A Simple Distance (11 page)

In my head, I could almost hear my grandmother weeks before, how she would have been the day they buried her son, such an important son, next to the body of her husband in this little place.

I could almost hear the wind. The ocean. And it was as if I were there, squatting at the side of the house, digging my fingers into the ground to pull up ginger my mom would boil and sweeten for beer.

I heard Granny, still in my thoughts, from the house:
These girls are so stupid. They can’t do anything right. I told them to put the paper serviettes out on the table, and look, they’ve put out the cloth napkins! Here, take these back to the kitchen and bring me the stack of paper serviettes. People will be coming soon. Look at the table! Oh my God, that dog is in the house … People will be coming!

I pulled a slow, full breath to the bottom of my lungs, held it until it was no longer needed, let it seep out on its own. Wrestled for control. With the next inhalation, not as deep and more metered, my thoughts plunged my head, wet, toward the bottom of the ocean, and the rest of me followed. The slick of the water against my arms and legs and pushing hands oiled my descent into the coral at Tours Beach, masking depths I could not fathom. Coming to the surface, the ripples of the water licked my face with their tiny tongues.

I could hear Susan, too, the night before Uncle Martin—small banana—and Mr. Williams followed us out through the bush, waited, watched until they’d had their fill. I could almost hear her whisper softly in my ear,
We don’t have much time. Please. No one is watching.
We’d been right there. On my mother’s bed. I kept thinking I’d seen someone outside the shutters, kept thinking I’d heard something just outside the door as she lay on top of me, removed her clothes and mine under the white cotton sheet I kept pulling back up every time her movements pushed it off. Her long fingers grabbing at the back of my arched neck, claiming me hers with each quick breath. Her mouth on mine; her hands gripping, pushing, pulling. Our bodies pressed so tight together I could feel the blood in her veins. Yet my eyes never leaving that window. Distracted.

* * *

Lightning pulsed outside the bedroom window and I was not myself—eyes wide and open; subsided, and I was back—closed. I sat at the edge of the bed, lay back.

In the streets of Bato above my uncle’s law practice, my youngest cousins yelled out from their second-floor balcony to men who lived on the streets—
Buller! Buller!
—ducked back inside before they were seen.
Bullers
are poor male prostitutes; my cousins, respectable children among the island’s elite.

* * *

My mind drifted toward fatigue. I remembered the man with the bad eye from Sommerset I’d seen during my last visit, saw him slip through the open window, felt his hands closing in around my neck, closing in between my legs. He slipped through while my guard was down, tore off my costume—my heterosexual façade—left me bare and exposed in front of my whole family, all of whom just stood there laughing, letting him grab me, place his one good eye and two strong hands on my sleeping skin.

CHAPTER 14

The dogs barked me awake from under the open window. Outside it was pitch black, except for a sliver of moon on the water far below, fast clouds moving past.

My heart hit my throat, stole my breath on its way up: They could not have arrived on their own.

Barking, barking.

Out there, in the country, I voiced a cautious yell
… Mom!
Received no reply.

Rascal and Lucia had quieted down but I still heard their movements in the front, by the carport. If they were alone, they would have been here already, running muddy inside the house.

I reached under the pillow, felt for the harmless handgun with shaky fingers, found it, and took hold.

Who’s there?

A voice from the bottom of the drive.
Hello, hello! Young Pascal, it is Mr. Petion. I’ve found your mummy’s dogs … And I’ve a friend for you to meet.

Embarrassed, I slipped the pistol back underneath the pillow, padded over to the still-open front door and halfway down the drive to meet them in my bare feet, the dogs at my heels, turning red with mud.

It’s a good thing those dogs remember your smell.
A tall, lanky stranger in slacks and a button-down dress shirt like the one Uncle Martin wore to the beach the last time I was here extended his free hand to mine and we shook. His mannerisms vaguely familiar—something about his easy smile.

I’m Jean. Souza. Sophie Pascal’s daughter from California.
My name meant nothing without that point of reference.
Have we met before? I feel I know you from somewhere.

