The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  For years, Hyacinth had told Avril that any time she was ready to come home and get help with the children, she was more than welcome. She stopped short at saying that she would come up to the States and look after them, because for one, her old bones couldn’t take the cold and for two, there was no way she was leaving the good-good house her husband and she had made with their own hands to go live in an apartment in New York. Hyacinth had always been astonished at the way people lived on top of each other up there. It seemed strange that people could live in such proximity, and yet still be strangers.

  On Bird Hill, there was enough space so you could stretch out your arms or raise your voice and touch only yourself and your family. But still Hyacinth knew the public and private affairs of people all over the hill. She knew whose milk wouldn’t come in no matter how many cups of the special teas she brewed for her, which women to expect in her yard like clockwork at the beginning of every month when their husbands drank and then brawled, painting their wives’ faces with their fists. That she knew so much was occasionally overwhelming to Hyacinth. Even when she didn’t want to, Hyacinth could still feel the tug of other women’s worries, which she knew as well as the birthmarks on her knees, the ones that Hyacinth’s mother said made her look like she’d come down from heaven after a lifetime of prayer. Still, Hyacinth preferred this small place and its difficulties to the strangeness of living some place where nobody knew you beyond what you saw fit to tell them.

  After Phaedra was born, it became clear that the thin thread that held together Avril’s marriage to her husband, Errol, was frayed. Hyacinth hoped that once Errol finally left, Avril would bring the girls home and they could be a family again. In her mind’s eye, she saw busy mornings sending Avril and the girls off to school, having supper ready for them when they came home, watching and talking at the television together at night while she packed their lunches and pressed uniform shirts and skirts. Despite the disembodied voice that her daughter had become over the years, Hyacinth still remembered the girl that Avril had once been, the light of her life, fiercely protective of her friends and of her mother. Hyacinth had a glimpse of this life in the year that Avril spent at home after she finished college, teaching first form at her old high school. But when classes let out that year for Christmas holidays, Avril met Errol, and the next six months proceeded only in service of them leaving Barbados together.

  Hyacinth blamed herself because she didn’t know enough of Avril’s life in New York, of the pressures that moved against her, or the way that the children stretched the precious little that she had to its breaking point. Hyacinth didn’t know that Errol’s imprint was still on Avril’s body—not only the bruises that were slow to heal, but also the other, more insidious ways Errol had lodged himself in Avril’s psyche, the damage that Avril couldn’t admit even to herself. There were only pictures and letters and cards and phone calls to go by, and Avril constructed the lie of her competence so perfectly that it was hard for Hyacinth to know what was really going on. And so she could claim only her memories of Avril before she left Barbados, and then the bits and pieces she came to know that summer in her conversations with her granddaughters. Avril, according to Phaedra, was a mother who missed parent-teacher conferences, who hadn’t held down a job in more than a year, who let Dionne assume responsibility for making sure that she and her sister were bathed, fed, and on time for school. This was an Avril she didn’t know. But she would come to understand that this Avril was as real as the daughter she remembered.

  The summer Phaedra and Dionne arrived on the hill without their mother, Avril’s letters became less frequent and the Sunday phone calls she promised never came. But Hyacinth could count on the money that she sent biweekly, which allowed her to buy Phaedra the colored popcorn and cheese balls she loved, round out the meals from her garden with meat and fish, keep the water running and the current on. It was only when Hyacinth went to the bank the Monday after she received Avril’s latest letter and didn’t find her deposit that she knew something was really wrong.

  One of the things that confirmed Hyacinth’s suspicion that America was an evil, lonely place was that people were islands unto themselves. And so when Avril drifted away, there was no friend or neighbor or pastor or coworker to reach out to and ask after her child. It was as if Avril had disappeared down a rabbit hole, never to be found again.

  The call from the hospital did not come as a surprise, then. Hyacinth had already begun to fill in the gaps of what she knew with bad news. When the phone rang, Hyacinth was washing up the breakfast dishes. She heard her neighbor Ms. Zelma call her name from across the rosebushes that separated their houses and hurried over. She stepped into Ms. Zelma’s kitchen and tried not to see the alarm that thrust her neighbor’s eyebrows toward her widow’s peak.

  “Who is it?” Hyacinth asked. She wiped the water from her hands onto her apron and then reached for the receiver.

  “Some white American person,” Ms. Zelma said.

  The fact that the man on the line said Avril’s full name when he spoke of her told Hyacinth that he wouldn’t go on to say anything she wanted to hear. She leaned against the kitchen sink for support. She was soon off the call, but not before committing to memory the number she needed. She put the phone down slowly, as if stopping time might shove this news back into the awful place it came from, give her a moment longer to dwell in the bliss of not knowing.

  “What happened?” Ms. Zelma asked.

  “I need to sit down,” Hyacinth said. She eased herself into a chair that creaked with her weight.

  Ms. Zelma looked at Hyacinth expectantly. Her hands were open in her lap as if they were ready to receive the news.

  “Avril’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean, gone. She killed herself.”

  Ms. Zelma sucked in a breath and soon it felt like there wasn’t enough air in the kitchen for both her and Hyacinth.

