The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  There was nothing like mango juice dripping down your chin, especially the juice of the prized Julie mango. Jennifer had saved one from the clutches of Little Wayne and presented it to Shannon earlier. It was a beauty, with touches of pink and yellow on the skin.

  “Go sit on the porch and eat it like a Jamaican,” her hostess had ordered her.

  Five minutes later, Shannon had changed out of her work clothes and was sitting in one of the rocking chairs on the verandah, a plate on her lap to catch drips. She stripped off the mango’s skin with her teeth, working her way around in a circle, and bit into the flesh. When Shad had taught her once how a real Jamaican ate a mango, he’d had to wipe her nose so she could breathe.

  As she chewed, the journalist thought about Katlyn, and how she’d gotten deeply into the Jamaican countryside and culture. Surely she must have loved mangoes. She’d learned the folk dances, would have learned patois in Gordon Gap, probably enjoyed the island’s food. Thoughts and questions about Katlyn had begun to sit with Shannon, along with a growing respect for the woman’s values. The woman in the photograph she carried around in her bag had started to become three-dimensional, four, if you included her idealistic spirit, and Shannon was starting to feel a connection with her. Two Canadian women who had fallen for a man in Jamaica; they were both risk takers with a strong sense of adventure—adventure that had gone awry for both of them, worse for the younger woman.

  The biggest questions about Katlyn were still haunting Shannon. Was the cause of her death natural or not? Who was responsible? And what happened to her after she died? Shannon shuddered to think that her body could have been thrown into the ocean or tossed into a ravine. It was only right that someone should investigate her death, give her some peace, as Shad had said.

  “I’m going to find out everything I can about you, Katlyn,” she promised aloud. “Maybe I’ll find myself in the process.”

  Shannon took another bite of mango, her gaze sweeping over the sloping garden in front of her, over the mango trees laden with fruit and the poinciana trees with their spreads of bright blossoms. Below the garden squatted her former lover’s bar. She’d been embarrassed for him when she’d first seen it, one of the dozens of crude island bars along the coast, a far cry from the hotel. It couldn’t take in much money, she was sure. The few customers that had been there on a Saturday afternoon had told her as much. Yet—and she gave him a check mark at the thought—he’d sent her child support every month for the past thirteen years and never whined about his finances.

  No longer the dashing lover with a charming hotel, he had fallen in her eyes and she was still coming to terms with the downward swoop of his life, karma she wouldn’t have wished on anyone. She’d thought of compliments she could give him about the bar, but they wouldn’t have been true. The only saving grace was the stunning view, but if she’d mentioned it, they would have looked over at the ruins of the hotel, and it would have brought back too many memories—for her if not for him. If not for the news that he was going to own a hotel again, she would have felt nothing but pity for him.

  He’d aged since she’d last seen him. His hair had gone platinum white, the lines on his face were now trenches, and his skin looked as if it needed a ton of moisturizer. The paunch was new. He’d never been one to exercise, other than working a bit in the hotel garden, and it had caught up with him. He’d seemed almost cautious, withdrawn even, when he spoke to her, and she’d concluded that his eyesight must be failing because he’d narrowed his eyes whenever he looked at her.

  Jennifer dropped to a chair beside her holding the large, yellow handbag Shannon had brought her as a gift.

  “Going out?” Shannon asked.

  “Nope.” Jennifer opened the handbag. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “I thought you’d stopped a million years ago!”

  “I started when I was taking care of my mom last spring, before she died.” Jennifer slid a menthol cigarette out of a pack. “The stress was so damn high, running back and forth to the hospital, dealing with doctors, screaming at nurses, meeting with lawyers, all kinds of stuff. My sister smokes and I gave in.” She lit the cigarette and, snapping the lighter closed, exhaled a cone of smoke to one side. “Don’t tell Lam, though. He hates it.”

  “Don’t smoke around Eve and I won’t tell Lambert.”

  “Done.”

  Shannon licked her lips. “You know what those things can do to you, right?”

