Land of Love and Drowning

by Tiphanie Yanique

  Eeona walked between the two of them. She looked at the man. Then at her own hands. She felt dizzy, which was something that Anegada could do—make someone dizzy with its beauty.

  At the house they ate lobster out of the shell. Eeona finally introduced herself. Gave her name, gave her parents’ names. The lobsterman nodded at her. “You come to find your grandparents’ graves?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Eeona quickly.

  “They was good, simple people,” he said to her. “And your parents are still remembered here, too. We still talk about the crash of The Homecoming.” His mouth tensed for a moment and then calmed. “The ship still there. People always finding bones in the sand from that very ship. Ghosts like you always washing ashore.”

  Had she just been called a ghost? Eeona had the urge to reprimand this man, but how could she when his face was there looking like the love of her life. Instead, she cleared her throat to swallow her words. Besides, she needed to gain any alliance. This lobsterman might be her guide. She was here for The Homecoming.

  Mrs. Norman stood to clear the dishes, but then the lobsterman, wary of Eeona’s stare, took them and went to wash them himself. Mrs. Norman sat back next to Eeona. “There is a beach here that is named after a girl who visited with her French sweetheart some years past. You know it?” Mrs. Norman said this with her face blank of any suspicion.

  “I do know it,” Eeona said.

  “Good. Is where we always go for our evening dip.”

  Flash of Beauty had not been originally named after Eeona and Moreau, but that was the story told, and so now that was how it was. And it was the same beautiful thing it had been decades before. How was this so achingly possible? The white sand with flecks of pink, like baby tongues.

  “I cannot quite believe that I am here,” Eeona said, swallowing the “again” at the end of the sentence. She waded out in the water with Mrs. Norman as the old lobsterman watched them from his perch on the sand. The two women swam fully clothed as was the old tradition.

  Mrs. Angela Norman, who was a Mrs. because she had been married to Norman, looked out into the ocean. Miles out where the reef began, the waves crashed without a sound. “Anegada isn’t real,” Angela said. “It’s magic.”

  “I am not, perchance, dreaming, am I?” Eeona was being lighthearted, but she also worried about the extent of her episodes.

  “Perhaps you are, Cousin Eeona.”

  True, Eeona was not herself. Not herself at all. Cousin Angela Norman did not seem to really understand or care who Eeona Bradshaw was. Angela only seemed to care about the fact of their relation. As if that was anything. As if that was everything. And that Lyonel, the lobsterman. The only time he’d looked at her, he’d called her a ghost. But he was the ghost. A man handsome enough to be her father.

  Mrs. Norman and Eeona began to walk out of the water. Their clothes stuck to their older women’s bodies in immodest ways. Eeona was not a woman to cry, but when Angela passed her the towel, she found she needed to dry her eyes. The lobsterman respectfully looked away.

  That night Eeona slept in a large mahogany bed in the couple’s cottage. It was the kind that Antoinette and Owen Arthur would have slept in. It was high off the ground, and when she sat on it, Eeona’s feet hung over the side of the bed like a child’s. That night she dreamed. Because she dreamed, she knew that this Anegada was not, after all, the dream. She dreamed about a school of women walking out of the ocean. Then she dreamed it again. And again. Until in the dream she was finally one of the women.

  The next morning, over a lobster omelet with seaweed, Eeona said to the lobsterman: “I should like to see The Homecoming.”

  The man squinted his eyes at her. “It beneath the water.”

  “That is of no concern.”

  He looked at Angela, his woman, and she nodded. “You a water woman,” he said to Eeona. “Is your father ship we talking.” Then he shrugged his assent.

  So Eeona went out to the ocean on a boat with the silver-haired man who looked to her like her father. It was an ill-conceived idea. But it was true that, though Eeona was a middle-aged lady who could not drive a car, she could slip on a mask and fins and slide into the water like any amphibian.

  The water was dark with the bodies of the boats. It was a place of quiet. The old lady and the older man snorkeled above it all, unable to speak for the mask. But for Eeona’s safety, they held hands. Like lovers.

