“What’s this I been hearing about you butching out?” he had asked.
Aubrey hung up the phone on him and ignored his calls. And then he died. They had been close once. She quietly mourned his death along with the others.
And then there was the boy from downstairs. She had watched him grow up, cooked him dinner more times than she could count. She had smiled approvingly when her daughter finally decided to give him a chance, comforted him when her daughter then decided to go stateside and not return his calls. This had been a significant loss. She felt it deep in the pit of her being. How much more of a loss had it been for Lee? For Patrice? Neither would talk about it, and she didn’t want to raise the dead if they were content in burying him.
But nothing ever stayed buried. It came out in strange and dangerous ways. Alice was right, but what could she do?
Aubrey put the dishes in the drainer and sat back down at the dining table. She listened for the bathroom door to open so she could jump into the shower. As she waited, Lee rushed past her.
“See you, Aubrey,” she said as she went. She was at the door before Aubrey even responded. She managed to say goodbye just before the door slammed. She heard the muffled sound of a car revving up and climbing the hill outside their house. Alfie’s barks continued long after the car was gone.
Alice came out of the bathroom, so Aubrey went to take her shower. She let the water run over her for ten minutes before she even picked up the soap.
It would be a long day at work. The population of strays had gone up since it happened. They had to put down so many animals. It wasn’t as bad as in the beginning, though. Many of the animals now were sick, emaciated, almost at the end of their rope. Right after it happened, she had to put down a lot of perfectly healthy dogs and cats. There simply wasn’t enough room, and with their owners dead or having left the island, there was nothing else to do with them.
So many people had left, and not just the men. The trauma of the whole event had caused a mass exodus. The entire island was straining under the absence of so many essential people, which meant a lot of the responsibility to keep things going fell on those who remained.
On the way out of the house, Aubrey filled Alfie’s bowl. She had adopted the dog the same day he arrived at the shelter, a few weeks after the massacre. Both she and Alice felt an immediate connection. At night, Aubrey would take him for a walk and then let him inside until they were ready for bed, but he spent most of his time in the yard.
“I’m worried about her,” Alice said on their way to work. “Especially with the trouble at school.”
Alice was not going to let this go. Aubrey kept her eyes on the road but moved one hand to stroke Alice’s knee, feeling the coarse denim against her palm and fingers. Another thing that had changed since it happened: a lot less traffic. The car eased from stoplight to stoplight without the slow crawl typical for this hour a year ago.
“I’m serious,” Alice said. “It’s about time.”
“I know.” They had gone this long without pressing the issue, content just to offer a shoulder when Lee couldn’t stop the tears.
But what Aubrey was thinking about now was her own daughter. She didn’t mention it, but Lee reminded her very much of Patrice: that same stubbornness, that guarded way they both approached the world, as if they would break should they let their armor down for even a moment. Aubrey understood this from Lee, but who had Patrice learned it from?
“Are you okay?” Alice asked.
Aubrey nodded. “You want to catch a movie this weekend?”
“No,” Alice said. “All the movies are depressing these days.”
“Okay.”
“I want to go on a trip. Get away from all this bullshit.”
“To St. John.”
“Sure, that’s far enough.”
Aubrey gave Alice’s knee one last caress. She turned on the radio, and when the news came on, she switched to music from her phone. An instrumental throbbed in her ears: contemporary classic. Music these days also had a quality Alice didn’t like. The Ynaa had changed everything. References to them, to the tragedy, could not be avoided. The world could not stop talking about the massacre. Aubrey resented it. The tragedy had happened to them, no one else. It wasn’t as if the world cared about them before.
On the other hand, now that the Ynaa were gone, Alice liked the idea of returning to the way things were. Aubrey wasn’t so sure about that, either. It seemed as though the Ynaa, despite the terror they left in their wake, had shifted humanity. People would never be so self-involved as they once were, never so fixated on their own greatness. The Ynaa had taught them humility. How long that lasted, and what good it could do, depended on how long their impact lasted on the collective psyche. And also on how humans decided to respond to that impact. So far, not terribly. Aubrey hoped for that continued grace.
“Let’s get married,” she said to Alice. She took her eyes off the road long enough to see Alice’s face. The smile she found there was so bright, it lit up her face, too.
“Sounds good.”
• • •
Lee’s day started out quietly. She went to school and sat under the big tree by the high school’s auditorium, talking to Jess until the bell rang. Then she went to English class and pretended to listen to Ms. Kerry go on about When the Night Falls, a novella about the Massacre of Men.
It was after class when things turned. On her way down the stairs from Building B to Building A, a boy from Croix pushed her. He was big for his age, but he wasn’t a senior; no tie hung from his neck.
“They should have killed him twice,” the boy said.
Lee rounded on him, punching him in the nose. Blood poured from the boy’s nostrils all over his hands and shirt.
“You fucking—”
Lee didn’t let him finish. She kicked him where the sun don’t shine, and that sent him to his knees. He groaned. He looked up to say something else—his teeth now red with blood from his nose—but he caught himself when he saw Lee winding up to kick him in the face. Her leg was cocked, foot in the air. Seeing that, he curled up into a ball.
