Again Bea felt her face redden. “And do you know what the famous American comedienne Phyllis Diller had to say about it? ‘You know you’re old when someone compliments your alligator shoes, and you’re barefoot.’”
Robert nearly spat out his coffee. “Oh, Bea. You are a delight. I am going to miss you when you go back home.”
“Robert, I—”
“Ah, mon dieu.”
“What is it?”
“It is uncanny.”
“What? What’s going on?” Bea repeated.
“There is a woman coming up the stairs, from the garden. A woman who looks remarkably like you, Madame Bea.” He laughed. “The same walk, the same kind of dress—it’s as if I’m seeing a ghost appear from years ago.”
Bea heard the fading sound of a motorbike heading down the driveway as footsteps approached. From behind, two hands came to rest on her shoulders.
“Hello, Mom.”
35
She hadn’t meant to shock Bea like that, Charlie thought, as she grabbed a handful of napkins to help dry the old woman’s tears. She’d never seen her grandmother really cry before. Maybe some sniffles at a sappy movie every once in a while, but never this. Bea had always been the toughest woman in the room. Now Charlie realized she should have given her grandmother some warning. And she would have, had she believed her mother would actually show up at the hotel.
“It’s okay, Bibi. Calm down. I’m here now.” She turned, squinting, toward her mother. “Look what you’ve done to her.”
“But I—”
Charlie held out an arm as her mother stepped in to help. “Please, I’ve got this.”
“I’ll be all right, Charlie.” Bea took the napkins into her shaking hands.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it to happen this way,” April said, wiping the tears from her own eyes.
“So what way did you mean for it to happen?” Bea asked with a sniffle. “All those years, not one single word from you, making your daughter feel so alone, so rejected, making me feel so, so—” Bea’s words were lost in the bundle of napkins.
Charlie was speechless. All those times her grandmother had covered up for her own daughter, making excuses, telling Charlie that April loved her, that she was sure there had to be a rational explanation for everything, pretending, herself, to be fine about it all. She had never recognized how brokenhearted Bea truly was. She sat down next to her grandmother and wrapped a hand gently around her bony, trembling fingers.
Robert stood and slipped away, quietly intercepting Lizbeth and Senzey as they descended the stairs from their room, leading them to a table on the other side of the veranda. April cocked her head toward his empty chair, as if asking for permission to sit. Charlie nodded her assent.
Not trusting what she might say, Charlie waited out the silence. It was her mother who spoke first.
“Now, I know you both have questions,” April began, sounding as if she were reciting a speech she’d rehearsed in her head for years. “And I understand that you both have lots of anger.” She turned her moist eyes toward Charlie. “And you can lay all the blame you want on me. That’s okay. All I ask for is one thing—that you give me the chance to talk.”
Charlie sat back and folded her arms across her chest. Inside she felt as though she were going to break. Beside her, Bea was drying the wet lenses of her glasses with her scarf.
“First of all,” April said, swallowing nervously before her next words. “I am sorry. Sorrier than either of you could ever imagine. There is never any excuse for a mother letting go of her child.”
“Letting go? No, April. You didn’t just let go. You abandoned the poor girl.” Charlie noticed heads turn at the volume of her grandmother’s voice. She cast her eyes downward.
“Charity, you have to understand, I did what I thought was best for you.”
“Charlie,” she hissed. “My name is Charlie.”
“Charlie,” her mother repeated.
“Were you thinking of what was best for her when you married that man?” Bea asked. “Were you thinking of what was best for her when you snatched her from everything she knew and loved, dragging her thousands of miles away? And what about after? Was it best for Charlie that you never wrote, never called, that you just disappeared into thin air?”
Charlie gently stroked Bea’s forearm, as if trying to calm an anxious dog.
“But I did write,” her mother protested. “You know I did.”
“Never a word since this child landed back on my doorstep a decade ago.”
April’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “And what about you?”
Now it was Bea’s turn to look confused.
“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” April said.
“Maybe you’d better.” Bea took a sip of water and sat back in her chair, placing the glass on the table with a small thud. Beyond the walls, the noise was intensifying, signaling yet another day of unrest on the streets.
Charlie’s mother rubbed her forehead with her hands. “Okay, let’s see if I can make some sense of this.” She took a deep breath. “Once I left home, I knew pretty quickly that I’d made a mistake, marrying Jim, following him down there. But after the way you and I had said goodbye, I wasn’t about to admit to that, wasn’t about to come crawling home to my mama with my tail between my legs. I was determined to make things work, no matter what. Believe me, Jim’s ugly side came out loud and clear down there, the way he strutted around as if he owned the place and everyone in it. I began to see the real Jim, the angry Jim, the controlling Jim. The jungle was hard on both of us, but I had Charlie.” She turned to her daughter, her deep hazel eyes soft and, Charlie thought, very sad. “It didn’t matter if I was in the jungle or on Mars, I had my girl, and that made life perfect.”
Charlie felt the hard metal of Bea’s rings dig into her skin as her grandmother grasped her hand under the table.
