The little pink cottage was rarely without a tenant. The rent was unobjectionable at first. It went through the roof four years ago, a hundred and fifty percent. The deposits just kept coming. Also around four years ago, Myrtle received a one-time transfer from Hong Kong: fifty thousand smackers. Then, like fifty grand wasn’t enough, the old harpy squeezed the life out of Aetna Simmons.
Maybe CAM suggested that she try the Asian markets, Doreen thought, but it was too much trouble, too confusing, so Myrtle sold out quickly, all at once. I don’t know squat about investing, but it sounded good to me.
The box had years’ worth of bank statements, pie charts that cartooned her CAM portfolio, financial correspondence; a yellowing letter from Masami and Barrington thanked Mrs. Trimm for placing her assets with them. The box was full, couldn’t hold a breath of air. That’s why we found last year’s statements in a bin.
From a nylon backpack she’d slung over her shoulder at the house, Doreen produced a postcard.
A gleaming Horseshoe Bay, Bermuda’s renowned strip of sand, where Nabi and I once somersaulted with the waves. Where we’d played at being pirates on the hunt for buried treasure. Doreen turned it over.
I leave everything I have, except my Life, to my daughters. “Mind the Pennies and the Pounds will Take care of Themselves.” Myrtle Josephine Trimm (Final Will and Testament).
She had beautiful penmanship. A strong, even script with flourishes on the capitals.
“Daughters. Plural. Only one kid ever lived in that house,” Doreen said.
It happens. People make children and abandon them. I know this better than anyone, and I doubted very much that Doreen’s heart bled a drop for the sister who’d grown up without her momma. Instead I surmised, watching her expressive eyelids narrow in impatience, she was miffed because she’d spent a lifetime putting up with Myrtle only to have to share her inheritance with a stranger.
“It’s not dated,” I observed. “There aren’t any names.”
“Not even one.”
“You could just not mention this. Even if you feel you should, you’re probably in the clear. It’s too vague for anybody else to make a claim.”
“You don’t think this has something to do with Aetna Simmons?”
I’d been watching an albino pigeon pecking at a loose stone near my shoe. At the sound of Aetna’s name, I looked up and the bird flew away. Doreen’s eyebrows lifted as though I’d missed an obvious connection.
A woman with an obscure past tracks down her biological mother who, for reasons unknown, probably to do with money, had abandoned her as a small child. The mother manages to raise a different child, Doreen, and has no idea what became of her first mistake. The mistake takes up residence on her mother’s rental property, perhaps intending to keep watch over her in her old age. Daily the younger woman wrestles the question of her true identity. Should she reveal herself or let Myrtle treat her as a mere lodger? Her greatest fear is that she might be rebuffed; for never in her life has Myrtle made an effort to look for her.
Aetna wasn’t the sort of person to pine for recognition from her mother. Then again, who can help but desire such a thing? Everywhere she went, she masked herself in anonymity; but when she found Suffering Lane, she found the mask becoming suffocative. All those years of not knowing if the woman who gave birth to her had ever loved her. When she found Myrtle at last, maybe she couldn’t resist revealing who she really was.
Maybe the need for acknowledgment was overpowering. Maybe Aetna told her everything, even about Clocktower, a thorough husking of the soul. Catharthis overran her better judgment. So when the worst happened, she never saw it coming.
Myrtle took it all in. When she was alone, she sat down with her calculator. The profit margin on another descendant was negligible. Blackmail, complete with an insurance company jammed into a corner, was another story.
It would explain why Aetna stayed. Why she chose that pinched little cottage in the first place. Four years trundled by. Despite all her pleading, she remained nothing to Myrtle but the goose that laid the golden egg. Ignored, betrayed, exploited for too long, Aetna learned of a new designer drug. She murdered her mother. And then she terminated what must’ve seemed a superfluous existence.
Well I was gonna crunch some numbers for my feasibility study during lunch to take my mind off K so I wouldn’t call & wake him if he’d got to sleep at last. I was antsy, I was worried, I just wanted to sit by myself in my office, nice & quiet with everybody gone, just in case Baby called me, when guess who came tickling at my door?
