Never another word did I hear from her again until some years later she began to send me Christmas cards from America. No message except
Love, Lise and the kids
. No return address. I didn't know she had left. By this time, Shirley had died, which is probably why the news for some reason upset me when Junior told me that Lise had moved to New York. What's this New York thing, I thought then. Is there some kind of homing call that they have to respond to, as birds to their instincts, to go to that place, to dieâor vanish, as Lise seemed to have done. She vanished to me, though I have no doubt she was in touch with her father. They all were. So what did that make me? I wondered sometimes. A monster who ate her children?
No, I was simply eating up myself with jealousy of their father, as Lise in another of her own bitter moments had told me. Or maybe that was Shirley. I was the one who was full of anger and hatred: “No fun to be with.” Yet, in all honesty, wasn't it that same grin, that powerful charisma that had also drawn me to him? So why did I condemn them for falling for it? It's all such a long time in the past anyway, and he is the past too. Died quite a few years back.
I was surprised that I didn't feel anything when I heard the news. At least not at first. And, I'm ashamed now to admit, I said no words of comfort to Celia when she came to tell me her father had died, nor to Junior. I just said, “Oh,” asked a few practical questions like “What happened?” or “What did he die of?” as if they were talking about a stranger. I honestly didn't think at the time how much their father meant to them. Or, for that matter, what he had meant to me. Yes, I suppose I was jealous. Jealous of the way he displaced me in my children's lives. And angry. Angry even now. For I still feel this man stole a whole part of my own life. Diverted me from some other road I might have taken.
And yet (to borrow Mr. Bridge's technique) if I hadn't run away with Sam, what would have become of me?
SOME WEEKS AFTER SHE
brought the news of Shirley's death, Celia came, by herself this time, but she had very little to add. The police thought the man responsible had been killed in another shootout. I felt I would never hear the truth. Celia did bring me the picture, though. It was Shirley all right, but not the Shirley that I knew, for she looked old, thin, and faded, only the smile remaining like a ghost of her former self. Or was it just my imagination that had already turned her into a ghost, a spirit child? A spiritless child?
I studied that picture so much it got cracked and worn. I kept trying to superimpose on it this vision of a child who in my mind was always vital, happy, larger than life. Noisy, irrepressible Shirley coming home from school bursting through the door, slamming down her school bag on the floor as she tore off her shoes and uniform and wriggled into her house dress almost at the same time as she was rushing through the kitchen asking, “What's for dinner?”, grabbing an orange or banana, recounting some event from school, and dashing out the door to play before I could get a word in. No matter how hard I tried, I could never slow her down, and it wasn't surprising that she was the queen of the fifty-yard dash at her school's sports day.
I couldn't reconcile that Shirley of my mind with the woman in the picture, Shirley slowed down to a dead halt. I wanted to cry every time I looked at it. Then one day I put it away in the old biscuit tin where I kept the few things that were important to me. It was many years before I looked at it again.
What I couldn't face was the chasm that had opened up between us, Shirley and me, before she left home. I hardly heard directly from her once she went away. Lise had done the same, once she moved to her father's, but with Lise it didn't matter that much. Shirley's silence was really painful since we never had the history of antagonism that Lise and I had. Shirley and I always got on well, she got on well with everyone. She began to change the year or so before she went to America. She got these terrible mood swings, almost as if she was two different people. In a way I was glad when she told me she was going away. I thought she needed a change of scene, she needed to do more with her life than be a typist in somebody's office. She was thrilled when she got into university. Things seemed to have worked out for the first year or two. But I really didn't know any details, for I relied mainly on Junior and Celia for news of her. Not that there was much forthcoming, and I was disappointed that she never came home on a visit, but at least I knew she was all right.
When I thought about it afterwards, though, I realized I didn't know if she was all right for I knew virtually nothing about Shirley's life in the five years she was away. Yet it was that very knowledge I needed to make the leap between the Shirley I had known and the one in the picture. Shirley silent and still. I think the image of Shirley in that picture disturbed me so much because I got the feeling that she was lonely, and Shirley was never cut out to be alone.
I KEPT WAITING FOR
Junior to come and see me because he was the one I expected to fill in the gaps, tell me everything about Shirley, but he too seemed to have vanished, for not a word did I hear from him. That made me realize something very strange that had not struck me before. In all the years Junior was visiting, he had never given me his phone number or address. I didn't even think about it until I was the one who desperately wanted to contact him. Then I realized how empty was my knowledge of him, how evasive he was if I asked him anything personal. After Shirley's death it was as if I was suddenly opening up a box marked “Junior,” to find there was nothing inside.
Once I did say to him, jokingly, “So, Junior, why don't you bring some of your friends to visit? Why you always come alone? You don't have a girlfriend? Man, you don't think it's time you settled down and got married?”
Junior just laughed. When it came to himself, he was the most closed-mouth, though he was quite affable about everything else. He hadn't forgotten his roots, either; everyone passing by who saw his car parked outside the house would call out some friendly greeting or come inside to shake his hand. He would always stop to chat with people on the road, the guys he'd gone to elementary school with. Although he had done so well for himself and gone way beyond them, there was nothing high and mighty about Junior. He was the same guy he always was. Generous too. I knew that, but I was quite surprised that Millie could cite chapter and verse of people whose children Junior was sending to school. He had never given me the slightest hint of this and I never let on that I knew. I laughed when Millie called Junior the Godfather, but only because for me that image was of a much older man, and though he was very mature for his age, Junior was still a boy to me. When I said that, she said quite seriously, “No, is true, Miss Sam. You don't know how many people him help. If it wasn't for Junior, plenty families wouldn't eat.”
This side of him was really news to me, but I had never doubted his popularity. I guess there was a lot of his father in him, though Junior was much more a man of substance in every way.
