How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Adan growls like he is more beast than man, like the bringing of blood means that he will now have to fight to the death. It is a terrible sound, but it is mixed with another, equally feral, that Tone realizes is coming from his own throat. This Thing He Cannot Name is not a thinking thing, it takes him over until he is a flurry of arms holding the rock and Adan is a big, solid boulder from the beach that he cannot leave without breaking. They are on the ground and Adan is butting him with the blunt handle of a gun that Tone did not realize he had and his mind is on the knife that Adan used to test the coke. But Adan does not draw the knife. A knife is something you use on a worthy enemy, one who has wronged you enough to deserve a savaging. The handle of a gun is something you use because it happens to be in your hand when you have to bring a bwoy to heel – it is the equivalent of a badman’s bitch slap – and the choice is not lost on Tone. He does not feel any pain because of this choice, this gun, but the blood slicking his face and staining his shirt is an inconvenience, it makes it hard for him to see and he can tell that he is spilling the source of the vital energy that he needs to surmount this challenge and escape alive. He can tell that he needs a source of shelter, a moment or two away from the onslaught of Adan’s big gun, to catch himself, to recover enough to retaliate, or to run.

  He stumbles toward the cave that marks the entrance to the Baxter’s tunnels. These are the tunnels that he knows like he knows his mother’s house, they will provide him a place to catch his breath, to lick his wounds. He might not be as large or as strong as Adan, but if he must run then his size and build will benefit him, decides Tone, and Adan cannot match him in there. Tone is making for the tunnels and Adan is in pursuit behind him when a thin white woman appears on the beach and almost bumps into them. He cannot wait. He runs into the tunnel just as Adan’s gun, tired of butting, begins to bark.

  Chapter 33

  Mrs. Whalen

  5 September 1984

  The path to the beach is nearly obscured by cherry palms framing a tiny shaving of navy blue. This is the path to the beach seen in travel magazines, dimly lit by a coconut-milk quarter moon and fringed on each side by the spiky fronds of lush tropical foliage. It is the path the magazines suggest you take barefooted, led by a lover whose feet are similarly unshod and who knows that, just past those fronds, is a starlit beachscape waiting for you to make memories. This is not the type of path that makes anyone think of security, so when she decides to take this path, to clear her thoughts on her last night before leaving Paradise for good, Mira Whalen does not wonder whether a big black man with a scar will jump out of the shadows on her left, just as she reaches the end of this path. She does not wonder whether he will raise a gun toward her. And when he does she wonders why she did not anticipate that he would.

  She looks to her right and wonders why she did not contemplate for a second that an ectomorphic Rasta would be running for his life toward the yawning throat of a cluster of boulders to her right, a black hoodie falling away from his head and neck as he flies. The big black man is sprinting after this Rasta who is running toward the rocks, desperate to escape from the big, bad man, who is holding a gun. And when the cloud parts to reveal the full face of the moon, the path is lit from above and she sees the hand holding that gun, she knows it, and she starts to scream because, while the face might have escaped her, while she might not have been able to recall the hulking build or the broadness of the back or the menace in the manner or that curly recessed scar, she would be able to tell this hand anywhere.

  And after all the fruitless worrying, the theorizing, the time spent staying away from harmless civilians and being frustrated with the police, after all that – here he is.

  Before her very eyes. The murderer.

  And the man stops his running and looks at her and lifts his gun, and he is no longer interested in the smaller man running into the boulders, not just now. And she tells her feet to run and her feet will not listen. And her eyes, mesmerized by the hand that has haunted her, watch that hand lift the gun until it is level with the robber’s face, her eyes watch that hand squeeze the trigger.

  Chapter 34

  There is more than one shot, and Mira Whalen is unsure of which one has hit her, but she is sure that she has been hit when she feels a sudden struggle to take a breath she took for granted only a moment before. She starts to run only after the gun is silent – her feet obey her only after the big black man runs on, toward the Rasta and the boulders – but once she starts to run she runs as if her life depends on it, because she understands, at once, that it does. Mira Whalen makes for the big houses behind her, she does not try to reach her own gate, she makes for the gate beside hers, because she believes that Grayson will be there and she knows that Grayson is a doctor.

