Island on the Edge of the World

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “It’s him I was supposed to be proud of, not the other way around,” Lizbeth said quietly.

  “Lizbeth, Luke needs you to tell Senzey that he did not abandon her, that he loves her.”

  Lizbeth was silent.

  “And he apologizes for not talking to you about her before he passed. He was waiting for the right time, but he waited too long.” Again Bea paused. “And then there’s the baby.”

  “You’re trying to tell me Luke knows about the baby?”

  “Senzey and the boy, they need to be together. Those are Luke’s words.”

  “A boy?” she asked excitedly, before quickly composing herself.

  “Luke says he’s with you, and not to be afraid.”

  And then he was gone.

  “You are most amazing, Madame Bea,” Robert said, his voice far quieter than usual.

  Bea dabbed at her forehead with the edges of her scarf and slumped back in her chair.

  “She has quite a gift, it seems, hasn’t she?” he asked Lizbeth.

  “I don’t know what to think. But if she’s so gifted, then why didn’t she say all this to me before?”

  “You didn’t ask,” Bea piped in.

  “I think I need that second drink,” Lizbeth said.

  “If only you could use your powers to find Charlie,” Robert said, as the sky broke open and lightning flashed behind the palms.

  “Now, that would be worthwhile,” Lizbeth agreed.

  Bea again shook her head. “Actually, it doesn’t work that way. Usually a person needs to have passed on for me to hear from them. Sometimes I get feelings, but it’s just too difficult to get anything from a person you’re close to. And there’s nobody on this Earth closer to me than Charlie.”

  “So, is that why you couldn’t simply use your senses to check on your daughter here in Haiti, instead of coming all this way yourself?” Robert asked.

  Bea let out a mischievous giggle. “Well … maybe.”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe yes and maybe no.”

  “And what is the ‘no’ part?”

  “I actually told Charlie I had a dream. But truth be told, I needed Charlie to come here. Charlie needed to come here. The girl needs her mother in her life. Not to be living with memories and nightmares that are eating up her insides like worms. I’ve waited way too long for those two to come back together, and I wasn’t about to wait any longer. How much time can an old woman like me have, anyway?”

  “Please, Madame Bea. You radiate youth.”

  Bea laughed. “That’s very kind, Robert. I think. But we all know how short our time on this earth truly is. And what’s the point of wasting that time holding negative feelings toward those who are closest to us?”

  “That is true,” he answered.

  “Family belongs together. That’s all there is to it. Am I right, Lizbeth?”

  Perhaps Lizbeth’s answer was drowned out by the sea of rainwater spilling down the eaves, cascading onto the pavement below and rushing down the long driveway into the streets of Port-au-Prince, or perhaps she hadn’t answered at all. The only thing Bea knew was that, for all of them, their adventures in this crazy country were far from over. She pulled her scarf even tighter, sat back, and waited for Charlie’s return.

  18

  Her stepfather’s face turned the color of raw beef when he recognized her standing there at the gate of his compound. “Well, well, well,” he said through clenched teeth. “Lookie who’s here. If it isn’t the prodigal daughter, come home to roost. What happened, Charity? You get yourself in trouble or something?” His gaze came to rest on her belly.

  “Hello, Jim,” she said coolly, determined not to let loose the fury boiling just under her skin. “Don’t worry—I’m not planning on staying.”

  Her stepfather slowly nodded, his beady eyes looking up the driveway. He punched a code into the keypad. “So, what can I do for you?” he asked as the gate swung open.

  Charlie moved into the road. “Not a thing, Jim. I came to see my mom.”

  He took a step toward her, running one hand through what was left of his greasy head of hair. “She’s not here.”

  “I heard.”

  Jim’s eyes flashed briefly at Eddy. “So?”

  Charlie shifted her feet, her sandals filling with pebbles as she struggled to come up with what to do next. “Where is she?” she asked.

  “Church errands.”

  “Really,” she replied, remembering what the pastor in Port-au-Prince had told her about Jim and her mother’s break with the church. “Will she be back soon?”

  Her stepfather shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t honestly say.”

  “Will you give me her phone number?” She already knew the answer.

  Jim shook his head.

  “Well, then can you give her a message from me?”

  Again Jim shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that, Charity. It wouldn’t be wise.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because she doesn’t want to hear from you.”

  Charlie couldn’t escape the sting of his words.

  Jim took another step closer. “She has no interest in you. You can’t just waltz out of someone’s life and expect them to welcome you back with open arms, can you? You’re the one who chose to leave. Don’t forget that.”

  “I chose? Are you serious? I don’t believe you gave me that choice. And she knew I had to leave, wanted me to go. She saw what I was living with. She was living with it, too.”

  “Your mother knows who you are, Charity. She knows exactly who you are.”

  Charlie stood with her hands planted firmly on her hips. “Who am I, Jim? You tell me. Because I’d really like to know.”

  “A smart girl like you should know the difference between right and wrong—between being a good, obedient daughter and one who turns her back on the family who sacrificed so much to raise her.”

  “Turned my back? And sacrifice? That’s a laugh.”

  “How dare you!” he roared, his anger suddenly igniting.

