Chapter Twenty-Eight
THE GIRL
Reena found her the next morning in Maurice’s bed, curled up and shivering, even though the night had been warm. She thought the girl must have taken sick, and after she finished her morning duties in the front house, she sneaked away from the missus, made the girl some warm broth, and brought it to her in bed.
First Reena wiped the girl’s forehead with a cool, damp cloth while she sat on the edge of the bed, her weight slumping the mattress down toward the floor. The girl was awake, Reena could tell, but she wasn’t opening her eyes.
“Come on and look at me, now. Let me see what ails you.” She touched the girl’s forehead with a fleshy palm and gently stroked away loose hairs into long red strings on the pillow.
“Come on. Open up and let me see what’s wrong with you.”
The girl shut her eyes even tighter.
“I can’t give you no soup with your eyes closed. We’ll make us a mess here on this bed. Come on now. Open up.”
The girl shifted her weight and finally did as she was told. Pushing herself back on her elbows, she lifted her body, then slowly opened her eyes to the hazy light. Peering into Reena’s glossy black eyes, she felt the warmth from Reena’s body, but there was a fog in her head.
Sunlight came through the window as if demanding some answer from her, but she didn’t know the question. She had no clear memory of the previous night, only a vague sense of running, a noxious smell, rough skin. Perhaps she’d had a bad dream, a nightmare, one of those intense ones that seemed so real before she awakened with her heart pounding out of every pore in her body. Maybe it had only been that, just a terrible, terrible dream.
But she was changed, different. Her skin felt charged with something hot and itchy, as if she’d been sunburned. She crossed her arms and ran her hands over them, and there was an unpleasant prickling heat, blistering, as if the inner substance of her had been burnt. An awful ache pulsed in the place between her legs. She had a sense of heightened irritability, of being on edge, a sense of invasion she could never explain, even if she could speak.
I know not how it falls on me.
She looked into Reena’s eyes, into those kind eyes, into the face of the woman who’d untangled her hair and bathed her face, who had tried to shelter her as best she could, and then came a moment of purest sadness and surrender. For some unknown reason, something was wrong with her, inside her. How futile had been all the effort and the faith that others had in her.
And then her heart beat rapidly in clear resolution of something she could never name. Despite the kind ones who’d done so much for her, it would not be enough. Even this good woman would not be able to protect her.
The night is darkening round me.
Nothing to do but wait until it ended, until it closed around her. She sat with that realization, with that clarity, which wasn’t all sadness. Not all sadness. But she nodded to Reena, as if to say, I’m all right.
“Well, that’s better.” Reena’s face relaxed, and she looked the girl over again. “You got a scratch on your face. How’d you get it?”
The girl shrugged.
“Probably you was up to no good.” Reena leaned in closer. “It’s not deep; it’s not the thing making you sick. Maybe it was just a little ole bug you caught, and now you is mostly over it. Here,” she said, offering up a spoonful of the soup.
The girl let Reena feed her the entire bowl. It was nice to be babied. She would’ve been embarrassed for Reena’s boys to see her being fed in this way, but alone with just Reena, she let it play out long and slow.
Try as she might, the girl couldn’t rouse herself for all of the day. Exhaustion would overtake her and lure her to nap, but then she would jolt awake with strange feelings of repulsion and nausea that she couldn’t explain. When night finally fell, she wept for no reason. She had lost something; something had been taken from her, but what? It lurked before her like a shadow, but when she reached out to grab it, she pulled back with empty hands.
It had been but a dream. A bad, bad dream.
Finally she slept.
In the morning, Reena brought her food and fed her again, then told her stories of Maurice’s antics at school. Finally the girl could go on living. Her skin was still hot, with the kind of heat that seared your heart and boiled your blood. But she could deal with the heat; the pain was easing.
When the bowl was empty, Reena asked, “Now, what else would make you feel better today?”
The girl gestured in the direction of the beach.
“No you don’t. You can’t go in the water right after you took sick. You be getting sick all over again. Mark my word.”
How else could she rinse this heat off her body? The next best thing after surf bathing on the gulf side would be getting on top of that seawall again and looking out to her favorite place. She wanted it more than ever before.
“You best be staying off that wall, too. What you did before, outrunning those boys, why, it was all the front-house people done talked about for days after. They was all wondering who you were, what you looked like without your bonnet covering you up. No,” she scoffed. “Now, you don’t need to be calling all that attention onto yourself. No, ma’am.”
The girl tried to argue with her eyes.
“That there’s a fool’s game, but you gonna go and do it anyways, isn’t you?”
Making a pinched gesture between her thumb and forefinger, she communicated, Only a little bit.
“Well, at least you be telling the truth, now. Praise the Lord for that.”
The girl looked down.
“I mean it. You must be growing up.”
After diving into Reena’s soft folds and holding still, she finally let go. Reena got off the bed, and the girl followed suit. She’d slept all day yesterday and two nights in the pale-blue dress. She shimmied out of it.
“Good,” said Reena. “That dress has got dirty. You go on and wash it today, but don’t you be wearing it outside the yard, you hear me?”