  “Oh Lord, I don’t know what to say.”

  “There’s no thing to say.”

  “And the body?”

  “At the hospital. I have to call and see about how to get it home.”

  “What about the girls?”

  Hyacinth hesitated. “No place to go but right here.”

  “I know that, but what are you going to tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  “That can’t fly. Phaedra is still small. And Dionne has enough on her head already without this. You can’t tell them that.”

  “I’d rather they hear it from me than out on the street.”

  “No, man, there has to be another way.”

  “Ms. Zelma, you bury any children yet?”

  Ms. Zelma didn’t speak.

  “Right, then.”

  “Can I get you anything, anything I can do?” Ms. Zelma said. She spun around her kitchen looking for something to occupy her hands.

  “Tea,” Hyacinth said. “I would take a cup of tea.”

  Hyacinth leaned her elbows against the kitchen table’s sun-warmed plastic tablecloth and stirred brown-sugar cubes into her tea. She looked at Ms. Zelma and marveled at the fact that they’d both grown into round, gray-haired women. When they were younger, their houses were interchangeable, their children tracking dirt and laughter through their living rooms. This was before Ms. Zelma lost each of her three children, the oldest to medicine in Toronto, the middle child to a controlling husband in England, the youngest to a singing career in New York that deepened the worry lines in her forehead. For Hyacinth the surprise was not that Avril had chosen to end her own life, but that she and Zelma had thrived for so long in a world that was at best indifferent to their survival. A part of Hyacinth wondered at Avril’s pluck in excusing herself from a game she was never meant to win.

  Hyacinth would have sat there for another hour, talking around the thing that needed to be done and watching her tea cool, if s
he hadn’t remembered that she’d left a pig tail boiling down on the stove. She pushed herself out of her chair, and made her way to the door. On Ms. Zelma’s back porch, she watched the sun where it was bright and high in the sky as ever. Hyacinth looked at the same sun she’d seen rise and set for sixty-three years and counting, and she felt betrayed. It seemed unfair that it shone no less brilliantly even though inside her a maelstrom raged. She could see smoke rising up from the abandoned house across the way, foul clouds billowing through the places where its windows were meant to be. Since no one lived there, it had been turned into a dump for Bird Hill, where Mr. Jeremiah put himself in charge of burning trash. Hyacinth inhaled the horrible stench of rubbish on fire, and the smoke burned her eyes, and she told herself that that was why she was crying.

  She knew that she’d never be able to smell trash burn again without thinking about Avril and what the man on the phone had told her. He said that it had happened on the subway, that her child had jumped in front of a train, that there was nothing they could do once she’d been found. It was so hard to make sense of all of it, not just her daughter killing herself. Although she’d been hearing about the subway for years, Hyacinth couldn’t really imagine a train underground, and the thought of her daughter dying in a place her mind couldn’t even draw a picture of hurt her keenly. And how was it possible that it’d taken so long for the news to reach her? Avril’s body had been in the morgue for ten whole days before someone had found her address, and then her apartment, and then Hyacinth’s phone number. She couldn’t imagine anyone dying in Bird Hill so thoroughly alone.

  The faces of Hyacinth’s dead passed before her, and she remembered each of them, first her grandmother, then her mother, then her husband, and now, Avril. She couldn’t really piece together the puzzle of Avril’s face, as the pictures she’d sent from the States didn’t look like her. She preferred to remember Avril as she was when she first left Barbados twenty years before, eyes shiny and full of hope for her life in New York. More so than even Avril’s dying, which was bad enough, was the fact that she’d not been home in so long that there were no recent memories Hyacinth could call upon—no hugs or trips or long afternoons spent in the kitchen or the garden—so little to take the edge off her absence.

  Hyacinth would have stayed with her grief for a moment longer, which was really an accretion of loss, first of the family she was born into and then of the family she made. But it was too painful. She moved on quickly to blame. She was to blame, yes, for not being able to heal her child, for not heeding her suspicion that Avril wasn’t OK no matter how much she claimed she was, for letting her fear of traveling overseas overcome her good sense. And then there was her husband, Avril’s father, who had tried to meet Avril’s fragility with his own hardness, claiming that what she needed was a thick skin, when nothing could be further from the truth or from his daughter’s reach. And then there was Errol. And the girls. The more Hyacinth thought about it, the more she became convinced that Avril, with her constitution as bright and brittle as it was, didn’t stand a chance against the life she’d made for herself so far away from home.

  When Hyacinth tired of the sadness and the confusion and the blame swirling in her head, she settled on the question at hand. What to tell the children? Hyacinth steeled her shoulders the way she did before any difficult thing, and then crossed back through the rosebushes toward home.

