Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  I didn’t move.

  “Come on, Em, get your butt downstairs and get changed.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “Of course you are. I have a whole day planned. After barre class there’s brunch at this amazing vegetarian place on Bedford. They do a homemade chai that is life-changing.”

  I tried to walk around her, but she reached out and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “What the hell? Are you seriously going to walk away from me?”

  She held me firmly and our eyes locked. In that moment I saw many things clearly that had previously been opaque to me. Jackie was a basically good person, but I did not like her and I never had. It wasn’t just Jackie. It was all of my friends. They were dramatic, self-absorbed, ridiculous people, and I had always thought so. I had cultivated friendships with them not for intimacy and connection but to be able to judge them, and to extract from our every interaction a sense of my own superiority. Look what I had been through! And still I was better than the lot of them. What was wrong with me? Why was I the way I was? Alison, Alison, the answer was always Alison.

  “Excuse me,” I said again.

  Jackie’s eyes filled with tears. She released me.

  As I hurried down the street I heard her call after me. “I’m trying to help you! Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”

  * * *

  WHEN A person you love dies, the calendar becomes a minefield. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. There is the loved one’s birthday. One’s own birthday. Various national and religious holidays, if one is religious. All of these days are difficult in their own ways. The loved one used to call you and sing happy birthday over the phone, awful and tone-deaf. Cranberry relish was the loved one’s favorite Thanksgiving food, they used to eat and eat. But the anniversary is different. On the anniversary of the loved one’s death, you slip backward through time to this same day one, five, ten years ago. (Eighteen years … How could it be? She had been gone as many years as she was alive.) You live it all over again, minute by minute.

  I made my way to Clive’s apartment building just before noon. I was sitting under the faded blue umbrella then. We were sorting through the woman’s basket of beads together, picking out purple and white beads, colors I had chosen not because they were my favorite but because they were hers. As I walked east on Cortelyou, I felt the brisk, delicate movements of the woman’s hands braiding my hair.

  The light was on in Clive’s window. I walked to the end of the block and sat on a front stoop diagonal from his building to wait. I’d left my apartment in such a hurry, what with Jackie’s unexpected appearance, that I hadn’t even grabbed my coat. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and within minutes my ears burned with cold. Alison pecked me on the forehead. She walked down the beach and was gone.

  More than two hours passed before the light in Clive’s window finally went off. A few minutes later, the front door opened and he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He walked first to the bodega a few blocks away. He was inside for just a minute and emerged empty-handed. We headed south on New York Avenue, passing block after block of red-brick midrise apartment buildings, interrupted occasionally by a blip of row houses. Clive turned onto Nostrand at Avenue H. I expected him to loop back up after a few blocks as he often did, perhaps to stroll the lawns and brickery of Brooklyn College and then take Flatbush back to Farragut back to New York. But he continued south. We passed Avenues I, J, and K. At Avenue L we briefly left the city behind and entered a mirage-like stretch of Japanese car service centers—Acura, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai—which we exited to find ourselves deep in Jewish Midwood. Men draped in prayer shawls sporting enormous fur hats, girls in long dark dresses and black loafers crossing streets blanched white with salt. It was midafternoon. She was lying on the beach, sipping a Diet Coke in the sun. I wanted her to play with me, but I didn’t want to annoy her, so I didn’t ask, I waited. My, you a patient child.

