Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  Troy just let his shirt go up in the wind. Took it off, reached up and let go, not sayin’ nothing. It looked like a big white flag floating on the breeze for a second and then swishing down into a puddle. Made me think of all sorts of things, none I want to remember just now; glad they’re not all washing around in my head anymore, night and day.

  Even when some people gave up trying to figure it all out and went off to work, Troy just frozen there and then like he wouldn’t look at me. I stayed there awhile, trying to talk to him. Eerie how he was so still. Not like Troy to be so still, ’less he was stuck in bed. But ’ventually couldn’t try to talk to him, get him to get to work like everyone else was getting, ’cause I needed to get to my own work. But I stayed there awhile, Miss Daphanie, Miss Myrna, promise I did. A long while. Promise.

  By next morning: gone. Put himself in the waves, meant not to come back.

  ’Nother day later Troy washed up out of the sea without life in him anymore.

  Found out by that evening, like everyone else did, word passing mouth to mouth, ear to ear, that all it was was a boatload of U.S. soldiers on leave, got a special trip to the big Paradise Now resort. A little bit of leave, a little bit of peace. For them.

  And that what happened to Troy, how he came to travel from us.

  So what about you now, Miss Myrna? You not going to speak on these stones, even with their shapes all bruised into you from the lifting, huh? Nah, didn’t think great chance you would. Didn’t mean to prostrate you so by telling. It’s OK: we all see what your eyes saying, watering the ground like they are. We’ll help you stand back up when you’re ready.

  Miss Daphanie, Myrna’s ma, Troy’s ma. Take my hand here. Sit and rest your feet. Speak some if you will or sit as long as you feel. As very long as you do feel like. We’ll wait for ya.

  Bench Story No. 16: Miss Daphanie Burre

  Thought dem going off to the capital was the worst thing I’d be carrying with me as a mother and a wife. See now, that’s what I thought back a ways, before they were lost for good. Wasn’t just the estate; all of life got too sad for talking about.

  Used to go outside at night, or even just by the window, look at the sky, and try to think which direction they were in away from me, how we all look up at the same stars above our head somehow. Reflection of these islands all up there, glittering down. Each night just look out there, and I’d start counting all the stars. And each night I’d count the same number. And when they did not come to be counted, I’d count the holes they’d left behind.

  A hush fell down on all of us after Mother spoke. She remained on the bench, and our neighbors and kin stayed just where they’d been.

  Hearing her voice after all this time! My mother’s voice! Hearing everyone tell their stories, all those voices forming words that hadn’t slipped their lips in years! And knowing now the details of my always-sad brother’s final sadness: not just Dad’s death and the capital’s disappointments, but some fear mixed in with the sadness he carried. Finally pulled him under. Finally saw his tiny, fragile place in the world’s busiest ports. All of it made me feel bruised inside layered with all my bruising outside. Like more stones tumbled down from the inland on top of me, on top of all of us. Looked down and saw how close I was pressed to the ground, kneeling.

  But also: it felt like everything in my brain that had previously been scattered, like all this archipelago, now had some design, like a constellation. Kept hearing Dad’s voice describing those dice spilling out in a scatter and then gathering themselves back.

  I felt a body near me and turned to see that Claudia had stepped out of the line she’d been in all day. Last person I wanted to talk to right now, but she was facing only me. I stood up and wiped the streaky layers of half-dried wetness from my cheeks. Started feeling the memory of her hands all over my uniform when we met in her office. Now I might push her off me if she got too close. Would I really? Maybe. Probably.

  Her arms were asleep at her sides, though, a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, but just hanging there now like props. It was the look she always seemed to have but intensified: ready to call it a day. Unsmiling face showing the symmetrical lines that came down from the corners of her lips, nose, and inner eyes: a kid’s drawing of a pine tree pressed into her face. As if the tornado of the banquet had been whipped up inside her and then spun out, leaving her listless and disconnected from its path. Not even watching as it went on its way. Listening, though, to us.