  “I’m cutting back.”

  “Promise?”

  “I swear. Now let’s talk about you. How’s the work going?”

  “Good—I think. Carlton and I went off to the Ocho Rios craft market today. I got some great shots, learned a lot, too. I found out that Rastas don’t like to be called Rastafarians, but Rastafari, which is closer to one of the Emperor Haile Selassie’s names—Ras Tafari, you know. It means a chief who is respected or feared, I found out during my interview with this really sweet woman who makes jewelry. We talked about the male-female-equality thing with Rastas.”

  “I thought the women were always subordinate to the men.”

  “I think that’s changing. At least, she seemed to think so. She’s pretty active in her community, plans events and all that, and she adores Haile Selassie’s wife, the former empress.”

  “They see Selassie as a god, don’t they?”

  “As Jah, the one and only God.”

  “What do they say now that he’s dead?”

  Shannon dropped the mango seed on the plate and wiped her mouth with the paper towel beside her. “They don’t think of him as dead since God is not supposed to die. Some don’t believe he’s dead; they say he’s in hiding. Others say he’s transitioned to a place where he can’t be seen, kind of like Jesus.”

  “The whole culture exists under our middle-class noses, doesn’t it?” Jennifer waved her cigarette. “We don’t even know much about it. They’re sort of mystical or something, in a different world. They don’t give a damn about society, and they—they scare me a little, to tell you the truth.”

  “I remember being afraid of them myself when I used to come out. They looked so fierce, you know. I’d speak to one or two if they were selling me something, coconut water or craft, but I pretty much kept away. I didn’t want to get into an argument with any of them.”

  “We see the dreadlocks, hear the language, and most of us keep a polite distance. You hear all kinds of things—”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “They’re probably rumors, but I heard one woman was burned to death in a camp. Then there’s all that marijuana smoking. They just think differently, kind of like a sect, you know. They have their beliefs and their rites and rituals, not Jim Jones or anything, but they’re very set in their opinions, very sensitive—and suspicious of foreigners.” Jennifer tapped ash from her cigarette over the verandah rail. “I want you to be careful, Shan.”

  “So far I haven’t seen anything to make me worried. I still have a lot of work to do, though. I want to see this professor who’s written some of the books I’ve been reading.”

  “I know you have work to do, but don’t forget you’re in Jamaica, sweetie. Leave some time for the beach, too.”

  Shannon laughed. “As long as I don’t get as red as Eve.”

  “Is she okay?” Jennifer’s botoxed brow allowed the ghost of a wrinkle. “It’s hard to read her. I offered to take her shopping in Kingston with Casey, but she didn’t seem interested. She’s kind of—detached.”

  “She’s fine. If she isn’t slightly miserable, she’s not happy.”

  “Does she like the waitressing bit?”

  “She pretended it was boring, but loved the four hundred Jamaican dollars in tips. When she heard how little it was in Canadian, she wasn’t too happy.”

  Jennifer chuckled as she put out the cigarette in a bottle extracted from the bag.

  “You’re pretty clever hiding your habit, aren’t you?” Shannon teased.
r />   “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Addictions can be hard to break.”

  “You mean like Eric?” Jennifer dropped the bottle into her bag and clicked it shut. “I don’t know who you’re trying to fool. You’re not through with him.”

  “My neighbor back home thinks the same thing.”

  Jennifer scrutinized Shannon through half-closed lids. “Did you ever end it, officially, I mean?”

  “We never discussed it. Everything kind of faded to black, I suppose.”

  “My God, Shan, all these years, fourteen years and you’ve never—”

  “Whenever we talked, it was always about Eve, about money, about his visits.”

  “There were only three.”

  “Right, well, about the three visits. Sometimes you don’t have to talk about things. Neither one of us likes to—has to go into things in detail.”

  “Do you want it to be over?”

