Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Someday when I’m making mad cheddar in New York I’m gonna build a mansion right up there, so close to the edge when you look out the window you just see sea,” Edwin declared one night. It was three A.M., and they were lying on the sand at the base of the cliffs with the radio turned down low.

  “Cheddar,” Don snorted. “Man, quit your Yankin’. You’re not going to no New York.”

  “Up yours, Don. Anyway, is what you know about it? When I’m in Brooklyn and you all still live with your mummies, you better not be expecting any barrel from me!”

  “We’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Damien said.

  “What you want with New York anyway?” Don asked. “Why freeze your rod off doing shit work there when you can do it here where the weather fine?”

  “And hang with we at Little Beach on your day off?” Des added.

  “And with we youths,” Clive whispered. He was so stoned his own words flew at his skin like wind.

  “With we youths!” Don gasped, slapping his knee. “What the ass you talking about, man?”

  “Nah, nah, he right!” Des shouted. “The Goges see it clear! All we liming in the shade with some Cruzan, and we wifeys making chat, and we sons playing windball in the sand.”

  For a moment they were quiet as the vision Des had painted seemed to take life above them in the dark sky.

  “We wifeys nagging and we babies whining, you mean,” Edwin said. “Anyway, I’m not gonna be doing no shit work in New York. I got plans, what you think?”

  “Hear that, breds?” Don said. “Edwin gonna be a big man! What I think? I think you’re full of shit. I think ten years from now you still living with your fat sisters. I think you gonna dead here, same as all we. Except the Doc here.”

  Damien smiled modestly. He was smart, so smart that he was able to lime with them every night while rising, quietly, to the top of their class at school. Though they teased him for his diligence, they were proud that he was theirs.

  “The frig you know about it?” Edwin continued. “I’ll swim off this island, come to that. Gogo will come with me.”

  “I’m shit at swimming,” Clive said.

  Edwin pinched the fat on his shoulder. “You buoyant.” Edwin shrugged. “You’ll float.”

  “Shit, it’s late,” Keithley said. “We gotta get back.”

  They gathered their things, waded through the shallows to the boat, and rode the calm waters back to Salvation Point. On the boat, Clive, too stoned to sit up, lay on the floor and let the wind blow over his open eyes as he stared up at the sky. New York was Edwin’s dream, and though he spoke of it as a place they would go to together, Clive sensed the unlikeliness of this; instead, Edwin’s desire for New York seemed to prefigure a future in which he would be left behind—on the island, and in the past.

  For hours after that, until his grandmother woke him the next morning, he could feel Edwin’s fingers on his shoulder as if they were still there, like the ghost of someone who was already gone.

  * * *

  “WE LIMING on Faraway tonight,” Keithley declared as the boat sped away from shore one evening.

  “We can’t,” Clive blurted out before he could stop himself.

  “Why not?” Keithley asked.

  Clive looked down at his hands. “You know why,” he mumbled. In his mind he saw her—the long black hair hiding her face. Hooves for feet.

  Keithley clapped his hands in delight. “Goges, man, don’t tell me you still believe that old-folk fuckery.”

  “But my great-auntie disappear there!”

  “Who don’t have a great-auntie who disappear there?” Des said.

  “Don’t stress, Gogo. If she turn you into a goat, we’ll set you up fine in my yard,” Don said.

  “Beside, if that sket would choose any of we to lure away with she, it would be me,” Edwin said.

  “Is that so?” Damien said.

  “A lady all alone like that needs a man who can sort she out proper. Can I help it if all the ladies know I’m the only man for the job?”

  As Keithley slowed the boat and guided it to shore, Clive was filled with an unease he felt helpless to counteract. The other boys climbed down the ladder and hopped into the shallows one by one. When it was his turn, Clive couldn’t move.

  Then he heard Edwin’s voice in his ear. “It’s okay, man.”

  “But my mum—”

  He knew he should be past believing, but he couldn’t rid himself of the story. It was what he had of her; it was the pocket watch, Bible, lock of hair she’d left behind for him.