  But Mira Whalen completes but a few strides in the opposite direction, back up the path toward the big houses. On the third stride she sinks, eyes wide open in surprise, and her face lands with a thud in a soft mound of sand that fills her mouth and her eyes and her hair. Mira wants to look back, to see if the robber will return to finish her. She wants to shout for Grayson, whose sand-dusted patio and sisal-shaded glass door are now just a few paces ahead.

  But Mira Whalen cannot speak.

  She cannot scream.

  She can hardly breathe.

  Mira focuses on trying to lift and turn her head, to fight a calm that starts to descend upon her, but her head will not move and the calm is coming anyway. She thinks of swimming, and drags her knees up on each side of her body, trying to leapfrog her way forward, which works like a charm. But it is so calm, so quiet, that she wonders why she is making the effort, whether on the other side of that calm is where she will find Peter.

  Mira Whalen finds it is true what they say about life flashing before you – a parade of random moments marches behind her eyes, snatches of a life she never knew she had been recording. She confirms also that the order of these scenes defies explanation: the marbled-chocolate tree bark she had fixed her eyes on the last time she’d lied to Martha; the brilliant blue sky behind the hug she got from Sam that day in Wimbledon when she’d fished his Matchbox car out of a grate; the custard-colored spit-up on her favorite pants that first day that Peter had brought him to their flat and given him to her to hold and he’d spat back out every spoonful of mashed banana she’d tried to feed him.

  Her very own life story . . . which she now knows has ended on the wrong side of a badman’s gun.

  In the manner of fairy tales, she is granted one last wish. And so she returns in her mind to the night Peter was murdered in an effort to do something, anything, differently. Something that will lead to him still being alive . . .

  Suddenly she is there again, back in their bedroom, and the robber is once again pointing a gun at her, once again squeezing the trigger.

  Click.

  She does not fall.

  Click.

  More nothing.

  Her refocused senses search for proof that she is indeed still alive. She is.

  She is in her bedroom – hers and Peter’s. It is again the night of his murder. She feels the sweat curling down the back of her neck, the panic constricting her throat, the tears soaking her cheeks, as if for the first time. She does not want to raise her hand to wipe her face dry for fear that the robber takes her movement as the precursor to some form of resistance he will not tolerate. She looks at his face.

  There is the robber. Swearing. There is Peter. Pleading. There is another moment’s breathless silence punctuated by the crash and hiss of water.

  There is the gun.

  Click.

  Peter is screaming as the robber breaks his nose with the butt of the gun. He is shielding his eyes when the robber yells not to look at him. This is her voice. Sobbing. I love you, Peter. There is Peter, curled up on the edge of the bed like a child, begging for her life. For hers.

  She is looking at this stocking-covered face that made her husband cry. This is the stocking-covered face she tried so hard
to remember. She stares at it now, this face, and she knows that beneath the stocking this face is beautiful – beautiful and deadly. She wants to see this face, wants to look into the eyes of the man who dares to terrorize the man she loves. She wants to claw at that stocking, that face, until she draws blood with her bare hands.

  There is the buzzer sounding from the street, just as it did that night Peter was shot. Peter had bought this house on the basis that the two of them would hear nothing but the water, but the sound of the buzzer is loud and she is not sure whether it is because the sound is really loud or whether it is because she knows this sound is the only hope of her getting out of their room alive.

  There is the gun.

  Click.

  There is her husband. There is the robber. There is she. Running to grab the gun.

  This is the gun. Its barrel is smooth in her fingers. Smooth and cold and heavy, the way she might have thought it would feel if she’d ever thought about it before. But she hadn’t, and the hand behind it is stronger than hers and, in retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do, to grab this gun, but she has grabbed it and she cannot stop staring at the hand that holds it, a big hand, with large velvet fingers that swallow the light and remain unmoved. There are ridges and furrows on the back of this hand and she believes she can see the blood beating through its veins.