Erik! Ya boy did not look happy. Well Erik always looks happy. I only knew he wasn’t cuz I know K. The tension that shows up around his gorgeous cheekbones. E doesn’t have the gorgeous cheekbones, but today he had the tension & so did I, so I accepted when he offered lunch. He didn’t mention seeing Kenji’s car. Then again, E’d double-parked outside, not in the parking lot, so maybe he didn’t see it. He ran us round to Mad Hatters, chopsin all the way. So it wasn’t till we were inside that I got to ask, “Kiki, is there something you need Kenji to do? Or something?”
Ya boy hollered out & hugged the maitre d’ like he hadn’t seen her in forever (Erik’s at Mad Hatters every other day or night). He said, “What hat you picking, mochi?”All the crazy hats hanging from the walls & ceiling. I don’t know why they creeped me out today a little. E grabbed something huge with sequins & feathers, & I laughed (I didn’t feel like it). He said, “You want a sweet little bonnet, innit.”
“No, bye. My hair.” Thinking I’d be seeing Kenji soon.
“You mean handsome Mr Martin don’t care for hat-head? Who’d’a thought!”
E got the giggles. It don’t take much. I felt a little cheap, so I said, “Martin’s off the Island.”
“So that’s why your pretty little chin’s down on the floor.”
I said I’m used to it, just tired. But thinking about M got me thinking about K & worrying all over again. Iesha hadn’t called yet, so all I had to worry about right then was suicide notes & night terrors & Baby being unreasonable. I got this dumb idea like maybe Kenji had been the one to reach out to his brother, maybe Kiki had heard something from him or about him, something that made him worry too, even after years of radio silence. So I blurted, “Is Kenji OK? I mean, is something wrong?”
For a sec Erik looked horrified & I realized (forgive me, Jesus) I should’ve said Are YOU okay. Kiki was the one reaching out to me, after all. But before I could say sorry, he laughed. “Like I’d be the 1st to know. Cuz Big Man On Campus (Kenji) goes out of his way to stick up for me all the time. Go head, mochi.” E stuck up his hand to order alcohol. Still laughing but with an angry pout on his face. While we were waiting for our food, he took a gulp out of his glass & then, right out in public, he asks me if my husband ever cheated on me with my sister.
Lord have mercy, I said, “What?!” Kinda loud but I mean aceboy was serious! He even still looked angry. I whispered, “No! & you got some crust, etc.” & ya boy got the nerve to get all whiny.
“OK but say they did. Just say. Would you slap him or her?”
Now Lord, I know what I should’ve said. I should’ve calmly said Neither & advised Erik to pray on his relationship with K & ask You for perspective & guidance. I’m hung around them byes for years, I know all this had to do with was the conflict inside E, wanting attention from his brother & envying him at the same time. I know this conflict is the Devil’s work inside poor E, & when he was a kid it helped him blame K for things K didn’t do. I know it was the same old problems rearing their same old ugly heads, & I should’ve been sympathetic instead of vexed. But I told You I was up a tree already. Now here’s both O-C brothers looking for conspiracies in every corner & getting me stuck in the middle! Suddenly I felt scared of a million different things at once & couldn’t tell what they were. Have mercy on me, Lord, it all came out as anger. Stupid t
o boot. I told E there’s no way his boy of the hour would interest K, & that’s something I know for a fact.
“No boyfriend right now, mochi. Too many good people left after government passed that law disgracing Bermy on the global stage.”
“So not a boyfriend but some man you think is cute saw Kenji on the street, found out Kenji’s your brother, told you your brother looks nice, & you got jealous, innit.”
“No.” Erik pouted like a kid, meaning I’m right. Sigh.
“Even though you’re just as nice. Check you looking sharp today. Looking boasty.”
“Well I guess that’s true.” Sometimes these lot drive me fullish.
