How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  “Don’t come, we are fine, but I have to go now.”

  “Wait, Mira, I think we should pray about this . . .”

  She is probably still praying when Mira hangs up.

  It is not a crime, thinks Mira Whalen, to want the best in life, and a bounty of it. It is not a crime to use what you have to get it, no matter what her mother says. This is what Mira Whalen is thinking when she jumps up in the middle of the night with her heart racing and her nightgown soaked in sweat despite the AC being on full blast. It is what she reminds herself when she is reading and the phone rings and she still fully expects it to be Peter calling to tell her his meeting is running late, and in fact it is her mother, begging her again to pack her things and come with her. It is what she replays in her mind while being shown pictures at the Baxter’s Beach Police Station after Sergeant Beckles, on recognizing that, despite her cultured English and expensive clothes, Mira Whalen is really just a local who married a wealthy white tourist, masks his face without feeling and stops calling her Madam and does not notice that one of his pictures is missing from his binder.

  “No,” she says, “it is not him. No, it is not him, either.”

  It is not a crime to want the best out of life, to use what you have to get what you want, Mira Whalen insists to herself. So why, for fuck’s sake, is she still being punished for it?

  Chapter 5

  Lala

  3 August 1984

  The name is a game they play on good days when they are lying in bed, lost in their own laughter, and he is someone else entirely. On good days they are cocooned in cotton sheets covering tangled legs and torsos and he is either the man she’d hoped he would turn out to be, or the man whose potential for good is as yet unrealized, or the man tormented by her inability to love him completely. On bad days, the name is not a game. Lala cannot play this game when he is a thief, or a liar, or a man who turns into a demon when he makes a fist or covers his face with a stocking.

  When they play this game, what Adan does is try to sing her. He tries every type of la-la he can think of: soft percussive notes that stretch his throat and deeply resonant bass notes that vibrate when she touches him and barely audible sharps that hurt her ears. Adan has said to her that she will know them when she hears them – the real notes, the real name. Something in her will click, says Adan, and just like that she will know that he has happened upon her name. He is the only man who can find it, says Adan, he is able and up to the task. They play the game a little less often now that the baby is here, but she is warmed by the fact that he is still trying.

  Today is a good day.

  “La-la,” sings Adan. “I think da’s it.”

  But Lala shakes her head No.

  It makes no sense lying, because he will know anyway.

  “Laaa-la!”

  No.

  When he is tired, and she fears he is about to fall into a temper, she cocks her head at the next note that rolls off his tongue, she widens her eyes, she makes the bewildered glance of the big, white dog on the beach, as if she will sit at attention and come bounding into the present if he says it again. And when Adan gets that rare smile of triumph, and tries to repeat it exactly, seeking confirmation, she holds his face between her hands, instead. She kisses his forehead, traces the outline of the scar above his left eyebrow with the tip of her tongue, sucks on the thin skin of his eyelids so that he has to stop looking at her to see if he has, at last, got the name right. She loves him. And when she’s finished loving him, he has forgotten that he has failed to crack it – that her name is still a mystery.

  Adan starts to talk about the robbery. This robbery did not go to plan.

  “It is the people’s fault,” says Adan. “Everybody know you don’t challenge someone who come into your house like that.”

  Adan says the white woman saw him when she pulled the stocking from his face in the struggle. He is thinking that her eyes made four with his, that this is worse than if she had just known his name or where he lived, because he could move if somebody only know his address, but if they know his face they can pick him out anywhere. He cannot let this woman live, says Adan, this white woman. Given a choice between her life and his freedom, says Adan, looking at Baby, there is only one choice he can make.

  “She woulda been too scared to see you good,” says Lala, remembering that stocking, that scream. “She woulda be too shocked to remember your face.”

  But Adan is not convinced.

  “One little puny white woman,” says Adan, “one little bitch who felt she could do me something. That little bitch look me straight in the face,” says Adan, “when she pull off the stocking. I tell her not to look and she not only look, she take off the stocking to get a better look. One little puny white woman and her kiss-me-crutch old man. I woulda get her too,” says Adan, “if the doorbell didn’t ring.”

  And then he pauses to look at Lala.

  Lala looks away.

  As he continues to talk, she listens to him. She no longer listens to the words. Lala has long learned not to listen to Adan’s words at moments such as this. She listens instead to the up-and-down of his voice covering the small space between them. It is possible, she is sure, that he can find the exact intonation of the two syllables of her name while saying something else entirely, and this is what she is listening for. This, and nothing else, is why she does not tell him to get the fuck off of her, that he’s an evil man, a liar and a louse and if he ever tries to hit her again, or to ravage her or to order her around, she will kill him with the other gun he has buried in an empty oil drum near one of the concrete pillars that saves their house from being swallowed by the sea, she will boil a pot of water spiked with oil and scald him while he is sleeping, she will wait until he is snoring beside her, and take a cleaver from the kitchen and make sure he gets one good chop in the head. In her dreams, one good chop, the kind that slices bone like butter, is all it would take.

  She listens for the sounds, but she cannot escape the words.

