Other Shepards (13 page)

So far, I have enjoyed everything about this trip, especially the airport, with its cargo-sized elevators and free-standing lounges and endless glass terminals through which you can see landed planes idling like slow-moving beasts in a game park. Even the taste of packaged food and the hum of packaged air is flavored with adventure and chance.

Getting to this point, all the way up here to become a dot in the sky, had not been so difficult, not nearly as hard as I had thought it would be once I knew we were going. The dentist’s notes had been easy; only the most critical eye could tell my imitation of Mom’s skinny, long-tailed handwriting from the real thing. The train ride was quick and efficient. Check-in offered only a few uncertain moments when, filling out our unaccompanied minor forms, I was faced with having to list the names of who would be picking us up and supervising our stay on the island. I hesitated before printing Ryan and Dana Hubbard. As the check-in clerk took the forms, briskly stapling them to our tickets without a second look at the parents’ forged signatures, I remembered what Annie had said about people being too busy with their own lives to care about anyone else’s. She might have been right, but it’s a lonely vision, a city filled with people who see right past or through you as long as you seem to play by the rules and don’t make trouble.

I phoned the parents the moment before our seats were called for boarding. Dad’s voice sounded lonely and long distance, as if he already knew I would be disappointing him. “Leave a message and we’ll be glad to return your call.”

“Hi, it’s Holland. Look, this is hard to explain, but Geneva and I are going away for the weekend. We’re fine, we’re safe, I’m sorry, but we’re going to Saint Germaine. To our house. We’ll be back Sunday night, I’m sorry, again. I love you. I promise I’ll be grounded when we get back.”

After hanging up, I moved far away from the phone, retreating to another part of the airport lounge to resist calling the parents again and apologizing a few more times before takeoff.

“I love to travel,” I say to Geneva now, pressing my nose against the plane window. “Love it, love it, love it.”

“How much longer till we get down? My head hurts from the altitude. I might be dehydrating.”

“Geneva, you act like we’re hang-gliding to get there.”

“I can’t help getting airsick, especially since you made me take the aisle.”

“You said you
wanted
the aisle.”

“I need to find the bathroom,” she says. She unhinges from her seat with the stiff joints of a marionette. I watch her careful progress up the aisle before returning to stare at my sky.

When we met at our vendor this morning, Louis told me not to forget my camera.

“I don’t own a camera,” I said, surprised. I hadn’t even thought of it.

“Aw, man, if I’d known I would have lent you mine,” Louis said.

“Really,” I answered, “it’s no big deal.” What Louis didn’t know was that I wouldn’t have taken a camera even if I did own one. I’d seen enough glossy, eternalized moments of Saint Germaine, and I don’t want to capture more of them. For the past couple of days, I have been electric with impulse, like the person who rushes headlong into the picture just before the flash goes off. I do not want to think about consequences.

I smile into the blue window and my smile is defiant: I am here, too, it says. I have a right.

Geneva returns a few minutes later, all eyes.

“You look like you saw a Martian.”

“Did you know all along?” she gasps. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Know what? Say what?”

“That Annie is on our plane! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“No! She is? I didn’t know.” I lift out of my seat and crane my neck, trying to locate Annie among the hills of heads bumped over their seat backs.

“In front.” Geneva points. “She’s sleeping. I’m not kidding. Go look.”

A movie has started and I walk, half-crouched up the aisle, to where I find her within the vague radius Geneva indicated, asleep on the aisle seat of the third row.

She is tented by her blazer, a deflated crumple across her shoulders and chest. In sleep she is fixed and distant as a star. Her nostrils do not dent in sleep-breath, her body makes no stir. Yet her presence is more assuring to me than the guarantee of any inflatable life raft or seat that doubles as a flotation device.

“Annie,” I whisper. The man next to her looks up at me, scowling. He is wearing headphones and he points to the movie.

“Shhh.”

“Annie!” I say louder. She opens her eyes; their gray is only a saucer’s overlay around sleep-dark pupils, and her face looks tired, soft enough to smudge with the barest press of a finger.

“See, I’m your warden after all,” she says in the secret voice.

“You didn’t have to come,” I say, although I am sure relief beams over my face. “Why did you come? You look so tired.” So sick.

“Mmmph. I’m just doing my job, delivering you safely.”