“Jim didn’t have any of that,” her mother continued. “All he had was me, and it seemed as though I was a daily disappointment to him. Nothing I did was right. I could see that he was having problems adjusting to his new post, and problems getting along with the people. I thought that maybe if I helped with that, things would get better for all of us. But it only seemed to make him angrier, more resentful of me.”
She paused before continuing.
“Believe me, there were plenty of times I thought we should all leave. But I was too scared to even mention it to Jim. Besides, you were thriving down there, Charlie. I learned from you, watching how easily you connected with everyone, seeing how free you were, how easily you gave your love, how readily you received it back.”
April smiled.
“Do you remember how quickly you learned the language? You used to rattle it off as if you were born to it. Everyone was so impressed. I had to scramble just to keep up with you, but I finally got it. Learning that language gave me freedom, Charlie, a place in a world Jim would never enter. Remember how furious he’d get? He made that rule about only speaking English at home? I think he was scared we were talking about him, right?” She laughed a little. “But you and I, we got out there and spoke with everyone. We learned what they wanted, what they needed. You and I were a team.”
“Until we weren’t,” Charlie muttered under her breath. But her mother just kept talking, as if she’d been saving up a lifetime’s worth of words for this day.
“Jim never did connect with anyone down there,” she said. “He hated that everyone came to me, instead of him, with their problems. And the more alienated he felt, the more frustrated and angry he became. So—” She paused for a breath. “One day, I decided to confide in one of the other women, while I was on a sort of retreat—a training weekend for mission wives. I told her I was beginning to think that ours wasn’t a good situation for Jim, that he didn’t seem to be adjusting well. I shared with her my thoughts about how everything was taking a toll on our marriage, and how for the sake of the family perhaps it was best we all go ba
ck. The adjustment to the jungle is hard on everyone, is what she told me. That having a child and being newly married probably made it even tougher. That I needed to focus more on my husband, that it was my job to support him. To pray to God for direction. She made me feel selfish, and small.”
She stopped for a moment, reaching up to scrape her messy hair back into the clip on top of her head.
“Toward the end of the retreat, I found myself admitting to her that I sometimes thought about leaving Jim. I thought she was my friend. But before I’d even returned to our compound, Jim had heard everything. The woman’s husband had told him. After that, I lost my freedom. Jim did his best to never let me out of his sight. I wasn’t even allowed to communicate over the radio for our morning checkin with the missionary base.”
“Oh, April.” Bea groaned.
“I wanted to tell you, Mom. I really did. At that point, I did want to run back home and forget it had all happened. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt like such a failure. All the other missionaries, all the church people, they loved Jim, told me I was so blessed to have a man like that in my life. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I’d been told that it was God’s plan that we were to work side by side in the jungle. Who was I to say it wasn’t? So, I just buried my thoughts and pressed on. I thought that if I tried harder, if I prayed more, if I read the Bible more, did my job to be the godly wife that Jim deserved, things would fall into place.”
A vision flashed in Charlie’s mind of her mother as a young woman, a tiny, tight smile fixed on her face like a mask.
“But what happened as you got older, Charlie, was that I began to see that my biggest job was going to be to protect you. You were the center of my universe. But to Jim, that was not what God had intended. You were starting to question him, to confront him. Every day you were becoming more like your Grandma Bea than like me. And I realized that even if I didn’t have the strength to leave, you could. So I told Jim that maybe the time had come for you to go to school back in the States. But he wasn’t about to follow any of my advice. So I ‘agreed’ to send you to the mission boarding school just a few hours away—making him think it was his own idea—to keep you out of harm’s way.
“Then, just over a year later, you were back. And I felt like it was only a matter of time before things were going to truly blow up. I began stashing away a little money, whatever I could save out of my allowance, and started thinking about a plan.”
Charlie ran her fingers through her bedhead hair. “So, let me get this straight. You purposefully let things get so bad that Jim would kick me out?”
“Everything was going from bad to worse no matter what I did. I just didn’t think it would all happen so quickly. So when I saw the opportunity, I took it. There was no way I was going to watch you suffering for one more day under that man’s roof.”
Charlie would never be able to erase the images of that last day in the jungle from her mind. The thoughts were whirling around and around in her head. “But you said you’d follow. You promised. You should have come with me.”
“If we’d both left, Jim would have come after us. He never would have stood for me disobeying him. And then, the longer I stayed with him, the harder—”
Bea reached for her water, and held out the glass in the direction of her daughter. Charlie could see by the look on her mother’s face that she was just beginning to realize how blind Bea had become.
“It’s hard to explain, Charlie,” her grandmother said. “It’s really not something you’d understand unless you’ve been there yourself. Trust me. I know.”
Charlie’s thoughts were stopped dead in their tracks. “You, Bibi?”
April’s eyebrows were raised in confusion.
“Go on,” Bea said.
“It was like I was under a spell,” April continued, her eyes still on Bea. “Like I had no will of my own. I guess it was part awe, part fear. Then it turned into just plain fear.” She paused to take a sip of water. “It’s so complicated. Your mind gets all messed up when you’re so isolated. I didn’t dare speak to anyone about it, not after the last time. And Jim knew exactly how to wear me down, how to punish me. It was as though I were being held prisoner in a jail without bars. He kept telling me I was nothing without him, and after a while, I believed him.” Her eyes bored into Charlie’s. “You will never—I hope to God—know what it’s like to be under the control of a man like that.”
