by Cherie Jones
* * *
Jack appears when she starts her third lap of aisle 5. He has probably been sent by the manager and he doesn’t talk to her at first. Not really. A flash of recognition as part of his peripheral vision and a sort of sigh in welcome. He’s crooked: half of his back sits lower on his spine than the other half and the half that sits lower drags, as though part of him is a sleeping friend he has to carry along. He wears the yellow T-shirt uniform they all do, but under his he wears a long-sleeved, white, much-pressed polyester shirt with a loud tie knotted right up to his throat and large black shoes with rounded toes he never polishes. And he wears a ridiculous smiling button that shouts his name in a cartoon cloud.
“Hi, Jack,” she says, with the enthusiasm she’d use to greet a five-year-old, already aware that if she doesn’t he will worry and ask her what’s wrong.
“Hi,” he says, and he licks the accumulated spit in the sagging corner of his smile. He is moving things around on the shelves. Randomly. Like he doesn’t really want to. Like he doesn’t have much to do. Like someone has asked him to go check on the crazy white lady doing laps in aisle 5.
“Do you go to work,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a question.
“No,” she says. It doesn’t sound like an answer.
“Work isn’t nice if you don’t sleep first,” he smiles, “so how do you make money?”
“I’m already rich,” she says, walking away.
“What you looking for?” he asks, following, because he already knows. He has not looked straight at her once, like he is afraid to. Like someone he trusts has given him the rule about not talking to strangers. The same person who might have told him about looking both ways before he crosses the street. About not looking directly at the sun, lest it blind him. She wonders if they told him to lock his doors at night. Whether he knows you need that rule in Paradise.
“Raisins,” she says, and there is only the slightest catch in her throat.
“Aisle 8.” He is pleased that he remembers. “Want me to go get them?”
“Yeah, one box.”
He comes back, licking spit and breathless. He ran the whole way. The proffered box is red, with a milkmaid logo. It costs more than it should and she doesn’t want to eat raisins, but she will buy them anyway. Because this is the last thing that Peter had asked her for, this tiny fucking box of raisins. This tiny box will join the others in the cupboard, similarly bagged in the smallest of the store’s puke-colored plastic bags. Maddeningly, Jack will hand the bag to her only after he has folded it over enough times that the box will not tumble out if she trips and falls. The bagged raisins mean that she has concluded her business there, that she has no excuse to stay.
The door rings as she goes.
Outside the dark blurs the edges of her vision and she stands for a while in the stare of the blue-garbed geisha painted on the lit exterior wall of the store, unwilling to venture into that dark again, to brave the possibility that the robber is there, waiting for her.
The relative absence of sound that tells her that something is wrong. The beach appears muted when the door of the convenience store closes behind her – there are about two dozen more people there than would be usual for this time of the morning, but without the usual shock of sound that accompanies an egress onto a beach this busy. It isn’t often that approximately twenty people populate the sand without a word, far less twenty with their arms linked, shoulders hunched against the wee-hour wind, walking in a row perpendicular to the shoreline. The row is made up of the 3 a.m. beach population – a few kindly prostitutes, the odd insomniac, the group of slightly drunk young tourists on their way back to the hotel from the disco, a few fishermen. The row stretches from the point at which the boardwalk disappears into soft, fine sand, past the dissolving sandcastles on the periphery of the beach, right into the silvery water. A few people in the linked line hold flashlights, saying nothing, combing the beach and flicking two-inch circles of light on parts where the sand dips unexpectedly or catches the feet of the fishermen and the whores in the line.
A short, rust-haired Rasta runs slightly ahead, up and down the line in response to each gasp or muffled query.
“What’s happened?” she asks him. She is thinking perhaps the security company was wrong, that there was indeed a robber, that he made his way down the beach behind her, that he has tried to rob somebody else and run away, that these people are now searching for him or what he has stolen. She swallows her panic and holds onto the Rasta’s forearm, feels the fine dusting of salt on his leathery skin, notices that he is in beach shorts at three o’ clock in the morning.
