Slowly, Agway quieted in my arms and fell asleep. I lowered myself onto the settee; the few steps into the bedroom seemed like a marathon.
I must have dropped off to sleep. A clunk woke me. I was drenched in sweat. Damn. So tired, I had slept through a hot flash. That one had brought me something, too; I’d heard it land. What was it? Couldn’t see anything, and I didn’t want to move and maybe wake Agway. Tomorrow. I laid my head back. If I slept right here so, I would wake up so cricked I wouldn’t be able to crack. But fatigue was like waves washing over me.
“Are there mermaids swimming in Cayaba’s waters?” chirped the television.
Oh, bite me. The eleven o’clock “news” with the same old filler crap.
“Finally,” said the announcer, “we may have proof.”
I raised my head. On the tv screen was a blurry, green-tinged photograph of two naked brown women floating in the sea. One had a baby lolling on her breast. The other one was doing a frog-swim. Her long, ratty hair rayed out from the top of her head. A second baby floated in the water, clinging to her hair. The two women were looking up, presumably at a plane or helicopter above them, where someone with a camera was taking their picture.
“Shit,” I said. “This is bad.”
The photo shrank and tucked itself to a corner of the screen so that we could see the announcer. “This nighttime photograph was taken by an ingenious young man whose name is Stanley Fernandez.”
Oh, God. He did his project already? Without me?
The announcer continued, “It is only one in a series of photographs of Cayaba taken by Stanley’s airborne glider-cam.”
Blurry photo stills, very close-up, started flashing by on the television: two men in police force uniforms sitting on a sea wall—one was in the act of handing a forty-ouncer of something to the other; what looked to be a very startled fishing bat, clutching the silver flash of a minnow; a thin-faced, big-eyed young man with hands like shovels, sitting behind the wheel of a car with a look of bliss on his face, holding—a huge pair of
panties?—to his nose; a totally mystifying shot of two young men and a woman, all quite fat, climbing out of the seal enclosure at the Zooquarium. They were naked.
How the hell he had gotten those pictures? For a moment, pride for my grandson quieted my guilt for not having helped him.
The announcer came back on screen, smiling a little and shuffling her notes. “Stanley put the mini digital camera on his remote controlled glider with the help of a family friend, Mr. Hector Goonan.”
Oh, Ife. You came here knowing this had all happened.
“Stanley only meant to take daytime photographs for a science fair project, but one night he took the glider for a spin, just for a lark. Only a handful of the photos were good images, but a few of those were very good indeed. When Stanley realised what he had on his hands, he wisely sought the advice of another adult, his grandfather, Michael Jasper.”
“Oh, God. Michael’s mixed up into this, too?”
“Mr. Jasper sent copies of the images to us.” And there he was on the screen. “I’m very proud of my grandson,” Michael said. “He’s showed a lot of initiative in putting this project together.”
Agway stirred and woke.
“Clearly,” said the announcer, “the citizens of Cayaba have a very active night life indeed! The police will be investigating some of the instances of apparent mischief revealed by the photos. One question remains: is this photograph of the women swimming nude finally proof of the existence of fish people? Or is it just an example of the types of hijinks performed by some of the more boisterous visitors to Cayaba? We may never know. And perhaps, to keep Cayaba the beautiful mystery that she is, it’s best not to look too closely.”
Agway looked muzzily at the screen, just as they blew up the photo of the sea women to full size again. He gasped and reached a hand towards the screen. “Mamma,” he said quite clearly. He was not looking at me when he said it. Then he burst into tears.
It was like somebody had splashed cold water on me.
The photo had gone from the screen. The news continued. I got Agway’s attention. “Pet, is that your mother? Your mamma?”
“Jes!” he sobbed. “Mamma!” He said a long, mournful sentence in his language. I didn’t understand a word. Might be his mother, or a relative. Or it might only be that he’d seen home, and people who looked like sea people. He was tired, and probably in a bit of pain from the surgery. Maybe I could put him to sleep, and he would be fine in the morning. “You sure that was your mamma?”