  Lala gathers from what Adan is saying that an old white man died that night she found him and that Adan knows that it is he who killed him.

  She catches her breath and holds it.

  Before Baby was born, when it had been a good day and Adan had smiled with her and sung to her, rubbed her legs and bought her strawberries for prices that made her dizzy, sometimes Lala was reminded that her memory is unreliable, that the things she heard, the things she had seen, the things she had felt were, possibly, not real. On such days she was not sure whether the awful things she remembered of Adan were indeed as awful as she remembered them to be. The time he found that bald patch in her hair, for instance, while kissing her head, and had asked her, sincerely, what had happened to cause her hair to fall out there. At times like those she was not certain that the man massaging her feet was capable of such damage, whether the injuries he had caused her were really caused by him.

  This is why she is unsure, when she thinks about it now, whether Adan is really telling her how an old white man begged for his wife, and not his own life, how he shook when he shot him, how the wife’s eyes opened in shock when the man fell, until they seemed to take up her whole forehead. It is possible that Adan expresses regret at not collecting more, searching harder, making them take him to that part of the house with the safe that rich white people always have. It is possible that Adan’s voice vibrates with anger, that it amplifies when he says he wishes he could have waited a little longer, made them give him everything they had. It is possible, thinks Lala, but it is not likely because, after all, this is the man who cups their baby in the crook of his arm, and rocks Baby so gently that she is wooed into the trusting abandon of openmouthed sleep. This is the man who has reserved for himself the simple gift of naming her, who, not being able to find a name that does justice to the wonder of his first child, still calls her Baby over a week after her birth, a name that means she has none. This is not a man capable of irreversible harm, of murder.

  “S
he can’t get ’way,” says Adan. “When I get her she going wish she did dead the first time.”

  His eyes are wild, his scar pulsing with hot blood.

  “She must be didn’t see you,” pleads Lala, looking at Baby, cooing on the bed.

  “She see me,” says Adan. “She pull off the stocking and she look right at me. She wouldn’t look away. She see me and she have to dead.”

  Robbery is one thing, but murder? Murder is something else altogether. Murder is one of those things you can listen to, thinks Lala, should you ever be so unfortunate as to be on the guilt-free side of a confession, or a statement of murderous intent, but it is not a thing to be repeated. Murder is a thing best forgotten, a thing best left a mystery.

  Chapter 6

  15 August 1984

  They are admiring Baby the night everything changes. They are quietly claiming things about her to the soundtrack of Adan’s cooing – in deference to the mystery of her mother’s name. Lala claims Baby’s nose, the way the little legs turn gently inward at the knees before repelling each other, the elegant, triple-jointed toes. Adan claims her long torso, the flat, broad bones beneath her face, the way her upper lip retreats when she smiles.

  “Just like Penny,” says Adan. “Penny daughter self.”

  It is one of the things she protests that they have in common, in mental inventories liturgized at night, this habit of calling a mother by her first name. It is one of the reasons she cannot leave him. For both of them, this mother died before either of them reached the age of five. In these circumstances, it is not strange to refer to a dead mother the way you would a fondly remembered friend.

  Adan has come to see them again, on one of his covert, nighttime visits since Baby came home. They are seated on opposite sides of the bed, and the baby is in the middle, in a space cleared of rumpled bedsheets, smiling at her father. She does not smile that way at Lala. She never has, and it is only now beginning to be something Lala worries about.

  Adan does not have to do much to make Baby smile – a twitch of his head so the light catches his bald pate and a clucking sound and Baby is already in hysterics. Lala is content to stay in the shadow of their joy. The warmth that ripples out from those giggles is like the sunny spot in which a dog seeks to lie down and curl inward.

  Neither of them anticipates the knock on the door. They are so enraptured by the beauty of this new baby that they have forgotten her father is a fugitive. Adan misses the first knock, coming as it does on the cusp of his clucking. Lala, on the other hand, hears the knock the first time and tries to ignore it, trying to hold onto her spot of sun. But when the door raps the second time and Adan jumps and puts his finger to his lips, easing his hand below the iron bed frame, where a machete lies waiting, she drags herself up, clutches Baby close, hears herself whistle, “Who is it?”

  But it is only Tone. And a woman. Looking for shelter from a sudden downpour.

  She does not say Come in. Tone is the type of friend who does not need to be invited in or shown where to sit or offered a glass of the alcohol kept for company. Tone is not company, Tone is one of Adan’s friends since boyhood, one of the ones who shadows him when he ventures out at night, watching his back to ensure that no one breaks it, the friend who soundlessly collects the spoils from Adan’s jobs and returns to him with all of the money from their sale. Tone is one of Adan’s inner circle, but he has never before sought to extend this privilege to people Lala does not know.

  Recently, Tone has appeared not to take his status for granted and has started knocking when he reaches the top step, something that Adan has, wrongly, attributed to the expectation and then existence of Baby. Something Adan fully expects will stop soon, once Tone understands that a baby does not change things, that we is still we.