  We walked through Sheepshead Bay on Avenue U, then took Coney Island Avenue down into Brighton Beach. While the neighborhoods we traveled through each had their differentiating features—Hebrew giving way to Cyrillic on shop signs, Kosher then Georgian then Russian bakeries—it was the landscape’s repetitions that began to take hold of me, the endless cycling of deli, slice joint, Key Foods, MetroPCS, and the thousands of thousands of brick apartment buildings. The farther we walked, the more disoriented I became by the on and on and on of the borough, by its vast peripheries and the impossible number of people living their lives out past anyplace I had ever wondered about. We passed Avenues X, Y, Z. Neptune. We had been walking for nearly two hours. It seemed the brick apartment buildings would go on forever, and when we turned onto Oriental Boulevard and, after a few more minutes, found ourselves standing on the sand of what I now know to be Manhattan Beach, the sight of the ocean stretching before me was like stepping into a dream. I clung to the perimeter of the beach while Clive walked forward. The sand was a gray crescent, the sea a sheet of shale. A man in a parka sat on a bench, tossing shards of bread to the gulls. The sun was already beginning to go down. We were in the water, one last swim before the flight home the next day. The salt water stung then soothed the bites on my legs. Alison dove into the waves, surfacing and disappearing again and again. Clive stood at the water’s edge for a long time, staring out at the ocean.

  Before he turned to go, he pulled something from the pocket of his jacket. From where I stood, it took some squinting to discern that it was a chocolate bar, which must have been what he’d purchased at the bodega. He removed his gloves and unwrapped it. The sun set without fanfare, its weak light spilling briefly and colorlessly across the clouds. Clive ate the chocolate bar slowly, never turning from the water. Then he crumpled the wrapper, stuffed it in his pocket, and headed home.

  How did I pick Saint X? Easy. I knew not a soul there and not a soul knew me. I had two suitcases and Sara. She was four months old, a scrawny babe with a head of dewy curls and an aroma like boiling milk turning to caramel. I wore the prettiest thing I owned, my floral dress and ivory pumps. The pumps had cut up my feet before Saint Kitts was even out of view, but so what? They would heal somewhere else, and that was all that mattered. I was seventeen.

  When we debarked at Bendy Harbour, a gentleman in a linen suit offered to help me with my luggage. When he asked my name, I told him I was Agatha Lycott, which wasn’t true. All my life I had been Agatha Hodge, but over my dead body would I be her here, too. Lycott was the surname of a girl in the form above me at school. I always thought it elegant, the sort of name that, of course, belongs to somebody else. From that day forward it was mine and, above all, Sara’s. To anyone who asked, I told the story I had dreamed up awake and alone and growing bigger in the dark in my father’s house, about how my husband, a government minister, had died in a tragic automobile accident just weeks before our daughter’s birth. To make the story more convincing I told everyone I was twenty-four, though I was such a small thing I could more easily have passed for twelve.

  But this one’s cousin on Saint Kitts knew that one’s friend on Saint X, and so on. I had been on the island less than a month the first time I told my story and was met with suspicion rather than compassion. The rumors trailed me even here, to this sand-and-rock speck where they make their curry with vulgar quantities of allspice and where not even the teachers speak properly.

  You can never start over. They will not permit it, neither the ones who shun you nor the ones who are kind to you so they may lord their kindness over you. In the end they are all after the same thing, all so very curious to know the truth about the origins of the daughter of that skinny little Kittitian sket. I will not give them the satisfaction, though the truth would make them beg for my forgiveness. I will carry the secret of Sara’s paternity to my grave.

  Before Sara was born, I imagined that my love for my child would be a sweet blooming inside
of me. I was desperate to have someone to love this way, desperate for love to swoop in and soften my sharp edges. But there are other kinds of love. What I got instead was a love that filled and terrified me, a love I knew as intimately as my own body; it was my mother’s love for me, a thing I never, ever wanted.

  When Sara told me she was pregnant, I knew I had been naïve to think a new name would be enough to put an end to the passing down of this broken mother’s love. I never should have let her leave the house so angry that day, the day she brought Clive Richardson home. Wait! Don’t go! Sara, I love you. Sara, forgive me. Sara, my child.

  At night, I plead into the darkness, hoping with the force of my love to undo the past so she may begin again.

  But answer me this: If I’m such a sket, then why have I been lonely every day of my life?

