“We was worried, you know, madam,” Singh says. “Den Miss Anna say you seeing Dr. Ramdoolal. I feel better when she tell me dat.”
Her mother returns to the house. She says she will take a nap before lunch, but at lunchtime she is still asleep. She sleeps past teatime. It is close to six before she emerges from her room. Her father is worried. She feels well, she says. Rested. She needed the sleep, but now she is starving.
While her husband sits next to her nibbling his evening sandwich, she eats everything Lydia had prepared for her lunch: stewed chicken, rice, fried plantains, steamed cabbage, carrots. Her plate is empty when she refolds her napkin. Afterward, they sit in the veranda. John Sinclair has put on a Bach CD, the Brandenburg concertos.
Anna washes the dishes. Her parents have not invited her to join them in the veranda, so when she has finished, she goes to the living room to work on the manuscript. Through the glass sliding doors she has a clear view of her parents. They do not appear to be saying much to each other. Her mother’s head rests on the back of her chair; her hands are folded on her lap, her legs are spread apart, though only slightly. She seems at ease, perfectly relaxed.
When Anna looks up next, her father is standing over his fishpond, rubbing his chin. He says something to her mother, who nods. He looks down on the pond. Her mother says something to him. He turns away from the pond, bends down, and plucks out the weeds that have pushed their way through the cracks on the pebbled concrete border.
Her mother has asked him to do this, Anna thinks.
When her father is done he returns to the chair next to her mother.
The fifth concerto comes to an end. Her father rises again and goes to the kitchen. He passes the entrance to the living room, but he does not look inside. If he knows his daughter is in there, he has decided not to disturb her. But perhaps he does not know she is in the living room; perhaps his mind is elsewhere, with his wife who is waiting for him in the veranda.
The electric kettle whistles. Her father reappears. He is carrying a tray with two cups of tea. In the veranda, he and his wife sip their tea in silence. When the music comes to an end, her father gets up, returns to the study, and puts the CD on again.
It is almost ten when Anna finally gathers up the pile of manuscript pages on the cocktail table next to her chair and turns off the light in the living room. Her father, who has still given no sign that he knows she is in the living room, suddenly calls out, “Leave the light on, Anna. Your mother and I will stay out here a little while longer.”
Common roots. They do not have to speak, sitting next to each other. A sigh, a frown, a clearing of the throat, a smile, the softening of the eye, legs crossed and uncrossed. Body language. That’s all they need.
Late into the night it rains, a hard rain that pounds the roof of the house. It beats a rhythmic drum, loud and insistent. Anna bolts upright from a deep sleep. For a moment she does not know where she is. Gunfire? It is her first thought. She lives in Brooklyn, Fort Greene, not far from the park. Sometimes there are muggings, sometimes gunfire. But it is not gunfire she hears. The drumbeat is furious, behind it a waterfall, the deafening sound of rain sluicing down in gallons from the clouds. Her bedroom, the whole house, seems overpowered by this force of nature suddenly unleashed.
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs
that give delight and hurt not.
When she was a child, she was not afraid. She is afraid now. She presses her face against the window pane. Then she remembers a childhood rhyme.
June too
soon, July stand by, August come it must, September remember, October
all over
.
She is here, in June, too soon for the rainstorms that knock down trees, that blow off the roofs of houses. June, the end of the dry season, too early for the wet. In her parents’ backyard, the flowers on the two mango trees have already dropped their petals. Green fruit cluster at the ends of branches, weighing them down. Yesterday, the grass was brown. Tomorrow, soaked by the rain, it will be green again.
Anna’s mother continues to improve. No nausea, no headaches, no weakness in her limbs. Dr. Ramdoolal credits her recovery to all that good, natural food she ate as a child. He says the ground provisions and the vegetables they grow on the island without artificial fertilizers are no match for the packaged foods full of toxic chemicals sold in grocery shops today. But Anna knows her mother’s improvement is temporary. There are two more chemo sessions to go; the third one, a week before she must return to her work at Equiano. She has not yet made up her mind what she will do, whether or not she will stay for the fourth session the doctor has scheduled. The manuscript she has brought with her has to be presented soon to the editorial board. Tanya Foster has not opposed her decisions so far, but there is much she will have to do to persuade Tanya to publish this one.