He shrieked, “Mamma!” and arched his back like toddlers will do when they’re agitated. He kicked, too. Got me a good one in the thigh with the heel of his cast. I managed to hold on to him and get him upright again. Agway’s mother was alive?
“Who really wanted a black dolly to dress up and parade around and keep in a box?”
I went to the phone. Fumbling, I dialled Ife’s number. But I hung up on the first ring. Couldn’t face her. She wouldn’t understand about Agway, anyway.
I took a child from his family!
Gene’s cell went straight to voice mail. He was probably working tonight. “Gene, you have to help me,” I whimpered into the phone. “Agway’s mother not dead, I just saw her on the news in Stanley’s picture. We should find her. The sea woman. Give her back her boy. God, call me as soon as you get this, please?” I hung up the phone.
Agway had subsided into a low, bubbly sobbing. The woe on his face made me feel sick with guilt. “Pet, I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Three weeks since I’d found him. And he still cried himself to sleep nearly every night. Because of me. And what had his mother been going through, and the rest of his family, if he had any? All this time, they would have been thinking they’d lost him.
Lost.
He wasn’t lost! I’d found him; Maybe I could find his family, too. I had to do it. Had to bring his mother to him. Goddamned hot flashes could materialise a whole cashew grove, they could help me call one woman.
Couldn’t wait for Gene. I had to do this myself. I had made it wrong: I could make it right.
I hitched Agway up a little more comfortably on my hip. “We’re going to find your mother. Hear me? Going to get your mamma.”
He sniffled.
Mrs. Lessing had brought me a toddler life jacket that her great-grandson had outgrown. I picked it up and left the house with Agway. I had to jog through a light rain to get to the car. I drove us both towards the private slip where Dolorosse people kept their boats.
Agway was sitting in the passenger seat. I glanced at his bandaged knees. And all the way to the slip with the wailing child, I kept hearing Ife’s voice in my head:
“Every good deed you do have a price attached.”
Maybe so, but this boy shouldn’t be the one paying it.
EVEN GRIEF HAS TO GIVE WAY to sleep. Agway’s eyes were closed when I took him in his life jacket out of the car. Wrapped in his blanket, he was just conscious enough to put his thumb in his mouth and rest his head on my shoulder. The drizzle seemed to be easing up.
He didn’t even stir when I took him into the boat. I put him under a tarp to keep him dry, and laid him down far enough from me to balance the boat a little better. It made me nervous to have him even that little distance out of reach. But even if he fell in, the life jacket would keep the weight of the cast from dragging him down.
I was so upset and shaky that it took me two tries to start the engine. Agway startled at the noise. He stirred, but his exhausted little body hung on to sleep. I headed us out further along the archipelago, towards the tiniest islands.
“I am ashamed of you.”
Find the sea people. Find Agway’s mother. Just fix your mind on that. Give Agway back. I had to have a hot flash. I had to.
But all I willed it to happen, my fingers wouldn’t itch, and the heat wouldn’t rise. Old Slave Joe the finder had been able to use his power at will. “I can’t even tell which muscles to flex
,” I grumbled.
“If you couldn’t have him all to yourself, you didn’t want nobody else to have him, neither.”
Tiny Dutchie Island was somewhere here-bout, nuh true? Didn’t think to bring the fucking compass. Shit, shit, shit. Okay. Just keep looking for the whiteheads of its reefs, and wait. Bloody hot flashes were like buses; there was always another one coming.
I had cut Agway’s hair. I had let the hospital cut his legs. What the sea people would do when they saw all that? I blinked the warm drizzle out of my eyes.
The skimming boat hit a swell especially hard, and sea water splashed us. That woke Agway. He sat up. Saw that we were in the sea. I cut the engine so I could hold him. Probably best to just let her drift, anyway. The noise of the engine might frighten them away. For good measure, I turned off the green starboard light. The port light was dead. I hadn’t used the boat in a while.
