Two nights before, Emma had run into Scott and Alice’s bedroom with the deep scream children have when the fear sounds like a sharp pain. In between breaths, she told them she had heard seven gunshots in the hills (she had counted them), and she was sure that seven bandits were coming for her. Alice and Scott were already awake, they had heard the shots as well, there had been many more than seven; but to comfort Emma they lied and said that the boys in the village were just “bursting bamboo.” They let Emma get into bed and lie between them.
During the long night Scott tried to calm Emma as more sounds of shots entered the bedroom. Their sleep was broken at best; Scott got up a few times to check on the dogs; the older two, terrified of the noise, were huddled near the toolshed. In the morning Scott went to the police station to talk to Sergeant Socks. Since the dry season had begun Socks had stepped up the marijuana raids in the hills; he had already been featured twice on the evening news, standing in a field of marijuana holding his automatic weapon with heaps of ganja smoking in the background. Socks told Scott that a raid had taken place the night before to “smoke out” two bandits who were hiding in the hills. Socks loved to use American phrases like “smoke out,” phrases he had heard on CNN. Before Scott left the Pastora station, Sergeant Socks reassured him there was nothing to worry about and Scott reminded him about Emma’s birthday party. An invitation Socks had always received ever since Alice and Scott moved into Pastora Valley seven years ago.
At 2:15 p.m. Alice was just about to call the security company when she saw the van pull up to the gate. The two guards came up to the camera perched high above the left stone pillar; they pressed the buzzer and spoke through the intercom. Looking into the small TV screen in the kitchen, Alice recognized the twins who provided the security for the dinner party they had had a month ago for Scott’s parents’ fortieth anniversary. This was a party she felt forced to have; she had never gotten along with Scott’s mother, and with things so tense between Scott and herself, the entire evening felt like hard work, with her acting the part of the contented wife and mother and smiling tight, wide smiles as the guests of honour were toasted again and again for forty more. That night Alice missed her mother more than ever; three years had already passed since she had lost her but the pain was still there, it was a nagging pain, numbed on busy days, paralyzing on others, so Alice felt as though it would never go away and in a strange way she didn’t want it to. With all of Scott’s family at the anniversary party she felt lonelier than ever.
The owner of the security company, Scott’s second cousin Jeffrey, was also invited to Emma’s birthday party; his daughter Charlotte and Emma were the same age and in the same class at school. Alice opened the electric gates and the gleaming white pickup with the dogs caged in the van’s tray drove up the winding gravel path and parked at the side of the house. The dogs were trying to poke their muzzled snouts through the spaces in the wire cage. Luckily Scott had already put their four rottweilers into the kennel. Only Netty, a skinny black mongrel, was still unleashed; she was a stray Alice had found two years ago at their beach house in La Fillette. Netty was friendly, harmless, protective, and at times quite fierce, as though forever grateful for Alice’s good deed. As soon as Scott saw the van he put down the weedwacker and went towards the security guards. His T-shirt was soaking with sweat; he had spent most of the morning with their gardener, Ricky, cutting down the dry bush around the edges of the property.
Alice was staring at Scott; just looking at him made her angry. He could be smiling, walking, drinking a cup of coffee, playing with Emma or the dogs, and she would feel like slapping and scraping him over and over again. They had been having the same fight for the last two years; things would calm down for a month or so, sometimes more, and then something would trigger it to start all over again. The months of counselling, the vacations to the Bahamas, London, and Paris, the separation, the short-lived reconciliation, the brief honeymoons—none of it could get rid of the intense desire she had on some days to hurt him badly, the way he had hurt her when she found out about his screwing that bitch Nalini. How many times had she warned Scott about Nalini? About what her friends called the Caroni Complex? Nalini was exactly one of those country Indians who had left the cane fields to find a sugar daddy in town. Her overfriendly manner, her willingness to work overtime, even on Sundays, her tacky, skanky outfits. But Scott never listened to Alice, or at least preferred not to.
“Eric. William. How’s it going?” Scott shook their hands. Scott was always very good with names and with people; his job as director of the sales department in his father’s marine equipment company demanded it.
