Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  But the more time he spends with her, the more he forgets to remind himself. She is such an odd girl, so young to be so alone in the world. Some evenings, looking across the table at her pale hair, skin, lips, a disquieting notion washes over him: She is not real. She materializes each night so that they may speak, then melts back into the city, dissolving into the salt-whitened streets.

  She may be trouble. Funny—from the time he was a child, he has always thought of himself as a person who avoids trouble and complication at all costs. Yet the facts of his life tell a different story. Sometimes he wonders if it is his fate to be controlled by people with the tug of stars, to let himself be pulled into their trouble again and again and learn nothing from it.

  * * *

  WHEN THEY were seventeen, Edwin and Clive and the rest of their class graduated from Everett Lyle Secondary School, all of them except Arthur, who had dropped out a year prior and who, as everybody save his sweet father knew, was into some serious shit by then. He could be found many nights loitering outside the bars and discos around Hibiscus Harbour, sometimes dealing to the tourists, sometimes looking to score. Damien continued his schooling; he would do well on his A-levels, receive a local scholarship, and go on to study biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. His picture would appear in the island newspaper, along with those of the other students from their form who would be attending college off-island, bound for Saint Thomas, Barbados, Miami, Washington, D.C.

  “You better not come back all assified,” Don would tell Damien when they gathered to see him off.

  “I’m right behind you outta here, Doc,” Edwin would say.

  The rest of them found work. Don got a job in his uncle’s auto repair shop. Des, good with boats like his brother Keithley, scored a gig aboard a party boat that took tourists—mostly American college students on spring break—for all-you-can-drink tours up and down the island’s south coast. The boat had a dance floor, and the nightly tour included a dance competition in which a dozen or so girls vied for the prize of coupons for five free drinks at Papa Mango’s. Often as they danced, the girls shed their clothes—flinging their tank tops into the crowd, sliding their panties down their legs. Des had been at the job a month when he confessed to his friends that there might be such a thing as too much pum pum. After four months, a naked woman was nothing to him. He would look at the girls flaunting their hips and breasts and feel an emptiness like water.

  Despite his grandmother’s disapproval, Clive joined Edwin in pursuing what Edwin referred to as his “business ventures.” It was not uncommon for them to have four or five such ventures going at any one time. They started an agency doing paperwork for charter boats on the cheap. They went to Philipsburg, on the Dutch side of Saint Martin, stocked up on Guess jeans, and resold them in the Basin. They went out into the shallows of Britannia Bay at midnight and hunted sea crayfish, which they sold by the pound to the restaurant at the Oasis. “Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Edwin was fond of saying, as they hefted enormous trash bags filled with jeans through the streets of Philipsburg, or when Clive got his hand snipped by a crayfish at two A.M. They were earning a pittance, less than any of their friends, but Edwin was certain it was just a matter of time before they stumbled on the right idea, at which point they would finally have the cash to “make a big move,” which Clive understood meant leaving—for the States, for New York, someplace with a stage grand enough for his friend’s ambitions.

  His life took on a familiar shape. He worked with Edwin. At night, they drove to wherever they were liming that night. (Officer Roy pulling them over with some regularity and tossing them in jail for the night to sober up.) When he arrived home, he stumbled into bed and slept until his grandmother swatted him awake, and then the whole thing began again.

  He was nineteen the day Edwin did something that would change his life forever. It was Carnival. They had spent the afternoon with their friends at the Grand Parade along Investiture Boulevard, watching the revelers and passing a bottle of rum among themselves, cheering when their favorite local band went by on a truck with speakers blaring, catcalling Miss Island Queen with her silly crown. As the festivities wound down, they spotted Sara and her friend across the parade route.

  “Your girl’s looking fine today!” Des said.

  “Check she out, dressed like a sket,” added Don.

  Sara Lycott was wearing a yellow dress that ended just below her ass, a thing that was altogether unlike the proper, innocent girl Clive had known all his life.

  “You going to ask to walk she home or what?” Edwin said.

  “Stop fooling,” Clive mumbled.

  “Who’s fooling? This is your moment! She dressed like a sket because she’s hungry for it.”

  Clive took a swig from the bottle of rum.

  “Look at he, too puss to even try!” Don said.

  Then Edwin grabbed him by the shoulders and looked at him with such conviction it shook Clive to his core. “You want to live your life or what, man?” He didn’t wait for Clive to reply. “Go!” With that, he shoved Clive, who stumbled out into the parade. He hurried across the street and found himself standing before the tight female circle of Sara and her friends.

  * * *

  IT WAS over a mile from Investiture Boulevard to Sara’s house. They walked along the side of the road. Sara wore peach pumps, her ankles wobbling on the uneven ground; she stopped periodically to brush the dust from her shoes. For some time, they walked in a silence that seemed to concern Sara not in the least, while Clive was desperate to break it but could come up with nothing to say, his mind at turns swirling and blank. He didn’t understand how it had happened. She’d stood there surrounded by her friends, arms crossed, as he stuttered his invitation. “M-m-mmmay I walk you home?” Once he’d gotten the words out, he looked up at her, awaiting her rejection. But something had changed in her. It wasn’t just the dress. Her eyes, usually so sharp and flashing, held a dull detachment, as if she were watching herself in this moment from some great distance. She opened her mouth and said, “You may.”