  “How dare I?” she yelled back.

  “Think about it, Charity. Why would your mother want an ungrateful daughter such as yourself, one who runs off and gallivants all over the world like some sort of tramp. One who turns her back on the Lord and everything he stands for?”

  “How do you know what I’ve been doing? And how dare you, of all people, accuse me of turning my back on the Lord? I’ve seen what’s going on up there, at your ‘mission’.”

  Her stepfather narrowed his eyes at the guard, who’d been standing stock still with his rifle resting against the fence. His anger seemed to have cooled as quickly as it had flared. “The fact is, Charity, your mother never wants to see you again. Why do you think she hasn’t written, or called?”

  Charlie bit the inside of her lip, desperate to keep her tears at bay.

  “Your mother sees the truth for what it is,” he continued calmly.

  “You are a disgusting, horrible man!”

  “And you,” he countered, “are a heathen. Just like your Satan-loving grandmother. Now get the hell off my property.”

  Jim took another step toward her, his chest puffed out like a rooster. Charlie walked backward to the door of the SUV, not taking her eyes off of him. She jumped into the driver’s seat and threw the car into reverse, spitting gravel into the air as she peeled away from the compound in a race to put as much distance as possible between herself and the man and everything he stood for.

  She flew down the mountain, the four-wheel drive bouncing over rocks and rattling across potholes. The sky was darkening, the clouds gathering into one thick mass that hung over the valley. But it wasn’t the threat of bad weather that was driving her to speed so recklessly. It was anger—a rage so overwhelming that it was filling her brain to the point where it felt ready to explode.

  She’d barely made it back to the turn at the little market town when the skies opened, turning the road into a muddy waterfall and
leaving the last of the street vendors scrambling for cover. Charlie continued ahead, grateful for the four-wheel drive and a half-decent wiper blade, which provided a slender crescent of clarity that came and went with every swipe. Her stepfather’s accusations echoed in her head. What kind of a mind did it take to twist the facts into a painful web of lies? Did Jim actually believe his own stories? The man was deranged, pure and simple.

  In retrospect, Charlie could recognize the signs. She and her mother had adapted quickly to life in the jungle, learning the language and making friends. They were easily embraced by the community. Jim, not so much. Any psychology student could have read what was going on in his head. He thought he’d be marching right in as the Great White Savior, a god to these people. Yet nobody was really all that interested in a word he had to say. Not that he let that stop him. In fact, all it did was stir up his resentment until he began to exert his ugly power over anybody and everybody, including his wife and family, projecting his own demons onto them in a perpetual tirade of suspicion and abuse. Charlie would never forgive his behavior. Nor could she forgive her mother for staying behind and pandering to his madness.

  The day Charlie left the mission had started just like any other. She’d woken to the smell of smoke from the morning fires and the sounds of the village coming alive—the echoes of voices, children laughing and babies crying to be fed. She finished her breakfast quickly, mopping up the remains of the runny eggs from the plate with a hunk of her mother’s bread. She was anxious to get her schoolwork done early, to escape her stepfather’s disapproving eyes and short-fused temper. She hated being back at the compound, missed boarding school, which had felt like a vacation after life under Jim’s roof. But he’d ruined that, just as he ruined anything good in her life, with his ugly suspicions about what went on there, his certainty that she was a girl who could not be trusted to keep her pants on.

  Until she hit puberty, Jim had left her pretty much alone. Her mother had told her the facts about what to expect from her impending womanhood. Charlie already knew all about the tribe’s traditions around a girl’s first period, which seemed sort of mysterious and romantic to her. First the girl would be put into a tiny shelter made of leaves, allowed only to drink water from a gourd that must not touch her teeth. When she emerged, after the bleeding stopped, she had to speak in a whisper for weeks. Then, when the women in her family decided it had been long enough, they’d tickle her until she burst out laughing, then would take her to the water for a ritual bath, rubbing her in “young woman leaves” and encouraging all the littler girls to swim downriver in the runoff, so that they, too, would soon become young women. Finally, her body would be painted and decorated in feathers, she’d be clothed in new skirts, and escorted like a queen back to her village.

  Charlie’s experience was nothing like that. By Jim’s reaction, it was as if the blood coming from her body was a sign of evil, a declaration to the world that she was shameful.

  At first she’d done everything she could to try to be a good girl, not even understanding what she’d done wrong. Her mother helped as best she could, cautioning Charlie to stay out of Jim’s way. But that was difficult. He seemed to be everywhere.

  When she turned fourteen, her mother finally, somehow, convinced Jim that sending Charlie to the boarding school for missionary kids two hundred miles away would be best for everyone. And though she’d missed her mother terribly, Charlie loved being away at school. Now she was condemned to long mornings at the kitchen table, buried in textbooks she’d struggle to get through between the constant interruptions from the tribespeople, who always seemed to need something from her mother.

  But the worst part about having to live back at the compound, besides her stepfather, was that there was no one, beyond her mother, to hang out with. Here, all the girls had been living the lives of grown women since they were five—tending to gardens, carrying firewood, and hauling around newborn siblings practically as big as they were strapped to their sides. At her age, they’d already been married for years. And the boys, they all spent their days hunting and fishing for real now, with families to feed. There was no room for a daydreaming seventeen-year-old girl among their ranks.

