The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  The winners of first, second, and third place were called and took their awards. No one called Legendary Mas Camp for any of the prizes. Phaedra was overcome by guilt, thinking that maybe if she had danced harder, kept her energy up, they would have won. She held her breath as they gave out the awards for best costumes, hoping her band would be called. Phaedra looked at the sea of gloating children who crowded the front of the stage, the sun’s rays bouncing off the fake gold of their trophies. Her face began to crumble in pieces so that by the time Mrs. Loving met her, Chris, and Donna, she had devolved into a full-on sob.

  “But Phaedra, what happen to you?” Mrs. Loving asked.

  Phaedra shook her head, hardly able to speak for the tears that flooded her mouth. “I thought we would win. We were good.”

  “Of course you were good. So were the other kids. You think it matters who won?”

  “It always matters,” Donna said in the knowing way of a girl who had never been inside the winner’s circle.

  “I thought you-all came here to enjoy yourselves.”

  “I know we did. But we should have won. It would have been better,” Phaedra said.

  “I know, I know,” Mrs. Loving said, burying Phaedra’s dirty face into her skirt.

  Phaedra looked up finally and asked, “Where’s my father? He said he was coming.”

  “I’m not sure where he is. I haven’t seen him or Dionne since we dropped you off.”

  “Why is everything so wrong today?” Phaedra said. Now she wondered whether Legendary might have won if her father had kept his promise to watch them.

  “Stop worrying yourself, Phaedra. I’m sure Uncle Errol will turn up,” Chris said. He tried to put his arm around Phaedra’s shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

  “Nobody ever shows up for me. Nobody. And you. Christopher. Stop calling my father Uncle Errol,” Phaedra seethed. “He’s no more your uncle than Father Loving is Donna’s father,” she blurted, and instantly wished she could take the words back.

  Donna, Chris, and Mrs. Loving backed away from Phaedra as if her anger were contagious.

  “This day can’t get any worse,” Phaedra said.

  With that, the sky opened up, and the rain the clouds had been holding back all morning was unleashed like an answer.

  • • •

  ONCE THE STADIUM had cleared and the cleaners started sweeping up cotton candy sticks, soda bottles, and wax paper from Kiddie Kadooment, it was clear that Dionne and Errol were nowhere to be found. The scent of popcorn hung in the air, and the empty food carts were strewn near the entrance like forgotten toys. Mrs. Loving packed up the children and went to the church in town where Father Loving was meeting with his old boys’ club from seminary. Called out from the cocktail party, he was alarmed to see his wife and the children. He handed his wallet to Mrs. Loving and waved them off to have dinner somewhere without him, shaking the ice in the drink that was in his hand as a farewell.

  Even though they’d all been excited for Chefette, the children’s gusto was considerably subdued when they finally got there. They sat eating their chicken and chips in silence, no one taking the bait each time Donna tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation. Donna got sick after the second cup of her favorite cherry vanilla ice cream, and Mrs. Loving ushered her to the bathroom. Chris’s mother nodded when he and Phaedra asked permission to go to the play yard.

  Outside, strong winds whipped up off Accra Beach; heavy rains had turned the sand beneath the plastic swings and slides into a thick sludge. Still, the cool breeze was a relief from the stagnant air inside the restaurant. Phaedra was getting onto one of the swings when Chris inched toward her. Phaedra moved back. Her mother’s death had made her wary of closeness.

  “Phaedra, I want to ask you something,” Chris said.

  Phaedra looked up at him, noticing the specks of glitter that sparkled at the corners of his eyes. “OK.”

  “So, you know I like you, right?”

  “OK.”

  “And I was just wondering if maybe I could kiss you.”

  “You don’t have to like me because you feel sorry for me,” Phaedra said. She was glad that the waves were crashing so hard against the shoreline because it meant Chris couldn’t hear her heart thump.

  “I don’t feel sorry for you. At least that’s not a reason to kiss somebody.” Chris shook his head and looked down at her again. “So, can I?”

  Phaedra shrugged her shoulders and held on to the swing’s seat. She let Chris rock her back and touch his lips to hers. She closed her eyes because even she knew this was what you were supposed to do when someone kissed you. And then she felt a strange tingle that started in her tongue and then traveled down her back. When she opened her eyes, she looked around Chris’s long torso to see Donna and Mrs. Loving standing in the doorway to the play yard.

  Just then Father Loving honked his horn. Chris let Phaedra and Donna each have a window seat, even though all of them wanted to avoid the middle seat’s bumps up the gravelly roads outside the city. The car was quiet except for the earnest strains of a program on family radio. Phaedra hated the Christian shows that Father Loving played in his car, but with her thigh touching Chris’s, she sloughed off her annoyance and almost forgot about all the terrible things that had happened that day.

