“Nice time, Princess, nice time.”
Nola nodded as she gratefully sipped the cold drink. It really had been a nice time. Even Petra had danced with Kendra, holding the child’s hand and spinning in circles to Bony M’s “Brown Girl in the Ring.”
Nola sighed as she stared at the fresh wood that had replaced the hanging eave over the front door. “Why you think love dies, Ab? First it come on so strong, then it just dead soh?”
Ab shook the locks that had grown back into stubby rolls. They reminded Nola of little bronzed sausages. “True love don’t die, Princess!” he exclaimed. “The kind of love dat die is not real love.”
Nola took another sip of stout and smiled as a burst of laughter came from the house.
“Alright,” Ab said, tugging at the collar of her dress, “When you buy this dress, you did love it, right?”
Nola nodded, frowning quizzically at his serious face.
“And when you put it on this afternoon, you did still love it, right?”
Her frown deepened, but she nodded again.
“Well, when you tek it off tonight, you goin’ still love it, but you mind not goin’ be on it, cause you done wear it and it serve it purpose for today. Next time you want to dress up nice, you might put on this same dress, but I guarantee you someting, Princess, 15 years from now, you not goin’ love dat dress. You mightn’t even have dat dress in your closet, might be you think it gone out of style.”
Nola laughed. “So that is love? In your mind one minute, out the next!”
“Nah man, Princess!” Ab gave her an exasperated look. “Dat is not the real ting, man! Just listen to me nuh! Suppose I tek a knife right now and cut you there?” He pointed at her wrist.
Nola held up her stout bottle. “Then I would have to lick you cross your head with this bottle here!”
Ab chuckled. “You would bleed! And it would hurt you for a long time, nuh true? And then you would get a scar, and every time you look on dat scar you ‘memba how Ab cut you.”
“What you sayin’ Ab? That real love is like a cut, that hurt you bad?”
“It can hurt, yes, but what you really must think ‘bout, Princess, is the cut—that it go deep. Dat cut is forever. You can’t choose who cut you, but when dat person cut you, it affec’ you for the rest of your life! Dat is love, Princess, true love, what Rasta call agape! Can’t stop dat love, Princess.” Ab cocked his head meaningfully at the house where another burst of laughter erupted. “But when it come, it cut your heart deep, and dat scar stay there forever. Agape, Princess … never die!”
Nola laughed and slapped his shoulder playfully. “You’re a good one to talk, Ab—you who have a new empress for every month of the year!”
Ab tugged at her collar again. “Maybe I just still dressin’ up, Princess, still waitin’ for dat cut.”
Nola stared at the eave once again, suddenly serious. “Boy Ab, I been cut plenty times, and it don’t feel much like love to me.”
Ab did not answer. They both sat quietly beneath the night sky, sipping their stouts and listening to the cheers that wafted from the house, while the dew descended and glistened on his bronzed locks and her dark skin.
CHAPTER
54
Finally, life was good. Nola woke each morning with that excitement in the pit of her belly, the same feeling she’d had when she’d first been to Dahlia and Merlene’s home. Had Fate tired of playing its cruel pranks on her? This was the time when she should have quaked in her shoes, waiting with bated breath for Fate to sweep through her life and turn it upside down once again, but she became too busy to wait.
The Dah-Lilly School took so much of her time that she barely had time to eat. She worked with each child, individually, throughout the day, assessing their progress and set-backs and designing lesson plans for each challenge. Aunt May helped in conducting the lessons, while Nola took turns with each child outside in the yard beneath a jimbilin tree. She found that the children were calmer and more responsive outside, where the leaves whispered above their heads and birds cawed punctuation marks at the ends of their sentences. She couldn’t bring herself to teach at a desk like the teachers had done with such distracted interest at Redding Secondary. Instead, she spread a cloth on the grass, and taught just as she’d done with Dahlia under the mango tree. And soon, there were results.