“Somebody kidnap de people baby,” he says. He takes in her smooth, fair skin, her dirty silken robe half-concealing pajamas now too big for her. He looks at her harder.
“A baby?” She is stupefied. “Who would kidnap a baby?”
The line sweeps forward a few shuffling inches. The Rasta shakes free of her grasp and is running in response to a small exclamation. Another false alarm. She must move out of the way, someone grumbles, or move with the line. She chooses the line. They are moving toward the rougher part of the beachscape, where clusters of boulders loom large and shadowless, marking the beginning of the luxury homes on Baxter’s Beach, which cannot be safely accessed from this side, not at this time of morning.
“Move ya toes in the sand like this,” the Rasta demonstrates, “in case there is a clue.”
“But if you disturb the clues they are less helpful to police,” chimes in one half of a middle-aged English couple in the group. The man is bald and short with the florid face and round torso of a heavy drinker. His wife is taller than he is and grasps his arm tightly. They are both wearing the bright blue tropical-printed clothing sold by the vendors on the beach – the man in a short-sleeved shirt printed with rum punches and the woman in a gaudy dress dotted with palm trees and dancing steelpans.
“Better not to mess things up,” she warns. “They can find more out if you leave things.”
“We ain’t want no police,” a woman grumbles. “Tourists always wanna call de police.”
A whore just joining the line clicks her teeth and strokes her hair back into a ponytail, as if the task at hand requires its restraint, her arms struggling under the weight of several gold bangles.
“Who bring she out here?” asks the whore, looking at the wife. The whore is wearing a gold spandex catsuit that hugs her like a second skin, and the long leather strings that fastened her stilettos to her feet, gladiator-style, now interlock to secure them like a scarf around her neck.
“Somebody kidnap my friend baby,” the Rasta explains to Mira. “Somebody say they see a man with a baby crying out here on the beach this morning.”
“Are you sure? It could have been a man trying to get his baby back to sleep,” says the wife. “My husband did it all the time, as a matter of fact, when Penelope was a baby . . .”
The whore borrows a flashlight and spots it on the wife, takes her in.
“Tell she to shut up, Tone” says the whore.
“Look,” says the Rasta man to the wife, “we just got to focus on finding the baby, okay? We not too interested in police. If you helping, help – but don’t be talking about the police all the time so, okay?”
The English couple are agog. The wife starts to pull her husband away – she wants no part of such a lawless approach to a search and rescue, even if they are trying to find a baby, but nobody else in the line seems particularly concerned about protecting clues for the police. She nods, shuts up, and shuffles, releasing her husband’s arm just long enough to link one of hers with Mira’s.
The baby is found a little farther up the beach, just before the luxury villas begin, stretched prone in the sand beside an empty canoe. A whisper crackles down the line, then the Rasta runs forward, and then he is running back the way the line has come, with a little body covered in pastel cotton fluff in his arms. The Rasta is turning the baby over in his hands, shaking her gently, checking t
o see if she is still alive. When he hands her to a thick, dark-skinned woman, the woman’s wails pierce the still of the morning. The links to the human chain disintegrate, and the whores run behind the Rasta. Others appear shocked and stand in the same spot where they were when the baby was found, moving their feet in the same way they had when they were still searching. Mira Whalen shudders as the wind whips; she is thinking of Beth and Sam and whether they are really safe with Rosa after all. She decides to call Rosa, tell her to bring them back home. She drops the arms of the persons on either side of her and hurries away.
Chapter 10
Lala
17 August 1984
Baby looks peaceful when they hand her to her mother.
She looks like she is just asleep, like she will wake up with the right whisper of her name, the right rub of her cheek, the right kiss on her forehead – but Baby’s cheeks are swollen, cold and clammy, her chest does not move up and down and she does not respond to Lala’s fervent kisses on her forehead.
