Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “My sister took you out with her.”

  “Right. Anyway, after that she basically adopted me into her friend group.” Nika was speaking more hurriedly now. The video game business had pulled her out of the sea of memory and back onto the shore of her busy life. I could sense she was eager to be off the phone, to check this task off of what was surely a long list.

  “And when she died?”

  “We were shocked. Devastated. The way it happened. I still feel bad I couldn’t go to the funeral. It was the middle of exams and I just couldn’t leave. Our group stayed together, though. We’re all still friends. We go to Steamboat every winter with our kids. My husband, Alex. Alison was always teasing me that he had a thing for me and I never believed her.”

  “That’s so great.”

  Nika’s hand went over the receiver again. We don’t interrupt people on the phone, sweetheart. “Sorry. What was that?”

  “I said it’s nice to know all of this.”

  “Listen, I’m really sorry, but I have to go. But I have a few pictures and notes and things. I can send you color copies for your memory book.” I told her I would like that very much and gave her my address. “I really am sorry to dash off. I need to help my son with this project. We’re working on a Prezi about the chaparral,” she said sardonically.

  “I miss the days of the shoe-box diorama,” I replied, as if I, too, were a harried mother befuddled by my child’s Information Age assignments.

  Only after I hung up did I realize that my entire body was clenched. This wasn’t a nice story about the good my sister had done in her short life. It was a story about Nika’s life. Alison was merely the device by which the universe had conspired to ensure Nika’s destiny as Nika (Ivanova) Cunningham, mommy to Jackson and Logan. The dead’s stories are lifted away from them; they are sentenced to an eternity as deus ex machina in the stories of others.

  “Alison Thomas Autopsy Report, Abridged Text,” Special to the New York Post, March 25, 1996:

  Decedent: THOMAS, Alison Brianne

  Authorized by: Cardigan Ralston, Coroner

  Assisted by: Diandra Young, M.D.

  Identified by: Thomas, Ellen, and Thomas, Richard, parents of decedent.

  Date of Birth: September 8, 1977

  Race: Caucasian

  Sex: Female

  Length: 165 cm

  Weight: 52.6 kg

  Eyes: Brown

  Hair: Reddish brown

  EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

  The body is presented in a black body bag. The victim wears no clothing. Jewelry includes three pierced earrings in the left ear: one gold hoop, one gold stud, and one small blue gemstone, and two pierced earrings in the right ear: one gold hoop and one gold stud. Fingernails and toenails are painted sky blue. The body is that of a normally developed, normally nourished Caucasian female. The appearance of age is approximately as stated. The eyes are closed. The irises are light brown. The teeth are native and in good condition. The tongue is smooth, bloated, and white-gray. The hair is reddish brown, straight, and fixed in a ponytail on the top of the head, secured with a yellow elastic band. It measures 35.5 centimetres at its longest length. The genitalia are that of a normally developed adult female. There is a scar measuring 12 centimetres in length on the lower left abdomen, which the parents of the decedent confirm is the result of an accidental injury sustained in 1981. There is significant bloating and draining of the skin, consistent with the body being submerged in non-saline water.

  Injuries

  The neck is fractured. There is a laceration to the skull measuring 3 centimetres in length, located on the left parietal. There are abrasions to the vulva which suggest recent sexual activity, but the superficial nature of these abrasions is inconclusive as to whether such activity was forcible. No semen is found within the vaginal cavity, though it is not possible to determine whether this is due to the body’s submersion.

  INTERNAL EXAMINATION

  Lungs: Non-saline water is found in both lungs. Sand granules, beige in color, are found in both lungs.

  Gastrointestinal, Cardiovascular, and Urinary systems are normal.

  X-Rays

  Total body X-rays reveal fracture of the neck located at the C4 vertebrae.

  Toxicology

  Blood and vitreous fluids positive for ethanols.

  Blood and vitreous fluids positive for cannabinoids.

