Authors: Anna Quindlen
I am proud to say that my sister never saw the point of all this. Why go to a drafty castle at the ass-end of Scotland when you can go to a small hotel in Mayfair? Why take a train to some medieval village in northern Italy when there’s the Hassler in Rome? And why take a chance on a puddle jumper to some off island in the Grenadines when Jamaica is a direct flight from New York?
“I just don’t believe the ocean is that much better in Fiji than it is at Grosvenor’s Cove,” she’d once said.
“Same with Atlantic City,” Irving had replied.
“Let’s not get ridiculous,” Meghan had said.
Of course, Meghan was interested neither in roughing it on vacation nor in going down-market. Grosvenor’s Cove is a resort that had been founded by a British couple two marriages removed from the royal family sometime after the stock market crash of 1929, and it has that appealing air of colonialism that the old rich take for granted and the new find so bracing. It is still a kiss-kiss-what-are-YOU-doing-here place, but those who find themselves meeting friends at Grosvenor’s Cove have a sense of confidence, are people who don’t care when someone who has just come back from that little village an hour by camel from Morocco raises an eyebrow and says, “Jamaica?” In New York the climbers have outnumbered the confident, so there are now many guests at the Cove who are from Kansas City or New Orleans, but as Evan likes to say, it is good to have new blood, and if they try to take pictures of Meghan, she smiles and poses and then the manager asks them privately to stop. Like expensive resorts worldwide, it is utterly not of its place. In other words, if you turned down the reggae music and shut off the supply of ganja the staff discreetly provide to the more adventuresome or younger guests, it could be in Miami or Sardinia or Nice, any of those places that are warm and on the sea and are off-limits unless you have a staff badge or a platinum Amex.
But we were a world away from Grosvenor’s Cove as the man Edward Prevaricator sent to meet me at the airport followed the steep S curves into and over the mountains that make up the undulating spine of the island. The cheesy American imports in Montego Bay, the Holiday Inns painted Caribbean pink, and the McDonald’s with sunburned tourists shuffling through its air-conditioned interior gave way to some large, white villas at the ends of gated driveways and then to a ramshackle assemblage of lean-tos along the mountain road. Little girls in dresses held out mangoes and lobsters for sale as the car passed, and musky smoke rose from an old drum sawed in half that a man in a Georgetown T-shirt had turned into a barbecue for jerk chicken and beef. I admit, I had expected some variation on a black car, but the driver, a thin man named Derek with an impossibly long neck, was driving an electric blue GTO with the words “Big Boy” emblazoned in silver decal letters across the top of the windshield. On the twisting rutted roads we had passed “Slo Mon,” “Love Mobile,” and a red Hyundai with “Jesus Ride With Me” in gold script. Twice we stopped for livestock, once a befuddled goat, then a herd of bulky oxen with enormous horns.
We passed through one small town, and along the road single file were women and children in dress clothes: lavender skirts, enormous straw hats, flowered pillboxes, starched collars. They picked their way carefully among the stones on the shoulder, and occasionally one of the women would give a child a thump atop the head with a clutch purse.
“Is there some kind of festival?” I said to Derek, who had insisted I sit in the back.
“It is Sunday. They are going to church.” He had a quiet voice that somehow sounded as though he didn’t use it often, as though it was kept folded in a drawer and brought out for special occasions.
“And you don’t go?” I said, trying to be friendly.
“I am a Seventh-Day Adventist. Our Sabbath is on the Saturday,” he said in a stiff way that made me realize I had taken the wrong tack.
I remembered staying at Grosvenor’s Cove with Evan, Meghan, and Leo for Meghan’s forty-third birthday, and how we had remarked on how warm and friendly the staff had been, how one of the men taught Leo about windsurfing, how another took him to meet a boat delivering the lobsters to the disgruntled chef, a Paris expat. One of the hostesses in the restaurant sang lilting folk songs during the dinner sitting, and one of the waiters did little dance steps when he delivered our meals. There had undeniably been a falseness about the entire performance, particularly following the afternoon I got lost on my way back from the tennis court and came upon the staff quarters, a long barracks of cinder block outside of which those men and women we’d seen in white shirts and floral dresses sat on upturned crates in worn everyday clothes, their eyes unfriendly as I came around the corner of the dirt path.
“That way, missus,” one woman said, pointing away from them.