  “Monster!” she is screaming, “fucking brutish monster!” And before she knows it she has clawed off that stocking, she is seeing that face, that winding scar, those deeply recessed eyes and broad, flat nose, that square, strong skin. When he strikes her cheek with the hand that holds the gun, she knows that she will lose the memory of that face she is trying to etch so firmly in her mind. She feels her face jerk and drop, her chin lands below her collarbones. The gun does not just click now; it pops, it roars. And when she lifts her chin, Peter is already dead.

  There is her husband’s body, his head resting on an outstretched arm as if he is merely asleep. And the gun goes back to clicking.

  Click.

  Movie again:

  The time she had broken her ankle and Peter had lifted her onto the toilet every time she had to go and had seated himself on the edge of the tub and laughed at her mortification that he’d planned to stay there until she was done.

  The nurse’s sallow, stony-faced stare while she cried.

  The time they had been picking tomatoes in the garden and Sam had toddled into view sputtering a mouthful of mud and her stomach had ached through their laughter because the expression on Sam’s face was funny, but it was also a reminder that she was proving incapable of carrying a baby of their own.

  She prays silently because the robber is pointing the gun at her and she knows she will be killed next. Psalm 23. Which she bungles because she cannot remember it. Or any psalm. She should’ve gone to church more. The gun cracks.

  She screams when she is shot, just to let the man know that she is protesting her murder, that she will not go quietly. Just to let the person ringing the buzzer know that they should not wait to be answered, that they should come quickly.

  Moments are measured in heartbeats that progressively lengthen.

  In this version of the night her husband died, Mira Whalen dies with him.

  In the murder in Mira’s mind, the kids do not come running when she starts screaming that Peter is dead. There is no white-knuckled Beth calling the police, no wild-eyed relief when Rosa reports for work and makes circles with the rotary phone to dial Mr. Watson. No, in the murder Mira Whalen imagines, she feels the will to live leave her body when she realizes that Peter is dead, it makes her think of the last of the dishwater draining down the sinkhole. It is not an unpleasant feeling. It is a feeling she is feeling again now.

  Chapter 35

  Tone

  5 September 1984

  Tone is running. He is running through a maze and his eyes are almost welded shut, stuck together with the blood that weeps from his head. He knows this maze, he knows it like he knows his own mother’s house, so it does not really matter that he cannot see properly. Here is where his feet must slow because there is a sharp turn to the left, where the tunnel narrows and it is harder to move in the dank and the dark, here is where he must get ready for an incline, where the floor of the tunnel will be slippery with mud because earlier today there was a heavy shower and there is a leak in the roof of the tunnels just above this spot where the water seeps through and makes the floor soggy. Here is where Tone has an idea. He can still hear Adan behind him, Tone can, he can hear him breathing a sort of breathless pant in the dark that is more about anger than oxygen. He can hear stones bustle and break when Adan’s broadness hits parts of the tunnel that Tone’s small frame have never had cause to touch. He can hear Adan call out to him, tell him to stop, this is foolishness, stop and let we talk. As man.

  Here is where Tone has the idea that will save his life. At the end of another fifty yards, Tone does not turn right and through the tunnel that will lead to the exit near where he and Lala sheltered almost two years before. Instead he turns left and goes deeper into the labyrinth, toward places where the moon does not penetrate and the black you see when your eyes are closed is the same as the black you see when they are open and you cannot run unless you know exactly where you are running, exactly which part of the tunnel is coming next. Tone slows to a walk, squeezes his eyelids shut, trusts his head, his hands to guide him. Here is where the tunnel opens into an antechamber with a rash of slippery stalagmites underfoot, like the bald heads of rising dead, frozen in the rising. Here is where the chamber narrows, where someone who doesn’t know this cave might see a glimmer of light, might think that they are about to go into a tunnel again – one that will lead, ultimately, to sunshine.