“Do the parents know?”

Annie snaps her eyes shut and turns her head away from me. I can see there’s no point trying to work more words out of her.

“You’re right,” I say wonderingly when I rejoin my sister. “She’s up front. I can’t figure out how she sneaked on. We never saw her in the terminal or anywhere. She says she wants to make sure we get there safely. She looks pretty worn out, though, and none of the flight attendants even thought to give her a blanket.”

“Oh, other people don’t notice her,” Geneva says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they don’t pay attention to her. We see her in our own way, but everyone else?” Geneva flicks the air. “No one notices. No one knows how to look.”

I try to watch more carefully how people observe Annie once we deplane and are faced with the bleak airstrip of the main island, but as far as I can tell nobody really reacts to any of us.

All our bags are carry-on, so we don’t have to wait beside the carousel in the baggage claim. Annie has slid into her broken strap shoes and does not remove her blazer, although Geneva and I ball our own jackets into our bags as soon as the air, warm as a bakery, hits our faces. The setting sun hurts my eyes. My watch reads 6:21
P.M.

“We’re here at last,” Geneva says, stretching her pale, bare arms over her head. “My fortune came true. I knew it would.”

“We’re not there yet. We need a car to take us to our launch site,” Annie reminds her as we walk out into the nearly empty airport parking lot. Other passengers are staggering into the heated air, waving for the few available car services to pick them up. “That guy over there, standing next to the Range Rover. Geneva, go ask.”

The man, a native of the main island, tells us his name is Chad.

“I can drive you to Regina Beach, then you wait for the boat to take you over,” he says, opening the doors of his spotlessly clean car. The interior smells like an entire can of air freshener was recently unleashed into it. “Thirty minutes to Saint Germaine, twenty minutes to Clothilde, forty-five minutes to Moore Island by motorboat. If you take a sailboat, a bit longer. Where are you going?”

“Saint Germaine,” I say.

“As I was going to Saint Germaine,” Geneva recites giddily, bouncing on her seat, “I met a man with seven brains. And every brain had seven pains, and every pain had seven—”

“What are you talking about? Calm down!” I scold her. “There are days I wish you
would
slice off your tongue.”

Instead she sticks it out at me, but I am relieved that she is more enthusiastic than unnerved by the new surroundings. In fact, for a day of traveling she has done remarkably well.

We are here at last. I roll down my window and am wrapped in arid air. The troubles that bound me all morning; the lies I told my teachers, the shrinking sock-wad of bills that I’ve paid out for cab and train fares, the bolt of chaos that will be striking 176 Waverly Place any second—slowly release their hold.

The setting sun is bleeding its orange and grapefruit and cranberry juice colors into the sky. We drive past walls of sugar cane, a clutch of goats all tied together by one long rope, a man selling painted coconut shells. We pass a row of cement houses and a cemetery of crooked crosses. I close my eyes and the Range Rover seems to gather speed, hurtling us faster and faster down the road, so fast that we melt into a ball of red fire roaring through the green cane. My heart shudders in my chest and my hands are a fusion of salty, wet fingers. I open my eyes; I remember to breathe. The colors of the island are so beautiful, they hurt.

Annie sleeps between us. Her arms, still freckled with the paint of our kitchen mural, rest on her lap. She does not open her eyes until we have arrived at Regina Beach.

She is right—it is romantic, more romantic than the Jersey shore. Pale surf breaks over a stretch of blond sand, nearly deserted save a rickety free-standing pier, a few forgotten canvas deck chairs, and a couple of fat, bright-eyed seagulls. They pick up their feet in a jerking march, sometimes heaving their bodies into a couple yards of flight before dropping back to earth. As I climb from the car, I open my mouth to taste the cool salt air. Geneva, a shoe in each hand, runs to the edge of the water, testing it.

“There’s our chariot,” Annie says, pointing.

My eyes locate the white sliver bobbing in the waves. Slowly it shapes into a weather-beaten hull canopied by a grimy sail and crewed by two old men wearing floppy hats and all-weather oilskin jackets.

Annie waves and breaks away from us, climbing up the pier, then easily springing from pier to boat. In the setting sun, her hair is the color of gold fire. “Come on, girls,” she calls. “No chickens. That means you, Geneva.”

