Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Mom?” I said finally.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “What happened when I went to Paris with Aunt Caroline? When I came back everything was different, but I never knew why.”

  My mother pursed her lips, and I feared she was going to give me the kind of evasive nonanswer I was used to from her.

  “I told your father it had to stop. Not just him with the police. Me, too. Both of us.”

  “But why? Why did you just give up?”

  “We didn’t give up, sweetheart. But we had to leave it behind. Because we had you, and you were everything. You are everything. We wanted you to have a life.”

  I think Alison was wrong about our mother. I was, too. We thought she was a fragile, timid woman. But as I looked at her on the bench, a smile flickering in her eyes as a young boy toddled unsteadily past us holding a small pink ball, I saw her differently. It took strength not to allow oneself to be subsumed by a thing that loomed so large.

  * * *

  (NOT LONG after my parents’ visit to New York, a Hollywood agent would drive out to Laurel Canyon, let himself into a mid-century modern house nestled among eucalyptus trees, and find the actor, dead in his bed. Foul play not suspected. Oxycontin, Ativan, and cocaine found on the nightstand, according to an anonymous paramedic. Most of the articles about his death were accompanied by the same photograph, a recent paparazzi shot in which the actor gave the impression of abundant unwellness: long unruly hair, a too-big suit and sandals, gin-glazed eyes and coffee-yellow teeth. I would stare at that photo, looking him in the eyes across time and space, life and death, and he would seem to look back at me.)

  * * *

  IT HAS been several years since I stepped into that taxi. I live in Charlotte now. I work in ad sales. My condo is spacious and bright, the walls painted an institutional peach I don’t really mind. I drive a little red Honda that gets great mileage. A few weeks ago, a coworker sent me an old article from The Onion, “Horrified Man Suddenly Realizes He’s Putting Down Roots in Charlotte,” and I laughed because it reminded me of me. I go by Claire here. At first hearing that name on the lips of my coworkers and new friends unsettled me. But I’ve grown used to it.

  Clive Richardson has disappeared from my life as completely as he entered it. I find comfort in not knowing where he is. Sometimes I close my eyes and send messages to him. I tell him I hope he’s found a place beyond the grip of his past. I tell him it wasn’t all a lie. I ask him not to judge me too harshly. The winter I spent with Clive is a locked room inside myself, one which, I’m reasonably certain, I will never open again. (Though still, now, when I find myself back in the city, I will climb into a taxi and hope that when the driver says hello it will be Clive’s voice I hear. And when, inevitably, it isn’t, I summon that voice, those nights, the city as it was that winter, and I tell myself, almost sternly, Remember this.)

  I can see now that during those months, I fooled myself into believing I was after closure, when all I really wanted was never to let go. Because, as Alison’s scar was her most sacred vanity, her death was mine. Because I needed a murder mystery. Without one, what choice did I have but to be angry at Alison for making herself so indispensable to me, to all of us, and then being so careless with herself? (Drinking and drugs, a reckless swim, a stupid accident. The police had suggested this basic scenario from the beginning, but my parents had refused to accept it. Why would they have? Why would anyone accept such a sad and pointless story, a tale that was not even cautionary but simply tragic, a shame?) What choice was there, finally, but to admit that I hated Alison every bit as much as I loved her? I hated her while she was alive for the way her dazzling, spectacular self took up the entire spotlight, and I hated her even more for the oppressive shadow she cast with her death. How could I ever be enough? How could I possibly compare to someone who never had to grow up?

  Had she lived, perhaps in her twenties Alison would have been like Jackie, a person who might say to her friends, over craft beer or picklebacks or whatever beverage would have been de rigueur then, “I need to find time for my dancing,” in a way that suggested that her dancing was something the world needed. If I was visiting her, in Williamsburg or the Mission or Silver Lake, say to celebrate my sixteenth birthday, then I would have rolled my eyes when she said this, and I would have gotten to experience the wrenching, liberating moment when your idol becomes just another person. She might have grown to be a woman like Nika, preoccupied by her children’s homework assignments and video game habits. Perhaps she would now be living a life not so dissimilar from our parents’; maybe she would take her own children to Caribbean resorts and reflect, as she read a memoir beneath an umbrella’s shade, on the trade-offs she had made for a life that was, it turned out, more than enough.

