“Should we draw shapes, my Bry?” I say.
He doesn’t reply. A shy day. I hoist myself from the cloth and squat in the sand. I trace a balloon with a squiggly string. A bird. A sailboat. Bryan looks at the shapes with interest and also some wariness. “Do you know what that says?” I ask, pointing. He shakes his head. “B-R-Y-A-N. That’s you, Bryan.”
He murmurs something.
“What’s that?”
“A nana.”
“You want me to draw a banana?”
His lips part and release the faintest, “Yes.”
I do my best, a thin shape that looks more like a crescent moon. “Like so?”
He nods. “Thank you, Dada.”
It’s not me who taught him thank you. It’s Sara. Already she’s showing him good manners. I didn’t even notice it happening.
Bryan is still shy with me when I tear the corner off a Cadbury wrapper and show him how to press out the melted chocolate. My boy accepts the chocolate I squeeze onto his finger like it’s something holy. He licks it off with his small pink tongue. Sara’s tongue.
Sara sits up. “Should we go in?”
I undress Bryan and take off his nappy. My son’s skin is dark and even and supple. His belly button is a small sweet nut. Sara removes her shirt and her skirt to reveal her swimming costume. I take off my polo, so I’m down to my shorts and singlet. I’m a bit embarrassed for Sara to see me, but she doesn’t stare.
With Sara beside me, I take Bryan in my arms and carry him into the sea. At Indigo Bay, the guests pause on the sand before they walk into the water, as if some sort of preparation is required. It’s different here. We walk into the sea as easily as taking our next step. We are not alone in the water. I see a father with a daughter. A woman in a pink bathing cap. An old man holds an old woman by the arm and guides her through the soft waves.
We wade out until the water comes to Sara’s waist, Bryan nestled in the crook of my arm. The water is warm, almost the same as the air. Then I feel something warmer on my arm. At first I think it’s the last of the day’s heat, but the warmth is moving, flowing. I look at Bryan. My boy is laughing—big laughter, full and free. Sara and I look down at my arm at the same time. Urine, trickling in a small channel. We laugh, too. Then Sara closes her eyes, leans back, and floats.
I see us then, a family together in the sea. And something happens to me that maybe I can’t ever explain. On this evening, I am a father. Later, Sara and I will tuck Bryan’s sleeping ragdoll body into bed. Later still I’ll lime with Edwin. For the first time ever, my life feels like my life.
ISN’T IT the fuck of it all that tonight of all nights, when all I want is to lime with my mate, to feel my life being my life, we’re saddled with the girl? We’re in the car on the way to Paulette’s. Engine sputtering, chicken in the road, and she. Tonight’s she last night. Edwin knows what this means and from the way she’s dressed in a short skirt and a top that ties with a string around she neck, she knows it, too.
“You ready for a wild night, girl?” Edwin says.
She scoffs. “Paulette’s is not exactly the pinnacle of wild.”
“Maybe we’ll take you out to Faraway,” he says with a grin. “See if the goat lady take an interest in you.”
“I’m down for whatever,” the girl says, like it makes no difference to she. But I see she hidden smile, so pleased to think we’re going to do something big for she last night. What is it about this one, so convinced she’s special? I want to tell she there was Julie and Callie and Lisa and Lauren and Molly before her, and there will be plenty of pretty pretty girls after her. She may be a bit sharper than most, she may be quicker with her tongue, but in the end she wants what they all want: to take home the story of how she fucked the man who brought she towels on the beach. But so what? She’s using him, but he’s using she, too. They get their story and he gets them.
At Paulette’s, Edwin buys all of we a round of ganja shots. Next, rum. At some point I must switch glasses with he, because soon both of ours are finished. I buy another, and another. I’m getting good and gone now. Music playing, bottles clinking, mutt begging. Sounds of Edwin and the girl.
I watch them dance. She does have a nice sway. Together they move so right. You can’t learn this. You want to know the secret of life? You will never be they. They is always someone else.
We’re at Paulette’s an hour or so when the girl says, “I’m bored. Let’s get out of here.”