Her mother is in such a good mood that two days after the chemo sent her to bed for twelve hours straight, she announces she is ready to spend a day in the country.
“Come with us,” her father suggests.
“Yes, Anna. You’d like it. It’s beautiful on the north coast,” her mother says.
Perhaps all her mother is doing is stating a fact—it
is
beautiful on the north coast of the island—but her words get under Anna’s skin. She is not a foreigner, a tourist.
“I’ve seen the north coast,” Anna says irritably.
“So you won’t come with us? Beatrice!” Her father turns to his wife in dismay. “Tell her to come. She’ll have a great time.”
“It’s just that you’ve been in America so long,” her mother says, trying to reason with her.
“I’ve lived there for eighteen years, Mummy.”
“More there than here,” her mother says.
“It’s still my country.”
“Anna, Anna, you’ve become so sensitive. Of course this is still your country. Nobody’s saying otherwise. Your father and I wanted to show it to you, that’s all.”
“Show it to me?”
“You know …” Her mother shrugs. “Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“It’s been a long time since you were there.”
Why is she so thin-skinned? So sensitive, as her mother says. She wants to go. For all her protest about the indelible stamp of her early years on the island, for all the resentment she feels when her mother intimates she has become American, she is forced to admit to herself there is much she has forgotten, much she can no longer claim as hers.
She does not want to lose her moorings, she does not want to be set adrift on some Sargasso Sea like the emigrants who left the island before her, the ones lured by England’s siren song, only to discover that once they cleared the rubble left in the wake of the war, once they had rebuilt the Mother Country, England no longer had need for them.
She wants to see more of the island, she needs to remember, to hold onto home, to sunlit backyards perfumed with the scent of ripe mangoes, to salt-filled rain, to skies washed clean blue, to flamingoes turning green trees in the mangrove to red, to fishermen pulling in seines in the silvery dawn. She needs to fix in her head waves breaking on the rocks below the narrow winding road to the north coast.
Her mother tries again. “I’ve asked Lydia to pack us lunch. Come with us, Anna. Please.”
Remorseful, ashamed now of her childish reaction, Anna agrees to go.
Her mother is right. She has forgotten how beautiful the north coast is.
The sun is a dry-season sun that illuminates everything: fluffy white clouds that drift lackadaisically across a pristine blue sky, brown earth that sparkles when sunbeams gild metallic stones. They pass through small villages at the foot of the mountain, tiny houses clustered at the edge of the road once a dirt track for horses pulling carts and donkeys loaded with produce for the market. They see a donkey now, burlap bags bursting at the seams grazing its flanks. The man sitting astride it waves his machete. All the villagers wave, laughter and talk suspended when the Sinclairs pass by in their fancy car.
The higher up the narrow road to the north coast they go, the fewer houses they see, only flashes of galvanize and painted wood here and there between dense vegetation. Two days of heavy rain and sporadic showers have watered roots, and, like magic, trees have sprouted new leaves, vines new tendrils that loop across branches. On the sea side of the road, the land plunges down deep precipices. Below, the water is rough. Waves crash against giant black rocks, miniature islands broken off from the land, and pitch glittering white sprays of sea water up to the sky. Anna drinks in the air that rushes through the car window. Salt carried on the wind stings her nose. This is what she needs to remember, what she needs to lock in her heart for wintry days in New York.
“We’re almost there!” Her father brings the car to a crawl. He can barely suppress his excitement.
“Yes, I can tell we are near now.” Her mother strains her head through the window. The muscles on her neck rise and stiffen.
Do they have a specific destination? Until now Anna had not thought so.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” her mother says.
The road bends and the sea disappears. They are entering the mountain now. On both sides the forest grows thicker. Tall trees have spread their branches wide at the tops and their leaves form a canopy shading the sun, but beneath them, new trees have multiplied and bushes grow wild.