“Amen to that,” Bea echoed.
“But that doesn’t explain why you couldn’t write,” Charlie said.
“I swear, Charlie, I did write, every single day. It was the only way I could survive, I missed you so much,” she said, her throat closing on the words as a fresh crop of tears filled her eyes. “I kept writing, even after I never heard back.”
“That man was messing with the mail!” Bea yelped.
“And I did call, after we arrived here in Haiti. You have no idea how many times I dialed that phone, just to hear your voice on the other end. I just couldn’t—”
“You mean you called and hung up on me?” Bea was incredulous. “Why the hell didn’t you speak?”
“How could I? After Jim told me about that phone conversation he had with you, when he called to suggest a reconciliation, what was I supposed to do?”
Charlie noticed Bea’s neck tense, her back straighten, the way it always did right before she lost it. “What phone conversation? What, exactly, did he tell you?”
“What you said to him. That I had clearly made my choices, and that you never wanted to hear from me again.”
Bea reached out for her daughter’s hand. “That call never happened. What an awful man he is. Even worse than I ever imagined. I never stopped caring about you. Not for one damn second.”
“You were right, Mom,” she sobbed. “About everything.”
Bea shook her head, her own tears spilling behind her glasses. “You don’t need to—”
“I do need to. I understand now how heartbroken you were when I left, when I took Charity—I mean, Charlie—thousands of miles away.”
“So why are you still with him?” Charlie asked. Her grandmother may have understood, but she still didn’t.
“I know who he is, Charlie.” Her mother wiped her eyes. “I’ve had to live with his sins every single day of my adult life. But it wasn’t until about three years ago, when we got here to Haiti, that I began to feel like myself again. The country was so full of life, and there was so much to be done. I felt like I had a place here, like I might make a difference. It wasn’t long before I got completely wrapped up in my work, and began to feel I was meant to be here. And, despite Jim, I still feel that way.”
“But what he’s doing, up there on the mountain? What about those people working their asses off at that so-called school? Living in filth like animals, being treated no better than slaves? What about them?”
“You can choose to believe me or not, but I swear I spend every ounce of energy I have righting that man’s wrongs. I think of it as my redemption. I do what I can, when his back is turned. I bring those men and women food, give them whatever money I can hide away. I teach them to read, and make sure they know they have a right to be paid for a job, should they be able to find one. And I watch out for their children.”
“Funny,” Charlie said. “I didn’t see any kids up there.”
Her mom suddenly became quiet. “There aren’t,” she finally said. “Jim doesn’t allow it.”
“So what does he do with them?” Charlie asked, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.
“He convinces their parents to send them away, for a better life. Or at least that’s what he tells them.”
“And that’s what you were doing yesterday, with that child you were dragging around like a dog on a leash.”
“What child?” April turned to Bea, as if she might know what Charlie meant.
“I saw you,” Charlie said. “Remember? At the orphanage.”
“Oh
, you mean little Mirlande. I was rushing to get her back inside before the riots grew. I had taken her out to see a doctor.”
Her mother slumped back in her chair, her gaze coming to rest on a spot somewhere beyond Charlie’s shoulder. “It’s horrible, what goes on in those places,” she finally said. “These children never stand a chance. Here they are, supposed to be getting love and attention, a decent start in life, and all they’re getting is used and abused. They’re moneymakers, that’s all they are. Part of a headcount or a photo opportunity used to get folks back home to send in their dollars. And when they grow up? When they’re not so cute and adorable anymore? Out they go, either sold as what can only be called slaves, or put out in the streets to fend for themselves. It’s a filthy business. And Jim—that man’s hands are so dirty he’ll never be able to scrub them clean.”
“So he’s involved in all this?”
Her mother nodded. “He works with a lot of the orphanages.”
“And you?”
“I make the rounds of them whenever I can, to do whatever I can. I bring towels, medicine, formula. Whatever I can get my hands on without Jim knowing. The people at those places, they think Jim knows what I do, that he sends me. And even if he does know, what can he say? I’m just keeping his little goldmine going by keeping those kids clothed and fed, right?”
For just a minute, Charlie felt as though she’d suddenly traveled back twenty years, back to a time when her mother was the answer to everything she ever wanted or needed, back to the time when her mother’s touch could extinguish even the sharpest pain, when her kiss could solve the darkest of problems.
“Mom,” she said, snapping back to the moment, “I want you to meet someone.”
36
From the other table, Lizbeth and Senzey had been craning their necks to get a glimpse of the drama unfolding across the veranda. Charlie gestured for them to come over.
“Mom,” she said again as the two women neared. “These are my friends. Lizbeth and Senzey. Lizbeth and Senzey, this is my mother, April.”
“I am so pleased to be making your acquaintance,” Lizbeth gushed, taking April’s hand and pumping it up and down with such force that Charlie thought her mother was going to fall out of her chair. “You have quite a daughter in Charlie. A real spitfire.”
Island on the Edge of the World Page 20