Mr. Petion shared his friend’s easy smile, let me in on their secret.
This is Leonard Hill, my business partner. I am godfather to his second child, Susan.

Hill looked me straight in the eyes. Seeing me prone, perhaps, on top his daughter, in the dirt, doing our filthy nonsense. Maybe he was there to get back at me for touching Susan.

My knees grew weak, unstable.
If I were a true Pascal
, I stammered,
I’d have something to offer you … some coconut juice, a snack of fried plantain.
I clenched and unclenched my hands behind me, backpedaled toward the house, tried to stay calm, feet on the ground in the cleared bush, and continued,
I’m sorry I have nothing for you.

I didn’t think I had time to reach the gun. Rascal and Lucia, still at my side, knew the men too well to attack. I had worked myself into some mess. Who was I to go there, armed with only my mother’s last name, two strikes against me—what I’d done and who knew it. My eyes began to tear.

I was treading water. Barely. Something in their look made me suspect they could see my arms flailing underneath the surface.

You came back, na. For your mummy’s house. To me, that has Pascal written all over it … George’s funeral was the first Susan’s been back to Baobique in a year, and your grandmother made such a fuss!
It was Mr. Hill who spoke.

Maybe they weren’t the other side. I broke.
Look. I’m sorry. But I don’t see my mother and I have to find her. She hasn’t been well of late …

My mother was missing again and I couldn’t negotiate Godwyn without her. Even if I’d known how to unlock her phone, I couldn’t call the police. That’s not how you solve your problems there.

Apparently enlisting their help, I asked them:
Where did you find my mother’s dogs?
They hadn’t been here when Mr. Petion dropped us off from the airport.

We didn’t find them at all. They found us. Met us at the edge of the road and your mummy’s drive. Down by the access road.

The access road had been cut by Grampy when he got the idea about the bay trees. They grow exceptionally well in Baobique.

The only thing I remember about bay, growing up, was not to eat the leaves in the spaghetti sauce. But in Baobique it makes rum. Grampy had twenty of their forty acres at Godwyn covered with bay. Bay got him the land at Milieu, got Uncle George and Uncle Martin educated in England; Uncle Charles, in North America.

The access road cuts all the way through the estate, runs clear to the port at Sommerset. And the rough types there.

I need to find her.
I went to my backpack, fished for my running shoes, sunk deep to the bottom, rooted them out, forced my feet in, laced fast.
I need a flashlight, or something.

You cannot walk that road at this time of night, you are not accustomed to its footing.
Mr. Hill tried to tell me what to do. He must have thought I was Susan. Continued,
And a storm is coming soon.

I noticed, then, the banging shutters of my mother’s open window—began to panic. Storms could get big that time of year.

I was brusque because I was scared, and they needed to know I was serious. I grabbed the flashlight and my mother’s machete off the hook by the back door, where she always kept it, cut them down to size, told them:
You are not my father. And I have to find my mom. She’s all I have.

With that I was out the door, off and running through a tangle of thin branches and thick red mud, cutting my way through the overgrown bush that would obscure the access road even were it light out; Rascal and Lucia at my feet, chasing the scent of my sweat.

It began to rain but I couldn’t stop. I had no choice. This road was in my blood and I followed it downhill. No staying dry anymore. Not for me. If my mother was lost, then so was I. In the middle of my family’s forest, it stormed all around me—swinging away with a cutlass to clear a path just big enough to let me through.

* * *

When Uncle George was my age, he had just returned to Baobique with his law degree and two eyes toward politics. During that year’s hurricane season, he got stranded once in Tete Queue, took shelter in the nearest shack with the little old woman who bakes the bread there. But the winds were fierce and began lifting the tin panels. So Uncle George climbed up to the ceiling and held the roof together with his bare hands.

The old woman had no teeth, but her jaws won Uncle George his first magistrate position; so much thanking she did when he came around every morning to buy Granny’s bread—such a mama’s boy.

After that Granny always got free loaves of bread. And Uncle George had Tete Queue in his palm.

Valerie would slice the bread with sharpened knives kept counted and locked in Granny’s pantry drawer with all the other amenities of her class.