  Thank goodness for Cole. He’d arrived in the jungle full of hope, to join his parents on their mission after completing Bible college in the States. He was quiet and serious, yet to Charlie he offered a welcome relief from loneliness. They’d spent much of the month he’d been there sitting and talking in the afternoons, under the shade of the palm grove by the river, away from the commotion of the compound. Cole would tell her about what it had been like going back to Michigan to live, after a childhood of hopscotching across the world with his parents as they worked. She laughed at the image of him arriving in his plaid pants and crew cut, in a place where nobody would be caught dead without their skinny jeans or their messy bedhead. He told her of his confusion over putting gas in a car, let alone learning to drive one. Always, he said, there was that feeling of not quite “getting it”, a fear of messing up by saying or doing the wrong thing. Charlie had heard these stories before, from other kids who had left the mission field for extended periods of time. And as much as she dreamed about getting out, the thought of going “home” to the States also terrified her. But a hard slap across her face, one that sent her reeling backward in the dirt, was enough to make her conquer that fear.

  She’d just put away her math book and stepped outside when Jim arrived home from his morning rounds of the village.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he said, blocking her way, his cowboy boots planted firmly in the dirt.

  “Out,” she answered, her eyes darting around for her mother.

  “You’ve no business parading around like that, showing your skin like a tramp,” he hissed. “If you can’t show respect for who you are, then at least show some for who your family is.”

  Charlie tugged at her cutoff jeans, the sweat already pouring down her limbs. “It’s hot. I’m just going down to the river to cool off.”

  “Don’t make your excuses to me, Charity,” he said, the volume rising. “And quit your lying.”

  “I’m not lying.” Charlie forced herself to look him straight in the eye, anger beginning to simmer inside her.

  “I know where you’re going.”

  Charlie stood facing him, her hands on her hips in a silent challenge.

  “I’ve seen the look in your eyes. Don’t think I haven’t. And I know that look—it’s the look of the devil.”

  “Oh, please.” Charlie tried to step around him, but immediately found her arm pinned in his grip.

  “Don’t you ‘oh please’ me,” he seethed. “Ever since that boy showed up you’ve been prancing all over the place, waving your lust around like a flag on a ten-foot pole. How do you think that looks to people? How do you think it makes me look?”

  Charlie should have seen this coming. There was no hiding here, in the middle of the jungle. She’d tried to be discreet, for her own sake, about her afternoons hanging around with Cole. And that’s all they were doing, anyway. Just hanging around. She couldn’t deny that she’d had thoughts about maybe, someday, doing more than that. But Cole was so damn serious. And so much older, almost twenty-two! Besides, she barely knew the guy.

  “I know what you two have been doing, down by the river. I have eyes everywhere, young lady. Don’t you forget that. And I’m going to tell the church exactly what those eyes have seen. That boy will wish he never set foot down here, in my house of the Lord.”

  “But we haven’t done anything!” Charlie shouted back. “And even if we had, so what? You know why? Because it’s normal!”

  That’s when he struck.

  “You whore!” he spat, standing over her with his hand open and ready to hit her again.

  Facing the man, Charlie felt any lingering traces of fear from a lifetime under his rule escape her body, leaving her emboldened by anger. She remembered seeing her mother running toward them through th
e compound as she and Jim went at it, April’s feet flying across the dust. She pushed her way in between Charlie and Jim, with her back to her daughter, her words to her husband measured and controlled.

  She said it was time for Charlie to go. “We can’t handle her anymore,” she told her husband. “Think about it. What good can come of having a girl like that interfering with the work you’re trying to do down here? You’ve put too much into it to have everything ruined by her shamelessness.”

  Charlie had been stunned. She’d never heard her mother say anything like this before. This was not her mother speaking. Had Jim hypnotized her or something? She numbly packed a bag of belongings, her mother watching with her lips pressed tightly together. The weekly boat heading upriver would be leaving soon.

  Charlie had wanted to shake her, to grab her by the arm and force her to come along, to run as fast and far away as she could from the ugly, pitiful excuse for a man who was poisoning her with his hatefulness. Instead, all Charlie was left with was a fistful of dollars sneaked into her pocket and a hushed promise, whispered into her ear as the two of them embraced on the riverbank. “I’ll come,” she had sworn she heard her mother say.

  Yet, ten years later, here her mother was, still following that fucking man to the ends of the Earth. There was not an excuse in the world for allowing herself to be pulled even deeper into his clutches, Charlie thought as she raced down the mountainside, rain pelting the windshield. Not loyalty, not God, nothing.

  She struggled to suppress the echoes of Jim’s mocking tone, to erase the image of his thin, mean lips and the skin that stretched across his sharp features like crinkly leather on a couch. Just being in his presence made her feel slimy, as if his treachery were contagious.

  “I hate you!” she shouted out loud, speeding through the rain, anxious to put this day behind her as fast as she could. “I hate you both!”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when she found herself skidding around a hairpin turn and straight toward a line of boulders spread across the road.