“Where do you have in mind?” Edwin says.
“I thought we were going to Faraway?” she says with a glint in she eyes.
He laughs. “You mad, girl?”
“But I thought you said—”
“I was just messing with you. Anyway, how you think we would get there?”
She looks down at the floor. “Whatever,” she mumbles. “Forget it.”
“Relax. Plenty of wild places to go.”
Next thing we’re in the car. Edwin drives fast. Windows down, radio blasting. The potholes give a good bump—the girl bounces so high she head hits the roof, hard, and she laughs. We’re all good and drunk. Ready for the night to take we.
When Edwin pulls off the road at the spot where the scrub leads to the nameless cliffs, I turn a hard gaze on he. I don’t want to take some Yankee chick to this place. But Edwin pretends not to notice. He turns off the car and climbs out. He grabs a bottle of rum from the car and says, “Follow me.”
We walk single-file, Edwin then she then me. We’ve limed here pretty regular over the years since we found the spot in the boat with Keithley, and there’s a path carved into the scrub, so faint you have to know it’s there to find it. But the ground is uneven and the path is narrow and the scrub is so thick sometimes you have to shield your face as you walk. I see the girl turn around and look behind she. The road is gone.
“Where are we going, anyway?” she asks. She tries to make her voice calm, but she’s nervous, and I feel a bit pleased to see this cocky one brought a little low. She stumbles as she walks. This is she drunkest night yet.
“This wild enough for you, miss?” Edwin replies.
She wraps her arms tight across she chest like she’s cold. She’s scared for true now, and just when I’m about to break and tell she everything’s fine and where we’re going, the scrub parts and we’re here. The stretch of smooth, flat rock that leads to the edge. The ocean lit up by the moon. The girl doesn’t hesitate. She dashes right up to the edge, so fast for a second I think she’s going to go right over.
“Shit, girl, watch yourself!” Edwin says.
She turns to us. “This place is amazing.” She kicks off she sandals and we do the same, leaving we shoes in a pile. She walks the edge like a high-wire walker in the circus, up on she tiptoes with she hands out to her sides. Next, she stands with she toes curled over the edge, looking out. In the distance, Faraway is a black shadow against the black sky.
Edwin nudges me. “She ripe to be fucked or what?”
Then he runs at she, his bare feet soundless against the rock. When he reaches she, he puts his arms around her and she shrieks. He scoops her up. He twirls her around.
“You scared the shit out of me!” she says, laughing so hard she’s gasping. She hits him, but not hard; she’s not angry, she’s flirting. She leans back in Edwin’s arms and looks up at the stars and kicks her feet like she’s swimming through the air. He puts her down and we sit together on the rocks.
Edwin passes the bottle of rum around. He pulls a spliff from his pocket. We’re having a real bacchanal now, just the three of we. The rocks are smooth and cool. The sky offers we everything: crescent moon, stars so bright it’s like they’re fucking with we.
She tips the bottle back and lets the liquor flow down she throat. She blows smoke into Edwin’s face and he breathes it in. I reach for the spliff. She shakes she head, wags she finger.
“Not yet.” She takes another hit, brings she face close to me, and exhales. Then her mouth is on my mouth. I’m so go
ne I don’t wonder what or why. Her tongue twists around my tongue. I take she hips in my hands. She berry lips. She little tits pressing against my chest. I feel myself going hard.
She pulls away. There’s a twinkle in she eyes. She turns to Edwin. Then her mouth is on his mouth and I watch she kiss he. Her ponytail tosses in the wind. He unties the string around her neck. He runs his hands up and down she sides and groans.
She pulls away from he, same as she did from me. I look to see if something’s wrong, but she still has the twinkle in she eyes. She twirls her ponytail with her finger, like she’s alone here, amusing herself. Then she looks at we. “Your turn.”
I laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she says.
“You shitting we,” Edwin says.
“You scared, boys?” She makes a big show of tying the string around her neck again, though she’s so drunk she does it sloppy. “I thought you were up for something wild. Never mind, I guess.”