  Beneath them, the boats were skeletons of their former selves. How would she ever find hers? But then the lobsterman pointed. Eeona looked. She struggled to see but didn’t see. He kept pointing and pointing. And then The Homecoming revealed herself there in the cemetery of ships. No longer painted white, there was a deep green to her shell. The seaweed of the ship’s underbelly that had once made Eeona uneasy had now taken over her whole body. It still troubled Eeona. But she gulped the unease down into her belly.

  Instead, Eeona flew, like a witch, above The Homecoming. She saw the galleon as though looking through glass. The boat that had been hers was hers still. She flew, with her lobsterman, around the molding deck. The fish flew with them. Eeona’s hair had been tight and flat to help the mask stay in place, but now the hair fought until it released itself and then it, too, flew all about her like tentacles. The ship was drowned shallow enough to catch the sun through the waves. Eeona could see the deck and the mast. Eeona could see the ship, like a body, leaning over on its side as though it were just a beloved reclining. Simply resting and waiting all these years.

  This was her father’s ship. And this was Eeona’s ship. And though she was no underwater expert, she now held her breath, let go of Lyonel’s hand, and shot her body down, so at least she might touch the mast. Or maybe she might reach the ball of her foot to the deck. Lyonel had to follow her, for despite his age, he still made a living off of this very sea. He knew it better than she.

  Oh, Eeona. She was not ready to be snorkeling and diving on a hot day in the sea for so long. She wasn’t young anymore. But she was of a sea people. So she did not panic as she fell, up, up, up toward the silvery surface. And when Eeona’s body buoyed up facedown, Mrs. Norman, waiting for them in the lobster boat, did not panic either.

  When the lobsterman saw Eeona falling up, not diving down to the boat at all, he watched her for a while. Her fall in the water was slow and gentle and full of grace. He watched and watched through his own eyes, for he never wore a mask. He saw her fall back up and up.

  Of course, the man knew who Eeona was and whom she belonged to. All that was so long ago. He had been trying to give some distance, but the girl, the woman, had been giving him a flirty look since she arrived and then she’d grasped his hand during the swim and he just hadn’t the heart . . . So he just watched her now. Watched her go, go.

  But then he noticed the loose way she soared, noticed that her body butted against a jut of coral and didn’t tense but simply slacked and bounced and kept falling up. Like she was dead. So he shot after her, sucking in fresh breath as he pulled her into the lobster boat. The same boat, it turned out, in which he had proposed life and love to Antoinette Stemme.

  Eeona stayed in her cousin’s cottage. She dreamed and dreamed. She was there in the school of women. There was no hospital, but the island medic who was not a medic at all but what the less Anglicized still called an obeah woman, directed Angela to pour garlic water and lobster soup down Eeona’s throat throughout her unwaking.

  And then Eeona awoke. And she was not herself. Not herself at all. She knew where she was. She knew how she had gotten there. She knew she had not made it to touch The Homecoming. But she took one hazy look at the lobsterman standing over her with a bowl of lobster soup and she realized that he did not look that much like her father after all.

  Who the lobsterman looked like was her mother. He looked like Eeona’s own beautiful mother. And Eeona saw how the lobsterman stared at her now as an uncle
might have. Those were Antoinette’s eyes. That was Antoinettte’s mouth whispering her name. Eeona had never really considered how beautiful her mother was at all.

  What on earth? Was everyone related in these Virgin Islands? Was that the strange secret to freedom and belonging? Eeona had never wanted, really, to be anything but her father’s daughter. And she’d been her desired self for nearly two decades and then in less than a year her father had died and her family had been deadened. And she’d never really considered what this might really mean. Never before.

  100.

  In the inn in Coral Bay, Anette could see her sister’s frame lean forward—as if for battle. But instead of saying anything, Anette just sat there with tears raining down her face.