  She turned in a semicircle, right and left, looking at me but also beyond me.

  “Let me say to all of you, local residents,” she announced. “As of this afternoon I will report my resignation to the international management office. I am no longer the Domestic Staff Manager of the resort.” Her voice sounded not resigned but relieved and, I thought, also proud. Domestic Staff Manager kept repeating in my mind; we’d always called her Arrival Manager because she seemed so focused on our beach theater with the boats coming in. I didn’t know what her role was in the departure of the American woman. If she’d stood on the beach when the helicopter alit and lifted off again. If she was the Departure Manager, too.

  I wanted to say to her that one person stepping back wouldn’t change anything, but I could see in her posture that she would-n’t have believed or understood me. Departure of the Arrival Manager. One big step for Claudia, going home and washing her hands of all of it. I saw her pass a folder to her assistant, smudges of inky blue along the edge: From the handling of the blueprints? The assistant slid the file into his bag, zipped the top, folded the flap and buckled it, yanked the tails as tight as they allowed.

  Some of the staff applauded her. While we all stood in silence, and Mother still sitting on the rocks and looking at her lap as if this had nothing to do with her telling, with our story. Papers packed up in a satchel that’d fly back to the States where she knew they belonged. Nothing to do with our Troy and why he’d chosen the ocean.

  Then Claudia turned to me. “Murna,” she said. Surety in her voice, no look in her eyes asking, Am I getting your name right or are you someone else? “I’ll let management know you’ve been hired back on as a temporary renovation worker. We still need a painter.”

  I flinched a little at that, but she said nothing else. Not waiting for a response, she walked toward the snack bar, thumbs active on her phone, and a few minutes later got in a car driven by a man. I guessed her husband. A small face with her same faded sandy hair peered out at all of us from the back window.

  Lionel started muttering. “White people always think they can fix everything with money.”

  Miss Patrice was right behind him. “Well, you got something better? Not fixing, but, you know, a job does help. Right place for the money, anyway,” she muttered back.

  The small circle near me close enough to have heard the muttering started debating:

  “I think she thinks it’ll fix everything, like a domino effect or something.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know what other step to take and did what she could.”

  “Don’t even know if the one who pulled her in is fired, let alone anything else.”

  “But Lord knows Myrna needs the work.”

  “If I were her, I wouldn’t take it.”

  “If she doesn’t, know some folks standing right here who will.”

  “Well, hopefully all of this’ll help some, then. All we can do is hope for something.”

  “Something had to happen to a Missus U.S.A. to make it all come down, you know. Not too hopeful looking to me.”

  “Missus wasn’t white, remember?”

  “Still.”

  A flash: many, many years ago. Moping when my parents argued at the dinner table. Mother turning to me, saying, Myr-na, my ma always said that to sit and argue with people at a table is a good thing. Remember that.

  I let all their voices drift away from me, no matter who I agreed with or not. Not even Mutiny Day could always change the next day. Let myself just look at Mother, sitti
ng on the bench by the gate. Not trying to sell to tourists. Not working. Not waiting to work. Bench I made for her to sit on.

  He report back, Stones Ask him, Stones?

  She stayed on stones, not talking Look Son in eye

  Rubbed out lines where stones been with my own foot

  These words from the book they took from me: still lodged in my brain like nettles.

  Chapter Nine

  The security staff stepped aside as we passed through the gate. We made the long trek to the hotel entrance and passed through the lobby to the pool deck, Mother’s arm looped in mine.

  The deck was dappled in light and shadow. Debris an abstract panorama. Anyone who hadn’t experienced the banquet would’ve sworn an awful storm had bullied its way through while we all slept, trampling our island while we dreamed of marauding bogeyman, escaped cows, people we’d let loose.

  “Damn, look like a cow went through here,” Mother said. “Bunch of them even.”