As the boat laps to the edge of the pier, one of the men reaches forward and plants a foot on its outermost lip while his other leg, heavy with muscle and burnt by sun, anchors him to the boat deck. He takes my hand as I leap, and in another second my bare feet hit the wet deck of the boat. In an instant, Geneva is beside me. Her face is serious but her eyes gleam with her own bravery.

“You did it, you did it.” I scratch the back of her neck, pat her arm. We squat together in the trunk, the back of the boat, braced against the swinging jib and yardarm. Annie stays up on the other end and seems fueled by some second strength, although she looks light enough to fly away, a scrap of blue skipping over the pale waves.

I touch my jeans pocket to feel the hard lump of Saint Jude. Louis had asked me to try remembering everything I see, to report back. I look at the water and wonder if there is anything in New York City that matches all these colors.

The boat catches a puff and begins to lift and dip us over the thumping waves so carelessly I think that Annie and the men have lost control of us. We lift, sink, lift, and then a coastline of black rock and thick columns of banana trees ring our horizon.

“Volcano Beach,” Annie tells us. “Those rocks you’re looking at are the fossilized remains of a natural disaster that happened over a million years ago.”

The giant rocks resemble half-melted candles, too fixed in place and too ancient to remind me of disaster, like the oldest black-habited nuns at Ambrose, who look harmless but are quick to slap you a demerit for tiny offenses like wearing boxer shorts beneath your kilt.

“Okay, guys, our ride’s over. Out, out, before this thing beaches. Take your shoes and bags and jump.”

“Into the water?” Geneva cringes and looks to me for help. “Jellyfish?” she mouths her fears to me. “Manta rays?”

“You’ll be fine,” I mouth back. I grab my waterlogged loafers.

Annie already has jumped overboard. She stands up to her waist in water. “Hold your bags above your heads,” she tells us. I wind the strap of my carry-on tightly over my shoulder so that it tucks just beneath my armpit. Geneva copies me.

“Get your feet ready to hit bottom,” Annie instructs. “It’s not all that deep.”

“Thanks,” I say to one of the men. He smiles with teeth that catch me off guard, they are so white and sharp, and I realize that his face is not old so much as sun-leathered and salt-cured by years of winds and water.

Annie wrings out her water-sopped skirt once we are on dry land, tying a corner of the fabric into a knot that hits her at the knee. She walks quickly and her gaze is restless, her eyes like a gecko’s, crisscrossing from sky to trees and back again.

“Where do we go from here?” I sigh. I am soaked and dizzy and exhausted from travel. “How far to the bungalow?”

“We’re already here.” Annie points. “They dropped us off at the back door, practically. Not a moment too soon.”

“I don’t see anything,” Geneva says, but our pace quickens.

The house is wedged into a cut of hill just visible just behind a plot of banana trees. We recognize it at once, and Geneva and I break into a run, half laughing, half screaming, the way we used to on Christmas morning.

The grass rasps against my ankles, and Geneva keeps pace, for once unafraid of stepping on bullfrogs or falling down rabbit holes. Familiar objects focus and click inside my brain as I run. I spy the hammock at the edge of the lawn; its familiarity is jolting. I see the bungalow’s wavy lasagna shell roof and the waist-high terra cotta pots by the door. I see the flower boxes, the slatted shutters, the two steps leading up to the patio. It is as if the box of slides have whirred together into a movie with sound and dimension. We vault the patio steps in a bound.

The tiled patio is hushed and echoing, and our breathing is heavy as horses’ when we brake at the front door. We stand, unsure of our next action, until Geneva jabs at the doorbell. The sound resonates through the house with a buzz that reminds me of our mosquito zapper at the shore.

“Why are we waiting? It’s not like we expect anyone to be here,” Geneva says after a few panting minutes. “We need a key is all. Check under the mat. Oh!” She puts her ear against the door. “The telephone’s ringing.”

My fingers are warm and stain to orange when they brush over the rain-rusted key, tucked under the doormat so long that when I pick it up, its outline remains imprinted on the concrete like a tracing in a crime scene. The key sticks slightly as I turn the lock. We take off our wet shoes and socks, leaving them to dry on the patio, before stepping with caution into the darkened front room. The telephone ringing stops before we have a chance to figure out what to do about it.