The best thing she ever did was to behave in front of her children. If all she could give them was to contain the dark, squalid rooms within her, then that is enough. If to other people it seems like very little, well, she knows that it is everything. She has freed them from a burden they do not even know exists, that of being tormented by a deep, unsolvable ache for all the wrong things.
She has outlived them all. Her mother. The father whose name she never knew, whom she assumes must be long dead. Edwin, whom she nursed until his last breath but who never, not even then, truly let her in. (Yet did two boys ever have a father who adored them more?) Only Clive is still out there somewhere. Rumors reach the island. Last she heard he’d left New York for the West Coast someplace. According to a friend of hers, he got married out there and has a daughter. But this is secondhand knowledge at best. She does not think of him often. A difficult chapter in her life, from when she was very young. It has been so long since any of them were here with her that her own endurance confounds her. Lately, she has the oddest notion that she might go on living forever.
The baby beside her on the blanket stirs and cries. Before she can reach out for him, Bryan is there, scooping the child into his arms.
“There, there, my boy,” he whispers. “You’re all right. You’re just fine.”
TRAVEL TO the edge of the island’s south coast and you will find yourself on a different beach, where the sand is soft as cream. At the water’s edge, children turn cartwheels and bury one another in the sand. A boy lifts a conch to his ear and hears the secret sea. A mother considers grabbing her phone to capture this moment; instead, she just watches him. A cruise ship glides soundlessly across the middle distance. Somewhere, in another world that is also this world, it is snowing.
Farther up the sand, a little girl sits beneath an umbrella as a woman braids her hair. In the sea, brothers with matching boogie boards ride the gentle waves. A teenage boy picks up a girl and threatens to dunk her, and she squeals with delight.
A woman pauses on her walk down the beach and watches them all. This place is much as she remembers it. The pool in the shape of a lima bean, the open-air restaurant where last night she ate conch carpaccio and drank rum punch on the veranda and felt the cool ocean breeze. As with all places remembered from childhood, it appears smaller now, more ordinary. The domed ceiling of the marble lobby is not quite so high, the sand not quite so white, as they are in her memory. They’ve changed the name, too. Indigo Bay is the Royal Hibiscus now, and has been for years; a rebranding effort after the things that happened.
One more thing is different: Several years ago, a French conglomerate purchased the development rights to Faraway Cay. Now it is a private island resort and spa with bungalows built on stilts in the shallows. According to the resort’s website, the restaurant is helmed by a celebrated Nordic chef who “marries his farm-to-table ethos with the local Caribbean bounty.” The spa’s offerings include a hot volcanic-stone massage, a local salt scrub, and a two-hour “Arawak Ritual” that promises “complete purification of both body and spirit.” The downed planes on the cay have been preserved. There is a picture of one in the website’s photo gallery, a yellow wing choked in sea grape. Stroll past the island’s mysterious relics en route to your own private waterfall.
The goats are gone. Exterminated, one assumes.
When the woman reaches the black rocks that mark the end of the beach, she sits in the sand and looks out at the cay. The white beach. The cliffs tufted with growth, a vivid green unlike any she has seen before or since. She can make out the bungalows that ring the shore and, if she squints, people on the beach—husbands with wives, parents with children. The woman stands, brushes the sand from her legs, and walks back in the direction from which she has come.
On the volleyball court, a game is under way. The players are newlyweds and retirees, thirty-somethings and teenagers. They bump and set and spike. When a girl who is a bit of a weak link serves up a winner, both sides cheer. After a teenager takes a running dive into the sand to save a point, a retiree slaps him five. “Appreciate those,” the man says, and points to the boy’s knees. “They’ll betray you someday.”
The woman watches, as she watched years ago. It occurs to her that this game is always under way; that, in a sense, it never ends.
In the shallows, two pairs of legs poke out of the water—a handstand contest. A moment later, two sisters surface.
“I win!”
“No, me!”
“First one to the buoy!”
They are off, swimming away from shore.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, it is possible to fly direct to nearly twenty Caribbean islands. One can reach Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, and Puerto Rico in under four hours; Antigua, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Saint Kitts, Grenada, Trinidad, Aruba, and Martinique in under five. Some 15 million American tourists visit the Caribbean each year. The islands are so close, American tourists visit them so frequently, and yet most of these visitors know so little about them. For a long time, I have been fascinated by this puzzle, by the place the Caribbean seems to occupy in the mind of the American tourist as an “escape,” or, as I put it early in the novel, a “lovely nowhere.”