Lee walked away. When she caught up with Jess, she told her what happened.
“Shit,” Jess said. “If Dian was here …” She stopped talking. Dian was dead. Milton was dead. All their male friends were dead. Angela’s ex-boyfriend, Woody, was dead, too, which was the one silver lining. The boys now at the school were all from other places, some from the VI but many from farther off—complete strangers to the Massacre of Men.
“Let’s go,” Lee said.
“I thought we were going to wait until after school,” Jess said.
Lee just watched her, hoping Jess would finish the rest of the conversation in her own head instead of bothering her with it.
Jess rolled her eyes. “Okay. Let’s go.”
In the old days, Lee and Jess had to sneak out of school through the special-education building in the back of campus and then walk fast through the field next to Lockhart Elementary. The two schools were separated only by a badly maintained fence, and you could slip from one to the other through an opening.
If it was lunchtime, you could slip out the front gate and go to Barbel Plaza, across the street, for food. If you wanted to skip the rest of the day, all you had to do was not come back.
But now you didn’t need to do any of that. Leaving school had become as easy as walking out the front gate anytime you liked. The school’s security was understaffed, and because only eleven months had passed since the Massacre of Men, the unofficial policy was to let students leave if they wanted, and let them face the repercussions later. The repercussions amounted to a stern warning. Lee had several of those already.
No one was there when they drove out the front gate. They drove over to Barbel Plaza and each had a paté: saltfish for Jess, chicken for Lee. Once they were finished they went
to the graveyard.
It was the old big graveyard, not the new one that was made after the Massacre of Men. Lee and Jess made their way to Angela’s grave. They put down the flowers they had brought and shared a few memories of Angela. The time they had gone to Jost Van Dyke over the weekend, and Jess and Angela had very brief romances with two local boys. And that time they all went to Fat Turtle and got drunk off drinks her shitty boyfriend Woody had gotten for them. At the end of the night, Angela was throwing up in one of the potted plants.
“You got vomit all over your clothes, too,” Jess said to Angela’s gravestone. “So nasty.”
Lee laughed. She allowed herself to feel what she had felt then, rubbing Angela’s head as she puked, laughing mercilessly.
“Stop laughing at me,” Angela had said between bouts of throwing up. At school, they’d all had a good laugh. They harped on it for weeks, until Angela got mad and yelled at them never to bring it up again. They obeyed—mostly. Milton just couldn’t let it go.
Lee didn’t notice the precise moment when her laughter turned to crying. And not just tears, either. She was bawling, her body shaking with wave after wave of grief. Through a tear-smeared world, she could see Jess staring, her face stuck in a frown. She gently stroked Lee’s shoulder, not saying a word.
It would be easy to assume that Lee had started crying because of Angela, but no one made assumptions about these things anymore. Not now. Tears for one friend could lead you down a bitter road, stopping at each house to mourn one life after another. There was no way to parse something so compounded, so endless. It just swelled and swelled.
Before long, Lee had stopped at her grandmother’s house. She had died just a few months after everything happened. Grams had stopped sleeping in her own room. She spent most of her time on the couch, watching soaps and sitcoms. She would laugh herself into coughing fits. Lee would hear her in the middle of the night, whimpering. “Stupid boy!” she would hear Grams yell at odd hours. When Lee went out, she would see Grams shaking her head in her sleep. Lee assumed it was just grief. One morning, Lee woke up and Grams had simply slipped away. No amount of yelling or tears would rouse her. Later, she found out she had cancer and hadn’t told a soul.
Jess had her share of things to mourn. She had lost her father and brother in the massacre. It had taken quite a toll on her, made her stony where she was once soft. “It could have been worse,” Jess had said several times afterward. Her father and brother died quickly: paralysis, choking, then death. Other people weren’t as lucky. Those who had encounters with the Ynaa and watched them murder their loved ones were suffering from severe PTSD. There had been an uptick in suicides. Women would disappear for days, until a friend or neighbor came over and caught the whiff of death.
Jess was there to pull the knife from her mother’s hand—a bit of good fortune that proved itself when her mother didn’t try again. Yet.
“Look who’s here,” Jess said.
Lee sniffled, wiped her eyes, and followed Jess’ gaze. Her eyes lit on a frail woman standing over another grave. It was Tony’s mother. Shawn’s mother, too, Lee had to remind herself. She had lost both sons, a little over a year apart. Lee took off walking toward the woman.
Jessica’s voice followed behind Lee. “Stop!” she said a few times. “Slow down.” Lee didn’t slow down. Not then. The woman looked up and caught sight of Lee. She tensed, her face changing from sorrow to straight-up terror.
Lee finally slowed when the woman did this, though she was only a few steps from being right in her face. Jess caught up but stayed behind Lee.
The woman stepped back and put her hands up, palms out as if to ward off blows. “What?” she asked. “Leave me alone!”
Lee stepped back in response. “Don’t mean to scare you,” she said. “Just wanted to talk.”
The woman wrinkled her eyebrows, looking genuinely puzzled. She didn’t put down her hands. “About what?”