  I still haven’t told my parents—not about Clive, or Alison, or what happened to me that winter. Maybe someday I will. The thing is, I haven’t decided if telling them would do them any good. For so long it was all I wanted. The truth! The truth! Good, fine, but for what? With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose? It seems to me now that some truths will never be enough to seal the mysteries that precede them. I think in her own way my mother understood this all along—that there is nothing the truth can give you that you cannot give yourself. That in the end, you just have to decide. To live. To continue.

  SAINT X

  LOOK DOWN UPON SAINT X from above and it will appear as if little has changed. In the Basin, children in pink and maroon uniforms still run and shout through the yard of Horatio Byrd Primary. Her Majesty’s Prison, eggshell-blue, still stands beside the bank. Along the winding ribbon of Mayfair Road there are now billboards for Digicel and FLOW broadband, but the white stucco churches remain, as does Perry’s Snackette, and the radio tower with its flaking red paint, houses with galvanized roofs and sandy yards. Float up and over Devil Hill and there it is—Little Beach. It is late afternoon, and everyone has gathered here. They have their umbrellas and picnic baskets, their coolers filled with cola and Carib. Constellations of families float in the sea. Children clamor out of the water and run onto the pier, not even pausing before leaping off the edge back into the water, again and again in an unbroken loop.

  Search among the faces and you will see a woman seated on a blue and white cloth, a point of stillness amid a lively family gathering. Her eldest grandchild dribbles a football down the sand. The youngest is curled asleep in the shade cast by the woman’s own body. Her daughter-in-law hushes and soothes and doles out kisses and tamarind balls. Her sons, Bryan and Eddie, laugh together as they let the workweek’s troubles lift from their shoulders. Sometimes she cannot quite believe that all of this is hers. Sara Lycott is neither as young as she once was nor as young as she still feels sometimes, until she catches herself in a shop window, startled by the silver flash of her own hair. It has been years since she first laid lisianthus on her mum’s grave. Remarkable, isn’t it, that a woman her age, who has not been anyone’s daughter in a long, long time, still, hearing a funny story on the news, or picking the first ripe sugar-apple in the yard, opens her mouth to call out, “Mum”? On some nights, she is still laid low by a longing for her mother’s house. She longs for bedding that smells human and that has grown soft as oil with unwashing. The plink of a sink that leaked throughout her whole childhood. The odors of old fruit in the refrigerator, of her mother’s urine in the bathroom. In her own house, she washes and presses the sheets on Tuesdays. She keeps the bathroom scrubbed and smelling of bleach. When a thing breaks she fixes it. When a thing is empty she disposes of it.

  The best thing she ever did was to behave in front of her children. If all she could give them was to contain the dark, squalid rooms within her, then that is enough. If to other people it seems like very little, well, she knows that it is everything. She has freed them from a burden they do not even know exists, that of being tormented by a deep, unsolvable ache for all the wrong things.

  She has outlive
d them all. Her mother. The father whose name she never knew, whom she assumes must be long dead. Edwin, whom she nursed until his last breath but who never, not even then, truly let her in. (Yet did two boys ever have a father who adored them more?) Only Clive is still out there somewhere. Rumors reach the island. Last she heard he’d left New York for the West Coast someplace. According to a friend of hers, he got married out there and has a daughter. But this is secondhand knowledge at best. She does not think of him often. A difficult chapter in her life, from when she was very young. It has been so long since any of them were here with her that her own endurance confounds her. Lately, she has the oddest notion that she might go on living forever.

  The baby beside her on the blanket stirs and cries. Before she can reach out for him, Bryan is there, scooping the child into his arms.