  “If you’re asking do I still have feelings for him, the answer is of course I—I care about him.” Shannon felt like a traitor speaking about it, but it was time for honesty. “He’s wise, funny, makes love passionately, demands nothing from you, and lets you be yourself—not like the younger guys.” The Canadian swallowed hard as she took a couple of rocks in the chair. “He becomes your best friend, your lover, the brother you never had, everything wrapped into one—then you get pregnant.”

  She rubbed a bite on her leg. “But he doesn’t want the child and he doesn’t ask you to marry him, and you spend your pregnancy defending your decision to keep the baby, rejecting your—your friends’ and family’s concern, but wondering if you’ve done the right thing. And every day after that you ask yourself if you should call him, if you should give him an ultimatum, if you should apologize, if he should apologize. Should you fly down and confront him or should you have a lawyer draw up a document?” Shannon turned to her friend. “And you end up having the baby and cashing his checks.”

  “Hoping that one day—”

  “I’m not hoping.”

  “You expect me to believe that you came here to do an assignment and that’s all? You could have stayed in Montego Bay to do the job. Not that I’m not glad—”

  “I came because—because I wanted to come back to Largo. It was an important part of my life, and I wanted Eve to know her father.”

  “And if it just happens that you and her father rekindle the old fire, you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “Times change, people change, Jen. I almost don’t know him after all this time. There’s a lot that’s happened to me and to him since I was here last, from the hotel being ruined to—I feel like I barely know him anymore.” Beneath them, the bar’s thatch roof lay dull in the sun. “Fourteen years is a long time, maybe too long. We’ll have to see.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  They were seated like an audience waiting for something to happen, facing the empty lane on a summer afternoon, a dancehall song blasting from a radio. Joella and two teenage boys had the seats of honor on the verandah’s three plastic chairs, two-year-old Joshua asleep sprawled across Joella’s lap, oblivious of the noise. At their feet, Rickia and a friend sat on the top step, their arms and legs spotted with the sunlight coming through the mango tree and its fruit overhead. Five sets of eyes stared at Shad and Eve as they approached the children and his home.

  “Turn down the music,” Shad yelled as he opened the garden gate. “How many times I have to tell you that you making the neighbors deaf.”

  “You can’t hear the music good if you don’t turn it up,” Joella parried as one of the young men bent to turn down the radio.

  “I bring a guest today. You children have been saying that you want to meet Mistah Eric’s daughter, so I bring her today. Her father say she can come for a little while.”

  Eve nodded to the crowd, her hands jammed into her jeans.

  Rickia pushed up her smudgy glasses. “Hi, Eve,” said the eleven-year-old, who was always impressed by foreigners, who was going abroad to study, she’d informed her parents.

  “What you guys up to?” Shad inquired after the two boys had given up their chairs to him and Eve.

  “Shante and I reading, Dadda,” Rickia answered, holding up a book. “Mamma borrow it from the library for me.”

  “Jethro, how your mother going?” Shad asked one of the boys, with short, brown dreadlocks. “I hear she not too well.”

  “She come out of hospital, suh. My grandmother staying with us now and taking care of her.”

  “And you, Winston,” Shad said, gesturing with his chin to the boy holding the radio, the youth he’d found a home for several months back, “you still living with Maisie and Solomon?”

  “Yes, suh, and doing a little mechanic work with Zeb.”

  “You hear from your father?”

  “He write me from Kingston last week. He say he get a job.”

  “Good, good.” Shad rubbed his hand over his chin, hoping to find a hair or two he could shave soon.

  Joella patted the baby on his rump, observing Eve out of the corner of her eye. “She don’t look like Mistah Eric.”

  Shad lowered his eyebrows at her. “She have her father’s blue eyes, you don’t see?”

  “But I have my mother’s mouth,” Eve said, the crisp Canadian accent slicing through the Largo heat. She looked at Shad when she said it, her mouth firmer and smaller than Shannon’s.

  “She speak pretty, eh?” Shante commented.

  “You been to Largo before?” Winston asked Eve.

  She shook her head.