  EVIDENCE

  Items submitted to the Royal Police Force of Saint X as evidence include: vaginal swabs; oral swabs; samples of hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows; earrings; hair elastic; fingernail clippings; 3 tubes of blood.

  OPINION

  Time of Death

  Body rigor, livor mortis, and stomach contents approximate the time of death between 72 and 96 hours prior to autopsy.

  Immediate Cause of Death

  Undetermined

  Manner of Death

  Undetermined

  Remarks

  Due to the condition of the body at time of autopsy, it is not possible to determine the immediate cause of death. Possible causes include blunt trauma and asphyxiation as a result of submersion. It is not possible to determine whether manner of death was accidental, intentional, or forcible.

  Statement to the Press, Prentice Carter, Chief of Police, April 10, 1996:

  The Royal Police Force is aware of the intense global interest in our investigation of the January 3rd death of American teenager Alison Thomas on our island. Our investigation into this matter has been conducted with the utmost seriousness and meticulousness, with the full resources of our department and in close cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Our department has conducted interviews with over one hundred witnesses. I can share with you at this time that on the night of her death, multiple witnesses confirm that Alison Thomas was present at Paulette’s Place, located at 24 Underhill Road, where, again, multiple witnesses attest that she appeared heavily intoxicated, a fact toxicology reports confirm. Witnesses describe her as wearing a revealing shirt and dancing provocatively with several patrons. A bartender has confirmed serving Thomas at least four drinks, including a shot of vodka infused with cannabis. Over a dozen witnesses provided testimony that Ms. Thomas was engaged in wild partying during the several nights preceding her death. Every effort has been made by our department to follow every possible lead in this case. Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson are no longer considered to be suspects in this case; at present, Mr. Richardson is serving a ninety-day sentence for an unrelated charge of drug possession. At this time, there are no other suspects in this case, and we do not find sufficient evidence that Alison Thomas died as the result of a violent crime to continue our investigation.

  Statement to the Press, Rick and Ellen Thomas, April 11, 1996:

  We, the parents of Alison Thomas, reject absolutely the conclusions of Chief of Police Carter and the Royal Police Force of Saint X. At this time, we plead with anyone who may have knowledge of the circumstances surrounding our daughter’s death to please come forward so that this case can be reopened as it should be. We will not rest until those responsible for our daughter’s death are found and punished to the full extent of the law.

  We want to end with a message to other parents. Please, hug your children a little tighter tonight. We pray that what happened to our beautiful daughter will never happen to another girl.

  * * *

  THE BEAUTIFUL daughter had died. What daughter, meanwhile, had lived?

  * * *

  A COLD drizzle was falling the next evening when I made my way to the Little Sweet. I stood beneath the awning of the grocery as usual and watched Clive Richardson sit at the table he always sat at, doing the things he always did.

  A few minutes later, I watched him push back his chair, carry his tray to the trash, and scrape the remains of his dinner from his plate. But this time I didn’t hurry away. Instead, when he approached the door, I lowered my umbrella, concealing myself behind it. I stayed still until Clive exited the Little Swee
t, walked to the end of the block, and turned the corner. Then I followed after him.

  I kept my distance, clinging to the shadows cast by shop awnings, clutching the umbrella, white-knuckled, ready to hide my face should he turn around. He walked north on Nostrand, passing storefronts that would, in the months to come, become intimately familiar to me: Health-wise Pharmacy. US Fried Chicken & Pizza. Immaculee Bakery. Red Apple Nails. Winthrop Hardware. I slowed my pace, letting the distance between us lengthen. KBB Shipping. Beulah United Church of God. I followed Clive for over an hour as he turned right, left, right again, heading in no particular direction, at least as far as I could discern, down the rain-sweetened streets. Finally, he made his way to a residential area not far from where we’d begun, block after block of midrise buildings, their exteriors sand-colored brick zigzagged with fire escapes. In the middle of a block, Clive turned and walked up the steps of a building that looked like all the others. He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out his keys. He fumbled a bit with the lock.