  PHAEDRA HAD HOPED THAT when she got home, Dionne would be there, but she wasn’t surprised when she was not. After Hyacinth finished interrogating Phaedra, even though she didn’t think it would do any good, she called the police station from Ms. Zelma’s house. She didn’t like having to share her business, even with Ms. Zelma, whom she’d known since they were both little girls running up and down the hill. Hyacinth had her own pain pulsing behind her eyes, and she only felt her worry magnify when she heard the concern in Ms. Zelma’s voice, saw the way that she kept shaking her head and talking about how you can’t trust people these days and fussing over Phaedra more than she usually did, offering her a cool drink and biscuits, which Phaedra knew better than to accept. Since a few minutes after she’d gotten off the stage at the stadium, Phaedra had felt a thirst in her throat that several soda refills at Chefette couldn’t quench. But Phaedra knew that it was more than enough to expose that her sister had gone missing; Ms. Zelma didn’t need to know that she was thirsty too.

  As Hyacinth expected, there was nothing that the police could do, given that Dionne had not yet been missing for three days. Hyacinth sucked her teeth hard at the officer who suggested that a girl gone missing during Crop Over didn’t register as a missing-persons case until a couple days after the parties died down. “Sir, I beg you not to pass your place,” Hyacinth said when the man asked if there was a friend’s or boyfriend’s house where her granddaughter might be staying. She thanked the officer for his time, hung up the phone, and bade Ms. Zelma good night.

  When they were back inside their house, Phaedra opened the windows to let in fresh air while Hyacinth dished the pudding and souse she’d made especially for Phaedra to celebrate after Kiddie Kadooment. They sat down to eat, the shadows of Avril and Dionne hovering above the dining room table’s empty chairs. Phaedra pushed the pig feet and sweet potato pudding around on her plate, afraid to tell her grandmother she’d already eaten at Chefette.

  “Your sister say anything to you about leaving?” Hyacinth asked Phaedra once she’d tucked away enough food to satisfy her.

  “She said she wanted to go to Miami with Daddy.”

  “I know that. But did she say anything about when?”

  “I heard her packing, but then I didn’t really think she would leave. Dionne’s always threatening to do things.”

  “That girl have her mother on her. From the first time I see that child, even when she was a wee little thing, her mind was made up about life and she wouldn’t hear another word about it. If she sees something shining, she just picks herself up and goes to it.”

  Phaedra j
iggled a piece of pork onto her fork, and thought for a minute about this reading of her sister, which she didn’t think was entirely untrue.

  “Well, the only thing we have left is our work to do.”

  Hyacinth took out a bottle of rum, and Phaedra raised her eyebrows, a reflex she’d acquired upon seeing her father and mother under its influence, their eyes and mouths turned wilder, as if a cork at the edges of their personalities had come unscrewed.

  “But watch your face, Phaedra. If somebody was looking in here right now, they would think that you were the old lady and not me.”

  “I’m not old. It’s just that I don’t like to see people drinking.” Phaedra frowned.

  “It’s not everybody that turns their lips to a bottle is a drunk. Sometimes we have to coat the throat and wet the eye so we can see more clearly the road ahead.” Hyacinth twisted the bottle open and offered a thimble-sized shot to Phaedra, who shook her head no.

  “That’s my girl. Sometimes people will come to you and ask you to do things you don’t want to do. And the only right answer is no. You start using your head now, it will see you through hard times.”

  Phaedra nodded as if she knew what her grandmother meant; she watched Hyacinth tip the bottle to her lips, and then followed the rum as it slid down her throat.

  They went into the yard where the moon, almost as brilliant as it was full, shone down on them. Hyacinth gave both herself and Phaedra baths scented with Florida water and jasmine and other herbs Phaedra knew the names of now. The water had been out in the yard all day heating up under the sun, and now it was shot through with a coolness that goosed Phaedra’s flesh and made her shiver as the night’s cool breeze moved around her. When they were clean and dressed, Phaedra and Hyacinth made their way up the hill to the church. At the edge of the cemetery, Phaedra hesitated.

  “What frighten you?” Hyacinth asked.

  “I don’t want to go in there with all those dead people.” All summer, Phaedra had run and jumped and played among the gravestones, but now, with her mother buried there and her grandmother beside her, things felt different.

  “So you think if you don’t walk in there, you won’t see dead people? Do you know how many spirits we passed on the road between our house and here? Before time, people used to bury their family in their backyards so they could go talk to them whenever they want.”

  “It’s different, though. I know someone dead now.”

  “Even better, then. You’ll have more to say. And someone to help you from the other side.”

  Phaedra hesitated, but then quickly followed her grandmother once she realized it was better to keep walking with Hyacinth than to be left alone.