  “To hell with she. You don’t need no mum. You have a brother.”

  Clive climbed down into the water, with Edwin right behind him. The moon that night was so bright they didn’t even need the flashlights they’d brought. Beneath its light, the sand seemed to glow white—in his memory of it, it almost looked like snow. He hesitated again before he stepped ashore, shaken by the feeling that he was about to break something that could never be put back together. He glanced back at Edwin, who nudged him forward.

  “Hurry up, you fools! We going to check out the goat lady’s watering hole or what?” Don called.

  “Wait up!” Clive shouted. Together, he and Edwin sprinted up the sand.

  It was one of those nights whose every pleasure is multiplied by all the future moments when, you imagine, you and your friends will gather and reminisce about it. They tramped through the jungle in the moonlight, casting behind them a trail of crisps bags and still-smoking roaches. When they came upon a goat, they shouted and chased it into the bush, whooping with delight. At the waterfall, they peeled off their shorts and cannonballed in. They swam and roughhoused and pulled off stunts—leaping from the highest rocks, pratfalling into the water, swimming under the falls’ churn and shouting “Fuck Daphne!” and “Fuck Joy!” and fuck all the other girls who wouldn’t fuck them into the obliterating roar. As the night rose, growing wilder and wilder still, Clive felt himself sending it all away—the stories and the ghosts. His mum.

  Later, they returned to the beach. Too drunk to make their way back to the mainland, they lay down on the shore, using their balled-up shirts for pillows and letting the soft sand love their stoned, tingling skin as the sound of small waves rocked them to sleep. That was the night they had everything. The night they brought friendship to the divine edge.

  And the girl was already there. As they leapt and roughhoused and plunged into that cool, clean water she was beneath them, at the bottom of the pool, waiting to undo them.

  Tuition for Jayson and Stasia at Porter’s International School. A Manchester United jersey for Jayson. Stasia’s pink dress for prom. A satellite dish with eight hundred channels. Life insurance. Jemma’s salon visits. Her annual shopping trip to Saint Kitts. Bikes for Christmas. Our house in Crofton Hills. A loan to Don when he was hard up. A surprise trip to Kingston with Jayson to see Man-U play the Jamaican national team. Miss Verna to clean the house weekly. Jemma’s smooth hands. Stasia’s acne treatment. Jayson’s club football fees. The headstone for little Jamie’s grave, pure granite. The diamond on Jemma’s finger.

  I used to feel mad guilty over all of it. We never could have lived this way if I didn’t start giving these tours. Pawning off my friendship with Edwin and Clive as secret insider information. Alison Thomas: Behind the Headlines, I call it. Ninety dollars a person, kids under twelve half price. On the tours, I’m careful to call it an unexplained death, not a murder. As if that makes what I’m doing any better.

  I tried to stop once. I told Jemma it was dirty money and I had to put an end to it.

  She took my face in her hands and made me look her right in the eyes. “Don’t you ever apologize for providing for this family. You’re a good man. You hear me, Desmond Phillips? You’re a good man leading a good life.”

  I want to believe that.

  If it weren’t me, I guess it would just be somebody else getting rich driving Yankees past the houses where Edwin and Gogo came up, and the bu
ilding where Paulette’s used to be, and boating folks out to Faraway. But it’s not somebody else, it’s me. They were my brothers.

  VOICES

  My name is Alison Brianne Thomas. I am fifteen years old and this afternoon I ceased to be a virgin. I’ve been thinking that I should keep a record of my life so that someday when I’m completely bored with my suburban-lady existence, which I really hope I never have, I can listen to myself and remember what I used to be like and maybe I’ll shake some sense into myself or something. Anyway, I figure today is the perfect day to start.

  The first thing you should know is that this afternoon you cut dance rehearsal. You put on a fantastic performance for Mrs. Conyers about your horrible period cramps, which you obviously didn’t have, and you went to Drew’s house. The crazy thing is, after all this time, we didn’t plan it. Today when I woke up I just felt different. I knew today was the day. Honestly? I didn’t really enjoy it. The actual act was sort of uncomfortable. But that’s fine. I’m not one of those idiots who thinks her first time has to be some perfect whatever. It’s knowing I’ve done it that matters.