Lee hadn’t thought of this, either, but now she could guess. She had been detached from any real interpretation of her internal emotions lately. But seeing the woman lift her hands in defense, she understood. She had been attacked by people on the street before, by those who recognized her connection to her son, the man who unleashed Ynaa wrath on the men of St. Thomas. In this, Lee felt some kinship with the woman—the burden of blame for loving foolish men who had played with fire and burned everyone.
Lee spoke slowly. She gave her name and asked for the woman’s.
“Mary,” the woman answered.
“You’re Tony’s mom,” Lee said, not really a question. “I used to go to school with him. He was a grade under me.”
Mary just watched Lee, waiting for a shoe to drop that never did.
“We’re sorry for your losses,” Jess chimed in, seeing that the conversation had lapsed into awkward silence.
“Yes,” Lee said. “We’re so sorry.”
“Sorry for your losses,” Mary said. The words applied to every local. She looked away from them for a moment, quick like a frightened mouse.
“Derrick Reed was my brother,” Lee said.
Anger and defensiveness flared in Mary’s face, but it subsided almost as fast, replaced by a guilty look. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Lee said.
“How you been?” Jess asked. The question was innocent enough, but Lee could guess at a possible subtext. How you been? meaning Have you had dangerous thoughts?
“Been okay,” Mary said. “Can’t complain.”
The answer you gave when you really were okay. And also the one you gave when you wanted to keep bad feelings private. Lee didn’t have to guess which.
“Take care of yourself,” Lee said, and then thought to walk away. Something stopped her. All at once, she became aware of how strange this whole interaction was. But even weirder was the fact that she didn’t want it to end.
“You, too,” Mary said. “Crazy world out there.”
Not here, though, Lee thought. Most of the people in these graves died oblivious to the world she now lived in. They were invaded, tormented, massacred, and abandoned. But the dead slept, unaware. It was the living who suffered.
“Didn’t really know your sons,” Lee said. “Not like that.” She placed her hand on Mary’s shoulder, steeling herself to look into the woman’s eyes without flinching. “But I want to tell you that it’s not their fault. Not nobody fault. We all were helpless against them.”
Mary nodded, though Lee could see in her eyes that the gesture was too much. Mary wanted to deny the reassurance but couldn’t, since she recognized it as a gift. She settled on a meek thank-you.
When Lee looked to Jess, she was staring back at her, but Jess didn’t give her away. Jess knew Lee better than this, knew that what she had said was a lie. Lee blamed a lot of people, not just the Ynaa. But she didn’t blame Tony, and that was the grave they were standing at. And even if she did, Jess would honor the lie.
“Can we stand with you?” Jess asked. “Pay respects.”
“Yes,” Mary said with a smile that warmed only the bottom of her face, leaving the rest mournful.
For a long time, no more words were said. Everyone stood staring down at the grave. After several minutes, Lee started swaying on her legs, and then stopped when she came back from her own thoughts, realizing that Mary and Jess had not moved for some time. She continued in silence. She would let this go on for as long as Mary needed. An act of kindness for a stranger in this now-strange world.
• • •
“Don’t worry,” Jackson said. “People have been very forthcoming. Mostly.”
Mostly. Patrice gave her best patronizing smile to the webcam. “Okay,” she said. He was trying to reassure her, but she still felt uneasy about her father going around asking people about the most traumatic moment of their lives, especially since one of those people had nearly killed him.
/>
“Come on, Pat,” Jackson said, reading her face. “It was a minor hospital visit.”
“Three days in the hospital is not a ‘minor visit.’”
Jackson gave an exasperated huff. “When did you become the parent?”
“From long,” Patrice said, chupsing her teeth. “Someone has to protect you from yourself.”
Jackson had abandoned his previous project. He didn’t tell Patrice why, only that it would fuel dangerous paranoia. “The world doesn’t need that story,” he had said. “Not now.”
His new book was about the Massacre of Men, which had afforded him enough stories to fill a hundred books. But it also meant he had to ask people about the most painful moments of their lives.
The woman who had caused her father’s “minor” hospital visit was a distraught survivor of three boys and a husband. She had ignored his calls and messages, sending only a text with a single question: How did you get my number? Her father told the woman that he had gotten her number through one of her friends; he didn’t say which. The larger question of how he got in contact with the friend was left unanswered. Everyone on island knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. You could find anyone within two or three degrees of separation.
The woman didn’t respond to her father’s reply. Still, her father was eager to get the woman’s story. On the night of the massacre, an Ynaa had showed up at the woman’s house to kill her husband—one of the random acts of extreme violence the Ynaa doled out on top of the widespread seizures. Jackson needed more descriptions of the Ynaa. He neglected to note what the larger trauma of losing three young children and watching her husband’s murder would do to the woman’s psyche.
When he showed up at her house, the woman hit him several times with a frying pan. Neighbors had to drag her off him.
“I won’t go to people’s houses unannounced,” Jackson reassured Patrice. “And I’ve been taking Jammie around with me.”
“Ah. The infamous Jammie.” Patrice would have to do it. She knew it now. Against his will, if she had to.
The Lesson Page 23