“It’s seductive here,” he said. “Beguiling. Easy to become a total slacker before you know it. Fall into the bottle every night and you could end up like so many expat prunes with their desperate, predatory eyes, pressing their butts against anything in pants.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Anyone might get a little tight contemplating the turn of the year, let alone a new century,” he said, “but don’t make a habit of it.”
“I’ve got nothing to do, anyway, no reason to be all bushy-tailed of a morning, so who cares if I’m oot ma face night after bloody night?”
“You’ve got a life-and-death job to do.”
“Oy, aye? And what might that be?”
“Forgive the past, embrace the future,” he said. “Hard work, both. I failed the first and bungled the second, but there’s still time for you.” He looked at her a long time, as if trying to recall something. “‘To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you,’” he said. “A theologian named Smedes wrote that.”
“I’d have guessed Hallmark.”
“Hard to control how your work gets cutesied up after you’re gone,” he said. “We’re all in prisons of our own making. I’ll help you spring yourself if you’ll return the favor.”
“Just how do you propose we do that, Mr. Philosopher?”
“Make it our resolution: liberation in the new century.”
One last firecracker shot up. She watched through the palms as its blue starburst disintegrated and rained down over the sea at Oualie.
“Happy New Year, sweet,” he said, and when she looked back, the court was empty.
CHAPTER 21
It rained nearly every day in January, prolonged downpours that turned the garden into a mire. Whenever Els complained of construction delays, Rohan, head of the Guyanese crew, would say “It pissin’ rain, lady, pissin’ rain.” The Christmas winds buffeted the house, rattled the palms, and made her fidgety.
While the workmen hammered overhead, she balanced on a ladder and stretched to roll paint onto the lounge’s planked ceiling. The phone rang and she climbed down and threw back the corner of the drop cloth, dislodging the receiver, which clattered onto the table.
She answered, not bothering to hide her annoyance.
“Timmons here, returning your call,” the voice said. “I’ve obviously interrupted something.”
“Painting, and I don’t mean on canvas,” she said. “Trying to contain the ballooning cost of this bloody project.” She rested her elbow on her grimy knee. “I need you to send more money,” she said. “Fifty thousand—US—ought to do it.”
A beat of silence.
“That will just about wipe out the balance of your trust,” he said.
“I can’t very well stop without proper plumbing,” she said. “I’ll still have a little savings.”
Another beat of silence.
“I’ll wire the money as usual. Look for it by week’s end.” He rang off.
She started a Dizzy Gillespie CD from Jack’s collection and climbed back up the ladder. The music did nothing to improve her mood, and she wielded the roller with such force that she worked up a streaming sweat and was covered with celadon speckles by the time she’d finished the job.
She set the painting tools in the kitchen sink and turned the tap. Nothing. Again. Anger flaring, she crammed the water jugs Lauretta had advised her to save into Wilma’s boot and drove dangerously fast to the Westbury public cistern.
Against one wall was a crudely rigged shower where an elderly black woman in a cotton shift was soaping her hair. The woman hummed as she rinsed, turned off the shower, and shook the water from her arms. She dried her face with a grayed pink towel and watched Els unload the plastic jugs.
“These bloody water stoppages,” Els said. “A shower would be heaven right about now.”
“This ain’t my idea of heaven,” the woman said. “But it better dan nothing.” She slipped into her rubber sandals. “You almost as green as that Jolly Giant,” she said. “Water alone never goin’ get off that mess.” She handed Els a sliver of soap. “Any left when you done, just leave it on that ledge.” She flipped the towel onto her shoulder and walked up the hill, her dress clinging to her hips.
Els gasped when the cool water hit her skin. Being sparing of the soap, she lathered her hair and scrubbed the grime and paint off her arms and legs. She stretched the neck of her tank top and the waistband of her running shorts to let the water rinse the soap and sweat away.
When she reached to put the soap sliver on the ledge, a girl of about six was standing next to a puddle, staring. Her hair was divided into squares and pulled into knots held with pastel bow clips.
“Your braids and hair clips are pretty,” Els said.
The girl ran toward the nearest house shouting, “Mammy, mammy, white lady using our shower.”
A woman came to the door and looked at Els. “Get in here, gyull, you hear me?” she said, and pulled the child into the house. Els remembered Salustrio’s taunt: Just because they smile at you, don’t get to thinking they like you.
By the time she reached her gate, the rain was pelting again. A skinny black man was pulling weeds in the garden. She stopped Wilma and leaned out the window.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He smiled and bent to his work.
The rain fell harder. She gunned Wilma up the hill and made a run for the kitchen door. On the step was a papaya and a calabash bowl holding several greenish-orange fruits with bumpy rinds. She carried them into the kitchen and mopped her face and hands with a tea towel. When she cut one of the fruits, loaded with seeds, it filled the kitchen with a scent somewhere between lime and orange. She squeezed a little juice into her mouth; her whole body seemed to pucker from its sourness. She took a fruit up to the study and riffled through Jack’s books on tropical flora until she found the aptly named “bitter orange” and recognized the aftertaste of marmalade.