“In a couple of weeks, you’ll need a machete if you have to stop to pee,” her father says.
Anna braces herself for her mother’s response to this crude remark, but her mother giggles. Like a schoolgirl, Anna thinks.
They drive a few yards further. “Stop! Stop!” Her mother grasps her father’s arm. “I think this is the spot. I think it’s here, John.”
The steering wheel is on the right side of the car. Her mother is sitting on the left, on the passenger side. The rules here are still British. What her mother wants her father to see is on the right side of the road. She is practically on top of him when she points her finger toward the bushes.
“I’ll have to cross the road,” her father says.
“Yes. Park there. On the side, under that tree.”
The road, though barely wide enough for one car, is a two-way road. Just a mile back, a car had come barreling toward them and her father had to swerve to avoid an accident.
“Be careful now.” Her mother directs him across the road. “Yes, this is it. I’m positive.”
Her father brakes. He squints, studying the bushes. “You’re right,” he says at last. “This is it. Your mother has good eyes, Anna.”
Anna sees trees, big ones, smaller ones, bushes, tall grass, no special marker, no difference in the landscape from the cluster of trees they have just passed.
“Your mother and I used to catch birds here.” Her father is beaming.
“
Mummy
?”
“Remember, Beatrice?”
But her mother is already out of the car. “It’s still here. I see it. Come, John.” She quickens her pace.
Her father hurries toward her. Anna tries to follow them but the sleeves of her blouse get caught in a knot of twigs. She stops to untangle herself and nettles cling to her pants. She bends to pluck them out. She clears one leg only to find the other leg of her pants crimped with more nettles. She reaches for a limb of a tree to steady herself and her fingers grasp the sharp ends of a branch. Everywhere she turns she is stuck, pricked, prodded. She stumbles over dried branches and loosened stones. They are far ahead of her. She cannot see them. She hears only their voices.
“Imagine that,” her father says.
“Come.” Her mother urges him on. “We’re almost there.”
The rain that fell has thickened the underbrush. Above, the sky strains through tiny spaces between leaves at the tops of giant trees, but below the green is dark. Threatening, it seems to Anna.
The forest is closing in on her. She can barely see more than two feet in front of her. Her heart is hammering. Her parents have stopped speaking. There are no human voices to guide her. All around her the leaves on the trees swish ominously. Fruit falling on the ground make sounds like the explosion of bullets. Birds fluttering their wings terrify her. A black, yellow-beaked crow caws. She stifles the urge to scream.
Be not afeard
. This is her island, her rain forest, but she cannot quiet her heart. It hammers still, beating loudly in her throat. Then, suddenly, in a parting of the trees, she sees them. They are standing a hair’s breadth from each other, so close that when a breeze ruffles her mother’s blouse, the edges brush against her father’s shirt. They are looking intently at something. What? Anna cannot distinguish it from the browns and greens in the forest. She draws closer. Shapes become more distinct: branches, leaves, vines winding into a shed, or what was once a shed. There is no roof, no windows, no door. Four wood pillars jut up from the floor; the skeleton remains of a staircase lead to the entrance. Slats of wood once nailed to the frame are scattered on the ground. Vines twist through spaces where they have fallen off.
“We should have come back here before now,” her father is saying.
“Yes,” her mother replies. Regret weighs down the word.
Anna clears her throat. The noise she makes is slight but it startles them.
“Anna!” Her mother spins around. They stare at her, eyes stretched open wide as if they had forgotten she has come with them.
“Did I surprise you?”
“Of course not.” Her mother quickly recovers her composure. “Your father and I were reminiscing.”
“About this shed?” The absurdity of the question causes Anna to rephrase it. “Did it belong to someone you knew?”
“No. It was ours,” her father says. “We built it.”
“You?”
We
did, your mother and I.” “
“I used to come here sometimes with your father.”
The picture refuses to form in Anna’s head.
“When I was a young man I came here to catch birds,” her father explains. “After your mother and I got married, she came with me.”
“Mummy?”