Louisa continued with her periodic calls to the new house in Havendale, relating stories that held little interest for Nola. Mr. Spence had developed colon cancer and was dying in a New York hospital where his daughter had taken him to get ‘top, top care’; Pastor Peppers and Sister Norma had been discovered in the church office, stark naked and in a compromising position on top of Pastor’s desk; Lydia had cursed Mrs. Spence in the churchyard one morning, telling her she was a fat, interfering buttu before running off at the age of 14 to live with a taxi driver named “Mr. Hype”; all seemed very distant from Nola’s life. With the trauma of losing first Mr. Spence, then Lydia, Mrs. Spence had taken to her bed, and Louisa was put in full charge of Razzle Dazzle.
Each time Nola hung up the phone from Louisa’s excited chatter, she was left with a strange numbness in her chest. The calls brought no laughter when there was humour, no tears when there was sadness, no surprise when there was shock, no joy when there was pleasure. So, when Louisa called late one night to announce that she would be getting married the following month, Nola could only mumble a distracted ‘congratulations’. She did not ask to whom her sister was getting married, nor she did ask where the wedding was going to be, or how happy Mama and Papa were. She just said “congratulations” and hung up the phone.
After that Louisa stopped calling.
Petra remained withdrawn. It broke Nola’s heart when Kendra sobbed because Petra told her to leave the room so she could lie alone in the sour darkness of her unbathed skin. They all tried to fill Kendra’s life with distractions during those times—visits to the zoo to see the emaciated lion and dazed snakes curled in their cages, long walks along the Havendale sidewalks to identify all the flowers and trees that they passed in the gardens, lessons in cooking Hopey’s popular soups and stews.
“Bad wind,” Kendra came to refer to her mother’s episodes. “Bad wind blowin’ on Mammy,” she would say, and they knew that Petra had just locked her door. They knew that they would just have to wait the two or so days until Petra would once again emerge from the darkness and pat Kendra apologetically on the head.
Petra droned through life like a worker bee whose only goal was to make the honey for the queen, claiming none for itself. Even the achievements that made Kendra into the bright, self-sufficient person that Petra never thought she would be, brought nothing more from Petra than distracted smiles.
In the end, Nola realized that she’d saved Petra from Eric McKenzie, but she’d been unable to save her from herself. In Petra, Eric had glimpsed the incomplete painting, and he’d taken his paintbrush and splattered his dark, hideous strokes across it.
Nola tried many times to talk to the girl, to let her know the secrets that had ripped her away from her own family in Redding and brought her to Kingston; to let her know that just as she had survived, so could Petra. But Petra did not want to hear.
Then, the dreams began. Dreams about Petra, sitting in a drum of bubbles; the bubbles flowed over the rim, covering the girl’s mouth and leaving only her wide, frightened eyes to stare at Nola. Nola tried to slap the bubbles away so that Petra could breathe, but just as she got to the drum, Petra sank beneath the bubbles.
The dream haunted Nola for several nights, but each morning when she woke to seek Petra, she found with relief that the girl was going through one of her ‘good spells’, playing ‘Go Fish’ with Kendra and smiling with those muted smiles.
Nola dismissed the dream, at the time not knowing that her dreams were not to be dismissed.
Petra did it in the early morning, while the new sun was perched on the horizon—the time of the dew angels. Nola often wondered afterwards if she�
��d told Petra about the dew angels if she would have still done it. Would she have gone outside instead, and sat on the wet grass and allowed the wash to take the darkness away? Would she have felt the sun’s new light tickle her skin despite the ‘bad winds’ within her head?
Hopey had found her. She smelled the acid melting the body and followed the smell into the kitchen. She found Petra lying on the floor in the choppy ocean of her own vomit.
She’d drunk the half bottle of drain cleaner that had been left beneath the sink after Nathan had cleared the drain the week before.
It must have been a horrible, painful death, yet Petra had uttered not a sound, had not called for anyone to come to her aid as her body had contorted with pain. When Nola heard Hopey bellow, and ran to see the sight for herself, she could hear nothing but Petra’s words echoing through the kitchen, bouncing from one wall to the other—‘I too bad for this world … don’t belong in it’. Nola had understood as she’d stared at the face on the floor, frozen in the pain that had digested the lips right off the face—only someone who thought of herself as rotten, could have done such a terrible deed to herself.