  There was only one lounger that hadn’t been split to pieces. As I reclined the back just a little more, I could see the crispy folds of Mother’s clothes slipping through each rubbery slat of the chair. A posture I’d never seen her in. I made sure she was facing the ocean, since I knew she’d never sat down like this, relaxed, and just looked out at the water because it was nice looking. I made sure she could also see the pool, just a little bit, so that when I lowered myself in she’d know that I’d taken the paint supplies from Troy’s room.

  I moved a cup of water closer to where her hand rested on the arm of the chair. Her hand so relaxed, fingers splayed all around, looked like a creature unsure of which way to go. Un-purposeful. Opposite of my hurried hand puttying and painting the graffitied Cruffey out of the resort sign before we passed under it.

  But she must’ve—sometime, someplace—she must’ve sat and looked out at the water just to look. Just sat there because she had nowhere to be and because the sun wasn’t so strong as to nudge you inside and because the water was turquoise glass.

  “See you,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Tell me again, Mother,” I said.

  “Each night just look out there, and I’d start counting all the stars. And each night I’d count the same number. And when they did not come to be counted, I’d count the holes they’d left behind.”

  My eyes closed, my breath adjusting to the rhythm of her words.

  “See, that’s poetry, girl, by a poet who plucked his own name from the sky. Not mine. Something I read.”

  “You read poetry?”

  “Didn’t you ever look under the table?” And then my mother laughed like I’d never heard a woman on this island laugh. A man’s laugh. A squawk. An I-don’t-give-a-fuck-who-hears-me laugh and a let-them-think-I’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do-thanopen-my-big-mouth-and-laugh laugh.

  “Some of those lines stay in my head like they’ve been sewn in there with my ma’s hand, you know what I mean?”

  My feet felt numb, like when I sat on the ruined walls for too, too long and worried I’d be missed. “Yes’m, I do,” I said.

  She closed her eyes, and I backed toward the pool until all I could see was the way the rim of her sunglasses met the plump of her cheek and her hand going on sitting there like it could saunter anywhere on the island whenever it damn well wanted. The shushing of the waves came and went. Quiet, then roaring, then quiet again. There was no music from the speakers today. Mother and I could feel the desertion of the resort all around us.

  Typically on a group of tourists’ last day, the Independence Departure ritual happened on the beach next to the pool deck. Columbus and his backup players would trade in their hats for clothing plastered with the asterisk of the British flag and march the tourists down to the boats. A few of us would stand on either side of their parade handing out suckers and palm-sized shells. Without our sheets at least. The steel drum band would play on the beach as the boats sailed to the key, re-caped Columbus promising new adventure on other islands, distributing brochures for the management company’s other properties.

  The animals who’d surrendered their shells were long disintegrated under our feet. Usually that sand was full, too, of sucker wrappers and tiny white sticks. But none had been left behind: there must’ve been no time for any Independence Departure. Management getting those tourists off the island at top speed. Far as I’d heard, Lionel hadn’t even gotten a secondhand good-bye from Katelynn before she flew back to snowy lawns and semester textbooks. (Or was she taking care of Nathan Manion full-time, since the incident?)

  No signs of the departure ritual, but I kept spotting hurriedly left behind things. A beer bottle on the gravel path, a sarong snagged on a broken chair, a pink flip-flop half buried in the sand. Blood. And a cloth sack shunted under a broken lounger. Inside the sack: a raft of paintbrushes in much better shape than the ones I had to work with. Art brushes. Not like the collection Troy had of any brush that might hold paint.

  Looked around me and memorized the image of my mother reclined almost all the way, so I could find it in my mind again and again. Just a few notches up from flat out on her softened back. Sunglasses over eyes I was sure were closed or almost closed. Her lips sliding up in a smile. I’d never seen them from this angle. Her fingers raised every so often, tinkling at me: a contented fringe, a don’t-bother-me flick. Every once in a while asking me how it was going.