  “There, there, my boy,” he whispers. “You’re all right. You’re just fine.”

  * * *

  TRAVEL TO the edge of the island’s south coast and you will find yourself on a different beach, where the sand is soft as cream. At the water’s edge, children turn cartwheels and bury one another in the sand. A boy lifts a conch to his ear and hears the secret sea. A mother considers grabbing her phone to capture this moment; instead, she just watches him. A cruise ship glides soundlessly across the middle distance. Somewhere, in another world that is also this world, it is snowing.

  Farther up the sand, a little girl sits beneath an umbrella as a woman braids her hair. In the sea, brothers on boogie boards ride the gentle waves. A teenage boy picks up a girl and threatens to dunk her, and she squeals with delight.

  A woman pauses on her walk down the beach and watches them all. This place is much as she remembers it. The pool in the shape of a lima bean, the open-air restaurant where last night she ate conch carpaccio and drank rum punch on the veranda and felt the cool ocean breeze. As with all places remembered from childhood, it appears smaller now, more ordinary. The domed ceiling of the marble lobby is not quite so high, the sand not quite so white, as they are in her memory. They’ve changed the name, too. Indigo Bay is the Royal Hibiscus now, and has been for years; a rebranding effort after the things that happened.

  One more thing is different: Several years ago, a French conglomerate purchased the development rights to Faraway Cay. Now it is a private island resort and spa with bungalows built on stilts in the shallows. According to the resort’s website, the restaurant is helmed by a celebrated Nordic chef who “marries his farm-to-table ethos with the local Caribbean bounty.” The spa’s offerings include a hot volcanic-stone massage, a local salt scrub, and a two-hour “Arawak Ritual” that promises “complete purification of both body and spirit.” The downed planes on the cay have been preserved. There is a picture of one in the website’s photo gallery, a yellow wing choked in sea grape. Stroll past the island’s mysterious relics en route to your own private waterfall.

  The goats are gone. Exterminated, one assumes.

  When the woman reaches the black rocks that mark the end of the beach, she sits in the sand and looks out at the cay. The white beach. The cliffs tufted with growth, a vivid green unlike any she has seen before or since. She can make out the bungalows that ring the shore and, if she squints, people on the beach—husbands with wives, parents with children. The woman stands, brushes the sand from her legs, and walks back in the direction from which she has come.

  On the volleyball court, a game is under way. The players are newlyweds and retirees, thirty-somethings and teenagers. They bump and set and spike. When a girl who is a bit of a weak link serves up a winner, both sides cheer. After a teenager takes a running dive into the sand to save a point, a retiree slaps him five. “Appreciate those,” the man says, and points to the boy’s knees. “They’ll betray you someday.”

  The woman watches, as she watched years ago. It occurs to her that this game is always under way; that, in a sense, it never ends.

  In the shallows, two pairs of legs poke out of the water—a handstand contest. A moment later, two sisters surface.

  “I win!”

  “No, me!”

  “First one to the buoy!”

  They are off, swimming away from shore.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  From New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, it is possible to fly direct to nearly twenty Caribbean islands. One can reach Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, and Puerto Rico in under four hours; Antigua, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Saint Kitts, Grenada, Trinidad, Aruba, and Martinique in under five. Some 15 million American tourists visit the Caribbean each year. The islands are so close, American tourists visit them so frequently, and yet most of these visitors know so little about them. For a long time, I have been fascinated by the place the Caribbean seems to occupy in the mind of the American tourist as an “escape,” or, as I put it early in the novel, a “lovely nowhere.”

  This phenomenon was at the heart of my decision to create a fictional, unnamed island, Saint X, for my setting. Building the world of Saint X was a process I undertook with a great deal of questioning about what it means to invent a fictional island within a place that is not fictional at all. In a region where every island has a rich and distinctive history, culture, dialect, cuisine, flora and fauna, and on and on, how does one approach creating a fictive space that embodies without simplifying, that is none of these places, exactly, but is also never pure invention? I have done my best to create in Saint X a cohesive place that, I can only hope, will inspire readers who don’t know much about the Caribbean to learn more.