They did not allow Aunt May or Kendra to see the body, and Aunt May did not fight as Nathan led her into the living room. She went quietly with him, and even when Hopey tore off her clothes and ran wailing down the street, Aunt May did not budge from the chair.
The neighbours brought Hopey back, and Mrs. Lyndsay wrapped her in sheets from the laundry room. By then Val and Ab had come, and they spoke to Hopey in soothing tones until she stopped wailing, hiccupping up at the police when they asked her if Petra had said anything when she found her. The police didn’t understand that Petra had already been dead when Hopey had found her, that she’d planned it that way so that they could not save her again.
They had to keep the casket closed at the funeral. They buried her at Dovecot Funeral Park, yards away from where her mother and father had been buried. The inscription on her tiny, aluminium tombstone read:
PETRA
BELOVED MOTHER, NIECE, FRIEND.
AT PEACE AT LAST.
They stood for a long time at her graveside. Long after the shell-shocked faces of their friends had stumbled away. They were left there alone, Petra’s family and adopted family—Aunt May, Kendra, Nathan, Mrs. Lyndsay, Nola, Hopey, Val, Ab and Mams. The air did the same thing it did when Dahlia and Merlene had died. It warbled loosely around them, flapping the folds that had once held the now absent life.
It was Kendra who surprised Nola. She’d not shed one tear since the moment they told her that her mother had gone to heaven and that she would never see her again. The child stood by the grave in the brand new white dress that Val had bought for her, holding Mrs. Lyndsay’s hand and moving her lips silently as if in conversation. When Nola went to stand beside her, to give her hand a supportive squeeze, Kendra leaned against her and whispered, “Listen … Nola. Listen, Miss Linsy!”
“What, Kendra? Listen to what?” Nola bent to the child while Mrs. Lyndsay cocked her ear curiously.
“Mammy talkin’,” the child answered, staring up at the trees, “Mama say that, bad wind stop blowin’ now.”
Nola stared down in awe at the heavy, wise, childish face. What was it about people like Kendra and Dahlia and Hopey that saw so deeply into the truth of life when others just merely skimmed the surface?
After the funeral, while everyone else rested from the grief that had left them weak, Nola sat in the kitchen and stared at the spot where Petra had chosen to silence her winds. This was where it had happened for Dahlia, too; where she’d stabbed her papa and earned her lip-nose. In this same kitchen, another life had been cleaned and scrubbed and disinfected from the ground as if it had been a spill of milk. The floor had been left shining with the brilliance that vinegar gave to tile.
Aunt May walked into the kitchen, stopping when she saw Nola, her eyes blinking dazedly through the green frames, as if trying to remember who Nola was. She said nothing, just continued over to the stove and poured water from the thermos.
It was strange to see her without Nathan behind her. He’d not left her side since they’d found Petra. He’d been such a good choice for Aunt May, despite what people whispered about the gardener with the educated teacher. He’d tended to her every need, and he’d comforted her, and everyone else. They wouldn’t have been able to plan the funeral if it hadn’t been for Nathan’s and Mam’s and Ab’s calm control of all the painful details. He must have fallen asleep, for he would not have made Aunt May come to make her own Milo if he’d been awake.
Nola watched as Aunt May’s cheeks shook as she stirred. They were so vulnerable with their freckles and without their mask. That’s probably why she’d worn it at Redding Secondary—to hide her humanness. To hide her vulnerability.
“Aunt May,” Nola whispered, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something for a long time. Remember that time when I was friends with Barry, and started smoking weed and everything? How come you never stopped me? How come you just let me drop out of school and do what I wanted to do, even though it was mashing up my life?”
Aunt May stopped stirring, but she did not look up. She stared at the garbage bin in the corner of the kitchen, her chin quivering slightly. Eventually she removed the spoon from the mug and placed it on the saucer, lifting the mug so that the steam snaked over her face. Her freckles sparkled with moisture.