Perhaps Derek’s stiffness was that same resentment. But some of the children along the road smiled and waved at us, and one little boy ran alongside the car until his mother called sharply, “Lawrence!” and he slowed and disappeared. On either side of the road there were small low houses with metal grating protecting the porches, and alongside a few of them were raised burial plots, rough stone tombs sunk down a bit in the ground as though little by little they would bury themselves.
Tequila was from a town like this, she’d told me, and her mother buried alongside a house like one of these. Like the people who had boarded the flight with me, people who now lived in East New York, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens, she had once gone home every summer with a duffel bag of clothes and an enormous assortment of consumer electronics. As the children had waited in the check-in aisle at Kennedy Airport, they had used appliance boxes as benches.
I had nothing for Meghan except detective novels. I didn’t know what she needed or, more important, what she wanted.
“Do you know my sister?” I asked Derek. He nodded. For a long time he said nothing. Finally he cocked his head toward the backseat slightly and added, “She is a very good swimmer.”
A minute later and we crested the mountain and saw far ahead of us the blue Caribbean. Below us the road twisted and turned as it made its way downhill, and far out on the horizon I could see a sailboat. The air was thick, and a long rodent crossed in front of the car as we stopped for a pothole.
“Mongoose,” Derek said softly. “If he go to the sea, it is good luck. If he go to the mountain, bad luck.”
“Which way was he going?”
Derek looked from one side of the road to the other. “Neither, I think.”
Twice we passed small guesthouses, once with a young couple with hikers’ backpacks out front consulting a map, but otherwise there was no sign of tourists and tourism. The road began to parallel the sea and at one point was almost upon it, and on the pebbly beach a man was soaping himself while standing waist deep in the water. Finally the car pulled up to a wooden gate painted a deep red. On either side were two enormous trees with red-brown trunks, a canopy of dim shade over the entrance. It was nothing like I had expected, no palatial villa, to be rented by the week. Down a path lined with old conch shells was a small one-story place, almost a pavilion, with a center room open to the ocean and the air. A small couch and two chairs were grouped around a low wooden table piled with books. A lizard ran across the floor, leapt at an insect, swallowed, and disappeared beneath an enormous philodendron whose speckled leaves covered most of the slope outside.
There was a patio and steps that led down to a narrow dock and a small stony beach. The sun had thrown a golden pathway from the horizon to the shore, and caught in its glare were a clutch of dugout canoes. I felt disoriented. That morning I had had coffee and a bagel in my apartment in New York as the May rain fell chill and hard against the window and the family across the yard, by the looks of it, slept in. Leo had spent the night at the house of a friend from Biltmore. “Tell her I said hi,” he had said breezily of his mother.
“Do you want to send a note or something?”
“Saying what? Hi? What’s up? Where are you? I’m still alive? I exist? No thanks. She knows.”
“No wonder it used to take months for sailors to get here from England,” I said aloud to no one. “It gave them time to get used to it.”
A boy was standing on the end of the dock, his fists on his narrow hips, his thin legs apart. His head was in shadow, his hair rough and shaggy, and suddenly he raised his arm and waved back and forth at one of the dugouts, shouting something I couldn’t hear. He was wearing khaki shorts to his knees and a shrunken T-shirt, and finally he let the shorts fall and dove into the water. He came up into the stripe of bright sun and began to swim, and in the light on the ruddy head and the sure length of the breaststroke I realized that what I had thought was a boy just short of manhood was my sister, wasted and shorn.
“Holy God,” I said.
“You will have to wait a long time,” said Derek. “She swims for many miles. My wife is cooking for her every night except for Saturday. She says someday she will swim to Cuba.”
“And interview Fidel,” I said.
On one side of the pavilion were two small bedrooms and a bath. Plantation beds with mosquito net canopies were in each. I could not tell which Meghan used because there was a framed photo of Leo in each with a small bouquet of some strange salmon-colored flower in a vase next to it. I changed into a bathing suit, some shorts, and rubber sandals, and followed the steps carefully to the dock. I looked out over the ocean. There was nothing, nothing, as far as you could see except for the dugouts. In one of them a man pointed at me, then spoke to his companion, and the two of them laughed. The coastline curved to a broad beach and the road running alongside it, and I could faintly hear the voices of the people bobbing up and down in a faint swell. I lay back on the dock. Above my head was a banana tree with green fruit. Somewhere in its branches a bird made a harsh braying sound. I fell asleep.