  In this process, I am especially indebted to the wonderful series of Caribbean histories and guides published by Macmillan Caribbean in the nineteen eighties and nineties, in particular: Nevis: Queen of the Caribees by Joyce Gordon, Anguilla: Tranquil Isle of the Caribbean by Brenda Carty and Colville Petty, St. Kitts: Cradle of the Caribbean by Brian Dyde, St. Lucia: Helen of the West Indies by Guy Ellis, Grenada: Isle of Spice by Norma Sinclair, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines by Lesley Sutty. To the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and the New Register of Caribbean English Usage, both edited by Richard Allsopp. To Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (see also the beautiful map “Archipelago: The Caribbean’s Far North” created by cartographer Molly Roy in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Jelly-Schapiro and Rebecca Solnit). To Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook by Donald R. Hill. And to Jamaica Kincaid’s seminal work, A Small Place.

  When it came to rendering Clive Richardson’s life in New York City, some key sources included Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in NYC by Biju Mathew, and Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York edited by Nancy Foner.

  I am incredibly grateful to those people on Anguilla who gave so generously of their time when I visited the island for research. Thank you to Josveek Huligar for being such a fun and helpful guide. My deepest gratitude to Anhel Brooks, Trevon Liburd, to M., to A., to M., and to J. for sharing your stories with me. Thanks also to Scott Kircher for the introduction to Trudy Nixon, and to Trudy for sharing her experience as an incomer on the island.

  Thank you to Melissa Borja for sharing her knowledge on conducting oral histories and interviews.

  To Stephanie Stokes Oliver and Crispin Brooks for reading the manuscript with such brilliance and care. To Graham Gao Hodges for so graciously reading the passages about Clive’s working life in New York.

  To wonderful friends who shared geographic and linguistic expertise with me: Margo Levin, Kate Rubin, Dave Serafino, Geraldine Shen, and Erin Zimmer. To Marisa Reisel for … everything.

  To the brilliance and generosity of Greg Jackson and Lulu Miller, who read this book when it was a mess and saw so clearly how it could become less of one. To my teachers: Christopher Tilghman, Caroline Preston, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Chang-rae Lee, Joyce Carol O
ates, and Wendy Phelps.

  I thank my lucky stars daily that Henry Dunow is my agent. He is the wisest reader I know, and he worked with me patiently over many years and many, many drafts to help this book find its footing. Thank you also to the wonderful Arielle Datz and everyone else at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

  To my fabulous editor, Deb Futter, who sees everything so clearly and who made this process more fun than I could have imagined. To Rachel Chou, Anna Belle Hindenlang, Randi Kramer, Christine Mykityshyn, Jaime Noven, Heather Orlando, Clay Smith, Anne Twomey, and everyone else at Celadon: I feel so fortunate to be in your capable hands. Thank you also to David Cole, Elizabeth Catalano, Cheryl Mamaril, and Jonathan Bennett for their wonderful work on this book, and to the incredible Callum Plews at Macmillan Audio for his work on the audiobook.

  Our son was born a year before this book was completed, and I never would have finished it were it not for the people who cared for him so lovingly in his first year. To Meg Sweet, Cate Nowlan, Roberta Sweet, Carly Knight, Allison Haley, Maria Mastrandrea, and Molly Egger: Thank you.

  To Shawn, Walter, Charlie, James, and Kelsey: I’m so lucky to be able to call you my family.

  To Dona, Keith, and Brian: my rocks, my favorite people, from the very beginning.

  To Emerson, our baby, our big boy. We are the very luckiest to have your light and spirit in our family.

  And, always, to Mason, whose faith in me is the most profound thing I’ve ever known. I love you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexis Schaitkin’s short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and son. Saint X is her debut novel. You can sign up for ebook updates here.