  “How did you enjoy the parade?” he tried finally.

  “The parade is the parade.”

  They walked on.

  “You look nice today,” he said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You always do. You’re beautiful, Sara.” He had wanted to say this to her for years, but had never believed he really would.

  “You’re the only one who thinks so.” She paused to dislodge a pebble from her shoe. “Shall we go to Milk Queen?” She pointed down Tillery Street in the direction of the ice-cream parlor.

  She ordered a banana split with peppermint ice cream. He got nothing for himself. He would have felt foolish eating in front of her. Sara ate her ice cream with the same weariness with which she’d responded to his compliments. She picked at it, licking tiny spoonfuls with a tongue like a cat’s, setting the spoon down, then sighing and picking it up again, as if this were merely one more in an endless line of tasks she must complete before she could be dead. Why had she said yes to his invitation? He wanted to touch the secret world inside her. Instead, he watched dumbly as she ate. When at last she’d scraped the glass dish clean, she murmured, “You’d best take me home now.”

  They didn’t speak on the walk from Milk Queen to her house. His throat felt clutched by a hand. He had not the faintest idea what had happened in the past hour, and he supposed that was what everybody meant when they talked about the mystery of women. There was some consolation, at least, in joining the ranks of mystified men.

  Sara’s house was a single-story cinder-block-and-plaster home like everybody else’s, but the paint was fresh—white, with sunshine-yellow trim. The short front walkway was lined with purple flowers and there were no enervated donkeys or dogs cluttering the yard. All of this contributed to an air of gentility that Clive felt befitted a minister’s widow and daughter brought down by circumstance. The only discordant feature was an old
, tumbledown cookhouse out back, with a rusted galvanized roof.

  As they turned off the road and walked up to the house, Sara’s mother appeared in the doorway. Miss Agatha, like her daughter, was a meager woman, no taller than a child. Growing up, he had seen her at church every Sunday. But as she stood in the doorway, her stance slack and desultory, her eyes darting like a hen’s, it occurred to him that he had not seen her there in years.

  “G-g-good evening, Miss Agatha,” he managed. The mother had the same effect on him as the daughter.

  She did not respond, just continued to stand in the doorway with her arms at her sides. Past where she stood, he could see the parlor. There were piles everywhere, and dirty dishes stacked on a table. A framed painting hung askew on the wall; beneath it a planter held the brown husk of a dead plant. As he took it in, mouth agape, he thought of Sara’s pristine speech and dress, everything that made the other boys call her snob and prude. He thought of his grandmother’s house, its smell of bleach and not a thing out of place. He thought of his mother’s house, and of his mother. When he felt Sara looking at him, he tried to avert his eyes from the scene, but he was too late—she had seen him seeing it. She bent her head. He wanted to tell her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted to tell her he understood how the shame came not just from being from a home like this, a mother like this, but from loving a home like this, a mother like this. But before he could do anything but fidget, Sara shook her head, and when she raised her eyes to meet his they were rinsed clean, bright and flashing as always. Miss Agatha turned and walked back into the dark house.

  “Your mum vex?” he asked.

  “My mum is nothing.”

  “I hope you did have a good time,” he said pitifully.

  Sara kept her eyes fixed on the ground.

  Clive turned and walked down the porch steps, past the purple flowers that lined the front walk. He was about to turn back onto the road when he heard footsteps behind him. Then he felt Sara grab his hand. He turned, and she met his gaze. Her eyes were shining, he couldn’t tell if there were tears or if it was the moonlight. She pulled him off the walkway.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Hush,” she said. She led and he followed, around the house to the yard and into the old cookhouse.

  * * *

  TWO MONTHS later, when Sara told him that she was pregnant, Clive had the feeling that this eventuality had been waiting for him all along. He was scared as shit, but it had a rightness to it. Clive and Sara. He looked at her belly and tried to get his mind around the truth that a person who was half him and half her was inside, blooming into being day by day. It seemed like a thing that could not possibly have happened to anyone else ever before.

  “I want you to know I’m going to take care of you,” he told her. “Both of you.”

  “You don’t even have a job,” she whispered. Her voice was not angry or accusatory. There was nothing in it at all. She blinked.

  “I’ll get one. We can rent a place of our own. Buy a car. It will be okay. I promise.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to make promises you can’t keep?”

  “I will keep it, Sara. We can be married. We can be a family.”

  He did not stumble on the words. He had at last found something worthy of his conviction.

  Sara looked right past him. “What kind of family would we be? You out all the time carrying on with your friends, and me … you’ve seen how I did grow up.”

  “It won’t have to be like that. I’ll stop all of it. We can give this child everything.”

  “I might be crazy like her. I know I might.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Sara.” He took her hands in his, but she yanked them away.

  “You think because you did rut with me like a goat in a shed I must marry you?” she snapped.