Still scattered on the desk were the calculations that had forced her to drain her trust. When I’m flat broke, she thought, maybe I can go into the jam business, or live on mangoes and coconuts. Especially if that man, whoever he is, will deliver them.
She went to the window and looked into the garden. The rain had slackened. The man had disappeared.
CHAPTER 22
Els paused from squashing and stacking the shipping cartons from her edgy artwork, so foreign to the customs inspector that Lauretta had successfully valued it at flea market prices, avoiding duty.
“These are worth more than the house,” Els said.
“Everyone tries to cheat the system,” Lauretta said, and flashed her pixie smile. She pulled a wad of price tags from her pocket and tossed them onto the refectory table.
“I can see why, if it’s true that our taxes go straight to St. Kitts and we never see them again,” Els said. “When did you remove all these?”
“While you were haggling over the furniture,” Lauretta said. “You’d have paid sixty percent duty on all that fancy underwear if he’d seen it was right off the shelf. What does anyone need with matching bra and panties for every day of the year?”
Els shuffled the tags. In addition to US dollars, their denominations were in pounds sterling, French francs, yen, Hong Kong dollars, pesos, riyals. “Consolation shopping,” she said. “I’ve always done it, but never so much as this past year.”
“Consolation for what?”
Els fondled a bra, handmade of exquisite silk and lace. “A hole.”
“What do you mean, ‘a hole’?”
Els hung a Basquiat painting of a skeleton with a fish over the refectory table, crossed her arms, and stared at it. “A hole at the middle of everything,” she said. The hole that had swallowed Mallo. The deeper hole that was her mother.
Lauretta settled the shade onto the celadon Chinese lamp from Cairnoch’s sitting room and tightened its finial. “Throwing your money at this house won’t fix that.”
E
ls placed the lamp next to Jack’s big chair. It looked perfect there, its bead fringe a jaunty counterpoint to the scuffed leather. “The first home that’s all mine,” she said, “is a gourmet meal after living on junk food.”
“That sequined gown and the Dr. Zhivago coat aren’t exactly Fritos.”
“Should have donated all that to a London charity,” Els said. “I’ve no closets for it. And a snowball’s chance of wearing any of it here.”
“You could add feathers to that underwear and parade through town during Culturama,” Lauretta said, and returned to unpacking the lamps.
Els watched her buzz about the lounge, examining each item and placing it with conviction, though seldom to Els’s taste. Finally, she said, “You just unpack the boxes. I’ll figure out where to put everything.”
“As you wish,” Lauretta said. “As usual.”
Els arranged her mother’s twenty-three drawings and paintings in date order on the refectory table.
Lauretta examined the collection. “You’d never guess those were by the same person.”
“In a way, perhaps they weren’t,” Els said. The emotional impact of the pieces varied—comforting, agitated, and furious—and their colors were alternately tranquil, festive, or gloomy. Her favorites were the earliest drawing of the animals, which made her feel as if her mother were reading her a bedtime story, and the self-portrait, which captured her own anger, all the more volcanic and disorienting since Mallo’s death.
Lauretta ran her fingertip over the gardenia signature on a harbor scene with orange sails against a cobalt sea, but since Els had no answer to the unasked question, she said nothing. She put the animal drawing on her bedside table and hung the self-portrait in the study, where its unframed raw power felt right.
They worked all afternoon, and when they were finished, Els’s belongings were melded with Jack’s in a quirky mélange that made her smile.
The empty shipping container crowded the court, and, in the light of the full moon, its serial numbers and letters glowed against its rusty sides. Els sank into a chair and watched the clouds darken to smoke, imagining the container’s travels. For the first time in at least five years, she hadn’t been on a plane in over a month. A night heron squawked and lifted off, threading through the palms and over the ribbon of drive.
When her gaze returned to the container, Jack was leaning against it, his shirt silvery in the moonlight. She jumped up and grabbed the broom she’d been using to sweep the steps. As a weapon it was ludicrous, but she planted her feet and held the handle across her chest like a fighting stick.
“Good evening, sweet,” he said. His voice was seductive. He walked soundlessly across the gravel to about ten feet from the bottom step.
She looked at her broom. Sparrow had warned her never to sweep at night.
“Did I . . . summon you?”
“Don’t believe all that mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It’s hard work getting here. I waited until your gear arrived. You’re less likely to flee now.” He stuck his hands into his pockets. “We should try to get along, seeing as we have so much in common.”
“I’ve nothing in common with a fancier of frisky young things, a drunken brawler.”
“How about an unabashed romantic, inveterate questioner, recovering pugilist?” He took a step forward.
“That’s close enough.”
The breeze played with his shirttails. “This house,” he said. “It called to you as strongly as it did me, once. We share more than you want to admit.” He raised his hands in surrender, turned a full circle, and smiled rakishly. “You can put down your weapon.”
She lowered the broom and hugged the handle to her chest. “I can’t blame you on nightmares or booze this time.”
He looked up at her. “Glad to see that getting some use.”
She looked down. After her shower, she’d pulled on his pale blue linen shirt.
“I always loved the look of a woman in a man’s shirt,” he said. “Bare legs hinting at what might be just above the hem. This moonlight on your alabaster skin turns you positively celestial.”