  SNOW

  AFTER THEY FOUND THE GIRL, Clive became untouchable. When he was released from prison he tried to return to his life, but Don and Des closed ranks. Even Arthur wouldn’t touch him. He couldn’t find work, not cutting grass, not even scrubbing toilets at Papa Mango’s. He and Edwin kept their distance from one another. As far as he knew, Edwin had also been shut out of polite society, but it was different for him. He hadn’t been to prison, for one thing. He didn’t have a family to support, for another.

  For weeks after his release, Clive went to Sara’s house and begged to see his son. But Agatha wouldn’t let him past the front door. Finally, one day, he waited down the road until he saw Agatha go out. Then he went up the front walkway. “Please, Sara! Let me talk to you!” he shouted as he pounded on the door. He didn’t care who saw.

  The door swung open. “Hush,” Sara scolded. “You’ll wake him.”

  He told her everything he had planned during his time in Her Majesty’s Prison. He was sorry. He would do whatever it took to make it up to her. He would quit drinking and smoking. He had messed up and he knew it, but he would fix it.

  “And what kind of mum would I be if I let you into my boy’s life after this mess?”

  “But I’m innocent! I swear it! Don’t you believe me, Sara?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you are,” she snapped. “Innocent, guilty, can’t you see? It’s all spoiled.”

  “I know it must seem that way right now. But with time, maybe—”

  She shook her head. She had her hand on the door, ready to close it.

  “Please,” he begged.

  She paused. She smiled a small, sad smile. “You know, I think you’re the only person who was ever really sweet to me,” she said. Then she closed the door.

  * * *

  GROWING UP, Clive had known more than a few people who had returned to the island from abroad, and it was from them, long before he ever thought their stories would be relevant to his own life, that he learned what it meant to leave home. Almost all of these people had gone either to New York or London, though he knew a few who’d gone elsewhere—to Glasgow, Birmingham, Toronto, Miami. A few years before he left, a boy who’d been three forms above him at Everett Lyle Secondary flew off to Houston, but last Clive heard he, too, had washed up in New York.

  For most of his childhood, New York and London were roughly interchangeable to Clive, big, gleaming cities, more Dominicans and Haitians in New York, more Jamaicans in London. But when Keithley returned from London with his wife and the baby boy who was destined to die on the soccer pitch behind Horatio Byrd, he began to understand that the people who returned from New York and those who returned from London had changed in distinct ways. Though Keithley had left home determined never to return, he appeared relieved to be back, and this seemed the case for many people returned from London. It was true they had failed to do what they had set out to do, to build a big life away. But in London it had become plain that this plan was naïve and misguided. The city had taught them that the big life was nothing but the delusion of a person from nowhere who didn’t know any better. They rarely spoke of their time away.

  The New Yorkers, too, appeared relieved to be home. New York, like London, had been drab and crowded and unforgiving, and the winters were colder and the summers hotter and more humid than in London. But their relief was thin, a skin covering the flesh of longing. They spoke of New York constantly, as one turns over a riddle one has not managed to solve. They seemed convinced they had missed the big life by inches. It had been there, set plainly before them, but some narrowness of vision had prevented them from grasping it. Now New York was over. They had not grasped it and they could not figure out why.

  Clive knew he was not like these men. He did not want to leave home. New York had been Edwin’s dream, never his. He arrived with no grand plans, no conviction that in New York the world would finally recognize his special deservingness. He hoped only that his time away might make it possible, someday, to go home and reclaim the only life he’d ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and his son. Mates and a drink after work. Picnics and cricket in the sand at Little Beach on the weekends. Perhaps another child eventually, a daughter, chubby like him. People did not forget, but they might decide, eventually, that they no longer cared.