  He wanted to tell her he would weather any storm with her. He wanted to remind her that what happened in the cookhouse had been her idea; that as he emptied himself into her in the pitch-dark, breathing in the smell of must and rusted metal, he felt such sadness, because he didn’t want to do it like this, that he would be angry with himself forever for letting it happen the way it did.

  “I know you come from a good family,” he said instead. “I’m prepared to set you up how you deserve.”

  She stared at the dirt. “If you believe I’m a minister’s daughter, you’re a fool for true.”

  * * *

  “SWEET BOY LIKE honey. Always stick to the most venomous girl.” His grandmother said this as if it could not be helped. Clive had waited nearly a month to inform her that he was going to be a father, telling himself he was withholding the news simply because it was none of her business.

  “Sara is not venomous.”

  “Don’t give me that backchat.”

  “You don’t know anything about her.”

  She snorted, then released a laugh like vinegar. “I know she crazy mother. I know goat don’t make sheep.”

  He slammed his fist on the table. “She’s the mother of my child and I won’t let you speak low of she!” he shouted.

  For the first time in his life his grandmother averted her eyes from him. Looking back, he would realize this was the moment when she relinquished him to himself; never again would she pester him about his late-night liming or encourage him to enter a training program so that he might learn a vocation.

  “Oh, you’re a real man now,” she whispered.

  He wanted to press himself to her and weep.

  * * *

  HE BEGAN looking for a job the day Sara told him she was carrying his child, but found nothing. He was beginning to despair, and to think that Sara was right when she’d told him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, when Edwin announced he’d secured interviews at a new resort for both of them. “I thought nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Clive said when Edwin told him.

  “What you think, I’m going to abandon my bred in he hour of need? Beside, we gonna make mad service charge.”

  What would he do without Edwin? They were hired. The job came with a uniform, crisp and white, with Indigo Bay embroidered on the breast pocket in gold thread. When he went to Sara’s house in the uniform after his first day of work and gave her the tips he’d earned, she smiled the secret smile he’d seen all those years ago at the Christmas pageant, the one he’d been chasing ever since.

  Clive made plans. He spent a Saturday at the small island library, paging through a mildewed book about pregnancy. He brought Sara ginger candies to quell her nausea. He purchased bottles and diapers and a soft brown bear he imagined would become his child’s favorite. He made sure Sara had the phone number for the back office at Indigo Bay so he could be reached when it was time.

  But in the end, Sara went into labor at night, three weeks early. He was at Paulette’s with his friends. He stumbled home that night the same as usual, woke from his hungover sleep the next morning like always. It was only when he went into the kitchen and saw his grandmother sitting stiffly at the table that he knew something had happened.

  “You have a son,” she said.

  He could not square in his mind how, as he’d been drinking with his friends, elsewhere, he was becoming a father. He would never know exactly when it had happened. The moment he went from being one thing to another was lost to him forever.

  When he went to Sara in the hospital that morning, she would not look at him.

  “How could you?” she whispered. She held the baby, his son, asleep in her arms, swaddled in a pale blue blanket.

  But how could he have known she would go into labor so early? Didn’t she see all he’d done to prepare? Didn’t she know he was not the deadbeat she seemed to want to make him into? He was about to say all of this to her, but the look in her eyes stopped him. It was not sadness, or hurt, but a brittle, impassive stare. The world had disappointed her once again, as she always expected it to, only this time he was the one who had done it.

&nb
sp; The baby began to cry, a desperate wail that sucked the air out of Clive.

  Sara turned away from him as she rocked the child. “Hush, Bryan. Hush, my sweet love.”

  When Clive told me I was beautiful, my heart cracked. All my life I had waited for a boy to say that to me, and now one had, and it didn’t matter, because I could not let myself believe it. I had finally gotten what I wanted and it was no good because I was who I was and I always would be. Everything was like that, ruined just because it was me it all happened to.

  Sara Lycott. So proper and well spoken, so devout at church, so obedient at school. How my friends would have recoiled if they saw who I became at home with my mum, how we yelled and yanked and scratched.

  Behind its freshly painted exterior, our house was a wild place. We were not so much mother and daughter as two women suffocating together, breathing into one another until all the air in the house had been warmed by the insides of both of us. There was nothing in life we were not tired of.

  Though we fought all the time, we only had a single argument, which we repeated over and over until I was insentient to it as stone. Our fight was like the walk home from school, marked by familiar signposts: the Scotts’s orange front door, the pothole shaped like a heart on Underhill Road. I think there was comfort in knowing we would only hurt each other in familiar ways. I think I hoped each time that the argument would finally take us somewhere new, out beyond the hating and loving and hating that was all I had ever known.

  It went like this: I would sass, or leave a mess, or be a disappointment to my mum in some other way, and she would scold that I should be better, for I was the daughter of a government minister and I could not afford to forget it. I would shout back, call her hypocrite. “When was the last time you did clean we house?” I would say, and off we would go, shouting about all the ways the other had failed to live up to the kind of family we both pretended we were.