I made my slow way, frantic, with my mother’s machete down Grampy’s access road. If I’d stopped chasing her, pressed the blade in my right hand hard against my skin to let leak her blood from me, my heart, beating fast, fast, would’ve had nothing left to push against.

Odd how, with her lost in the dark like that, my wants and fears turned out to be the same thing: her hand rough through my curls. Without her weight, I’d have been adrift in a storm. No ballast to keep me upright.

* * *

Turn off da light, na
. A whisper, low and unfamiliar, interrupted my lack of progress, mired in the middle of the old road.

Out there, alone. So close to Sommerset. What was I thinking? The flashlight had given me away. My heart was in my throat.

Da light
. Again.

No! Who are you?
There was no way I was turning it off. In the dark I was defenseless. I scanned the trees with the white from the light beam, reflecting rainy static. My searching stopped cold on the man with the sewn eyelid, not two feet to my left. Before I could say anything else, he knocked the flashlight and the cutlass to the ground, locked a strong wet palm tight on my mouth.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. His hand on my mouth; I couldn’t scream. His arm at my midsection; I couldn’t hit. But I kicked; hard with adrenaline. Broke free. And ran.

I heard him shouting from behind:
Watch out! Watch out!

He may have been stronger, but I was faster. By far. And I was gone, running with two hands free to push away branches, and just the night. Eyes undistracted by the flashlight’s narrow beam—its false security; I moved fast.

On my own again, me and my beating heart. Those dogs nowhere in sight. Utterly useless.

My mind would have liked to wander, wonder how on earth I ended up there, soaked through in the middle of the forest, when just days before I was sitting safe in the coffee shop at the corner, nursing a latte—the only real danger, a hurt feeling or two.

I would have liked to reflect on how these two worlds came to collide in me, violent like the crashing of continents. Find the words for just the proper spin to recount this story at the office, where everyone else who traveled to the Caribbean went for vacation. This was no vacation; it was the hardest work I’d done in years—going back there, simply showing my face.

But they wouldn’t understand that at the office, and up ahead I thought I saw a light. It brought me back to the night, the trees around me, the rain drumming its steady rhythm on countless fronds.

My eyes had accustomed themselves to the dark; without the flashlight, I was at an advantage. Quietly as possible, I moved forward.

I heard voices. Men.

The lights were three: two together, one roving.

An engine started up.

The roving beam scanned.

As I moved closer: a voice I knew.
Hello, hello … young Pascal!

It was Mr. Petion.

Jean!
And Mr. Hill.

Thank God! I was not going to die in the jungle, get attacked by Granny’s “dreds,” or fall off a cliff. That cliff only as steep as I chose, I cut it down to child’s play, called out,
I’m here! I’m here!
as the flashlight and I made our way toward each other.

Mr. Hill’s voice soothed me in the dark, eased back my breath.
You were headed the wrong way, Pascal, this road leads you nowhere you’d want to go, just to a blind cove and its drug runners.

I argued back, defensive, yet groping my wet perimeter for his outstretched hand.
But this road leads straight to Sommerset. My grandfather cleared it for better access to the port, to export his bay leaves. Uncle George took off six months of his law practice to help.

They laughed. Petion answered,
I am sorry to inform you, Jean, but an extension has been added since your grampy’s time … This branch leads only to some speedboats I don’t think would welcome you, busy with cargo worth much more than bay these days.

I was expecting the soft hand of Mr. Hill, but as the flashlight and I met, it was a rough one that grabbed my arm.

A ’oman must take care on dis road at night.
It was that man with his eye, again. I screamed loud and shrill, like a goat under attack.

But by that time he knew me, held me still.

It was Hill, his voice, who brought me back to my senses.
So you are a Pascal after all. You, too, judge quick, without knowing. Trust first your clouded eyes.

His tone had changed to harsh reproach. He continued, flat and dry, out there in the rain, introduced me to the man whose face had haunted my dreams.
Jean Pascal, this is Mr. Bruce. Mr. Bruce, this is Jean Pascal. Perhaps once she stops screaming, she will thank you for looking after her mummy’s dogs for her while she was away.