Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (29 page)

When Dr. Jacob McKenzie arrived, Papa Franky left to drink at the corner. The rum shop was open all day and served warm single barrel for cheap because that was all there was. Franky went and ordered little glass after little glass. He left because he didn’t want to be there in his own house, competing and losing.

Jacob came in smooth. Stepped out of his clean car that ran on actual unleaded gasoline, unheard of since the hurricane. He leather-shoed up the steps, still strewn with debris, because there was just so much of it that it would take months to clean up. Jacob wore his white coat, but he looked straight ahead so the neighbors didn’t have a chance to ask him questions.

Jacob and Anette did not say a word to each other, not for the entire time he was there in the house that Franky had built for her. For the first time she was ashamed of her house, and not because of the little hurricane wear. It was a nice house, but the living room was so small and the kitchen
was so crowded and the only thing pretty on the walls were the misty pictures of the parents she had never even really known.

But really, Anette was ashamed of herself. Her hair had been thinning since she had begun to dye it so many years before, and now it was no match for the luminous bush of Jacob’s younger wife who had been sighted a few times over the years at the American-style supermarket. Anette had heated the iron over the gentle wick of the lamp and pressed the old white dress into newness. Did Jacob notice? It was the dress she’d worn years ago in the airport when he left her. She could not help herself. It was there in the closet when she opened it. Well, let us be honest. It was at the back of the closet. But it was a dress she had worn the last time she was Jacob’s. It was the dress she should have married him in. She still fit the dress. She fit into it too damn well.

But Jacob, in his own white, walked past her, even though he felt the static in the air as their breathing rolled toward each other. He went to the room where Eve Youme sat on the bed beside her aunt.
That harpy,
Jacob thought, seeing Eeona holding the child’s hand. Anette followed but did not say a word. Young Frank watched his mother’s figure as she closed the door behind her in his face. Frank felt an instant and sticking hate for the doctor. Not because Dr. McKenzie was the only man let into the room that he could not go into. Not because Dr. McKenzie was Me’s rich father. But because this man had caused his mother to stuff herself into that graying dress that was too tight for her. It shamed the son.

Oh, but if Anette had worn the red and yellow dress. Jacob had never actually seen her in that dress, though he had seen the movie poster. But Anette had not worn that dress because after the porn film she’d ripped the dress to shreds and thrown it out. Right now parts of it were disintegrating in the dump out in the Bovoni countryside. Other parts were being eaten by fish in the Caribbean Sea. But if Anette had worn that dress or any red dress, Jacob might have not made it back to his lovely wife that afternoon. He might have not been able to steady his firstborn’s backward foot on his
knee and watch it twist and grind forward, as though this was a regular abnormality. He would not have been able to examine her silver through the child’s embarrassed weeping.

They had to half draw the curtains and twist the louvers open to let in daytime light since there was no electricity. Nothing about the exam felt intimate and precious, as it should have. Eve Youme was weeping because no man had ever looked at her there, despite Eeona’s concerns, and now here was her father and her aunt and her tightly dressed mother, all in the room with the windows gaping, while the girl rolled down her sock and then rolled down her panties.

Jacob did not kiss his daughter on the forehead as he should have. Eve was suddenly a patient and a thing to be cured, not loved, for he was small-souled and did not realize that these things were the same thing. He nodded tensely at his child-patient, snapped off his gloves, and slid out of his white coat. But instead of going to Anette, he went to Eeona. “I’m not this sort of doctor.” He had no diagnosis, no cure.

But Eeona’s hushed response filled the room like steam. “This is your mistake on the child’s body. I told you.” She turned to Anette and then to Esau. “I told the both of you.”

Eeona walked out of the room, out of the house, and right out of that island. Then Eeona disappeared.

Communication was more vital than light and hot water, so the phone lines were already being replaced all over the island. Jacob was thankful for this, because he did not want to visit his mother in person to discuss what needed discussing.

When Jacob told Rebekah, she breathed “Ahhh” into the phone, as
though he called her often to discuss his patients—which he never did. He was afraid his mother would say what it seemed Eeona had said—that the child was a sin. But why a sin? Perhaps he would be bold with his mother and demand to know what was meant, really. Many men on the island had outside children. This was a minor sin, if a sin at all.

But Rebekah said “Ahhh” again and again into the phone. She kept ahhing and Jacob wondered if she was in a trance or if she was ill herself. She kept at it until he grew weary and was about to interrupt, but then she finally gave words. “I say you have two options.”