Edwin shakes he head. “Fucking girl.” He grabs me and pulls me toward him. Next thing I know, his lips are on my lips. His tongue pushes into my mouth. Quick, he pulls away. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and I do the same. We spit onto the rocks. He kissed me hard, like a smack across the mouth. At first I want to laugh. Can you believe what we just did? Can you believe how far my bred will go to fuck a girl? But then I look at he and he looks at me and something in his face stops me. For the first time in we life, Edwin appears afraid.
I hear the girl clap, slow slow. I hear she say, “Bravo.” We don’t move. “Guys?” she says. “Hey, guysss.” Out of the corner of my eye I see she stumble. She falls to her hands and knees like she’s going to be sick. Then she lies down on the ground, curled up like a baby.
Edwin snaps back into the moment then. He turns away from me and faces she. “You satisfied, miss?” he says.
“Shhh. The stars,” she mumbles. Her eyes are closed.
Edwin goes over and sits next to she. He takes the string of her shirt in his fingers and pulls. She lets him. She shirt falls down to she waist. She’s not wearing a bra. Her tits are like Sara’s, small small, the kind that remind you a woman was a girl. He unbuttons his trousers. He runs his finger up she leg, she thigh, under she skirt.
“Mmm.” She says it so faint I barely hear it.
I go off to give them space. I walk to the edge of the rocks and lie down and listen to the sea crash. I close my eyes and for a moment I’m falling, weightless. Then I hear Edwin.
“What the fuck?” he says.
I look over.
He’s wiping his hand on his trousers. “Girl, quit slobbering!” he says.
I laugh. “Edwin, man, she passed out!”
He groans and shoves she off. In the starlight her scar glistens like a thing that could slither away. He lifts she arm and lets go. It flops.
“Typical,” he spits.
Edwin leaves her there and walks over to me. He lies down near me, right at the edge, so close he hangs one arm over it and swings it back and forth through the abyss above the sea. We look up at the stars. A memory comes over me like a breeze, of lying like this back in this same spot in secondary, when Keithley would take us out in the boat and sometimes, amid the bacchanal, the night would find its stillness. I’m drifting off now. Ground cool and smooth. Air cool and smooth. Sound of waves far below.
Then I feel Edwin’s hand on my hand.
He turns and looks at me. I don’t laugh or pull my hand away. It all happens fast. He unbuttons himself, then me. I make my mind go empty. I make myself all body. Not because I know what I want or don’t want, but because this night has taken us to a place we may never find again, and I need to be there with him before it’s gone. I don’t believe we’re doing this until he places my hand around him. He’s warm, like my own self. It’s he or me or we—I don’t bother to understand, just touch and rub, touch and rub, until the world goes tacky with we. We’re together beneath the cold stars, and then the stars groan and unleash their white light and the night goes so thick and sweet with our chlorine I swear that perfume will last until the stars are dead.
Then I’m on the ground. Shoved off by he, hard, and at first I don’t know why, but then I sit up and rub my eyes open and see she looking at we.
“The fuck you staring at, little girl?” Edwin says.
Her eyes open wide. Her mouth makes an O and a sound comes out so small the wind takes it.
She stands, gathers she sandals, and runs.
FARAWAY
“AT FIRST, I believed she would turn up.”
People disappear and are found. A mother at a department store plunges into panic until she hears a muffled giggle coming from inside a rack of clothes. A husband is late on a rainy night, but eventually the headlights come up the driveway. The girl is sobering up somewhere. She is swimming in the ocean, in the pool. She is a bit late, is all, to the breakfast buffet. For a time, the missing person is everywhere. Then, sometimes, just as quickly, she is nowhere.
Clive and I sat on the bench on the sidewalk. Snow had collected on our coats and on Clive’s gray wool hat. The traffic light at the end of the block bathed us in its shifting light—green, yellow, red. It was after midnight. I felt as if I had been walking for days, for years, and now that I had finally arrived at my destination, this faraway place the reaching of which had been my sole object for so long, I didn’t want to look around. I didn’t want to take in the sights or know anything about what kind of place this was. I was only tired.