“Just how much of this alabaster skin have you seen?” she asked. The thought struck her that he might have been watching her naked in the rain during the hurricane, or on the shower platform—that he was always about, as if the wind had eyes.
“I don’t spy,” he said. “And I wouldn’t join a lady in her bath unless invited. If you’re so worried, put up a curtain.”
“And spoil the view of the sea?”
“That’s my girl,” he said. “Joy over modesty all the way.”
“I want my joy and my privacy,” she said.
“And your consolation.” His gaze was intimate, unnerving. “Now that you’ve patched up the roofs, how about fixing what’s really broken?”
The moon’s sparkling road over the sea merged with the bottom of the drive, tempting her to run away from his question and out onto the waves, straight to the ether, in pursuit of the spirits she preferred to his company.
“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt,” he said. “‘They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.’ Horace.”
“Fixing what’s been broken most of my life isn’t solely up to me,” she said.
“Never is. Since I’m here, I might as well help you.”
“What makes you think I want you around at all?”
“I couldn’t be here if you weren’t receptive,” he said. “I can’t visit just anyone, alas.”
“I thought you spirits had the run of the place.”
“Only in comic books,” he said.
A bat made a loop over the steps, followed by another, and soon there were dozens of darting bodies, each on an acrobatic course, barely visible in the moonlight.
“I know they live under the roof because I hear them chittering to each other when they come home at dawn,” she said. “But I never see them leave at dusk. They just appear. Like you.”
“Some people are more afraid of bats than they are of spirits.”
She swept a pebble off the step and sat down. “As children we were fascinated by bats,” she said. “The barn and tower were full of them. Mallo made a collection of their skeletons, mounted against black velvet in a suit box. Tiny, intricate dinosaurs. Once we found a baby, no bigger than this.” She touched her thumbnail to the first joint in her pinkie finger. “We made a bed with cotton wool in a kipper tin, hid it from Burtie, and nursed it with an eye dropper. Mallo planned to teach it to sleep in his cap during the day.” She wrapped her fingers around the broom handle and rocked it. “When it disappeared, Burtie blamed the cat, but he could never have opened that cupboard.” She smiled. “You have no idea who I’m talking about.”
“I’ve got a hunch,” he said. “Good first step, unearthing memories like that.” Against the sky’s pewter glow, the bat silhouettes careened between the dark trees, speeding, diving, pivoting. “Come down here.” He extended his hand.
“I’ll stay where I am.”
“Admit it, you’re curious.”
She pointed the broom handle at him like a tommy gun, went slowly down, and stopped a few feet from him, the tip aimed at his chest. He was ashen, with dark circles under his eyes—or maybe it was just the moonlight. He cocked his head at the broom handle with its loop of string dangling from a hole in its tip. She jabbed it toward him. He stepped back and smiled.
“You appear to be different ages when you visit,” she said.
“It was a big effort to show up the first time as that younger me,” he said. “I’m too tired now to be so vain. You’re probably stuck with this Jack. Or worse.”
A bat flew so close that she felt a puff of air on her ear. The court was alive with hurtling shapes, sweeping through the space between her and Jack, or maybe even through Jack, but they were too fast for her to tell.
“Do you bring your own bats?” she asked.
“These come with the place,” he said. “Without them to suck u
p all those mosquitoes, you could never sit on the gallery at sunset.”
“I’ve never seen such a swarm,” she said. Being immersed in a natural phenomenon so indifferent to her was oddly enchanting. It wasn’t the first time she’d been arrested by the throbbing and largely invisible life all around her, but she hadn’t felt that wonder since her rambles with Mallo through the magical kingdom of their childhood that was Cairnoch.
“It’s a rare feeding frenzy. Full moon, perhaps?” His voice was intimate again, but no longer unnerving. He struck a St. Francis pose, inviting the bats to land on his hands. “I’m no scarier than they are, to the right person.”
They stood barely the broom handle’s length apart. “Could I sweep you away as easily as a cobweb?” She flipped the broom so that the tattered bristles nearly brushed his face.
“It’s been years since a beautiful woman took after me with a broom,” he said. “Go ahead. See what happens.”
She looked at him and slowly lowered the makeshift weapon.
He smiled. “Another bunch of periwinkle might be a better deterrent.”
“Sparrow told me to put rice in front of every door.”
“Did he also tell you that jumbies like untying knots?” he said. “Hang a knotted rope by the door, and a jumbie’ll get distracted and forget all about you.”
“They say unfinished business keeps jumbies from their rest. What business has imprisoned you, Jack? I want to know what kind of resolution I might be getting into.”
“Make you a deal. That’s your forte, isn’t it—deals?” he said. “I promise to wheedle you into recognizing—no, admitting—the obvious, and being brave enough to do what you need to do, if you promise to resolve what I was too cowardly to finish.”
“I’m to be brave for both of us, is it?”
“Brave for real, not that pretend brave you’re so good at,” he said. “Or else neither of us will get out of prison.”
“What if pretending to be brave is too hard a habit to break?”
The Moon Always Rising Page 14