“Afternoon, Mr. Charles,” they both said in unison, in the same polite tone. “Sorry to be late, we had to wait for the dogs,” Eric continued.
“No problem.” Scott walked towards the kennel; the dogs were now going crazy, snarling and barking at each other. “Take your set around to the back to calm these down a little; we have a horse coming too.” Scott didn’t see the need to have horse rides, a bouncy castle, and two children’s makeup artists all for a six-year-old’s party, but he was still doing as much as he could to keep Alice calm, if not happy, today. He tried to convince himself that she had actually forgiven him for the night he had spent with his former secretary Nalini two years ago; that one-night stand, that one drunk, fucked-up fuck had cost him two years and counting. Scott tried to convince himself that things would get back on track, the way they were before Nalini. Early on, after he was cornered by Alice and like an idiot confessed, he felt like running away, taking Emma and moving out, because he couldn’t stand the torture of the never-ending interrogations, the silences that could last for days, or the constant badgering, the crying, the screaming, that feeling of apprehension, of tension, from the moment he walked in the door each evening. One night when he decided he couldn’t keep paying for his crime any longer, he drove off, leaving Alice screaming on the verandah, holding Emma. He stayed at his cousin Jeffrey’s house for two days. Alice never called. But all Scott could think about was Alice and Emma and so he went back. Scott knew then that Alice would have to be the one to leave because he felt even more battered and broken away from her and from his Emma. They had known each other since high school, for goodness sake, but there were sides to Alice that Scott knew he would probably never understand. Beyond their own mess, she carried a sadness inside her, probably as a result of losing her father when she was only six, Emma’s age. To survive, Scott tried hard not to think about what he had done or even Alice’s unhappiness.
“Plenty bush fires up here, Mr. Charles?” Eric asked.
“Boy, endless, and the ashes only just settling down, earlier today they were falling like rain.”
Eric and William both gave pleasant grunts, then worked quickly to get their two pit bulls out of the van’s tray, away from Mr. Charles’s dogs, and immediately began to patrol the perimeter of the backyard. They wore the usual uniform: black cargo pants tucked into black high-top boots, black short-sleeved shirts with two pockets on either side, guns in their holsters and wraparound black shades. They weren’t the typical blue-black, stocky, muscular security guards that most companies used; Eric and William had light-brown skin, were slim and not very tall. They looked more like bank clerks, Alice thought, peering out at them from the kitchen window, but according to Jeffrey they were his best men.
The dogs finally settled down but all the noise had woken up Emma. Alice heard Emma’s familiar scream for Tricia. They were all trying to let her nap as close to party time as possible. Although three thirty was the time on the invitations, Alice knew that most of the guests wouldn’t arrive before four. Tricia had just stepped into the backyard to pick some dill and a little rosemary for the yogurt dip that Alice had taught her to make.
“Trish, Emma’s up, I’ll do the dip if you get her ready.”
“Yes, Miss Alice.” Tricia picked another sprig of rosemary and then hurried back inside. She washed her hands in the large kitche
n sink, dried them with the towel on the counter, and left Alice opening the containers of plain yogurt for the dip.
Alice didn’t look up at Tricia when she said, “The dress for the party is on the bed. Put her hair in a bun, she’ll want to leave it out but it will get too messy. Thanks, Trish.”
Tricia saw Eric and William walk by the perimeter of the porch; she knew them; they acknowledged her with a nod and moved the dogs away.