When I woke it was because of the sound of laughter again. Meghan was treading water near one of the dugouts. They handed her a net bag, and she looped it over one ankle, then struck out for the dock. As her arms curved overhead, her muscles were as clear as those in an anatomy book, and her freckles had almost merged into one expanse of mahogany brown. When she approached the pilings, her left hand rose from the water and wrapped itself around my ankle. Her right grabbed the splintering wood, and she arched out of the blue water like a red-gold fish. The men in the dugout watched. With one motion she pivoted, spraying water all over me.
“How is he?” she said fiercely. “That’s all I want to know.”
“I haven’t seen him,” I said. “I’ve talked to him a couple of times on the phone.”
“What?” The insides of her frown lines were a paler color, as though she kept her face clenched when she was in the sun. “I thought he was living with you. Mercedes just sent me a fax saying he was living with you and working at the office in the Bronx. I was so relieved. I haven’t been able to track him down anywhere.”
“I thought you meant Evan.”
“Evan? Who cares about Evan?”
“Leo’s fine,” I said. “He sends his love.”
Meghan smiled and threw her arms around me tight, holding, releasing, holding, releasing, as though she was doing an exercise. The water was warm, but she felt cold. “You are one of the world’s worst liars,” she said. “I’ve always admired that. Learning not to lie is the hardest thing.”
“Did you learn not to eat, too?”
She ran her fingers down her sides. Meghan has always been slender, and in times of trouble perhaps more than that. When she went on foreign assignments, she would sometimes look a little drawn on air, but I suspected she cultivated that: Look, America. Look how difficult is the work of bringing you the news! When we were children, I’d read the term
fighting weight
somewhere and thought that it applied to Meghan. In the months after our parents were killed, she had become so thin that she’d had to pin a fat handful of fabric at the side of her uniform skirt to hold it up. Every morning at breakfast, every afternoon when we arrived at our new home, she would make me food: cinnamon toast with cups of hot chocolate, cream donuts with glasses of milk. She even learned to make milk shakes in the blender, and she would sit at the table, hunched slightly forward, and watch me eat until I was done. By the time the school year was over, a roll of pink fat hung over the waistband of my underpants and the school nurse called my aunt and uncle in to say that Meghan must eat or she would have to leave school.
“I eat,” Meghan said then. “I eat,” she said now. It was probably true. You would have to eat a lot to underwrite the calories needed to swim to Cuba.
Derek’s wife at first had cooked and served, but she and Meghan now had an arrangement in which she left the food in an ancient oven in the small kitchen. I couldn’t understand how Meghan had lost any weight at all. That first night we had lobster stuffed with onion and bread crumbs, potatoes mashed with cheese, a local vegetable called callaloo, and some key lime pie. Meghan made me a rum punch while she drank beer. She wore an unfamiliar shift dress of cheap yellow cotton that hung straight to an inch or two above her knees. “I bought some stuff at an outdoor market a couple of weeks ago,” she said.
After dinner we went out to the patio and lay on two old teak lounges placed side by side. The stars were so bright that they seemed to press down on us, and Meghan pointed suddenly to the sky. A shooting star moved in an arc away from us, then fizzled like a bum firework. Bats moved in careful figure eights overhead. For a long time we just lay there silently. Meghan went inside and got another beer and a joint from a little box on her bureau. I shook my head when she passed it over. Now that I was here, I didn’t know how to begin. There was too much to say.
“What’s the deal with this place anyhow?” I finally said.
“It’s Edward’s,” she said. “Edward Prevaricator. He said you two know one another. He was at the Cove when I was there. One of the waiters took a picture of me with a cell phone and was peddling it to the tabloids. The waiter got fired, but the rest of the staff weren’t so happy about that. And Sunday was coming, with a whole new group of tourists. Never mind the prices at that place. He took me out for a drive one day and we wound up here. He and his wife bought it twenty years ago from a friend. He said they used it maybe twice a year. She died about five years ago of breast cancer, and he’s barely used it since. He just asked if I wanted to stay for a while. I went out running the first morning, and everybody was staring at me. Little kids, women carrying laundry baskets, the guy at the jerk stand up by the police station. I came back and said, You know, this isn’t going to work, they all recognize me. He’s such a nice man, he just gave me this little smile and said, I suspect few of them have ever seen a redhead before. That was it. Isn’t that pathetic? These poor people, who get maybe two channels if they even have a television, and I’d convinced myself that I’m so important that they all recognize me. And it’s all because I have red hair. Anyhow, I decided to stay.”