  Dinner the night before she’d looked so much stiffer as frail Uncle Q slowly slung the sack he always carried on the back of Dad’s chair, then lowered himself down. When he thought I wasn’t listening I heard him tell Mother, with a nod in my direction:

  “That is why our fore-parents ceased talking about all of that. No matter how many times you may travel inland, with however many reasons you may have for doing so, you will end up thrashed, yes, but without a single new answer.”

  “Yes, Uncle Q,” I’d said, sitting back at the table so they’d remember I was part of the question. He was right: my scars from the thrashing haulback weren’t answers. But at least they were visible. “Guess I’m still kinda glad, though, that I read about them up there. Can picture them now, up there.”

  Uncle Q nodded.

  How it makes me feel to find out where the pain is coming from, Dad had told me about his dentistry work. To know exactly how to dig out the source of the pain, he’d said. Not one of us had said whether we were glad we’d heard Andre’s story of Troy’s death. Much as I hadn’t wanted to know it all, Mother was better off knowing. The knowing had at least opened her throat. Let her lie back now on the recliner to laugh, voice spilling sunlight.

  Standing on the deck, looking out at the ocean with the pool dropping in front of my feet, something like the livestock and their people standing at the watering hole on the estate. Lifting their eyes to take in the view: the innuendo of a mast at their horizon. Imagining an end to the day’s work. The horizon an illusion that this oval, this warped circle, had a straight line in its future.

  Painting the bottom of the pool: last work I’d do for the resort. No matter how many brushes it took to prime the electric blue of the pool’s interior that resisted covering, I didn’t feel like I was working for them anymore. Painting away without an ache. Full of my own mother’s voice like wind in a sail, like I was drunk on the airiness of it. Hearing each note felt like the last few sucks on a thiflae flower, when you could sense the sweetness ebbing away. You had to draw your lips in extra tight just then.

  Management, their adjusters, and their lawyers were sure busy around the resort “investigating” what had happened to the American woman. That’s what most of us kept calling her, though we all knew her name. (B3 stayed in my muscles, too, my nails tracing the letter and number into my palm. The pregnant curve of the B; its repetition in the 3 hugging close as our knees in the truck.) All knew the woman with the family we couldn’t help but notice from their first steps on the beach—her foreign bag laden with our own history.

  At night on barstools at T
hiflae, it seemed like the whole island debated whether any of it would make a difference, to her or to us or to anyone.

  Some folks said keep on keeping on hoping that something would change.

  Some folks said you’d have to have crazy in your head to think anything would change for the better at that place. Just hoping for better like believing you could empty the ocean with a bucket.

  Some folks said organizing was the only way.

  Some folks said good luck to that without the government’s eyes on any of the resorts.

  Some folks said all you could do was keep your own eyes open, and we will see.

  Some folks said maybe I should negotiate with management about giving tours of the estate.

  Some folks said last thing we needed were tourists slithering up paved paths, taking snapshots, not knowing what on this earth they were looking at.

  Most folks said at least there still was work to be had at the resort. At least there was work.

  All folks said there was no good solution for the tangled puzzle of the inland. Knowing how to untangle it like thinking you could catch all the invisible cows on this oval.

  I said the knowing just how to fix things was only for ghosts.

  Listening to it all at Thiflae, I turned into a migrant: sat on a barstool a spell, stood out back on the pier of the porch a spell, came back inside to linger by the stereo system that tremored my insides.

  Always a mix of people on the porch, adrift from the day. Later it got, more the mix was just folks my age or thereabouts: crowd that could include Lionel, Christine, Lem, Hebbie, Andre. Like plants that grew up together into a tangle of different-tasting tea leaves; me still the prickly haulback. All of them were willing to have me there, it seemed, even with my hanging on just to the edges of their conversations. Until some point when the porch would shudder beneath me like sand pulled under by the tide, and I’d step back into the bar. Out of the sloshing water, onto firmer ground.