Jacob took out his lean leather notebook, which had a pen looped in at the side. He slid the pen out and touched the fine smooth tip to the heavy white page. He kept the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. “I’m listening, Mama,” he said.

“First, you might consider throwing the child into the cistern of Villa by the Sea
and closing the trapdoor and not opening it until two full moons have passed, but it might be hard to get around the new bakra owners. More of a rigamarole, but just as effective, would be stoning the child with seashells until she slept and then holding her head down in a bucket of sea-wet sand.”

Slowly, Jacob put down his fancy pen and hung up the phone. He poured himself a full glass of rum and took two horsey painkillers. Then he called Anette, desperate for her to answer, for he always hung up if anyone else came on the line.

“We must talk in person,” he said, when he heard Anette’s voice. “Just you and I. We must figure this out together.” He was trying, trying. Trying, perhaps, to earn his soul back. He knew of a public place they could go to speak privately. Hibiscus Hotel and Restaurant was deep in Frenchtown and its restaurant was open and serving fish to monied natives and the Americans who still remained since the storm. The generator would be growling loudly, but it was a nice place, a fancy place. He didn’t know that it had gone, in his mother’s time, by another name:
Villa by the Sea. The exact place his mother had suggested he drown his daughter.

“This might not be a good time. My sister . . .” Anette started to say.

“I know, but this must be addressed promptly.” But he didn’t know. He didn’t know that Eeona had gone back to her inn and now would not take calls even from Eve Youme. He didn’t know that Anette still had never been anywhere in Frenchtown. The French village was foreign to Anette.

Still, Jacob Esau and his Nettie agreed to meet there two days later. It was a public place after all. They could have met on a beach but that, though public, would have been an infidelity. Beaches are romantic places, family places. They are not places people of the opposite sex meet unless they are romantic or they are family. So the two would meet two days later at the restaurant of Hibiscus Hotel.

But even just two days hold a whole forty-eight hours. And so much could happen in those hours.

In those hours the Joseph family would gather on a beach, as lovers do. Because Franky couldn’t take Dr. McKenzie coming into his home, edging him out with his walk alone. Franky needed to do something. The island was still a sea of blue tarpaulins covering every roof. That is how the idea of a beach lime came to him. Franky, the man of heart and timing and patience, knew of a beach. He knew how much his wife loved a beach. How she loved to swim. How Anette sometimes went to the beach alone early in the morning just to walk, she told him. Franky had gone to this faraway beach when he was a child and he’d taken more than one woman there before he was married. He’d passed it many times on Guard patrol. So the evening after Dr. McKenzie left, Franky announced his idea. The
candles were flickering, but instead of telling stories they began considering their beach outing. They would go tomorrow morning.

Frank, the young man of the family, loved the idea of exploring more of the island. The hurricane had revealed to him that other people, those in the hills, had a piece of the island he had never known. Anette liked the idea of discovering a new beach. A place to create new histories with the man she was spending her life with. Just the thought of a beach still held the memory of Jacob’s body and her body. Anette wanted to be a good woman; she would like the Jacob thoughts to be undone. More undone than she had thought they were.

Eve Youme wasn’t sure she should go. If her brother and stepfather were at the beach, she would not be able to take off her shoes and swim. They didn’t know about her strange foot or her silver. Only Auntie Eeona, Mommy, and now her father.

The husband and wife woke before the sun and had lemongrass tea in the dawning light of the kitchen. They leaned into each other as they had when he owned a green Cadillac and nothing else at all. Anette packed some mangoes. Some salted crackers in a tin. Franky packed towels and a big sheet for them to lie on. They worked together to wake Frank, who slept like a stone. Eve Youme was already sitting up in bed, fully clothed in her sneakers and jeans when Anette creaked open the girl’s door.

They gathered into the Datsun and smiled at one another. For the first time since Ronalda had left for college they felt like a full family. Two parents and two children. The two parents looked at each other and then back at their children. The son, the only child they had created together from scratch, looked back at his mother and smiled. He seemed to be looking at her with a kind of wonder. Later, during the protesting, young Frank would remember this very moment as the dusk of his own innocence. He would also remember this day as the day the BOMB really began.

