“I’m sorry, Mr. Johns.” I wiped my face with a handkerchief he gave me from his red housecoat’s pocket. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, no. no,” he said. “All things in time and place. Why wouldn’t you have? We are all friends here, are we not?”
“Yes, sir, we are,” I said.
The man put out his hand. I held it for a long time as Chase tapped at his notepad. He was surprisingly rested after a night sleeping on Mr. Johns’s couch. The other guests left that day, so he could have his own room. He and his subject were already old buddies by the time I came along after their breakfast together. I could have joined them. But a surprising green dot and flashing bar on my cell phone cleared me to call the States finally. I did so, a few times. I heard Summer’s wordless orchestral greeting.
So I texted: “Everything’s going well so far. Phone troubles, but you have the estate’s number. Stay by the phone this evening. Give Mama my kisses. x.”
In an hour, without one ring or ping, my digital egress closed back to a red dot and static. I presumed Summer was tied up with her campaign for Daughter of the Century. But of course the second-class daughter has not even called. I went down to ask Olivia to try to reboot the internet in her pre-Y2K haven, where the staff still did paper filing and expected guests to come to disconnect. With Summer’s selfish nonresponse, the best I could do was send Penny an email and hope she checked it.
Her quick reply was the soundtrack for my mind that morning: “Mum is just fine my honey. Do not worry your pretty head. We had no accidents at all today. She sleep all through last night. Now, she’s reading one of your books. Enjoy, sweetheart. I wish you to have fun and come back safe and sound. All is well. God is good . . .”
I wiped my nose on a special dress I felt suitable to meet a notable man. It was a fresh pale yellow. I gave him the I Heart New York T-shirt I brought overseas for him.
“I’m not helping the interview . . . I should go,” I said.
Mr. Johns held my hand tighter across the small round table where we sat.
“No, I like these kinds of interviews. I get to learn something too, for a change. I don’t have too much to offer. My life very simple. I just wrote a lot of books.”
“We can at least talk about your books rather than my problems,” I said, becoming better. “I read Night Wind, about how you survived Hurricane Janet. I’m sorry. I wanted to get to more of them. But with caring for my mother and keeping up with work—”
“No, Night Wind is the one everybody want to talk about. I wrote twelve books before it and thirty after. About rebellion and growing up by the sea. Even love stories. One about my mother, too. But nobody knew my name. I struggle to find work. I go to the shore to get with the fishermen and they run me away. Too much competition. They say I have lady hands, and call me a sissy: ‘Go back in de house n write de book like de ladies.’ For long time I live with my sister and her husband and children. A shame, a disgrace for a grown man can’t live on his own. But, after Night Wind . . .”
The novel was his masterpiece. It was one of the required readings thrown in my world literature college class. Chase was so impressed to see the book on one of my shelves: nearly five hundred pages to describe just three days in September in 1955, when Johns’s whole house was swept into the Atlantic and his pregnant young wife went with it. The wife and child was something Johns’s literary agent had already cautioned Chase not to bring up. It was essentially true fiction, a memoir puzzle, an account of life gone awry and masses left scattering to rebuild or reunite. So in some fortuitous way, I was the one to give Chase this whole big idea for SWAG Marketing to bring attention to Mr. Johns.
“This lady got me to read Night Wind again,” Chase interrupted. “I tell people about you all the time. You got nominated for a lot of prizes for it. All around the world, the States and Britain and even India, it was published. I pulled up reviews online.”
“On where?”
“Online,” Chase said. “On . . . the internet?”
“Oh, yes, the computer thing,” Mr. Johns chuckled. “Typing slowed me down. We write by the hand. Pencil. No pen, because you can’t erase and it all gets messy. Then, if you lucky enough to have a pretty girl, she type it for you, with the carbon between the papers so you can send it to the publisher. In my times. Everything so easy today, it’s bad. Instant rice? Why such a thing? Even love. Once you had to really, really love. You could not just pick up the phone or send the email. I hate the email. I don’t type. Now, my hands hurt. I need Charles to listen to my words and record.”