“I couldn’t stop you,” she said. “You wouldn’t have listened. You know how broken you were when I picked you up from that roadside?” Suddenly her voice broke and the flesh of her neck rose and fell as she swallowed hard. “You were there trying to walk to that taxi by yourself, and you didn’t even know where you were going.” Crisp curls shook as she opened her palms towards Nola. “You just put your life in my hands without asking one question, with all those scars and burns all over you.” She took a deep breath. “I knew it would take plenty time for you to heal, Nola, not just overnight, so …” she shrugged, “I knew that the breakdown had to come. When you met up with that Barry fellow—all that weed smoking and drinking and other such delights?—I knew that was all your pain, all your anger, all your sadness coming out. I couldn’t force you to do anything that you didn’t want to do. I would only have driven you away. You were too busy looking for somebody to hate for me to put myself in your way.”
She sighed heavily. “I knew you would come around. I knew you would find yourself after all the anger was spent. Remember, Nola, I was at that school from the time you were just learning to talk and other such delights. I knew you well, Nola Chambers, and I knew all that bad behaviour wasn’t you. It hurt me to see you like that, but I knew it was just a matter of time before you found yourself.”
She gripped a curl that had fallen onto her forehead and pushed it back up into its indented line. “For many years after that fire, I blamed myself, you know. I only wanted to help you, when I gave you and Dahlia that assignment. I saw you in that classroom, around the town, always alone except for when you sat with Dahlia at lunchtime, and I saw how unhappy you were till you were with that girl. But you wouldn’t allow that friendship to go any further, because of the way everyone else looked at her.”
Nola opened her mouth to protest, but Aunt May held up a hand.
“You got to know them when I gave you that assignment, when you saw for yourself that everything you’d heard was all a lie. You got to know them and I saw the change in you—overnight! I knew it was a good thing, Nola. It was a risk, but a good thing for you and Delroy. Dahlia Daley loved life, and I wanted both of you to learn about some of that love.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the kitchen floor. “Maybe because of Petra…” Her voice cracked again, and once again, she swallowed hard. “Maybe because of Petra I could recognize the unhappiness in you. I just wanted to give you joy, a little joy, so you could just know the feeling of being a child, of being carefree.”
“But they made the choice to die, Aunt May! Just like Petra. To die
instead of fighting.”
Aunt May nodded. “But that’s the thing, Nola. I once told you that I saw something special in all of you because of the struggle. It wasn’t the struggle I meant. It was how you fought it. Some people just get tired of fighting, Nola. Some people just can’t manage it any longer.”
“What about Petra, Aunty? She wasn’t fighting. She gave up a long time ago.”
Aunt May’s chin quivered again as she stared at the garbage bin. Eventually, she shook her head slowly. “You know why I had to leave Kingston and go to Redding, Nola? Because I had to give Petra a chance to bond with her father, to learn how to manage on her own and stop leaning on me. She was like my own daughter—my brother’s child, but like my own daughter. The things that she saw when she was a baby were things that no normal person could forget. You see, Petra’s mother wasn’t the type of woman who was ready to be a mother. Pretty like money and other such delights, Tricia was! Made people stop dead in their tracks when she walked past, and she used her looks to get what she wanted. But Petra wasn’t one of those things she wanted—‘a mistake’ is what she used to say that child was, from the first time they put that tiny baby on her chest in hospital. But my brother …” Aunt May gave a little laugh, “My brother was a good man, and he married that woman same way, knowing that she didn’t want him or the baby, thinking that in time she would come around. But she never did.” Aunt May distractedly picked up the spoon and began stirring again.
“Tricia had so many men on the side that people used to leave buns on my brother’s doorstep to make fun of him. Till one day, it stopped. You see, one of the men she had was very jealous, a carpenter from Spanish Town, ‘hurry-come-up boy’ who thought he’d made it, thought everything he wanted he should get, even if it belonged to someone else. One night he came to my brother’s house and told Tricia that she had to leave her husband and come live with him right then and there. But Tricia was spoiled, she loved that good life that my brother was giving her too much to leave … nice house, nice clothes. Tricia liked eating her cake and having it too. The carpenter just couldn’t guarantee everything my brother was giving her, so she told him to leave, to get out of her house. Petra was only five, but I swear to you, up to the night before she died, every time I looked into that child’s eyes, I saw everything that she saw that night … when that man took out that knife and stabbed Tricia in her neck.”
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