  • • •

  ONCE PHAEDRA PUT her mind to something, there was little that could get in the way of the bullheadedness that was her birthright. The summer before this one, when Avril was in an incredibly good mood, she’d started talking fast about half birthdays and how they should celebrate Phaedra’s, which, since she was born on New Year’s Eve, would be June 30th. Phaedra still remembered the catastrophe of that half birthday, and so she knew better than to court disaster by planning a half-birthday celebration for herself in Bird Hill. She appreciated her friendships with Chris and Donna, but she knew that three kids weren’t really enough to make a party. Phaedra was chastened by the memory of her, Dionne, and Avril’s attempt at celebrating her half birthday the summer before, and so had settled on a Bird Hill half Christmas instead.

  The summer before, Avril had barely started making Phaedra’s half-birthday cake when she broke down in tears and Phaedra and Dionne had to help her to the pullout sofa bed in the living room. Dionne finished the cake, following the instructions on the back of the box to a T.

  The yellow cake turned out well. It was spongy and moist, and bore some resemblance to the confection on the blue box. But the morning after the cake was made, Phaedra and Dionne woke to find that Avril had disappeared, leaving no note behind and no clue to where she had gone. Phaedra and Dionne ate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days, each of them striving to turn their meals into a joke that was funnier than the empty refrigerator. “I’d quite like some cake” and “This cake is quite smashing, isn’t it, darling,” they said in accents they thought were posh, borrowed from Friday-night viewings of EastEnders with their mother. Avril complained bitterly that they were so far behind on the soap opera compared to what people were watching in England, but Phaedra and Dionne loved to practice their accents and watch their mother yell at the television, as if these strange British people with bad teeth could hear her. Summer, with its extended rounds of playing double Dutch and riding bikes and roller-skating up and down their block, had turned the days into an extended play party. Hunger could be a game too.

  On the fourth morning, Phaedra and Dionne eyed each other across the kitchen table with the last slice of cake between them. Dionne said, “Fuck this,” and then, “You can have it, P.,” because she could hear her sister’s belly rumbling. Dionne went on a mission to pick through the places where her mother might have dropped money, knowing full well that she’d cased those spots before and come up empty. Still, she made a show of it for Phaedra, digging around the indents her mother’s body had made in the sofa bed’s lumpy frame, rifling through the kitchen drawers, shaking an empty piggy bank. Finally, Dionne put on her sneakers, through which anyone with eyes could see her toes pressing. “Be right back,” she said.

  By dark, Dionne was home as she promised, smelling of cheap menthols and the bar around the corner where her boyfriend, Darren, worked, Liquid Love. Dionne smiled, a smile Phaedra knew meant that she and her sister were picking up their game where they’d left it. She watched as Dionne pulled groceries from her book bag: bread and milk and peanut butter and grape jelly, Steak-umms and a head of broccoli and chicken breasts that looked like permanent residents of the bodega’s freezer section. For Dionne, a cherry pie. For Phaedra, yellow cupcakes crisscrossed with white icing. Ten packs of Now and Laters for them both, which Dionne pulled from the hidden pocket of her backpack like a magic trick. Phaedra was grateful to Dionne for taking care of her, but she knew how her corniness ruined things, so she resisted the urge she had to throw her arms around Dionne’s neck. Instead, Phaedra rifled through the kitchen drawer for candles to top her cupcakes. Before she blew out the flames, she made a wish for Avril to get well. Phaedra was glad that birthday wishes were secret, because she knew Dionne would have said her wish was a waste.

  Instead of reprising her half birthday, on Bird Hill, Phaedra became obsessed with the idea of half Christmas, insisting that they celebrate now since they wouldn’t get to spend the holidays with Hyacinth. For weeks, she’d been pestering Hyacinth about half Christmas, and even though Hyacinth pretended to be bothered by Phaedra, in truth, she was already sad that they would be leaving. And it was for this reason, and because it was hard to refuse Phaedra anything, that there was a black cake soaking in rum in the pantry and salt pork boiling down on the stove for Hyacinth’s special Christmas jug-jug on the day when Hyacinth got the call about Avril.

  Hyacinth came home and found Phaedra where she’d left her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, stringing colored popcorn onto thread. Hyacinth knew that Phaedra
was serious about this half-Christmas thing when she sacrificed her weekly ration of sickly sweet popcorn for decorations. From the kitchen, she could see the intense concentration on Phaedra’s face and Dionne with her legs curled beneath her on the sofa, reading a magazine. She turned down the water on the pot and made her way into the living room.

  “Well, darlings, it looks like wunna going to spend half Christmas and Christmas with me too,” Hyacinth said.

  Dionne saw the ball Hyacinth was making with her skirt and fist, and she knew that something was wrong, because her grandmother was never anything but deliberate in her movements. She looked up from her magazine and narrowed her eyes. “Sorry?” Dionne clutched the smooth ebony arm of the sofa her grandfather had made, and waited for the blow.

  “Really, Gran?” Phaedra asked, not looking up from her project. A stray pink kernel slipped from her hand, and she reached out for it and put it in her mouth.

  “Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, that is disgusting. I bet you would eat that even if it fell into the toilet,” Dionne said.

  “Would not!”

  “Would too!”

  “Stop it!” Hyacinth said, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. The girls didn’t know it yet, but they would need extra helpings of tenderness for what lay ahead of them. Like so much else, Hyacinth didn’t know where she would find extra from to give them.