Chase recorded nothing. We would remember, for sure, everything Mr. Johns said. Mr. Johns’s daughter wanted to review Chase’s profile and sign off on it. Chase didn’t expect to produce draft copy until he got back, but he couldn’t refuse Mr. Johns’s daughter. I would be on my own later in the night, again, while he worked.
Mr. Johns insisted we have lunch together in his study: breadfruit, callaloo, jamoon, and a noni fruit and avocado salad. More local rum. I was a big girl. I could hold my liquor. But the homegrown brew was nothing to play with. I stuck with guava juice. Chase and Mr. Johns noticed, and laughed. He was full of stories and charm, perhaps grateful a photographer wanted more than that “native thing” for a portfolio spread. He never once mentioned his wife.
OLIVIA WAS GONE WHEN I came in to use the phone to call home, as technology kept me in a dead zone, now of all times. I accepted she could not live her whole life at her job, babying guests like me who appeared to escape harrowing realities back home. Only she and Mr. Johns’s family had an office key, not Damian or Charles or a teenaged lady maid I met. I could not even check my email for an update. I asked the men to leave me a note when Olivia returned. I was being silly. I could not believe Summer would not pass along an update through Chase, or consolation of nothing to update. I knew her need to dominate and indeed I was accustomed to it. Peace numbed judgment. I forgave her new level of bitchiness and self-absorption.
Nothing was near the estate but modest tin-roof homes, a hop bar a half mile from them, and a few roadside fruit and drink stands. Without a train map or yellow cab or tour guide or bellman in sight, humdrum looked psychedelic. At dusk, I took my first excursion out alone in Grenada. I walked around the twenty acres of not only nutmeg trees, but cotton and almond trees. My hands luxuriated in the soft and hard grainy textures. I massaged my feet in the wild grass. So long had it been since I’d had an empty mind. I was thankful to the Caribbean skies for swallowing it for me whole, gently.
My first “faraway” trip had come courtesy of Mr. Murphy. My mother thought we’d take the train to Cedar Point in Ohio. Just two states over. But Mr. Murphy asked, “Do you know who I am? An hour on the plane, and a car takes us to O’Hare and picks us up when we land.” Now, my sister and I could go back to school able to compete with what the other sixth graders said about their summer vacations. Cedar Point was a memorable otherworld, watery and humid and loud. We got right to it: boat rides on rolling waters through makeshift rapids. Summer laughed at my frozen hold on the raft’s bar. She and I rounded the stony binge to go into the dark waiting tunnel. I looked at Summer and took a breath. A confederate in doom should it come, she reassured me. I looked back to wave at Mama, to show her my courage. But she was looking at Mr. Murphy and not her own daughters.
“Would you like some nutmegs to take back with you?”
Olivia had come up behind and pushed me out of my memory. I lurched from watery rapids back to the sunny grove.
“I didn’t mean to startle you. We all need quiet time.”
“Oh, no,” I told her. “This place is almost too quiet. I was just, well. Thinking . . .”
I cut off “about my mother.”
“Yes, the gentleman was wondering where you had gone. He went upstairs to work before dinner.”
“Yeah, I wanted to give him and Mr. Johns some time alone.”
If I was to learn to make conversation, without my mother h
ealthy or even alive, I needed to start. I could not have another episode like the morning’s. I could approach this like a new job, or essay, or deadline. I knew how to do those: research, patience, details, questions, answers, digressions.
“How do you cultivate the trees and harvest the nuts?” I asked. “I mean, how does all this turn into a profit?”
“With a lot more workers around here than you see now,” Olivia said. “Peak harvest time is July. But, we call in boys from town to handpick what doesn’t fall to the ground. They give me good price for their hands. Fingers throw out the bad ones before they make it into a batch. Machines cannot do that for you.”
She sifted through a few fallen seedlings on the ground. In her fingertips, she held a round green ball encircled by what appeared to be a spider on fire. She stuck a fingernail between the tentacles and began to peel away the thick casing.
“This is the mace,” she said. “Very powerful and hot.”
“Wait, like pepper spray mace?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“We girls need this back home,” I laugh. “We buy a little spray canister and attach it to our keychain. For the freaks that come out at night.”