“K’s type in’t your type anyway.”
Lord, what nonsense! But it helped. So we talked about other stuff, well Kiki talked, talking always helps him. & well, Gal. 6:2, “Carry the burdens of others…” But after that lunch I was ready for my BED. Tried getting on with what I had to do, couldn’t get nowhere. Listening to E (like he’s contagious, Lord have mercy!) just worried me even more: what if K took everything I said all wrong, what if my tone was wrong & Baby felt something I didn’t mean, what if he ran with it the way he runs with things & ran smack into a wrong conclusion like maybe he should let that girl who looks at him at MarketPlace look a little longer? I’m a fool, Lord Jesus, I’m a grownup Managing Partner acting like a silly tweenie, but I just had a bad feeling. I don’t know, just a bad feeling. Plus a feeling like I get when I’m trying to Double Dutch with my nieces, which I’m bad at cuz I’m slow. Like I can’t see the ropes & can’t figure out which way they’re coming if they’re coming. I had this crazy thought of what would “she” do, the digital & paper girl whose made-up name isn’t Seabird, & now that’s just ridiculous. Then I knew what I had to do.
I wrapped up the transaction I’d posted wrong 3 times. I packed up all my stuff. & cuz I know Kenji’s love is my safe secret place, a rare sure thing in this uncertain life, I knew the only way I’d calm down was if I went to him & Baby held me nice & quiet.
That’s when Iesha called.
It didn’t feel right.
Or maybe I just didn’t feel right. I felt like the sugar spoon that falls behind the drawer, forgotten except when it makes the drawer stick. The view back there was dark, paneled in self-pity. I gave the postcard to Doreen without a word.
“She’s the one,” said Doreen. “That means you’ll never prove Aetna Simmons was anything but generous to her own mother.”
I didn’t care for the smile that twisted Doreen’s mouth as she watched me over the rim of her cup. The grimace of someone who’s got one up on you or thinks they do or thinks they’ve caught you in a lie. But she said, “Where do I get the feeling you already knew that?”
From my lack of reaction to her stupid postcard which, by the way, I now believe to have been set in my path in order to draw me out. Doreen’s question hardly merited a response, although she thought otherwise. She put down her cup with vigor. I was glad it was ceramic and not china.
“What is it you want, Kenji? If you’re not looking for an extortionist, what are you looking for?”
She couldn’t have said anything more cruel. At one stroke and out of context, that question brought home the lesson of the walk-in closet: no matter what lay between me and my horizon, the horizon was empty. No use in looking for the lighthouse or the sun, but like an idiot I looked anyway. From the middle of St. George’s Square I looked for what I might have missed in a long kiss and a movement of eyebrows in a closet on the opposite end of the country, where I’d chased down Nabi naked (me not her) to plead for hope. The absurdity of being there and not there with Doreen brought back the sensations of being in the bowels of a wooden boat on a hurricane-tossed ocean with nothing but heavy fog and driving rain in all directions, and then I wanted only to be in bed with the covers over my face.
I said, “Where’s the Empyreal?”
“The drug?”
“Give it to me.”
“Why?”
Before I could overturn the table in a fit of rage, something happened that I never could’ve anticipated. And yet I should’ve. It changed everything.
Bermuda’s capillary roads twist and coil in on themselves, often doubling back. Finding yourself faced with where you started even as you move away from it is far from uncommon. So is running into someone at exactly the wrong moment. Just as randomness plucked her out of the unknown, destroying her blissful obscurity as a haven for cahows and shipwrecked pigs, the Devil’s Isle takes revenge by visiting coincidence upon its human occupants, often to their peril and embarrassment.
Hands on my shoulders. Whiff of perfume. “Working hard, I see.” A dulcet voice. An echo of a sparkle that would’ve turned any other day into a winning ticket.
I have Zo’s comedown to thank for my failure to leap from my seat, endangering the tea set. Instead I took the beringed hands and said, “Iesha, girl, where you been to?”