  I hadn’t planned what I did next. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was done, until the shout—“Gogo!”—had left my lips and was coming back to me as an echo off the wet bricks and the soft night air.

  I tucked into the shadow of a plane tree as Clive Richardson whipped around.

  “Who’s there?” he called out. The street was empty, silent. “Who said that?” He stood frozen halfway through the door. “Leave me alone! Do you hear me? Leave me alone!”

  He let the door slam shut behind him and was gone.

  GOGO

  IT WAS THE WIND. It was someone on the next block yelling, “No, no, no!” It was a dog barking. There are any number of explanations for what he heard: a voice, which surely wasn’t a voice at all, calling that name. In the days that follow, he is vigilant with himself. If he catches his mind spinning during his shift, he turns the radio to a Christian station and brings his focus to the words of the sermon. On his nightly walks, when he notices his pace growing frantic, he forces himself to slow down. In the apartment, he busies himself: he wipes down the stove, gives his teeth a long brushing rather than his usual cursory going-over. He even strikes up a conversation with Cecil, listening attentively as his roommate recounts the surprising turn of events from the variety show he watched the night before—a magician was beaten out by a unicyclist for a spot in the grand finale. He nods as Cecil delivers a speech that he has clearly been working out in his head for some time about what makes the show so entertaining; it has to do with the apples-and-oranges comparisons the show requires. How ought one to measure the talent of a contortionist against that of a stand-up comedian? Who is more impressive, a one-in-a-million ventriloquist or an excellent opera singer? Anything to crowd out the voice. Gogo. It is not the first time he has heard his name on the wind, there and then gone. He knows where it can lead, and he does not want to go back there.

  The voice is mostly dormant in the daylight, so that each day he thinks he has conquered it. But at night it resurfaces, the darkness so thick with it he could choke. Gogo. Again and again he tells himself he did not hear what he thinks he heard. After all, how could it be? He hasn’t been Gogo to anyone in a long, long time.

  * * *

  IT WAS the first day of second grade and Clive Richardson’s grandmother had buttoned his pink uniform polo all the way to the top. They sat together at the kitchen table, where his grandmother had prepared a breakfast of fried jackfish and bakes and bush tea in blue enamel cups. As he ate, Clive tugged at the collar. His grandmother, who ate her fish in big quick bites, grabbed his hand and held it.

  “None of this fidgeting.”

  He nodded. Things were like this with her, prickly and wonderfully firm. She removed her hand and they continued eating.

  “You will make some nice friends today. Good boys.”

  It was a habit of hers, this way of speaking, as if the future were not in doubt; as if she were merely waiting for it to come along and cooperate. It had been less than a month since he had come to live with her, and as he sat in her kitchen, with its lacy white curtain fluttering against the open window and its smell of allspice and everything in its place—the yellow jug of oil beside the stove, pink beans soaking on the counter, margarine in the dish with the rosebud border on the table—it was still a new, miraculous comfort to be in the care of an adult who was so firmly in command and in possession of such a clear-eyed vision of what ought to happen. He would go to school and make nice friends. He wanted this very much. But he was unsettled, too, because he worried that even his grandmother’s oracular proclamation would not be powerful enough to bring about something so unlikely, for he was seven years old and had never had a friend. Not really. Only if you counted Vaughn, who called him “Big Man,” but Vaughn was his mother’s special friend, so he knew he didn’t really count. There was also Jeremiah, who lived down the street from his mother’s house, but Jeremiah was simpleminded and it humiliated Clive that one of the only people he might count as a friend was simpleminded, so he did not want to count him.

  “Y-y-yes, Gran,” he said.

  She cupped his cheek with her palm. “You a good boy, Clive.” With these words, too, he sensed her trying to speak something into being, to wrangle the loose threads of the past into a neat and orderly present.

