The Worlds Within Her (56 page)

YASMIN WHISPERS, “I
feel like burning the box.”

Amie shakes her head slowly. “He himself done burn, Beti. A long time ago. Ain't no point. He done do what he done, no changin' that. Beside, he inside us, you know, all of us. For good or for bad. As for the box and them t'ings —”

She folds her arms, glances away towards the open bedroom windows, as if reaching through it for what she wants to say.

“Jus' keep him in his box, Beti. Close the flaps and keep him there.”

She goes close to the window, splaying her fingertips on the sill. “He up there too,” she says. “Behind those clouds.”

Yasmin stands behind her, looks out. The day has cleared, the cloud cover burned off by the sun now brightly shining in early afternoon. “But there aren't any clouds, Amie.”

“Yes, Beti, it have clouds. You jus' ain't seein' them.”

It is, Yasmin thinks, a notion of ubiquity: her father — and her mother and her daughter, for that matter — everywhere, in everything, as integral to the worlds without as to the worlds within.

It is, she thinks, a notion of survival.

Penny waits for Cyril to begin making his way down the stairs with Yasmin's suitcase before saying, “So.”

“So.” Yasmin repeats the word, accepting the segue to summation. “I'm a stranger here.”

“You're not like us,” Penny's agreement is immediate.

“You don't like me, do you, Penny?”

“I don' know you.”

“You don't want to know me. Or to like me.”

“Well, now,” Penny says quietly. “Maybe you gone and put your finger on it.”

“So,” Yasmin says again, the word conveying now the difficulty of saying goodbye: How is it to be done? She will let it hang for a moment, then she will simply turn and follow Cyril down the stairs.

So she is unprepared when Penny's lips suddenly press themselves to her cheek. She holds herself still as the lips remain there for a mindful moment, then slowly peel themselves away as with the tug of a light adhesive.

Lips, lipstick: She has been branded — but temporarily.

Penny is the first to turn away, stepping towards the living-room doors, past the curtains and into the shadows of the house.

Yasmin digs into her purse for a tissue to wipe the lip-print away. Then she changes her mind. She will leave it, for now. She will let it fade by itself.

As it will.

Naturally.

AS THE CAR
trundles along the gravel driveway, she turns in her seat and looks out the rear window at the retreating house. Already it seems of strange provenance to her, its shapes and contours of an unknown architecture. She knows its individual rooms, but is not sure how they fit together. She is not sure she could sketch a plan of it.

She glances ahead: to Ash standing shirtless beside the open gates, the chains hanging heavy in his hand.

Then she turns back again, for a final look. And she sees that Amie is now standing at the foot of the stairs, her arms folded, her gaze on the car. And upstairs, at a bedroom window, a lighter shadow against the greater gloom, Penny, also looking out, also following their progress. She raises a hand, but they are already too far, the sun's reflection off the rear window too dazzling, for them to see the gesture.

They approach the gate, and as they drive through she waves at Ash, but he too does not see — or, perhaps, does not wish to see.

Cyril turns, without slowing, from the driveway onto the road — away from the sea ahead and the house behind — and Yasmin finds herself looking back once more.

But all she sees now, and only for the briefest second, is Ash intent at his task of chaining up the gate.

Once they have left the town behind, she sees what she did not see on the evening of her arrival. She sees why the darkness through the taxi window was so unrestrained.

The road to the airport, raised on a bed of packed gravel, runs through a broad plain sectioned off into fields. Some are cultivated, some are wild.

Rice, Cyril says. Tomatoes, lettuce, green peas.

His answers to her questions are brief, laconic. He is not in a talkative mood today. At lunch, he was as if weighted down: as if Yasmin's sense of lightening — a lightening which grew into a kind of restlessness as they left the cremation ground — has found its opposite in him.

His silence wins the day. Yasmin asks no more questions — she realizes she is attempting to make conversation — and, without the effort, finds herself growing indifferent.

Indifferent to the landscape that remains a mass of undifferentiated vegetation.

To the people speeding by in cars.

To the children labouring in the fields.

To everything but Cyril and the meaning of his silence.

She smells the airport before she sees it, fumes of jet fuel drifting heavily over a mass of sugar cane.

And it is perhaps this reminder of imminent parting that prompts Cyril to say, “So …”

It is all she needs, the words coming to her with no effort.

She has a sense, she says, of things falling into place where she had not known they had fallen apart. Has questions now where before there were none — questions which, she understands, are more precious than their answers. She returns to her world, she says, assured of her place in it.

Cyril hears her out in silence. Then he says, “I hear you talking to yourself right now. Is the way it should be. But let me tell you one thing. It would do a selfish old man a lot o' good if one day, when you good and ready, you decide to come back, even for just a little while. A lot o' good.”

Yasmin breathes deeply of the jet fuel, aware that now the silence is hers.

As the airport comes into view, Cyril says, “At least you not saying no.”