  Tone pushes his way past Lala as soon as she opens the door. He is panting from having tried, and failed, to outrun the rain up the stairs and his face is contorted in a scowl because his brand-new sneakers have been drenched. It is a beautiful face: almond-shaped eyes set deep in grizzled caramel-brown skin stretched tight over bones so delicate and pointed you could think a scowl would break them. It doesn’t.

  “Is only Tone,” says Lala, and Adan emerges from the shroud of dresses and slacks and jackets Lala has hung from a piece of broomstick laid diagonally across the corner above the bed. He puts the machete gently down and beams.

  Tone and Adan touch fists in their usual welcome.

  “My man, I thought you supposed to be undercover,” Tone reprimands him, mildly. “We went to the tunnels and you wasn’t there. I thought we agree you was gonna stay in the tunnels.” He looks at Lala and falls silent.

  “I come to see the baby,” Adan explains. “I had was to come.”

  Tone trots over to the kitchen sink, which stands shakily beneath a window through which the sky is gray and ominous and the rain is now pelting down, drumming on the galvanize above them so that they have to speak a little more loudly to be heard. Tone leans over the single-basin sink, barely held in place by the rotting wood that cradles it, and starts to squeeze the rain from his locks.

  Lala watches the water dribble from Tone’s matted hair and splash onto Baby’s newly sterilized bottles. Perhaps this is the first thing that irritates her, that plants a seed of anger, this little intrusion. She and the baby have made their peace with the impossibility of breastfeeding by now, even though Adan still insists that she try Baby on her nipple first before each feed. It is partly her guilt at being unable to breastfeed that makes the ritual of sterilization so sacred to her, that makes her so infuriated by Tone’s indiscriminate squeezing of his hair. She does not know why breastfeeding does not come naturally to her, but Adan seems to be beginning to accept the bottles. Perhaps it is Lala’s anguish each time Baby draws milk that makes the little one turn away from her mother’s breast of her own accord, bewildered. Perhaps it is Lala’s distress that causes Adan not to frown when she starts giving Baby the store-bought formula she has to scrounge coins to buy.

  The rain drums on the rooftop and the glass panes above the sink tremble in the wind and let in the rain, but Tone does not close them. The woman is still standing at the top of the stairs, smiling in at them with the rain plopping down on her hair. It is the kind of hair Lala charges extra to braid, the kind whose soft, loose curls have to be gripped tightly and forced to behave.

  “As man,” says Tone, “this rain just start pelting down just so, I tell this girl let we come here by you until it blow over.”

  His voice has lost the affectation it wears when he talks to tourists. When he is hustling Americans or Europeans on the beach, he mirrors the foreign accents so central to theirs: Hey baby, want someone to show you a good time, mayne? He offers them tightly rolled weed or rides on a Jet Ski or the promise of the hard, rough sex of a slave put to stud in an accent they recognize, and his smile lights up those delicate bones so that old tourist women cannot resist him. When he is talking to friends, to locals, however, his voice is undressed, unfussy and runs roughshod over the local dialect without thought.

  Adan had retrieved Baby from Lala’s arms after she announced that it was just Tone, and had resumed his cooing, but he looks away from Baby when Tone says this girl. His eyes bore into Lala’s back and then rise above her shoulder as he stands.

  “Jacinthe!” he exclaims. “Come inside, Jacinthe, don’t stay outside and get wet so.’”

  When he says her name Lala looks at her again, properly, this girl on the step. Before now she had dismissed her as one of Tone’s girls, one of the ones who paid him, but such girls were never young, never brought to Adan’s house, and never attributed names. Not by Tone, and certainly not by Adan. A name, she knows, is often a revelation of things that are hidden. It is only after Adan says her name that Lala sees the way the woman refuses to allow her feet to cross the threshold of the door, even with the rain daggering her hair and back. It is only then she understands that this is not one of Tone’s paying older women. This girl is
something else entirely.

  “I tell you come inside, Jacinthe.”

  Jacinthe hesitates just for a moment before shedding her sandals and putting her foot on the welcome mat. She tries to pull the PEPSI door closed behind her, but it flies open again with the wind. She abandons her efforts to close it, comes inside, sits down on the wrought-iron chair beside the bed, and tucks the skirt of her neon Hunza dress beneath the spread of her upper thighs, as if she needs it holding her close in order to stay put. Adan looks at this woman’s smooth, beige thighs, Jacinthe smiles, and something in Lala’s chest turns over.

  Jacinthe is the color of construction sand, with a small-boned frame and a wary, restless manner that makes Lala think of the pigeons, approaching jerkily, on the little bridge in the garden of Baxter’s General. When Jacinthe can be coaxed to the very edge of the chair, closer to the side of the bed, Adan shows off his baby: lifts her and pulls back a bib to show a birthmark, displays her healed navel, lists the features he claims are gifted from his side of the family, seeks Jacinthe’s agreement. Jacinthe nods. Says that Baby’s smile is just like Penny, Penny self, and Adan grins in a way that Lala does not often see – with a sort of mirthful idiocy that does not acknowledge that this Penny lives only in a picture, that a picture is where she has only ever lived.

  Lala searches her memory again for a mention of Jacinthe, but comes up empty.