  Clive had come to live with his father’s mother when his mother departed for Saint Thomas to find work. His father was dead, a fact that did not make him sad because he did not remember him. This troubled him, because he was four when his father died, and he did have memories of being four. He remembered getting nipped by a black and white goat, and how his mother spanked the goat on its backside like a naughty child. He remembered Claude Félix, the old fisherman with clouds in his eyes who walked the streets of the village at sundown, stopping at his customers’ houses to deliver parcels of fish wrapped in brown paper; he remembered the evening his mother told him that Claude Félix had gone to his eternal rest. But he had no memories of his own father or his death, and so these other memories filled him with shame.

  On the day of his mother’s departure, she packed his things into half a dozen Goody Mart bags and one of her friends drove them across the island from Bendy Harbour to his grandmother’s house in the Basin. She opened the front door when they were still coming up the road. She crossed her arms and stood in the doorway.

  “This how you bring my grandchild to me? With he possession all in disarray?” she said when they were standing on the porch in front of her.

  “I need the suitcase, Nella.”

  “How silly I be! You need the suitcase.”

  “How I’m supposed to get on the plane without one?” his mum snapped.

  For what felt like forever, his grandmother stood there, her arms crossed, and looked at his mum with eyes as blunt as wood.

  “Convenient you not taking he with you, then, or what would you use for he luggage?”

  For weeks his mother had spoken heavily of her impending departure, as if their separation were a thing over which she had no control. Now he understood this wasn’t the case. She could take him. She wasn’t. What a fool he was, no better than Jeremiah.

  His mother knelt beside him and squeezed him tightly. “Mama will miss you so, my love.”

  His body went rigid. He couldn’t let go. Finally, his grandmother pulled him away, uncurling his clenched fingers from around his mother’s neck. She held him fast against her as his mother got into her friend’s car and drove away. When the car disappeared from view, he began to sob. His grandmother patted his back. “Come, now,” she whispered, and led him inside. When he had exhausted himself from crying, she changed him into an old nightshirt that had belonged to his grandfather and tucked him into bed. When he awoke in the middle of the night, aching and confused, she brought him into the kitchen and fixed him a warm bowl of the most delicious pepper pot he’d ever tasted.

  It was hard to explain what he felt for his grandmother and his new
life in her home. He knew that things were better here. Her house was spotless. For breakfast there was fish and corn porridge or flour pap instead of Frosties with Nido. They went to St. George’s Anglican Church on Sundays. She filled a bath for him every evening, and with a rough cloth and a bar of Ivory soap she scrubbed him, a task she completed with an unceremonious physicality bereft of gentleness and harshness alike. He was required to make his bed each morning and read a psalm each evening, and even though he did not enjoy doing these things, he could feel the goodness of them.

  At his mother’s house he did not have a proper bedtime. Often, she went out at night, and he stayed up, snacking on crisps and pitching marbles on the floor until the house grew dark and he dropped off to sleep. Sometimes he woke in the night to voices and unfamiliar laughter. He would stumble into the kitchen to find his mother and a few others sitting around the kitchen table with the kerosene lamp with the blue base at its center, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes whose smoke tickled his nostrils with its strange funk. “Come here, Big Man,” Vaughn would say if he was there. Clive would climb into his lap. “Thirsty?” Vaughn asked him once. Clive nodded. Vaughn handed him his glass. “Just a little sip, Big Man,” he said. Clive sputtered as the brown liquid burned down his throat. Vaughn clapped and laughed and patted him on the head. “Look at you, life of the party.”

  Yet sometimes he ached for his mother’s house. He missed the way she kissed his fingers, one by one. Even when she’d been gone weeks, months, years, his fingertips still prickled with her love and her leaving. He missed the flowers from their yard that she picked and tucked into her hair; sometimes at night when she wasn’t around he went out into the yard in the moonlight and touched the flowers and imagined he was touching her. He missed going to the harbor with her at Christmastime, when the boat from Saint Croix brought ice to the island; on the pier, she would hold him up high above the crowd and he would watch as a man threw salt crystals into a machine, turned a crank, and churned out ice cream.