Iesha Douglas. Nabi’s older sister. The only person in the solar system who knows the score. On certain occasions, when despite their untimeliness we cannot stay away from each other, Iesha covers for us. She tells Martin she requires Nabi for an evening of Girl Talk or Auntie Time with her twin girls.
I stood up and hugged her, introduced her and Doreen. Iesha’s with Davison’s, the souvenir chain. She normally works at Dockyard in the tourist season, but that day she was filling in for someone in St. George’s.
I refrained, just barely, from asking about Nabi: had Iesha heard from her, was she angry, would Iesha cover us for a week or two so I could take Nabi to Greece and persuade her not to come back? I confined the conversation to Iesha’s progeny until she strutted off with Nabi’s buoyant step.
Where Nabi’s soft and round, Iesha’s taller, angular. She wears her hair in rows, Nabi flaunts sumptuous waves. Those absences of similarity were enough to conquer me. I watched Iesha walk away, folded my napkin in silence.
“Kenji,” said Doreen.
“I’ve got to go.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Bullshit.”
“You shouldn’t keep shit like that in the house.”
“Shit like what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’ll give it to you if you tell me why you really came here. I mean the first time.”
“Hon, you’re acting up over nothing.”
We walked to the house in silence. Should’ve gone straight to my bike, but Doreen pulled me inside. I don’t know why I let her do it.
“Why don’t you trust me?” Her hands were all over me.
“How many times have we done this, and I still don’t know a thing about you?”
“What you got in front of you is all there is worth knowing. Be nice this time, all right?” She kissed me slowly as though she gave a damn.
I whispered, “Why? You a cop or something?”
“No. More hurt won’t help anything, that’s all.”
The zeal of loneliness was in every move she made. Sometimes I held onto her too tight. We let our deprivation feed on itself through one another. So when it was over, I felt restored and desolate.
Doreen fell asleep with her head on my chest. I didn’t want that, but I saw no way out of it. We were in Myrtle’s bed. Everything smelled like dead cat. The light fixture on the ceiling had insect corpses in it. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I said, “I have to go.”
“No, you don’t,” sighed Doreen.
I lay still a bit longer, hoping she’d fall asleep and I’d have time to hunt down a certain tiny thing.
But she sighed again. “I may have a sister whom I never knew.”
Wrapped in my own ruefulness, I perceived but a glimmer of the strange new light that Myrtle’s postcard cast over Dore
en’s whole world.
“Help me find her,” she whispered.
“Aetna’s dead, hon. I’m sorry.”
“Help me learn about her then. You will, right, Kenji?”
“I guess.” In actual fact, I felt proprietary about Aetna. “Look, I really have to go. Stuff going on.”
“Call me.” She rolled under her mother’s quilt.
I poked around in the clothing we’d dropped on the floor. I checked the nylon backpack and the pockets of her shorts.
“Kenji.”
“Yeah?”
“Next time we’ll make that trade.”
See? She tortured me and I encouraged it. As the door closed, I could’ve sworn I heard her chuckling.
It’s been about an hour since I wrote down all that stuff about Doreen. When I couldn’t write anymore, I called Nabi. She didn’t answer, I tried three times, no, four times. I felt myself starting to panic and that’s no good because when she calls me back I’ll be useless if I panic. I took some Zo, called again. Nothing.
To continue. I had sex with a revolting and enthralling predator who pretended to need me. I was back on my bike by three o’clock. And the day’s accomplishments did not end there. After Doreen’s parting jibe, I was determined to find out who had the balls to ignore my fine print. Anywhere besides De Rock, policemen might have qualified. Here, though I couldn’t hold out hope, well, I had to try.
I have a thick handful of clients in the Police Service. They’re all of high rank, so they spend most of their time in their Court Street offices. My unexpected visit rattled them. I wasn’t in a mood with which anyone dared trifle, especially when greeted with a kyuusho jitsu handshake. I made them wheeze out the fine print as their eyes watered. What with all that and the possibility of eavesdroppers, no one gave me any crap.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 16
