the ground and smelled the beer pooling out. Wouldn’t be the only bottle on the ground around here.

  They walked along next to me no matter how quickly I moved my exhausted legs. I tried to seem calm.

  “What’s going on with this banquet?” I asked, keeping my voice high and innocent. My pulse felt fluttery; it couldn’t decide between being anxious and being annoyed.

  “We’re taking over this island!” Their voices were filling with the bluster of the boat script I’d heard a thousand times, and they were giggling a little, sounding like kids. Just stupid. But I didn’t like how they were also sort of circling around me.

  “Run, native! We will be plundering!”

  I tried a laugh and a dismissive wave of my hand. I tried the tipped-up chin of wonder the boat crew seemed to want us all to show during arrivals. But I picked up my pace a little, to keep them from getting real close to me. If I could just make it to the stooping lignum vitae tree—my marker—which was coming up around the next bend. I’d slip away before they could figure out where I’d vanished to.

  One of them started sputtering synonyms for plundering while the other seemed to be pounding on his chest.

  “Run!” he said. In a low, low voice this time.

  At first I thought they were trying to grab me, but they kept getting too close behind my heels, without touching me, and calling “Run! Run!” at me, trying to make me let them chase me. Kept my fast walk still a walk, deciding what to do. Kept walking. Kept walking more quickly but still not giving in to a run.

  But then one of their hands swooped close to my stomach, and I bent away, spinning. Cuss-cussing like my mouth had never done before. Another car pulled up, and when the two looked back at it I was able to duck into the brush and come out with my machete.

  “What the fuck?” one of them said, backing toward their car, opening the door.

  I stood in place, weaving the machete in a figure eight around my head, no matter how my
shoulders burned from mopping and dusting and lugging garbage all day and night. The handle fit right under the notch of callus on the inside of my thumb, as it always did.

  The other guy was planted in the road, cautious but smirking, deciding what to do.

  I recognized the car that’d pulled up as Hebbie’s mother’s car. And sure enough Andre got out, yelling at the boat guys till it was all mayhem, and they looked at him and looked at me and looked at the machete and finally climbed in their car and sped off with a silly shriek of tires.

  Car door still open, one frayed backpack strap hanging out like a dead man’s arm. Standing there alone in the road, staring at me: my brother’s best friend. Andre was a tall stick and bronze, while Troy was stouter and shiny colored; Andre was always wearing T-shirts so hip you might not understand the phrases they told you, while Troy was always done up a little dressier than anyone else, button-down shirt tucked in, always.

  Still: looked like a single bookend missing his twin side when I saw Andre by himself, without Troy. Not sure if the dark was playing with my eyes or if that broken strap had been red. If the night was playing with my imagination or if I should’ve smelled ginny cologne on its way five minutes ago. Nose filled with it now.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  My only response was to let the machete down from above my head. I passed it back and forth between my hands as he was talking, rambling about being back on the island to check on his elders, how Hebbie told him I was still working at the resort, how he’d heard Mother was doing, and on and on and on and on. Streak of words that never slowed down just like always. Never let me catch my breath.