“Junior,” one day I teased him, “it looks like you're planning to run for election. Millie says if they put you up as a candidate, not even a dog would vote for the opposition.”
Junior laughed heartily and his eyes crinkled up and vanished inside his face till they could hardly be seen, for though he had started out with his father's face, long and narrow, over the years both his face and body had filled out. Junior was a walking advertisement for the good life.
“No, not me,” he said. “You think I would be crazy enough to go into politics?” But everybody knew he was an active supporter of the party in power and a friend of some powerful politicians, including our very own MP.
Once when I complained that I knew nothing about him, he said, quite seriously, “Sometimes it's best not to know. What you don't know can't hurt you.”
He had a faraway look in his eyes when he said it, but I remember laughing to myself at his use of the saying, one more likely to come out of the mouth of some old person like me than this youth.
It was only after Shirley's death when I so desperately wanted to get in touch with him that I remembered that he had in fact given me an address. Not a home address, but one of his business cards. “Samjam Enterprises,” it read, with an address in Montego Bay, a phone and fax number. He hadn't wanted to give it to me, but I had begged him. “Suppose there is an emergency or something,” I remember saying, “how on earth would I contact you?”
He took the card out of his wallet then and handed it over, saying, “If I'm not there they will always know where to find me.”
So now when I so desperately wanted to find him, I dug up the card and dressed and took the bus to town, determined to phone him, for these were the days before cell phones and there were no call boxes in the remote country where I lived.
You can guess how the story ends, can't you? After a lot of trying and frustration and grief, I ended up knowing that phone was no longer in service. Ditto fax, for I went over to the hardware store where I knew the owner and he tried to send a message for me. Nothing going through. I went home and wrote Junior care of the company address but no answer came back.
I then started to think of all the people Junior knew in the district, since some of them were bound to know how to get in touch, especially if he was helping them out. But I was too ashamed to ask, for it would have been admitting that I didn't know anything about my own son. There was one person, though, Bertie. He was older than Junior, but they were good friends.
Bert was one of the young men from around who was born with nothing but had suddenly blossomed into the wealthiest man in the district. A show-off one too, so people had a lot to say. He built himself this huge house on the hill, a white palace with many arches that could be seen for miles, with a huge satellite dish on the roof. He owned several trucks, huge refrigerated things, not to mention matching Volvos for himself and his wife. Bert used to hang around with Junior when he was a little boy, but I hardly saw him these days, the most I got was a wave as he sped past. People had a lot to say about the source of his sudden wealth, but I thought a lot of it was envy. Bert had gone away as a farm worker, and unlike many of the others had saved his money. He continued to go, year after year. When I mentioned this to Millie, who was always throwing word after him, she laughed long and loud.
“You really believe is so farm worker can get rich quick, Miss G? Well, if that was the case I would send my Roy over there to pick apples in Canada long time. I would even go myself.” She walked off laughing, perhaps at the idea of her husbandâa hard-working mechanicâworking for someone else. I suppose I was being naïve, because by this time the drug trade was big business and there were whispers everywhere about who was the Mister Big behind it. Or rather several Mister Bigs. Our own MP was rumoured to be one, though at the time the air was so polluted with politics, drugs, and gun violence there were rumours about everybody. All I wanted from Bert was to find out if he knew anything about Junior or had heard from him or knew where I could find him. But I was shocked to discover Bert too had gone away, his cousin was running the trucking company, the Volvos had disappeared, and his wife and children had departed overnight.
After that I gave up on Junior. I got to a point where I decided to forget I ever had children, for all I ever got from them was ingratitude. Even Shirley, how dare she go and die? Leaving me to the blankness of questions with no answers. To the emptiness.
Long after this, Celia told me Junior was in Canada, but he didn't want anyone to know. I kept my mouth shut, though I couldn't believe he could have left without telling me. But this was a time when politics had tainted everything, had split the country. People were dying for it, and so many who had been involved in even the most marginal way were running scared, leaving the country without telling their closest friends. Most of the business people were running, afraid of Castro and communism. Another set was running because they feared the opposition coming to power in the election that was imminent. So I thought it was something like that with Junior. Part of that exodus, when bumper stickers were reading,
Will the last person to leave please turn off the lights
. I don't know if Junior might have been involved in politics far deeper than I knew, and it was to be some years before I actually got a letter from him. I didn't think of Junior and Lise too often then, but I couldn't get Shirley out of my mind.
MR. BRIDGES' STYLE IS
to ask a question as a way of finding an answer, and I'm trying to adopt it rather than leap to conclusions. He certainly asks me a lot of questions, and I am flattered, for no one has ever shown this sort of interest in me before. I have come to open up to him, a little bit. He is so comfortable to be with, he seems to draw things out of me like a conjurer. I hadn't spoken much about the other children, but one day we were talking about Celia. So when I told him Celia hadn't grown up with me, which made me feel guilty to this day, he asked me to tell him how that had come about and then he posed the question: “What would she have been if you hadn't done what you did? Have you thought of that?”
It is late afternoon and we are sitting by ourselves in comfortable wicker chairs in a corner of the veranda overlooking the lawn, our words unheard by a bunch of noisy Scrabble players at the next table. Mr. Bridges is making the one whiskey and soda he permits himself last as long as possible. I am struggling with needlepoint.
But, perhaps what is really making me uncomfortable is not the needlework but Mr. Bridges, because it is not always that we want friends to be so reasonable and rational about things. Sometimes we want people we like to agree with us, to say yes, you have been hard done by, regardless. But Mr. Bridges is not like that; in his gentle way he always looks at both sides and in the process is forcing me to confront some hard truths. So now when he asks me if I have thought about it, I want to snap at him, “Of course I have.”