“Will it do?”

“Oh, yes, dear Yasmin, oh, yes. It'll do.”

She holds his glance, and she sees in those eternal seconds that his eyeball does not waver.

Only as she pauses on the tarmac and searches for him among the people waving from the terminal does it occur to her that he is the loneliest man she has ever met.

A loneliness that was there, at the entrance to the departure lounge where they said goodbye: in his stiffened back, his moistened eyes, and — most of all — in the single-minded precision with which he walked away after the brief hug: as if following a line he had prescribed for himself well in advance.

She searches for him, and even though she does not see him, she waves, the gesture genuine and heartfelt. Turning back to the aircraft, watching her shoes cover the oily paving, she finds herself hoping that he has seen the wave, and that he has read it well.

The aircraft is full, the passengers subdued.

Skins have been tanned, bodies unwound, and what awaits at the end of the flight are the jobs and the problems and the
tensions reassumed. In a few hours, weeks of anticipation will be fading memories and overlit photographs. There will be no partying on this flight.

The carry-on luggage is voluminous and awkward — woven hats, wall hangings, bottles of rum — and it is some time before all is secured and the cabin settles down.

Her seat companion, a large man with a nose painfully reddened, grunts in response to her greeting, turns away and shuts his eyes.

She sits, takes her book from her bag, straps on her seat belt, and waits. In her mind she replays the drive she has just taken with Cyril, going the other way now, following him back to the house.

And to her surprise, an ache of wistfulness tightens in her chest.

Only some time later, when the plane trundles along the tarmac, when it gathers speed on the runway and eases itself off the earth, does she reach into her bag once more and take from it the one object she has coveted from among her father's things.

She holds it up to the thick sunlight flowing in through the window, runs her fingertips over its silky pages.

Icarus.

The silence is absolute.

He soars through the air, gliding along on unseen currents, the earth far beneath reduced to simplicities of green and blue.

He feels the warmth of the sun on his face, a soothing caress through the cool air.

But soon he grows hungry for more. He stares upwards, into the very core of the fiery disc, and heads straight for it: There, he feels, is where he is meant to be. There is where he belongs.

It is not long before the air loses its coolness and the heat begins to sear. He feels the wax softening on his arms, and he thinks of candles melting onto his fingers in his mother's house.

A feather detaches itself, flutters from his arm.

Then another and another.

He strains to maintain height, to maintain momentum. The effort is useless. He feels himself descending.

But even as he falls, even as his arms grow bare, he utters a long and crackling laugh of pleasure. For he knows that he is flying still — and he knows that for this he does not need the permission of the gods.

He watches the sun descend, watches the moon rise.

On and on he flies, borne up by the silvery light, all the while his laughter thundering down with the riotous delight of a man at peace with himself.

SHE SEES JIM
before he sees her. He is leaning against a pillar, hands in the pockets of his jeans. She sees that he is watchful, as if afraid he will miss her. And this is why she sees him first: He is looking away, looking for her.

She does not walk up to him. Instead, she puts her suitcase down and stands some distance away, a distance complicated by people and movement and the echoing sounds of airport announcements. She stands there, hand grasping the strap of her shoulder bag, waiting to be discovered.

He does not see her immediately — but when he does it is
with eyes of wonderment. He straightens up, sliding his hands from his pockets. Then he wends his way slowly towards her, eyes never wavering.

It is that gaze that she holds as he presses himself to her, as he slides his arms around her shoulders.

His lips graze hers, and she feels herself grow warm.

Feels herself beginning to melt.

Traffic is light, home not far away.

In the distance, beyond the carpet of lights that imposes beauty on industry, the heart of the city glows like a cluster of dark crystal.

Jim says, “So what was the question?”

Yasmin smiles. “The question,” she says, “is, what are the questions?”

“Any answers?”

“So many that there aren't any. But that doesn't matter. Just having the questions is enough. They say … They say that we exist.”

She knows she sounds cryptic, and is grateful that Jim's glance, caught in the half-light from the dashboard, reveals a puzzlement that is not pressing, reveals that he will be patient so that, in time, they can decipher the puzzle together.

She says, “Jim, do you know how immigration works?”

“Not a clue. Why?”

“There's this young man, a distant cousin. His name's Ash. Remind me to tell you about him.”

After a moment, he says, “I've got some good news by the way. Mrs. Livingston's come out of her coma.”

“Oh, good. Does she know about Mom?”

“Yes, her son told her. In fact he called this morning. She's asking to see you.”

“Me?”

“She's got a message for you. Something about your mother.”

“Did he say —?”

“No, but she's pretty frail. There's no telling how long she'll …”

“Will tomorrow be soon enough?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.” Then suddenly, in a voice choked with an emotion long unheard, he says, “Yas, I love you.”

Yasmin holds out her palm and waits patiently until, with delight she feels his words, their warmth and their weight, alighting.