“The stories I hear from my people in your country,” she said. “We hardly have prisons here, and yet you all sound like daily American life carries out in one. But I don’t want to dwell on the negative. You are welcome back anytime to remind yourself it can be different. We let our guests handpick, too. It’s great exercise.”
“We’ll definitely be back,” I told her. “My sister would love to do that.”
Success. I did not say “my mother.” I had learned that quickly.
“All your friends will be jealous when you bring back a bushel of nutmeg to grate, nut by nut. The spice lasts better that way, whole. I can give you just enough so customs won’t make a fuss.”
“Thank you. It would cost an arm and a leg for me to get that in America.”
“Not here. You bring it straight from the farm, for free. Well, I will leave you.”
I wanted to tell her not to go, as she creased a fold between the moment and the worries. My mind would wander from the effortless glamour around me to the inelegance of illness. Or Chase. It was inconvenient not to be in love as Mama’s life threatened to pass. The enormity of my inexperience in the situation forbid me from noticing the male body, let alone pleasing one. I’d always seen myself as the more prepared sister. Summer followed Mama to demonstrate that sometimes reliable men are the most preparation women can make.
I stayed out until the great trees around me sagged to giant faces with no expressions in the darkness, silent messages and secret stories in their towering personas. I was far inland, yet I felt my blood yearned to be drained of all of its vital elements, until only seawater remained. I would levitate as droplets of the rainy season, liquid more furious than fire and impenetrable than land, renewable as the wind. I would bring my mother along for the ride. Together, we’d join my father.
Those are the fonder memories of the time.
THE NEXT DAY, OLIVIA WAS hospitable enough to keep the office door closed but unlocked, so I could slip in to sit online. Life was too short to struggle with technology. Besides, the wide monitor gave a much better view than my small phone screen. Two Skype chats between me and Penny, afternoon and evening. Mama, however, was asleep each time I could connect. Summer sashayed in the screen’s background. She stopped just long enough to order me to tell Chase to call her. She could have told him herself when he called from a real smartphone SWAG afforded him.
On the third day, a sensation of lift and ease settled in my gut and gait. Olivia left a basket of whole nutmegs outside my door. Chase had a full day alone with Mr. Johns, for more men talk. I walked headstrong to buy passion fruit and noni juice at the talkative vendors’ stands. A child no more than ten swindled me to pay $5, plus tip, to pet his mona monkey. Once during my few hours of adventure, I was momentarily curious but ultimately undisturbed by a prevalence of small snakes entwining a sapodilla’s trunk. At the side of sandy roads bound by devil trees and presumably wild ganja, I dropped off the bitter taste of Summer’s beguiling. I forgave and understood. I planned some beguiling of my own. Chase was officially like a brother in the closeness and trust our journey demanded. My onslaught of date-night recommendations would be unyielding, for him to keep Summer occupied out of our house. Then I would enjoy my solitary time to elicit Mama’s recipes, lores, and secrets.
But on the fourth day, two days before we were to be back in New York City, a clerk from the Grenada Tourism Authority sped onto the neat front lawn of Johns’s estate. He had a strained request for “the Americans here.” I would remember him as the loudest person I’d heard in Grenada. He yelled about the unanswered office phones.
And, an American nun called to send him to us.
The shared bathroom was too occupied earlier for either one of us fit in between a London couple and backpackers from Brazil. It was already ninety degrees by noon. Chase and I were hot, unshowered, sticky. The patient clerk was parental in his insistences. Olivia organized us, directed everyone to stay calm.
“Mr. Armstrong,” the gentleman explained, “it’s best for you both to come into the office to discuss a matter I don’t want to bring up here in this setting.”
I would be over 2,100 miles away from her side when I found out, in a small office fit for barely five people, Mama passed away.
I only grasped it when Chase repeated what the clerk repeated several times: “Grace Spencer, Autumn’s mother, was pronounced dead in the home this morning.”
The sentence tasted like silence.
The words went down like scorched soup scalding.
The shift absorbed all my blood energy to clamor for rebuttal.
Mere strangers heard my childhood and every fragment of it howl.