  “How long you staying?” Joella inquired.

  “I don’t know. It depends on when my mother finishes a job she’s doing.”

  “What she doing?” Rickia asked.

  “Writing an article for a magazine.”

  “Maybe Eve can come to the wedding, Dadda,” Rickia said.

  “If she and her mother still here, of course,” Shad replied.

  “Who’s getting married?” Eve asked, turning to Joella as if she expected it to be her.

  Shad’s face got hot and he was glad his skin hid it. “The children’s mother and me.”

  “A wedding, that’s cool,” Eve said. “When is it?”

  “July twenty-eighth,” Joella and Rickia replied together.

  “I’d like to come,” Eve said to Shad.

  It was the warmest she’d been to the bartender thus far, and he felt less conscious of his half-painted house with its scraggly yard. He was glad now that he’d asked Eric if he could bring her to meet his children, something he’d thought of when she’d first arrived but hadn’t done, the way she’d pulled her arm away from him. The girl should see how poor Jamaicans lived, he’d decided, and then maybe she’d be grateful for her own life up in Canada and not have such a sour face. He was also glad that, at least for this first meeting, she wouldn’t see Ashante, his five-year-old, who was at the school in Port Antonio where Beth took her every day. Strangers didn’t understand the child’s odd behavior, didn’t understand autism.

  A gangly, black-and-white cat wandered onto the porch. Rickia laid it belly up in the crook of her arm.

  “Can I pat it?” Eve asked. Rickia nodded, and Eve knelt down and stroked the cat. “I like cats.”

  “You can have this one!” Joella snickered. “She eat too much.”

  A discussion started about what the cat, named Precious, ate and where it slept, while Shad went inside to make himself lunch. When he came back out, Joella announced that they wanted Eve to stay with them for the afternoon. “We going to walk her back to the Delgados’ house before it get dark.”

  “Is that okay?” Eve actually looked energized, alive for the first time since he’d seen her. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

  Shad chewed the inside of his cheek. He’d promised her father he’d take her back to the Delgados’ when he returned for his evening shift. On the other hand, Joella was a responsible girl, about to star
t twelfth grade at Titchfield High, off to dental-tech school in Kingston the following year, and she had a reputation for handling her younger siblings with a strong, sometimes too strong, hand. All six young people were looking at him now, eyes expectant, Joella’s hand stroking the baby.

  “We walk her back along the beach,” Rickia blurted out. “She can see the fishermen going out to fish.”

  “Can I please?” Eve asked. “My mother wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

  That Eve herself wanted to stay, that she had some desire he could finally fulfill, persuaded Shad. “Make sure you have her back at the Delgados’ home by six, no later, you hear me?” he told Joella.

  “We look after her,” Winston assured him.

  Shad took his leave, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he’d done the right thing, but the children weren’t looking at him. They were talking about something—and they’d turned the music up.

  When he got back to the bar, Eric was out, and Shad called the Delgados’ and told Miss Bertha about Eve’s change of plans. “She coming back for dinner?” the housekeeper asked.

  “Yes, man. No problem.”

  Sunset arrived at the Largo Bay Restaurant and Bar with its usual flair of color, appreciated that evening by a busload of tourists bound for Kingston, who arrived tired and thirsty, taking the bartender away from his reading of Grossman’s Guide and rushing him off his feet. After a few too many Planter’s Punches, the customers turned to singing along with Jimmy Cliff, three of them dancing, delaying their departure until the bus driver said he’d be fired if they didn’t leave for the hotel. Shad was happy to see them go despite the hefty tip, and with only the regulars left, the evening suddenly went quiet.

  “You’re helping Miss Mac move, right?” Eric said after he arrived back at seven o’clock. His habit was to come through every night, say hello to whoever was there, and disappear to sit on his verandah, only to be disturbed in an emergency.

  “I have that under control,” Shad mumbled, his finger keeping his place in the book describing the working arrangement of an efficient bar. “Remember we going to use the Jeep, though.”