  Most of the people he knew who had gone to New York had settled in the Bronx, but he did not want to run into people from home. He chose Flatbush because it was the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city; a place, he hoped, he could get lost in. He found a room in an apartment on Farragut Road, in a building whose dim hallways smelled of mice. The apartment had four small bedrooms, each shared by two men, and a common space with a kitchenette against one wall. When he moved in, a bunch of rotting bananas atop the fridge cast off a sickly sweet smell. In the bathroom, toothbrushes balanced precariously on the rim of the sink, which was lacquered with a pale blue chalk of hardened toothpaste; the floor around the toilet was littered with cardboard tubes. He could hardly believe this filthy apartment was New York, and he was thankful that it was he, not Edwin, who was here to see it.

  The unwritten rule of the apartment was that the men pretended not to see one another. In such close quarters, it was the only way to keep the peace. They took wordless turns in the bathroom, slept and woke and pretended not to overhear one another’s phone calls home.

  Only two of them disrupted this dreary concord. The first was Ousseini, Ouss for short, the youngest among them at twenty-two and the only one not from the Caribbean. He was short and sprightly, with the simultaneously curious and sleepy countenance of a child. On Clive’s first night in the apartment, as he unpacked his suitcase in his bedroom, Ouss stood in the doorway in his mesh shorts and undershirt, elbow against the doorjamb, and confessed he’d been socially and sexually deprived ever since he arrived in Brooklyn from Burkina Faso three years before.

  “I desire a wife with such ardor I can think of nothing else.”

  Clive was hot and tired and wanted only to lie down on his thin mattress and sleep. On the opposite side of the room his roommate Charles was flipping through a sports magazine, diligently ignoring Ouss and eyeing Clive every so often with a glint of warning.

  “You’re young,” Clive said succinctly.

  Ouss shook his head sadly. “This is what I thought, but it was an error. I have five brothers in Ouaga, and all have children. When they were marrying I thought they were foolish to start families. I thought I was so smart to remain free to pursue my dreams. Now I fear I am too late. I want a woman who will be my partner. I want to start a business. But what woman in New York will love me? We need women. All of us here. You, too, Charles!” Charles kept his eyes on his magazine. “You see! You see! We are becoming dysfunctional. To live in this world of solitary men is not natural.”

  Ouss talked on and on and Clive, not wanting to be rude, nodded politely and offered small words of comfort. Later, he understood that this had been his critical mistake. The other men ignored Ouss absolutely. This was how Clive became the recipient of Ouss’s laments, a position he found somewhat irritating, though ultimately not as disagreeable as he supposed he should, becaus
e, as Ouss had said, theirs was a solitary existence, and it was nice to have company.

  Then there was Sachin, as surly as Ouss was talkative and romantic. Sachin left his briefs on the bathroom floor, his old food in the fridge, was often drunk and prone to picking arguments. (Those were his bananas rotting atop the fridge when Clive moved in.) He took an immediate dislike to Clive, who found himself on the receiving end of much of the man’s vitriol. “It’s not personal,” Ouss assured him. “He possesses a lot of anger. He had a wife and daughter back in Trinidad who died in an accident after he left. I think he should go home and begin again, but he’s afraid. Jean-François says he speaks to them in his sleep.”

  In New York, with these men, he became Clive again, as he hadn’t been since Edwin christened him in the schoolyard at Horatio Byrd Primary. Gogo. That name, that world, that life. At times it seemed to him like one of the stories his mother used to tell him, vivid and vaporous as a dream.

  * * *

  NEW YORK surprised him. He expected a rough, gritty place, and while this vision was not exactly inaccurate, there were things it failed to capture. The pleasure of a nine P.M. summer sunset. In spring, in the parks, the quiet grace of what seemed like all the people in the world spread across the lawns. He had expected a place where there were a million things to see, but also where what you saw was what you got. Instead, New York seemed to tremble with the unseen. Subway tunnels whooshed people through the earth, the warm steam rising from street grates the only sign of this subterranean world. He had heard that the layers of the city went down ten meters, that below the city of today were buried houses, streets, and cemeteries, and he could sense this past beneath his feet. Walking at night, he sometimes feared someone would grab his elbow, and he would whip around to find himself staring into the eyes of his dead father.