  Anyway, when it was over Drew kissed my neck all over. I love when he does that. It just … gets to me in the best way. He kept whispering over and over, “You’re so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.” Middle-aged Alison, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you have that. I mean, I’m not a dingbat, I know it probably won’t be with Drew. But I hope you have someone who feels that way about you. The neck kissing. I love that.

  * * *

  IT HAD taken my mother several weeks to make duplicates of the tapes and send them to me. I imagined her hovering over them, fretting about whether to grant my request. When I returned home from work one evening in early November and saw the box addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting in the building’s foyer, it took me a minute to realize what it was. Opening it up on my bed, I saw that there were dozens of tapes, many more than I had expected. My mother had even taken the time to photocopy their labels, each one in my sister’s bubbly teenage penmanship: “Frosh,” “Sweet 16,” “Seniorz,” “Summah!” They were arranged in chronological order, beginning with “Fifteen” (the i dotted with a heart). At once, I put this tape into the dusty brown cassette player I’d purchased weeks earlier at a pawnshop on Flatbush Avenue and pressed play.

  As soon as the first entry ended and Alison’s voice faded to silence, I stopped the tape. With trembling hands I took the cassette out of the player and put it back in its case. For weeks, I had been waiting to listen to these tapes, to be held and soothed by my older sister’s voice. But the voice on the tape was not what I had imagined at all. Alison sounded so much younger than I had expected, so shockingly girlish, and I was filled with shame. I was an adult listening to the private confessions of a child. Why on earth had I expected anything different? Then and there, I vowed I wouldn’t listen to any more.

  For a while, I managed it. I kept myself busy. I’d fallen terribly behind at work, and I endeavored to catch up—reading manuscripts, combing through the mixed reviews of the new Mann for phrases that, with a few strategically placed ellipses, might suggest positive endorsement. At night, I walked with Clive. Flowers outside of a bodega. Boys on playing fields. Special! Persimmons!

  One night I had a work function to attend—one of our books was a number one New York Times best seller, and the whole office was going to happy hour at a bar in midtown to celebrate. I calculated that I could easily put in an appearance and make it to the Little Sweet in time to join Clive on his nightly sojourn. But the Q stalled on the Manhattan Bridge for over twenty minutes. It was announced that a rider on another train was in medical distress, and as I sat there, waiting with increasing impatience for us to move again, I decided this rider was a man who’d gotten stumbling drunk at his own happy hour, and I hated him as the minutes slipped away. When at last I arrived at Church Avenue, I dashed up the stairs and down the block. I arrived at the Little Sweet breathless, but I was too late. He was already gone. I would have to wait an entire day to see him again, an amount of time that felt no different than an eternity.

  When I arrived back at my apartment, the man in the NASCAR hat was just coming in from walking Jefe, and he held the door open for me. Jefe, who had never paid me any attention, began to growl, a deeper and more menacing sound than I’d thought the poor animal capable of producing. “Cállate,” the man said. The dog lunged at me. His little claws scraped at my tights. He bared his tiny yellow teeth. The man jerked the leash and scolded him, plainly shocked at his dog’s behavior, but Jefe would not stop. He glared up at me with his milk-white eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though what I was apologizing for I couldn’t explain—it seemed to me that I had been seen by this pitiful creature, naked right down to my soul. I fled down the stairs to my apartment. Quickly, before reason or willpower could creep back in, I plunged my hands under my bed, yanked out the package from my mother, and threw the cassette back in the player.