I said nothing and he continued. “When she ran off, I started to go after her, but Edwin said to let her go, and I did. We were only half a mile from Indigo Bay. We weren’t abandoning her in the middle of nowhere. I figured she’d find her way. On the drive home, we got pulled over and the police officer took us in to sleep it off. You must know about that, I guess. We were in a cell together all night, only the two of us, but we didn’t talk. We just sat there together. But it wasn’t a bad silence. It felt like we had time, is what I mean. We didn’t have to say anything to each other yet about what we’d done. Then the next day we found out she was missing and everything changed.”
“What did you do?”
“When he heard the news, Edwin came up to me on the beach and said, ‘Listen. We limed with she at Paulette’s and then we drove her back here. That’s all.’ So when the police questioned me that’s what I told them. I knew how it must look. The two of us with her all night, and now she happened to be gone? They knew I was hiding something, but what could I do, tell them what had happened?” He shook his head. “The police came and searched my grandmother’s house. They were looking for drugs. I don’t know how they knew. Edwin—he wouldn’t have done that to me. I still believe that. My grandmother watched me get taken away, with all the neighbors out in the street.” He ran his hand over his face.
Clive told me the rest of his story, and I did my best to listen, though I confess I found it difficult to focus on the details of a life that I saw now had very little to do with me. He told me about his time in the eggshell-blue prison, where he and the twenty or so other incarcerated island men did nothing much as they waited out their sentences. At night, he was troubled by dreams. In them, he was back at the cliffs with Edwin, together beneath the stars. He looked up and saw everyone he knew standing in a circle around them, watching. We have found you, we know, everybody knows. He woke from these dreams soaked in sweat. Then he reminded himself that the girl was the only one who had seen them together, and she was dead. He felt so relieved, and right on the heels of this emotion came the next one—filthy, gut-twisting shame that he was relieved that a girl was dead, and in these moments it seemed to him that they must have willed her death somehow, that their desire to protect their secret had made it happen.
In prison he had time to think. Mostly, he thought about Edwin. They had not spoken since Edwin instructed him on what to say to the police, so Clive was left alone with the mystery of that night and what it meant—a
mystery that cast its shadow back to the beginnings of his boyhood. He went over it and over it, sifting through the smallest moments and details of their shared life. He thought of the antimen on the beach before Indigo Bay was Indigo Bay, when Edwin orchestrated the ambushes to chase the men away. He thought of Jan sitting in the stifling afternoon air of Paulette’s, his eyes bloodshot with drink, his thumb beating like a heart against the sticky bar. Fleet. What was Jan’s interest in them, in Edwin, really? He thought of Alison and Julie and all the rest, the whole parade of Edwin’s pretty American daughters. Edwin always said he went after them because the local girls were either prudes or skets or gossips, and Clive had always been impressed with himself for knowing better than to believe this. He had thought Edwin pursued these girls because they came from the places he dreamed of going, because he hated them for their stupid good luck even as he tried to draw himself closer to his dreams through their sweet-smelling skin. And maybe that was sort of it. But what if there was something else, too? What if he chose these girls because whatever happened, or didn’t, they were leaving, gone?
No matter how much he thought about it, without knowing what that night had meant to Edwin, it was impossible to determine what it had meant to himself. What would have happened next? What future was thwarted because that girl went off and got herself killed?
Edwin did not come to see him in prison. His grandmother did, every Sunday. She sat stiffly across a folding table from him in the visitors’ room, beneath an overhead fan that ticked as it uselessly stirred the warm air. It was from her that he learned that Edwin was looking in on Sara and Bryan in the evenings. He had been fired from Indigo Bay, of course, but recently he had started a new venture silk-screening island-themed apparel—T-shirts with palm trees, neon sunsets, a pineapple wearing sunglasses, slogans: I’M ON ISLAND TIME. WHAT HAPPENS ON THE CRUISE STAYS ON THE CRUISE. His merchandise was already in a few of the souvenir shops in Hibiscus Harbour. He was giving Sara money. Clive was grateful. Edwin had always helped him, and he was helping him now, as Clive still believed he always would.
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