DAMIAN AND CHARLES SET DOWN a hot buffet early for us, before the general community dinner. The photographer understood. Chase would meet Mr. Johns in the morning for more interviewing and recording. My flight back to New York left right after that. Chase’s would leave two mornings after mine. He charged my changes to his company American Express. They, too, understood. Mr. Johns heard. He wanted me to come to him, but I wasn’t up to it.
I came so far and did not even see the wondrous land. Gone were the extra two days of pleasures we planned just for ourselves and social media friends: a local chocolate factory, the rum estate tour, the nature walk. All that remained was what Chase would never have left Grenada without: the twenty-five-minute ferry ride to the nearby archipelago and its fishing village where he was born, for a half day of garlic-laced fish, lobster, and lambie meals with his mother and other relatives he had not seen in two years.
The fact came up often between us now: I went to support him on his dream project, which gave him the side benefit of seeing his mother again after a few years away. His reunion with his mother led to me never saying good-bye to mine.
The other fact of the trip thorned our histories and possibly, if Summer discerned, our future.
Chase’s room was above mine. A more humble one. Its construction was stunted by a padlocked storage closet that stored Mr. Johns’s memories and papers until auctioneers took it all away to the highest bidder, most likely an American or British university after decades of not teaching his work. I wanted Chase to do what he felt he shouldn’t: disturb me.
My brief call to Summer was productive. Gratefully, she was the one in the States and so it was her burden to inform our relatives, who’d most certainly deliver maudlin performances in spite of their failures to visit. This task passed time I could not easily. So I walked up to a gold light stream from under Chase’s door, carrying my tall glass of straight sweet rum in my hand. I was probably drunk. I heard cheerful voices from the room behind me. I whispered to him in between short, quick taps:
“Chase, it’s me. Please open.”
He did not answer for a moment. Then I heard his
footsteps. He opened and we stared at each other. I had tried to moisturize my face and fix up my hair. I had not cried yet, so my eyes were not red, but maybe hooded. He let me in, hugged me close.
“Autumn, I am so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think. I really didn’t think . . .”
I did not talk. Not a sound, even when I dropped my glass and it broke. I let him hug me in the middle of the room until I—not him first but I—put our lips together. I held the back of his head until he kissed back. When we fell into bed I was on top, and I never answered when he asked me, “Are you sure?”
SUMMER HANDLED HER TASKS TO see Mama’s body away and alert the family, then she washed her hands. I got off one plane just to board another one the next day, to fly with my mother’s body back to Illinois alone. Summer’s excuse for leaving me to my tasks?
“It’s easier to look at the dead when they’ve been dead. And now we can tell them all to go to hell, for leaving us orphans another man had to take care of.”
Summer never made efforts just to be polite. I didn’t have time or mind to push her to be more grateful for all we’d had, even if it did not last as long as it could have. Nobody told us to go off and be so ambitious. Her discourtesy left me alone to negotiate the insurance matters and burial arrangements, done through Mr. Murphy’s agency of course. He was still alive but in assisted living after a stroke. I busied on caskets, program orders, and flowers. I had obituary writing down pat.
I could not stay at the house on Trummel Lane. It sold, at a loss, vacated of anyone to nurse the piled-up renovations and repairs. Mama’s sister Aunt Mae made room for me and funeral repast for family. When I could finally retreat to hang my black interview suit and veiled fascinator, to crash in my cousins’ bunk bed, I understood the place where I was born no longer had a place for me in it.
EIGHT
One Hundred and Forty-Seventh Street was packed with many buildings like the five-story walk-up I looked for. Their units waited on new parquet floors, faux marble kitchen backsplashes, and doubled rents once the long-term tenants were evicted or dead. Across the street, boys scooted around concrete and banged a basketball against a netless hoop in a defunct school’s yard. Apparent Rastas rolled fat blunts on the stoop, next to barbecue grills and foil pans on card tables alongside the building. Women sat in fold-up chairs next to the tables. Some glared at me, then went back to turning meat and picking bones. A CD player blasted dutty wine. Children danced. The men nodded at me as if I were a relative.
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