Silence and dark blanketed us, and the percussion of raindrops. I hated the sea at night. If it wasn’t for the reflective patches on his life jacket, I’d have had a hard time seeing Agway.
I sat him beside me, rewrapped him in the tarp, and put an arm around him. “We going to find her,” I told him. “Somehow.”
He asked me a question.
“I don’t understand you, Pet. Ife was right. I didn’t even try to learn.”
What a three-year-old boy could say to frighten me?
Fingers itching any at all? No, not a rass. No sensation like ants crawling on my skin. “I don’t know how to do this!” I said, frustrated.
The darkness was getting to me. Every slap of sea water against the boat made me jump. Except where there were stars, and the light cloud that Dolorosse cast above itself, I couldn’t distinguish sea different from sky. “I don’t know how allyou manage out here come nighttime,” I told Agway. The rain was making me shivery.
I decided to keep looking for Dutchie Island. Go slow. Keeping the engine revving low. When I opened up the throttle again, the prow of the boat began slapping the water, too hard. We were overbalanced. But now that Agway was awake, I needed to keep him within reach. I slowed us down even more, and sat him on the floor at my feet.
He pointed out into the water. “Mamma!”
“Smart boy. Yes, we going to find Mamma. You just sit right here, you understand? Don’t stand up, you will fall out. You will sit, Agway?”
“Ehe.”
We crawled along. I kept trying to will the magic to happen. I didn’t know how far out we were. Could have reached the shipping lanes, for all I knew. And still the feeling of being weightless in an infinity of ink. I kept looking all around us, trying to get oriented in space, trying to spot any trouble before it got to us.
What the rass I was doing, really? This was ridiculous. It was dangerous for the child, and I was cold. Take us both back. Get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow, ask Gene’s advice.
I was concentrating on turning us around: that’s how I came to have my eyes off Agway. Only a splash slightly louder than the rain told me that he had gone overboard.
“Agway!” I screamed. I slipped my alpagats off. “Agway, I coming!”
I jumped. The blood-warm water took me in. When I surfaced, the life jacket was floating beside me, empty, on a pock-marked sea like black glass.
“Agway!” I couldn’t see him! I screamed for help, but the open expanse of water swallowed my voice.
…So the devil woman of the sea wait until the ship was approaching the archipelago. Then she swim close to the porthole of the cabin where the young woman was sitting in chains, and she sing,
Young girl, young girl,
Drop your hat in the water.
Agway’s empty life jacket was a small orange blur, bobbing away from me quickly, disappearing into darkness. Without it, the cast would have dragged him down. I tried to dive, but the groaning black of the sea entombed me immediately. There was no way to see, no air to breathe. Mindless with terror, I surfaced, choking. I felt at my waist for my cell phone. I hadn’t been in the water long; it just might work.
It wasn’t there. Must have fallen off when I jumped in. I had to go for help. Fast. I slewed around in the water; tried to peer through the rain.
I couldn’t see the boat any more. The sea was obsidian. I stopped, bobbed in the water and tried to listen for the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. But my panicked heart was beating too hard, my breath coming too quickly; they and the rain were all I could hear. Weeping, I struck out again, heading for where I thought the boat might be. Didn’t even know what direction I was facing any more. The sea was vast; it went on around and beneath me in blackness forever. My boy was drowning, and the nighttime ocean was monstrous. There was no way to know what could be rising from the depths this very moment, its maw stretched wide around dagger teeth the length of my arm. My lizard back-brain screamed at me to get out! Out! A cold water current ran just below the surface. Every time I dipped a hand or foot into the ribbon of cold, I knew it was taking my scent, carrying it to the invisible horror rising up from way down deep. I swam harder, going nowhere. My side began to ache. I was gasping, my strokes getting weaker, my head dipping occasionally below the water. No boat. “Agway!” It came out a hoarse whisper. I coughed and sputtered on brine. I was scarcely paddling at all now, too tired to move my arms. The pain in my gut made my belly feel distended. Salt syrup burned my throat.