  “Come, Anette. Give yourself some air. I want you to see what I’ve finally done. Open the balcony wide.”

  Anette sucked her nose in and bunched her eyes. Then she stood and reached her hands to the balcony doorknobs. With a pull, she let in the light and the breeze. The curtains winged around them.

  The scissors were in Eeona’s lap. The dark and light tresses were already gone from her head, already gathered in her hands. Her head, with the fine scars of an old lovemaking in glass, gleamed in places like a cut diamond.

  “Your hair. What the ass?” And it was true that it was intense. More—it seemed insane.

  Eeona’s face was not a young woman’s face. She was an older woman now. Beyond middle age, really. Her mouth opened and released a breezing sigh. “I was a child and I only wanted . . .” But she shook her head. The words were not working. Her hands were full of her own hair. Those hands were now reaching toward Anette as in offering. Without her hair, Eeona’s face was all there was to offer. And Jesus, she was beautiful. Only now she also seemed as though she were either wise or an acolyte. Both seemed as though they might be the same thing.

  “Sister?” Anette asked in a quiet way that said all the shock and sadness. But still Anette stepped forward to meet Eeona, because she was the little sister, after all. She took the silver hair. The hair was heavy and soft. It was the weight of a child and Anette cradled it. Now Eeona dusted the small curls of the hair from her own shirt and lap. She did it with her fingers, shaking and slow. She regained her composure as Anette pressed the hair to her own chest.

  “There,” Eeona said finally. She wiped her face with a kerchief. She nodded her head now. Nodded and nodded until finally the words came out. “Anette, we are selling the inn.”

  Anette’s tears were storming out of her eyes. Crazy witch, she wanted to say to her sister. But she kept her composure. “Relax, Eeona. You’ve had an episode. Your mind is not true. This inn is what you’ve always wanted. You just said, it’s your villa . . .”

  “Nettie, I am moving to Anegada.”

  “No.” Anette was still standing. The balcony was right there beside them. “I need you, Eeona. I need my family.” She hugged the hair from the breeze.

  “You have your family.”

  “But Eeona. Right now you don’t know real from not real. But is okay. I going take care.”

  “Oh, Nettie. If only I had sent you to be raised on Anegada. Perhaps you would have been able to walk through mountains instead of carry them on your back.”

  Anette felt uneasy with the nickname Eeona kept using. Had she overheard Jacob use it? Anette’s fingers slipped in and around the hair. “But Eeona, you can’t just up and go. I need to know things. I need to know about what happened with Papa. What happened in our old house? Come, Eeona. The truth. I have real frigging questions.”

  “Do stop cursing. It is quite unbecoming. Besides, I am taking Eve Youme with me. You may visit. We will write letters.”

  Anette felt the tightening between her shoulder blades. “You gone bazadie. Now go to hell. Nobody taking my child from me.”

  “She is not a child anymore.” Eeona breathed out. Pushed her shoulders back. “To be frank, Nettie, Anegada needs her. I suppose I need her as well.”

  Anette couldn’t catch her voice fast enough. “If you had just speak the truth back when we was young.” Anette’s voice was rising. The hair was against her breast. “And if you had, maybe I would never had get knot up with Jacob and none of this bullshittiness would have happened.”

  “Yes, Nettie. That is true.” Eeona said this without her face releasing any expression.

  “That is true? That’s what you have to say? After I love up the wrong man. After our birth house come a restaurant and people throw us off a beach on our very own island . . .” The hair began to slip out of Anette’s arms. This made them quiet for a moment.

  “Nettie, do you know why they call it Anegada?”

  Anette felt that maybe none of this was real after all. Right here and right now was a thing reeled in from her subconscious. So was that time in Hibiscus Hotel. So was Youme’s deformity. Jacob himself was a dream. She was still a child in her parents’ house. Maybe Anette was the one going crazy. She shook her head now, as if clearing her ears of water. “Eeona. I teach history. I know Anegada is the land of drowning because of all the ships that crash into it. Our father’s ship included.”