Franky had two cans of rough gasoline sealed in his trunk. Prepared, as always. It was more than enough to get them to the beach and back. Once
they were out of town and away from the worst of the debris, the Joseph family drove with the windows down and the wind whipping about them and the sun rising at their backs. Anette thought briefly about being in another car, without doors, with Gertie and the man Gert would eventually marry, him careening through where a windshield should have been and the man Anette would love her whole life holding on to her. And then thought again that that was so long ago.
Let it go,
she said to herself.
Let it go
.
The only thing you have with Jacob is a daughter.
Anette stuck her hand out of the window and let the wind keep it aloft. Eve Youme did the same, but on the opposite back window. Anyone watching might have said that their arms were wings and that the two were keeping the car flying through the hills.

Finally, Franky came to a turn down a steep rocky road. “This is it,” he said with a breath. But as he said it, the car smacked right into a link chain that was the length of the cleared road. The chain came sliding up onto the hood, scratching it, and right up onto the windshield before Franky had a chance to brake. “A chain,” Anette said, as though anyone needed clarification.

“Maybe this is the wrong place,” said little Frank, who was actually bigger and taller than his father.

“This is the place. I know it like myself, yes.” Franky’s father had worked for a branch of the Hodge family, who owned the beach. One of the daughters, a woman he’d fancied, had married a McKenzie. He shook his head now at the unfortunate memory. The beach had been Franky’s father’s in a way. He’d kept it clean. And so it had been Franky’s in a way, too. Though, of course, it always belonged to someone else. But that someone had never put up a chain.

Anette and Franky thought of their own separate specialness on beaches and then thought, desperately and together, that they must get to this beach. It was more than a family outing. It was essential to the family. They needed their own common beach history. But it was Franky who said, “Maybe the
road is being fixed, yes? From the storm. That’s why they have a chain? We can walk from here. Though is a long walk.”

“Let we start then,” said Anette.

They left the car at the side of the road and began their journey down into the crotch of the mountain. Frank held the mangoes and the crackers and the bag with the bottles of water. Franky held the bag with their sheet and towels. Eve Youme held nothing but herself, though she still walked as though she had a weight on her head, and maybe a pebble in her shoe. Hers had become a haunting swinging movement and girls at school sneered that it was a sluttish walk. Boys in the street hissed loving curses—“Pssst! You breaking my heart just walking by, sweetness.”

Anette, walking downhill beside her daughter, noted the weight of something to come.

It was a long walk down with nothing but trees around and above them, and the tree roots below them to climb over. But it was beautiful. It was an adventure. Frank began to sing a calypso and everyone joined in. They saw no one the whole way down—more than a mile. When the hill began to flatten, they could smell the beach. They could see brightness ahead. Now there were sea grape trees around them. Soft ocean trees. Then there was something hard under Frank’s foot that made him trip. “Motherscunt!” he said out loud. It was the first time he had ever cursed in front of his parents. He looked down and there was a gravestone.

It was not only one grave. There, scattered in the sandy grass, were three others. “Oh, these been here since I young, yes,” said Franky, as though he were introducing them. One was marked 1830–1885. One was 1846–1907. The names were washed out. They were close to the sea, after all.

“Nah, Pop. This one that tripped me is marked 1952–1952. Is a baby.”

Anette looked where her son was pointing. “A baby boy. He was called Owen. Like my father.” She read on. “Poor thing. No last name even.”

“Don’t worry,” Franky assured them. “It old. It been here since dog days.”

“But this one isn’t old, Pops. This Owen would be the same age as Youme.”

“Look.” Franky redirected. “Here’s the beach, yes.”

And yes, there it was. Franky took his wife’s hand, Frank took his sister’s, and they led each other out to a quiet stretch of white sand. The waves were smooth and calm. The beach had been combed of debris. There was not another soul in sight.

As the family walked out, Eve Youme noted that there were whole shells in the sand. Things to pick up later and take as souvenirs, for they each had the feeling as though they were tourists on vacation—complete with that small niggling as if they weren’t sure they belonged. They laid out their sheet, and the parents put their shoes at the corners to hold it down from the wind. The wind was whipping the sand and making it sting their skin just a little. Franky stripped down to his bathing trunks and strolled toward the perfect water. Anette sat beside her daughter.

“You doing fine, Me?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

“You can swim over there, past the rocks,” Anette whispered. “I could come with you.”

“No, I just want the sun today.”

“We’ll fix you up soon. Your McKenzie father want to meet with me privately to discuss—”

“Yes, Ma, yes.”

Anette nodded, understanding that Youme didn’t want to think on these things. Anette went to join her husband in the chill of the morning sea. “Is just woman problems,” Anette said, shrugging it off to Franky. Her eyes slid away to the horizon where the sun was still rising.