Lala takes her baby from Tone’s outstretched arms and is shocked to find her floppy, like the best kind of doll, one of the ones whose limbs do not resist embraces, whose arms can be made to hug you back. Baby is neither stiff nor unyielding, not the way she’d imagined she would be. She is the same soft that she was two hours before, when Lala had woken up to feed her and realized she was not moving. Lala wraps Baby more securely in the blanket shrouding her and hugs her close and pushes through a silent throng and goes to sit with Baby in a little wooden boat made black by the battering of salt and water and wind. She sits herself down on the rain-soaked wood and rocks her dead baby and pats her gently and looks at her and looks at the sea.
Wilma did not come when Baby was born, when the nurse had called to tell her that Lala had just delivered her great-granddaughter. She had not provided an hour or two’s respite when Baby had squalled incessantly those first few days and Lala was exhausted, she was not a source of guidance on how to help Baby latch onto Lala’s breast when Baby kept turning her head from her mother’s milk. Wilma had not passed on to Lala the women’s wisdom that she herself had been gifted – what bush to burn to keep duppies away from the new soul, which psalm to open above baby’s head in her cradle to ensure that the Devil did not take her, what bush to bruise and soak in water so she could sit in to soothe her stitched-together parts.
Wilma had not come then, but Wilma comes now, when she hears that her great-granddaughter is dead. Word travels fast in a small village and she is sliding her small feet into a pair of Chinese slippers within half an hour of hearing that Baby has been found. She comes and the crowd outside parts to the vision of Lala sitting still in that little black boat, staring at the sunrise, holding her dead baby, with the sea crashing and foaming in grief in the background. Wilma sits next to Lala, she puts her arms around her, she sobs, she puts her palm on Baby’s forehead to see whether there might still be warmth there, whether perhaps this is all a big mistake.
“I sorry, Stella,” she says to Lala. “I real sorry.”
This dead baby is still her great-granddaughter after all, she explains to two policemen later, even if she and Lala have not spoken properly since she married Adan, even if the girl would have avoided all this trouble if she hadn’t gotten involved with that louse of a man in the first place; the death of this baby has something to do with him, she is sure of it. It is still her own-way granddaughter sitting there in the boat stiff as the tiny baby she is holding. She lost her own child, says Wilma, she lost Lala’s mother and raised Lala herself from the time she was a little one, so she also knows how terrible it is to lose your own offspring. It is nothing she would wish on her worst enemy.
When Lala’s torso does not yield to Wilma’s embrace, Wilma sits shoulder to shoulder with her instead, and in this way offers her granddaughter comfort. But Lala does not take this shoulder, she does not cry on it, she does not tell Wilma things she might think she should say, she does not tell Wilma anything at all. And when the morning sun is hot in the sky and the blouse of Wilma’s dress is soaked with sweat and the policemen have taken the last of their pictures and measurements and the van from the funeral home honks from the beach, Lala surrenders Baby to two gloved men, gets out of the boat, and leaves Wilma sitting there, alone.
Chapter 11
Wilma
17 August 1984
When Wilma Wilkinson is asked by the police, right there on Baxter’s Beach, to tell them what she knows about her granddaughter, Lala, Wilma decides to tell the story of conquerors. She does not tell the story about how her granddaughter ran off with a giant who beats her. She tells the police instead that Lala is from a line of landowning women who do not need a man to survive. All Wilma has, she says, will be Lala’s when she dies. It is important for them to know, says Wilma, that any tragedy which befalls Lala is of her own making; Lala is not a woman without an inheritance.