Tricia’s only son, Tony, used to work for Mr. Jeffrey’s security company as well, but the long hours, the good chance of being shot by some show-off bandit, and the minimum-wage paycheck made him leave. Things only got worse after he quit; he started liming with a group of young Muslimeen who claimed to be doing community work in the village; everyone knew they were selling drugs and looking for new recruits. Tricia and Tony fought daily about all the time he spent with them, until one day she came home from work to a neatly made bed and a note. It said that he believed that Islam was the path to his new God, Allah, and that she shouldn’t worry because he would be taken care of by his Muslimeen brothers on their compound deep in the Sans Souci hills. Tricia could do nothing to get him back; her only consolation was that he wasn’t in Sergeant Socks’s area anymore; the last two Muslimeen youths from the village (boys no more than seventeen) were shot dead by Sergeant Socks right in front of Woo’s Grocery. Socks and his men accused them of robbery and the attempted kidnapping of Mr. Woo himself. No one disagreed, not even Mr. Woo, even though everyone knew that Frank Woo was burying his first cousin in Arouca that very Saturday. The rumour was that Socks shot those boys to send a message to their boss, the imam on the Sans Souci compound, who owed Socks a lot of money.
These days Tricia saw her son once a month. Tony, now Hassan Ali, would pull up to her gate in the village in his shiny black Sentra, never without two other “brothers” from his youth group; he’d blow the horn and she would come out. Tricia’s neighbours in the village always paid attention when they saw the black car with the young Muslimeens driving up the street; if mothers were in their homes they peeped through their curtains and kept their young boys inside, but the young men liming on the corner hailed the car as it passed as though it were a chariot carrying kings. Later in the day, when Sergeant Socks came to make his rounds, they hailed his jeep in the same way.
Tony never got farther than the gate to mutter an “Assalam-u-alaikum,” then a “Hello, Ma,” handing her an envelope before he got back into the car with his brothers in their black shades, white robes, and white toupees. She took the money, never asking where it came from (things were just too hard now to think about that), half for her, half for Tony’s child-mother and their baby girl, Fatima. In the early days after Tony left, Tricia would lie on her bed at night and weep, holding her belly like a child with a terrible stomachache, but now she just took the money and thanked God that her son was still alive. Tony, he was her only begotten son. She had had hopes for that boy; the teachers used to say how bright he was and she had worked hard to give him what she could, because for most of his life it had just been the two of them.
Upstairs Tricia had managed to get a still-drowsy Emma into the dress from her godparents, Jeffrey and his wife Kathy; it was a deep pink, embroidered with small yellow-and-blue flowers around the sleeve, neckline, and hem. Emma’s godparents had bought it on their last cruise to Mexico. Emma often resisted any suggestions Alice made about clothes, but she always accepted Tricia’s without a fuss. So Alice usually had Tricia dress her for special occasions.
Alice put the dip in the fridge and went upstairs to Emma’s room. From the doorway she saw Tricia combing Emma’s thick, curly brown hair—hair Emma hated because it wasn’t straight and smooth like Barbie’s or silky and straight like her cousin Charlotte’s. They were facing the window, not the door. Emma’s room had one of the best views in the house; in the rainy season the two sets of large sliding windows opened up to the thick green valley hills, and in the dry season, if there weren’t too many fires, the hills were orange and yellow from the immortelle and poui trees.
Alice looked at Tricia from the doorway. They were only a year apart, but Tricia was already a grandmother at forty. She had on an old floral dress Alice had given her a few years ago and a pair of Alice’s old slippers. The angle of Tricia’s body exposed a thin leg that looked dry, black, and powdery; the heel of her foot was flaking, the sole was thick and yellow; her body looked old but her voice was that of a young girl’s. Alice often wondered what it would have been like if, in another life, things were turned around and she was the one working for Tricia in Tricia’s old dress with her dry black skin, her kinky black hair, her two-room home, and this job, bringing up somebody else’s child. When Emma was a baby, Tricia used to sing hymns to her from her church while she brushed her hair, but these last few months, ever since her son joined the Muslimeen, Alice noticed a change in Tricia. She still laughed when she told Alice stories about the village, but whenever Tricia thought she was alone, Alice could see the sadness in her.
“You going to behave a nice girl at the party,” Tricia said as she pulled Emma’s hair into a perfect bun. Emma nodded.
“So tell Trish who coming to your party.”
Emma began her list: “Charlotte, Juliette, Jean-Paul, Emily-Louise, Izzy, Tara . . .”