Franky did not ask for the details. Not because he was cautious about woman problems, but because he knew that the other father, that
McKenzie, was the doctor. Instead, he looked out to the horizon with his wife. “This is ours,” Franky said. And that was the only possible response.

So Anette focused on Franky. She thought only of Franky telling her that she was a star that time they had done that nasty movie. She smiled to think of it now, for it had been a while ago and the pain of it was mostly gone. Though her just thinking on that, of all things, should have been a sign that things were not right in the least.

While his parents swam and his sister read a dense American paperback, Frank looked around at the bay. It was one small strip of beach. He looked up and saw the hills where they had come from. And then he saw the house on the hill. And then he saw the white woman, her hands flailing into the air as if trying to signal them. Frank waved back but the white woman kept waving, as though she was directing a plane. Now that he was watching her, he could hear her faint shouting. He decided to ignore her. Something in him knew that he did not want to hear what she had to say.

Instead, Frank took off his shirt and sped into the water. He ran fast and hard, trying to make enough noise that no one would hear the woman. He splashed cold water everywhere and his father swam to him and they had a race—their arms flinging and legs kicking. The son won. His father panted, but his face shone with pride. His mother clapped and cheered. And when Frank again looked up at the balcony, it was bare.

It was when they were sitting down to suck their mangoes that another man came slowly along the beach. He hadn’t come from the road but from some other private path. He was the first person they had seen in almost two hours. Franky stood to receive him. The beach was small, but it seemed to take the man a long time to get to them. He was dressed in cut-off shorts and a white shirt that plumped out with the wind. The man stopped some dozen feet before Franky. “You with the Hodge family?” he asked.

“No, we’re Josephs. My wife’s a Bradshaw.”

The man nodded as though he knew this already. “That woman own
the land.” He pointed to the house Frank had seen. The woman was there on her balcony again, looking out at them like a queen, her house held together, despite the storm. “She don’t let no one come out here except the Hodges, because they have some of those graves there. Some of the graves are the Hodges’ but the land is hers.”

“But we’re not on the land. We on the beach, yes. Besides, I’ve always come here. I know the Hodges.”

“The Hodges don’t own it no more. It all hers. Even the beach.”

Anette stood beside her husband. “And who she?”

“She an American. I just work for she. I just do the yard and other dirty work.” He shook his head. “All you didn’t see the chain? That mean
don’t come in
. It don’t mean
you are welcome
.”

The man glanced over at Eve Youme, there in her sneakers and jeans and bikini top. His eyes trolled her body and then back up to her face. She was very pretty. Very. Though no one had much noticed before.

Franky looked at the man hard. He couldn’t place the man’s accent exactly, but he knew the man was from another Caribbean island, one far down the chain. “You’re not even a Virgin Islander,” Franky began in his big Guardsman voice. “You come from whatever gyaso island you come from, yes, and now you helping the white people run us off our beach?” Franky’s body tensed all over.

The man stepped back and put his hands out as though to calm Franky. “The white woman watching, eh. You lay a hand on me and she going call the police.”

“Now, you watch me good,” said Franky. “I am a military man. The police do what I say.”

“Well, then . . . well, then . . .” The man looked again at Eve Youme, who stared right back at him. He looked back up at the house there in the armpit of the mountain.
What a rigamarole,
he thought.
Why the hell did I leave Antigua? To come here and be in the middle of these blasted Americans?

Frank, who was almost a man, came out from the water like a previous
life form. He stood silent beside his father, goose bumps bursting over his body. Then Eve Youme, who was almost a woman, spoke. “Let’s go, Papa. We’ve been here for a while.” But Franky had something to prove. Proving something was the reason they were here to begin with. He looked at his son standing beside him. He wanted to kill for his son. Wanted to be brave for his son. Braver than any doctor who could walk into his house. But then he looked at his daughter—he never thought of her as his stepdaughter—and nodded at her. He began to pick up their things. He did not look at his wife.

The walk back up the hill was long. The Antiguan man told them that it was the same on his island. Beaches that you were always allowed to go to were now bought up and the white people were now disallowing you. “Listen. Is how it is now. Just cool it.” He was trying to be reasonable, but really he was thinking that these Virgin Islanders must think they’re better than everyone else in the Caribbean. No other islanders could just lie up on a private beach. But he didn’t say any of this as he escorted them back. For the most part they were all silent.

Both Franky and Anette thought of the porn film they’d been in but said nothing to each other. They didn’t yet see the connections.