The sun has, by this time, climbed to its zenith, and the beach is teeming with the squeals and laughter and towels and buckets and shovels and books and jewel-colored swimsuits of bathers oblivious to Baby’s death. A few policemen still linger near the rocks where Baby was found, but other than that there is no sign that there has been a tragedy. The wind brings the buzz of faraway Jet Skis closer to the blue picnic bench where the police are talking to Wilma. They are tempted to take Wilma’s words as the meaningless ramblings of a woman in distress, so they are not writing everything she says in their notebooks, which are nevertheless open and poised in readiness. They believe Wilma to be a woman overtaken by the heat beating her from the sky, the glare of unrelenting sunlight, the grief of the loss of an innocent little baby; it would be unmannerly to ask such a woman to understand that every word she says in this moment of grief will be recorded. It would be ruder still to actually record her.
Sergeant Beckles watches his men drag the canoe farther inland so they can search it for clues. He has been called from his bed before dawn to investigate the discovery of a dead baby on the beach and he is therefore dressed in yesterday’s slightly wrinkled slacks and jersey. Sergeant Beckles did not have time to put on his jewelry before he jumped in his car and made his way here, and the lighter skin around his fingers where his rings usually are is visible as he rubs the sleep from his eyes with his knuckles. He watches the Rasta wait his turn to be questioned. He remembers how this Rasta had held the mother of the dead baby after she had finally surrendered the little body to the funeral-home attendants. There was something about the way he held her that made him think of Sheba – who, he notices with dismay, is not on the beach.
Something does not sit right with him. An uneasiness in the lower part of his gut tells him something’s wrong, that there is more to this mystery than might meet the eye. It is this same gut instinct that he had planned to apply to the investigation of the murder of Peter Whalen, whose slightly faded good looks still stare at him from the cover of the daily newspaper, but he hasn’t been given the chance. The Whalen murder investigation has been unceremoniously removed from his responsibility and allocated to the new Criminal Investigations Department, to be solved with the assistance of Scotland Yard. It is no reflection on his capabilities, the Assistant Inspector assured him when he broke the news, but he had his orders. Peter Whalen had been a rich, well-connected British citizen. The newspapers mentioned the murder almost daily and everyone, from the British High Commissioner to the remaining wealthy ex-pats on Baxter’s Beach and elsewhere was demanding that it be solved, and quickly. After three weeks without much progress, Beckles had been pulled from the investigation.
It still burned.
“Napoleon!” he orders now, “I want statements from everybody – the mother, the Rasta, and the granny. Anybody who see anything.”
Sergeant Beckles had intended to speak to the dead child’s mother himself, but after the funeral attendants took the body away, after she had been held by this Rasta, the baby’s mother had fainted. He has ordered her off to be seen by a doctor
for her distress. He watches the grandmother of the baby again.
“Yes, sir, Sergeant,” obliges Napoleon, and he runs back to Wilma, still seated on the blue bench answering questions, to tell her they will need a statement. He gives her the option of giving her statement now or back at the station.
Wilma chooses the station, and when they are settled inside it the sergeant tells her to start again, don’t mind if she already said something on the beach, say it again, they are interested in everything she has to say, not just what she saw when she got to the beach. They are interested, for instance, in why her granddaughter, a mere girl of eighteen, does not live with her, then, in this house she will inherit, instead of on the beach in a house such as that, with a man such as Adan, whom she calls a louse. Sergeant Beckles does not make the connection just then, that this Adan is the same one he himself had arrested several years before, on suspicion of involvement in a violent break-in. He does not realize that the Adan in Wilma’s story is the man he was forced to set free when a jury accepted that a confession had been beaten out of him. He does not understand that this Adan has been channeling his energies into less-confrontational thievery since then, and into the smuggling and sale of marijuana. No, for the moment Sergeant Beckles is focused on Wilma’s story about her granddaughter, the mother of the dead baby. It is for this reason that he is coaxing out of her anything and everything that might help them better understand what happened to Baby and how its mother came to leave her grandmother’s house to live with a man on the beach.
It is this coaxing that leads Wilma to share the story of the time her husband, Carson, molested her daughter, Esme. By this time Carson is dead and it doesn’t matter what Wilma says about him because those facts are not the focus of her story. In order, Wilma thinks, to explain how Lala came to leave her, she must first explain how she came to stay.