Alice walked away quietly, still hearing them chatting; she had hoped that the distance she felt between herself and Emma would get better with time, but it had only gotten worse, and what Scott had done didn’t help. For some strange reason she had passed some of the anger she felt for Scott on to Emma. Or maybe she was always jealous of the way Scott treated Emma—he was so gentle with her, always trying his best not to hurt her. But it wasn’t just Scott; Alice had always envied mothers, like her mother, like Tricia, who felt this closeness to their children right away and knew how to make it grow.
As Alice passed the large glass window along the corridor she noticed the twins, Eric and William, standing with their dogs like statues on either side of the entrance; by the time she got to her bedroom and looked again, they had disappeared.
Alice knew that this was not the best time to have a party. There had been so many kidnappings in the last few months that many of Emma’s classmates had bodyguards as drivers. Only a year ago, if a parent couldn’t make it, they would send the housekeeper or sitter; now they sent a bodyguard. Good security had to be provided at the parties, otherwise the parents would think twice about coming or sending their child. She didn’t like having the parties, never had, even though she tried her best to hide that fact from both Scott and Emma with her wide smiles and supreme organization. She didn’t like being inspected by the other mothers. In the beginning she tried to make an extra effort to keep up, spending the day at the salon, buying new outfits for herself, Emma, and even Scott. But lately what she wore to a birthday party seemed to matter less and less to her. Her standard khaki capri and a black T-shirt would have to do today.
When Scott and Alice first moved into Pastora seven years ago, having grown up in areas where grotesque sprawling houses covered most of the land, they were excited by all the green fields with the buffalypso, the old cocoa estates, and even the fires in the hills around the vale at night. Sometimes the valley would burn for days and nights, but after one heavy downpour of white rain it could renew itself again, with fresh razor grass reclaiming the burnt earth in what seemed like minutes. At night, during the dry season, they sometimes sat outside on the verandah to look at the fires; orange cinders sparkled against a pitch-black night with silvery blue stars and a thick, milky moon. The black hills resembled volcanoes, sending streams of lava into the valley below. Once, Alice even tried to write a poem about the valley at night using all the same words: silvery blue stars, milky moon, and streams of lava, but she never finished it.
Everyone said that this dry season was different not just in the valley but all over the island. There were fires everywhere on the hills, even along the highways, with flames somet
imes licking the cars as they drove by. Hot, hazy mornings exposed the damage done the night before; the earth looked like chunks of coal and ashes, like there were mounds of salt everywhere. The local Venezuelan psychic said that the island was being punished for all the terrible crimes: “De kidnapping, de murder, de chile abuse, and de drogues, taking over.” The leader of the largest Pentecostal church on the island, Pastor Henry, pleaded with the entire nation to “stop allowing evil to take over our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our souls, because Judgment Day is fast approaching and we don’t have much time”; he had seen in a dream the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Catholics, Anglicans, Hindus, and Muslims all called for a national day of prayer. The government promised more policemen on the streets, help from the army, and even more help from Venezuela’s Guardia Nacional to patrol “our drug-infested waters.” Alice and Scott had even discussed leaving the island, but they didn’t want to end up in Miami like so many of their friends.
The phone rang. Alice heard Scott pick it up downstairs. After the call he came upstairs and gently shut the door of their bedroom. Alice glanced at the clock on the bedside table; it was already 2:35 p.m.
“That was Jeffery on the phone. They’re not coming, Kathy is too upset. Apparently they tried to take the Clarke boy early yesterday morning, around three a.m. They followed him from the club. When he slowed down at the traffic lights before the turnoff into Golf View, they tried to grab him and push him into a car . . .”
“So what does that have to do with not bringing Charlotte?”
“Kathy is worried.”
“About what?”
“I just said what—they nearly took the Clarke boy.”
“So what does that have to do with Charlotte coming to Emma’s party?”
“I don’t know, the Clarkes live on the same street, quite close to them.”
“I know all that but I still don’t see what it has to do with Charlotte. Kathy is so damn jealous of everything. What does she think? That they going to take her? Or her lovely Charlotte? She thinks that they’re really in the same league as the Clarkes?”
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