  I just had this memory I haven’t thought about in forever. When I was really young we had this tape of Irish folk songs I was totally obsessed with. I used to jig around the living room in my nightie. I remember singing along, trying to do this Irish accent which I thought was so romantic, and in my head I was one hundred percent prancing across the highlands in a tartan dress, which I guess is actually Scottish, but you get the idea. I was, what? Five years old? And I already sensed that there was this thing missing from my world. Like, depth. Or maybe, rootedness. I already got that I was from a totally superficial place. People do not exactly write books or make movies about their poignant childhoods in Westchester, you know? My family doesn’t really have a heritage, or a religion, or any of that. Alison. What even is that name? I’m not named after anyone. It doesn’t have some meaning. My parents just thought it sounded nice, as, apparently, did a million other parents, dooming me to a life as Alison T. At least they had the decency to spell it the good way. But it’s like my entire identity from that first moment when they named me—it’s not about anything. It’s like our only culture is this very nice life we have.

  Tonight for homework I have to fill out this career quiz for health class for whatever freaking reason, and the last question is, “What are you afraid of?” I’m honestly stumped. I mean, I can tell you the stupid things. I’m afraid of being home alone at night because every time I hear a sound I think there’s a murderer. I’m afraid of mayonnaise because it’s disgusting and I hate how it gets on people’s fingers. Loose teeth totally skeeve me out.

  But real stuff? I guess the thing I’m most afraid of is that my life won’t be what it can be. I have everything, everything going for me. I have no excuses. And what if I still blow it?

  When I broke my promise not to listen to Alison’s diaries, I broke it fully. There were so many hours of tape it seemed I would never get through it. Much of it was rambling and not particularly illuminating. For twenty minutes she leafed through her high school yearbook and developed a ranked list of the ten cutest senior boys. She sang along to the entirety of a Counting Crows album. I didn’t fast-forward. I listened to every word. She talked about Drew a lot, about the romantic things he did for her, like taking her out on real dates to restaurants and the movies while other boys just took girls to the pond and parked. She talked about her friends. Lisa was her “soul sister,” Amanda was driving her “just bananas”; a week later, Lisa had been demoted to “okay, I guess.” She complained about her teachers. Mr. Conti kept sticking her with the “chalk eaters” for group projects, which she had decided was a deliberate attempt to teach her some lesson, and let him try. The more I listened, the less I considered whether it was right to listen. What did it matter? I couldn’t stop. I gorged on Alison until I could hear her voice even when I was away from it—her breath hidden in the hum of a ceiling fan, her laughter tinkling within the piano track of a song I was listening to on the subway home. She was with me as she hadn’t been in years.
<
br />   HEY THERE. Me again. Hahaha. You’re so diverting, Alison. Jocular. Convivial. Uproarious. Titillating. Winsome. It’s March and as you may have guessed, you took the SATs this morning, and let me just say, the SATs are to actually being smart as having a pretty voice is to being a talented musician. Analogies are to meaning as a puddle is to the ocean. I’m pretty sure I did awesome, though. But that’s not what I want to talk about. This afternoon, Claire went to this birthday party for some girl in her class. Stacy? Anyway, the party was at that Chuck E. Cheese–type place, and my parents asked me to pick her up when it was over. When I get there, all these kids are racing around together playing tag and some girls are pretending to be horses or whatever. I’m looking everywhere and I don’t see Clairey. Finally I find her. She’s in the ball pit by herself. She’s holding a green ball and just turning it in her hands and looking at it like she’s figuring something out about it. Then she started doing her writing thing, where she moves her finger around in the air like that? I wanted to run up and shake her and say, Just stop doing it, kiddo. Just stop, easy peasy. But she can’t. She can’t change or she would change, right? Nobody wants to be the weird kid.

  But also? I feel terrible saying this because she’s my sister and I love her, but sometimes I don’t actually like being with her, because it’s like her life—she’s only six years old and I can already see every single way it’s going to be hard. Meanwhile, for whatever nonreason, the same stuff that’s impossible for her comes easily to me. I’m not trying to brag. It is what it is. When I’m with her, sometimes I feel so freaking relieved I’m not her, and then I feel horrible for feeling relieved. I don’t deserve anything I have, really. Then I took her out for ice cream even though she already had birthday cake, and the end.