  “That is good, Nettie, but you are wrong. It is because of the land itself. It is the land that is of the water and that is how it has survived.”

  Anette had never been to Anegada. In truth, she had only read about it in the “Pirates and Piracy” section of the world history textbook. It was also the only section where the Caribbean was mentioned at all. Hundreds of wrecks still soaking in its shores, she remembered. Anegada was not a place one moved to. It was a place people avoided out of fear. Anette whispered to her sister. “Youme sick, Eeona. She has that thing, you know.” She lowered her voice. “That obeah thing. The magic thing.”

  “Nettie, on Anegada there are others like her. She can come to understand herself.” Eeona turned to look at the beveled mirror fastened to the wall. “Isn’t that the most you could want for the child?”

  Anette turned with her sister as though the decision was there in the reflection.

  There was Eeona’s neck and there were her shoulders and there she was. And finally Eeona was a woman who was fierce and elegant and the queen of somewhere—a woman men would always swoon over. Anette shifted her eyes to look at herself. And she saw that she had that in her, too.

  A wind washed in from the balcony. Anette opened her arms and the hair floated out and away like it was nothing more than air.

  101.

  He meets her on a beach that is shaped like a lover’s heart. But instead of sealing off into a pointed tip, the bay is a heart that is open. The sea waves in and out of the heart, as with any love. They will always meet there in the morning. No one is silently picking whelks on the far end of the beach. Not anymore. Someone had actually been robbed right there on the sand recently. But now it is early in the morning. The sun still rising and the air blowing cold. The water is even colder. Everything is covered with the blue of the blanching dawn sky.

  They are not the only ones on the beach. There are also two Americans who have lived on the island for many years, close by in one of the big Peterborg houses. They are jogging in a pair. There is also a figure doing capoeira bends and balances by the rocks. The manager and assistant of the beach concession are already there, speaking Spanish to each other as they unpack frozen hot dogs and veggie burgers.

  The woman sits on a bench. She doesn’t lean back provocatively as she might have done if she were younger and wanted to show off her neckline. She does not look about anxiously waiting for him, hoping he will turn up. She knows he will come. He always does. And anyway, she has a sense of arrival. She isn’t wearing a white dress nor is she wearing a red dress with big yellow flowers. She is wearing a gray linen pantsuit, one that matches her silver-speckled red hair. In her hand she cradles a small bag of stewed cherries.

  She has taken off her shoes. There are littl
e hairs of silver glinting on her toe knuckles. The sand feels good running through and over her feet.

  The man comes walking up the beach in his leather shoes. He is wearing a very fine gray suit, but with the jacket over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up. He wears a suit every day even when he isn’t working. And he still works, even now that he could retire. But there is no one to take over the medical practice. All his six sons have gone into Wall Street business where there is more money. They have left him and his wife alone in their big house in the hills. His sons are only phone calls from America. They are only the occasional visit with a new lovely girlfriend, and they never stay very long. Except for the youngest, he still comes home for Carnival. In college in the States, he has learned to play the steel pan. Jacob smiles, thinking of this son in particular. With children there is always the possibility of a small reincarnation or a large redemption.

  Anette watches her feet dig into the sand. Sand, she thinks, is a kind of land that flows like water. Ronalda had called last night purring about her husband, an American from Florida. Together, they make peanut brittle for a living. Anette hadn’t been able to boil water at the same age. Frank Junior is teaching in Grenada. He will visit soon, likely bringing one of his tough-talking Marxist friends. A letter from Youme arrived yesterday afternoon from Anegada. And though Anegada is just there across the ocean, all letters have to be routed through Puerto Rico, and so the letter has taken two weeks in the coming. Anette has it in her lap like something childlike or something sacred. Which are the same thing.

  Jacob is carrying one anthurium. Not a rose or a lily. Not an orchid. The flower still has its long stem. Its thick petal is strong and pink like a woman’s private flesh. The elaborate pistil surges from the crease in the heart-shaped petal.