Something told her to agree with Reena’s advice, to really agree with it, and so she nodded with conviction.
“Good,” said Reena again.
After folding the dress and setting it aside, the girl donned her old shirt and knickers, which Reena had recently laundered and ironed.
“You been seeing that rich white lady still?”
She nodded.
“Good.”
Reena had always wanted to keep her in hiding from everyone except a few trusted souls. The girl shot her a questioning look.
“That lady seem nice, better than the others. She help people, and she got soft eyes. And something has got to change ’round here. You can’t be living down here in secret forever, girl. Someday you is gonna have to do something with yourself. Maybe that there nice lady can help.”
The girl shrugged.
“I’d sure like to believe something good could come out of all this.” She gestured around, but her face showed doubt.
It was almost as though Reena knew something, too, something she couldn’t say aloud. Reena seemed lost in thought but then finally said, “Sure as shooting, nothing better has come up.” Then she left the room and robustly went back to her work.
The girl walked down to the docks, sure that she was probably late and sure, too, that Harry would be waiting for her on the boat. She found him not out in the stern but down inside the boat’s small cabin, sitting on the edge of the berth, his back curled over like a shrimp. He looked up, acknowledged the girl, and started to speak, but then a coughing spell began, one much worse than usual; one that bulged out his eyes, turned his face a strange color of bluish red, and brutally went on. Harry had been coughing for as long as the girl knew him, but she’d never observed such a lengthy spell that coughed out all the air from his lungs and left him gasping and ashy colored.
The girl sat down gently next to him on the berth. He’d stopped coughing for now, but he was gravely ill; she knew it from seein
g two of her grandparents when they’d had the pneumonia in their lungs. But she didn’t know what to do to help Harry. She should have brought some of Reena’s broth to spoon into his mouth. Instead, she stood and poured him water from a brown jug he kept in the galley. Just as she tried to pass it to him, Harry started coughing again, a long stream of hacks and gasps and raspy, crackling, wheezing sounds that made her own chest ache to hear them. Harry was only nineteen years old—too young to be so sick.
She stood over Harry until it passed. Harry finally finished coughing and then ran an old stained handkerchief over his mouth. When he pulled it away and slowly set it on his lap, the girl saw fresh blood and stringy fibers that she could only imagine were bits of his lungs. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew with surety that people weren’t supposed to cough up blood and pieces of their lungs.
She should have brought that slate Grace had given her. She would write out in bold dark letters, hospital!
“If you’re thinking a doctor could help, you’re wrong,” said Harry in a hoarse voice, as if even the effort to talk was straining. “There’s no help for it. I’ve had consumption since I was a boy, but it only got real bad lately.” He nodded toward the rolls of tobacco lined up on the galley stove. “Light me one of those, will you? It’ll stop me coughing.”
The girl picked up one of the rolled cigarettes, put it in between Harry’s colorless lips, and struck a match. When the flame reached the end of the rolled tobacco, Harry inhaled weakly, then held the smoke inside, and finally let it out in a narrow gray stream. “Thank you,” he said.
The girl lifted her hands, as if to ask, What else can I do?
“I won’t be going out on the bay today, if that’s what you’re thinking. I cain’t do it. Got to wait for a better day.”
She slumped back down on the berth beside him, disappointed not so much because she’d miss being over the water today but because now she was worried about Harry’s ability to work.
“I’m going to lie me back down now, after I finish up smoking. You best go on and do something else today.”
She sat for a few minutes longer and wished she could say, I’ll be back to check on you later, but nodded instead, which he seemed to understand. Harry nodded back, and she climbed out of the cabin and then out of the boat.
The day was near perfect, with bright, unbroken sunlight and a cool wind that wound her hair into knots. She retrieved the bonnet from her pocket and put it on her head, tied it down low, and then headed in the direction of the gulf side of the island. She dropped by Reena’s and changed into the yellow dress. It felt warm and soft against her skin, like something sunny.
Then she headed toward the stretch of beach that she favored for swimming, a stretch of beach she believed was where her father had built his souvenir shack before it washed away in the storm.
By the time she reached the sea, it was midmorning, and the gulf side was busy with bathers in surf higher than usual. It made rhythmic crashing sounds that sounded like a large animal breathing in and out. It was the kind of surf that redfish like—rough sandy water that comes after storms and quickly leaves. There was reassurance in that surging continuous sound, as if the ocean were saying, All will go on.
She wanted to hike up her dress and wade to her knees but decided to heed Reena’s warning and not go into the water so soon after her illness of the day before. Instead, she walked the beach and found another sand dollar. It wasn’t a perfect one, but it was large. She decided to give it to Madu, and then she found a spiraled whelk shell to give to Reena. But it was Harry who stayed on her mind throughout her long stroll.
No matter how hard she tried to part with the worry, she couldn’t let go of the sight of that blood and fibrous stuff on the handkerchief; she couldn’t set it free into the wind. She couldn’t shake his pale, drawn face and that racking, frightening cough that stayed with her and weighed down her steps. The ring of a ship’s bell sounded like a death knell.