  “You right,” says Tone at just the right time. “You right, Adan, this is foolishness, let we talk, man. As man.”

  Tone’s voice echoes and amplifies. Here is where he crouches as he speaks. Here is the tall stalagmite he nicknamed “the Pastor” because it reminded him of the head of his mother’s church congregation, the way it loomed above the other rock formations, leaning into them as if imparting a wisdom it could not afford for them to miss. Tone ducks behind the Pastor and is silent, becomes part of the congregation, listens for the truth that will give him life.

  “I tell you so,” Adan replies. “We ain’t friends from since we was little? Can’t let a little something come between we so.”

  Adan draws closer, listening for Tone’s voice to tell him where to turn in the deep dark.

  “Okay, let we talk.”

  When Adan enters the antechamber, when he follows the echo, he sees a lightening of the dark ahead. This lightening suggests that somewhere ahead is an exit, that with a few steps he will be standing with Tone in a larger room from which they could leave the tunnel as friends.

  But Adan does not want to be friends.

  “I tell you this ain’t make no sense,” assures Adan, drawing the knife and flicking open its blade, “I tell you – ”

  When Adan steps through the opening from which gleams the promise of light, his foot is perplexed at its failure to find solid ground beneath it on the other side. Tone understands this, because he hears, from behind the Pastor’s skirt, the sharp inhalation that marks Adan’s surprise. He hears also the quick scuffle as Adan’s hands seek the security of the stones beside and beneath him. Many, many years ago, when Tone used to retreat to these tunnels and think about the man who had held him down and raped him, he had come across this very chamber, had almost stepped through this very opening, next to which the Pastor perpetually spoke a silent warning. Your hands cannot find the edge of the Pastor’s skirt, the stone pleat of which could save you, if you are brandishing a knife. Or a gun. Like the story of any good gospel, you must approach this opening empty-handed. Your eyes cannot see that this is not the light of a promised exit on the other side. There is where, three hundred years ago, ten soldiers went tumbling as they dug out these tunnels, where a terrified
lieutenant screamed for the others to stop while the Pastor stood and watched him. This opening is the mouth of a yawn, where the floor of the cave falls away a hundred feet into its throat. Adan is swallowed by this throat, against the stone side of which he bounces and breaks on his way down.

  When it is quiet, Tone releases the Pastor, stumbles to his feet, and makes his way back out again before collapsing on his face in the sand, as if forced into prostration by an undeserved grace.

  Chapter 36

  Lala

  5 September 1984

  Lala cannot sleep in the sterile silence of Grayson’s grand house, so her eyes are already open when she first hears the scream. Grayson had gone back to his room when she had first dozed off, but she had awoken only a few hours after – the house was too still and the air-conditioning much too cold for her to settle down in, the abundance of blankets on the bed insufficient to keep her warm. She is lying in the dark, staring at the stark white roof and the molding that borders it, when she again hears the scream that has haunted her worst nightmares since Baby was born.

  She listens. There are noises, but the scream doesn’t come again. It is probably just a skinny-dipper shocked by the crippling cold of the water, she reasons, but she cannot settle, her stomach is queasy with unease.

  She spends what seems like a long time looking for more blankets in the unfamiliar closets of the room. She spends longer looking for the remote to turn off the AC so sleep can be possible, and eventually she accepts that she won’t be able to go back to sleep. Lala wanders into the kitchen for a wineglass of water, which she fills from a faucet in the dark. The kitchen gleams in the glare of the moon from the skylight – the surface of the stove and the front of the fridge look like silver, the countertops like slabs of semiprecious stone. For a moment Lala thinks she should take something to remind her she was here because she is sure that somehow she will wake up and this will be a dream – she will be back in Adan’s house by the beach, trying her best to remember his name. Instead she wanders into the dining room with her water and then into the lounge where she takes a seat, nervously, not wanting to wake Grayson if nothing is wrong, having the awful feeling that something is very terribly wrong indeed. She dozes fitfully because, despite her discomfort, she is tired. She is very, very tired.