I panicked completely, struck out in one direction, then the next, never finding the safety of the boat. I whimpered and spat out water.
Exhaustion had set in. My arms felt so heavy. All of me, heavy as rockstones. Rain water filled my eyes, and sea water kept getting into my nose. In the back of my brain, I knew I should go horizontal, try to float, but terror and despair kept me thrashing. Please, please let Agway still be alive. Let me get help.
But it was too late, for both of us. I couldn’t make my legs scissor any more. They sank into the chilly current, and the rest of me began to follow. My head sank into the water.
Something hard touched my ankle. I screamed, sucked in the sea.
Something held me, bore me up. My head surfaced. I coughed out the water. It was hands I was feeling on me, many hands, not the grip of a massive jaw. In the dark I could just make out the heads of people bobbing in the sea with me.
“Thank you,” I shouted hoarsely, over the increasing storm.
One of them gurgled a reply, a liquid sound. So did another.
Sea people. Agway’s people. Holding me fast. “You found him?” I heard myself ask, my teeth chattering. “You found Agway?” Just this once, let my name not hold true.
A little voice warbled, “Camity!”
I twisted about to try to see where it was coming from. I saw him. Agway! A sea man was towing him through the water. I held on weakly to the shoulder of one of the people holding me up, and sobbed for joy. Agway held tight to the man’s long hair. So that was why he grabbed hair like that.
“Nna,” he informed me merrily. He tugged at the hair of the man towing him. The man grinned.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. My body was shaking with cold and after-reaction. Through the water blurring my eyes, I peered at the man. Did he and Agway have the same nose, the same shape mouth? The man sank quietly beneath the water, taking Agway down with him. I gasped. But seconds later they surfaced again. Agway was laughing. He spat a stream of water from his mouth. “Camity,” he chirruped. He swatted his father on the head. “Nna.”
“Yes, baby, I think I understand you now. So stop beating up your daddy, all right?”
Agway pointed at another man and then a third, called them both “Nna.” So it meant something like “uncle,” then? No matter. Family.
“I’m sorry,” I said to them. “I should have brought him back earlier.”
Another creature broke surface not two feet from me. I yelped. It snorted, as though in surprise, and sank again. “What the fuck is that?” I asked. Some of the people holding me laughed and joked. Fuckers.
I grabbed the shoulders of one of them, and pulled my feet up as close to my body as I could. So hard to see in the dark with water stinging my eyes! A dog? A seal? I thought I’d seen large, liquid eyes. An intelligent face. The sea people didn’t seem worried at it being there. They kept pets?
Another head broke the water, this time beside Agway. A person. “Mamma!” squealed Agway, and tried to throw himself into her arms.
“Chiabuotu,” she said, with a catch in her voice. She gave the man towing Agway something large and floppy to hold. A blanket? I could use one of those right now. Then she took Agway into her arms. “Chichi,” she murmured. She was definitely weeping. I felt heartsick at what I’d put her through. She bobbed upright in the water like a bottle, holding Agway tightly to her, laughing through her tears and chatting back with him as he tried to catch her up on everything he’d seen and done. And the whole time, she kept inspecting his shorn hair, touching his arms, patting his face, stroking his back. Every touch said love, love, and Agway echoed it back at her. He curled his fist tightly in her hair.
Damn. One thing to see a dead one, or a little boy who might or might not be one. Something else again to be right here in their own environment with them. Sea people were real!
We were moving. Where were they taking me? Not deeper out to sea! “No, no, I can’t.” I tried to pull free from the ones holding me. “I’m not made like you. I have to go back to land.” They ignored me. I pushed against the bodies moving me. I was too weak, there were too many of them, and they were in their element. Didn’t stop me trying to break free. I fought and fought until I heard a hollow “thunk.” I shook water out of my eyes and peered. One of the sea people had just slapped his hand against the side of my boat.
The New Moon's Arms Page 26