This phenomenon was at the heart of my decision to create a fictional, unnamed island, Saint X, for my setting. Building the world of Saint X was a process I undertook with a great deal of questioning about what it means to invent a fictional island within a place that is not fictional at all. In a region where every island has a rich and distinctive history, culture, dialect, cuisine, flora and fauna, and on and on, how does one approach creating a fictive space that embodies without simplifying, that is none of these places, exactly, but is also never pure invention? I have done my best to create in Saint X a cohesive place that, I can only hope, will inspire readers who don’t know much about the Caribbean to learn more; I know that readers will feel differently about the choices I have made along the way.
In this process, I am especially indebted to the wonderful series of Caribbean histories and guides published by Macmillan Caribbean in the nineteen eighties and nineties, in particular: Nevis: Queen of the Caribees by Joyce Gordon, Anguilla: Tranquil Isle of the Caribbean by Brenda Carty and Colville Petty, St. Kitts: Cradle of the Caribbean by Brian Dyde, St. Lucia: Helen of the West Indies by Guy Ellis, Grenada: Isle of Spice by Norma Sinclair, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines by Lesley Sutty. To the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and the New Register of Caribbean English Usage, both edited by Richard Allsopp. To Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (see also the beautiful map “Archipelago: The Caribbean’s Far North” created by cartographer Molly Roy in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Jelly-Schapiro and Rebecca Solnit.) To Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook by Donald R. Hill. And to Jamaica Kincaid’s seminal work, A Small Place.
When it came to rendering Clive Richardson’s life in New York City, some key sources included Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in NYC by Biju Mathew, and Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York edited by Nancy Foner.
I am incredibly grateful to those people on Anguilla who gave so generously of their time when I visited the island for research. Thank you to Josveek Huligar for being such a fun and helpful guide. My deepest gratitude to Anhel Brooks, Trevon Liburd, to M., to A., to M., and to J. for sharing your stories with me. Thanks also to Scott Kircher for the introduction to Trudy Nixon, and to Trudy for sharing her experience as an incomer on the island.
Thank you to Melissa Borja for sharing her knowledge on conducting oral histories and interviews.
To Stephanie Stokes Oliver, Crispin Brooks, and Graham Gao Hodges for reading the manuscript so sharply and carefully.
To wonderful friends who share
d geographic and linguistic expertise with me: Margo Levin, Kate Rubin, Dave Serafino, Geraldine Shen, and Erin Zimmer. To Marisa Reisel for … everything.
To the brilliance and generosity of Greg Jackson and Lulu Miller, who read this book when it was a mess and saw so clearly how it could become less of one. To my teachers: Christopher Tilghman, Caroline Preston, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Chang-rae Lee, and Wendy Phelps.
I thank my lucky stars daily that Henry Dunow is my agent. He is the wisest reader I know, and he worked with me patiently over many years and many, many drafts to help this book find its footing. Thank you also to the wonderful Arielle Datz and everyone else at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
To my fabulous editor, Deb Futter, who sees everything so clearly and who made this process more fun than I could have imagined. To Rachel Chou, Heather Graham, Randi Kramer, Christine Mykityshyn, Alexis Neuville, Anne Twomey, and everyone else at Celadon: I feel so fortunate to be in your capable hands. Thank you also to David Cole, Elizabeth Catalano, Cheryl Mamaril, and Jonathan Bennett for their wonderful work on this book.
Our son was born a year before this book was completed, and I never would have finished it were it not for the incredible people who cared for him so lovingly in his first year. To Meg Sweet, Cate Nowlan, Roberta Sweet, Carly Knight, Allison Haley, Maria Mastrandrea, and Molly Egger: Thank you.
To Shawn, Walter, Charlie, and James: I’m so lucky to be able to call you my family.
To Dona, Keith, and Brian: my rocks, my favorite people, from the very beginning.
To Emerson, our baby, our big boy. We are the very luckiest to have your light and spirit in our family.
And, always, to Mason, whose faith in me is the most profound thing I’ve ever known. I love you.
Founded in 2017, Celadon Books, a division of
Macmillan Publishers, publishes a highly curated list
of twenty to twenty-five new titles a year. The list of
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