At the seawall, a larger group of strollers than usual had taken to the top. The fine weather had no doubt drawn people out. In fact, there were so many of them, along with a few people on bicycles, weaving in and out and dodging the pedestrians, that she figured she wouldn’t be noticed among such a throng. She wanted to look out to her favorite place again. After seeing Harry in such a state, she thought it might be the only thing to make her feel better. And she might be able to figure out how to create light with her pastels, as Grace had said, and then she could finish her drawing and give it to Harry.
She went in search of the same old ladder she’d used before and found it tossed aside in the riprap below the wall, out of sight of the people on top, obviously put there by someone else who didn’t want to pay the boys to get up and down. She carried the ladder over to the wall. Again she climbed as high as she could, and then she used her strong arms to hoist her body up the rest of the way until she could gain the top.
Once up high, she stood and gazed out to the deep ocean, found her spot of soft, quiet brilliance, and managed to smile. She thought she saw the fin of a whale lift up and then recede back into the depths. There was a whole cloud of Franklin’s gulls, hundreds of black-tipped wings cutting into sky. She set her eyes back out to sea. The searing heat beneath her skin cooled in the breeze. Something had changed her, but she didn’t have the words, even if speech were possible, to verbalize it.
She turned to stroll for a while and then stopped dead in her tracks. Loud shouts came in her direction.
“There she is!” someone called. “There’s Miss Girl!”
Another voice. “She’s back!”
A tall man approached her and leaned down close to peer underneath her bonnet. She turned away and faced the blinding sunlight.
“Don’t be scared,” the man said in a voice that sounded smooth but not trustworthy. “Are you going to run away again?”
It took a minute to settle into her head—the gossip Harry had told her about, Reena’s warnings, and what Grace had said about some Miss Girl in the newspapers. Her senses sharpened, and her skin tightened. What a mistake she had made to come up here again. Another mistake! She should’ve listened. She shook her head and tried to walk away, but others were coming toward her. She ducked her head and turned to her side so they couldn’t see her face. But more people came, streams of them following in her wake, calling out to her, laughing, talking, and pointing.
She had no choice but to run again. She picked up her yellow skirt and darted in the direction where she saw less people, which turned out to be the same way she’d run before, down the length of the completed wall. The people in their fine clothes and pomaded hair all passed by in a blur.
Shouts of encouragement, commands for her to stop, cheers, and laughter, and soon it became not exactly fear but the sound of chaos too close and large in the world, all the energy too bright and anxious and compressing, trying to squeeze her through a slit. She ran all the way to the end of the seawall again, jumped off into the same pile of soft sand, once again absorbed the stunning landing, then caught her breath and vanished into the city, into the alleys, leaving a stream of joyous, pushing, pulling, and cheering humanity behind in her wake.
After running down the alleys for several blocks, she stopped and leaned against a wall to catch her breath. She didn’t know what this all had to do with her. She, who had only tried to hide for the past three years, had now become the center of so much unwanted attention.
Minutes later she glanced up and into the eyes of the only outsider who could follow her into this world, the young pretty woman called Grace, who was sure to ask her questions. Still, when the girl gazed into Grace’s kind face, her eyes so wide and elated and open, she couldn’t be angry with the woman for following her. The girl kept breathing deeply and then shook her head and gave a look of defiance.
Grace’s face fell. “I won’t tell anyone. I’ve known from the beginning you were the one, and I haven’t told anyone. Well, I told Ira—I mean the mini
ster. But you have nothing to fear. Please, don’t be concerned.”
The girl shook her head again.
“But for someone who wants to be left alone, you certainly aren’t behaving as such. If you run the wall like that, people are bound to be curious. Probably every woman I know is a little envious of your running like that and getting away. But people mean you no harm, I’m certain of it. They simply want to know who you are. You’ve piqued their curiosity. In truth, I think you’ve charmed them.”
Wanting to cry. Suddenly so tired. Wanting to take the woman by the shoulders and shake her. Instead, she turned away. She walked in the direction of Reena’s house. She no longer cared if the woman followed her. She hadn’t been able to do anything to stop her. On this island, where people should never have tried to put down roots in the first place, on this flattened, sea-beaten, stretched-out strip of sand, there was just no place else for her to run.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
GRACE
Jonathan and I were hosting a small dinner party to include our closest friends: Larke, Wallace, and Viola. Summer was coming to a close; we were taking advantage of Jonathan’s waning time among us. Of course Etta was to be included. It would have been difficult to leave her out, and I didn’t want to slight her on top of all the damage I’d already done. She had at first responded favorably, but then at the last minute, as Dolly was curling my hair with hot irons at my dressing table, she rapped on my door.
Dolly stepped back when she caught sight of Etta, and I found it such a strange reaction, totally involuntary, as though Dolly had seen something that unnerved her.
“Come in,” I said to Etta and smiled. She hadn’t joined me in my room since the very beginning, and I imagined she wished to discuss the evening ahead. Informal as it was meant to be, it could still prove to be lively. I hadn’t spent time with my dearest friends for almost all of the summer, and I missed it.
Etta said, “I regret it, Grace, but I do believe I’m going to have to miss your evening.”
The Uncertain Season Page 23