  They made their way toward Avril’s grave, which was positioned in a way so as to receive the full light of the moon. A fresh bouquet of Avril’s favorite hibiscus sat at the head of the plot. Phaedra and Hyacinth admired the flowers and then sat on the ground, which was damp and still slightly raised. There had been no money for a tombstone, just a small cross made of poured concrete, with Avril’s name and dates of her birth and death. It cost Hyacinth a small fortune and the indignity of begging a distant cousin to make the cross at a deep discount. But she thought that Avril deserved at least this.

  Phaedra sat at the edge of her mother’s grave, boring her eyes into the cross as if by deciphering the numbers and letters she might crack the code of why and how she’d died. Phaedra remembered what her grandmother had told her about Avril’s suicide. But this image, of a woman brave enough to take her life, didn’t match up with the mother Phaedra had left in Brooklyn. A lot had changed in the last few years, when Avril had gone from being a woman who was vibrant and full of life, writing children’s books for Dionne and Phaedra, taking them to every free event she could, making elaborate birthday celebrations for them, to someone else, someone dull and slow moving, burdened by the world. Maybe this woman could have killed herself, although Phaedra suspected that in the end her sadness wouldn’t have allowed her to go through with something so terrifying as jumping in front of a train. Phaedra remembered how tightly Avril held her hand when they stood waiting at the Sterling Street subway station, how many times Avril warned her not to ever walk between the cars. Still, so much had changed about Avril in the last few years, and Phaedra considered that the Avril who’d waved good-bye to her and Dionne at JFK airport in her slippers might be capable of doing anything that she thought might relieve her pain.

  Phaedra held out hope that the end of summer might wipe clean the slate of what had come before, that one morning she would wake up and still have her mother and her sister, be back in Brooklyn, and none of the bad things that summer brought would be true anymore. In this moment, Phaedra felt as far as possible from this vision of the future as she could possibly be. She dug her hand into the dirt and felt her mother there, and some part of her ached less violently than before. With an anchor to the land, she felt steadier, safe.

  “So what do we do now?” Phaedra asked. Her grandmother was bathed in the pale brilliance of the moonlight and starlight. Phaedra looked at Hyacinth’s face, the lines around her mouth and forehead that had deepened from creases into valleys in the weeks since Avril’s passing. Phaedra thought then, though she’d never thought it before, that her grandmother had been beautiful once, and was now too.

  “Nothing to be done different now than if your mother was standing in front of you.”

  “But she’s not!” Phaedra shouted. She looked down into her lap, at the way that the front and back of her palms were almost the same color now, equally coated in dirt.

  “I know that, Phaedra, I know. Come,” Hyacinth said, and stretched open her arms. Phaedra went toward the now-familiar musk and starch of her grandmother’s clothes.

  “Cuhdear. You need something to loosen your tongue and say the things that need saying. You hold on too tight to something that you don’t need and your hands won’t be open for the thing that you most need when it comes along.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  Hyacinth reached into the white canvas bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out a flask. She tipped a bit of the liquor onto her index and middle fingers, and then pressed them to Phaedra’s tongue.

  “Now, speak, child. Talk as if everything you want to say can be heard.”

  Phaedra dug her knees into the earth and stared at the swirl of dates and names to which her mother’s life had been reduced. When she felt her words come, she spoke.

  “Mommy, I don’t know what happened to you. One day we were getting ready to get on the plane, running around trying to find this and that and you were running behind us, telling us not to forget our toothbrushes, and our sweaters for the cold nights. When we didn’t hear from you, we thought that maybe that meant you were so busy getting your life together that you didn’t have time to call us or to write. Mr. Jeremiah says that you can’t be living your life and talking about living your life at the same time, that if you are, it’s not really living you’re doing. So we thought maybe that’s what you were doing, living. But then I realized that wasn’t what you were doing at all, that while we were running around here and playing and getting in trouble, you were back in Brooklyn, and moving further and further away from us. You were dying there. And once you were dead, there was nothing we could do to bring you back to us. Well, not alive, anyway. When I was little, you used to laugh at the same knock-knock jokes I told you over and over again, and you’d laugh every time as if it were the first time. What I’ve wanted to tell you all this time more than anything is that I forgive you. And that I understand why you might have had to leave us. Granny’s teaching me a lot of things. I bet some of the things you don’t even know. And Dionne, well, Dionne is Dionne. She ran away with Daddy, and I just want her to be back here with us, so it could be the three of us again. Or the four of us, really, because I still count you even though you’re not exactly with us. Mommy, I’
m not sure if you can hear me. Or what you might be able to do if you can. But if you can, if there’s something you can do about it, please send her back to us.”

  Phaedra was close to the headstone now, her ear pressed to the cool earth, her head just above where she thought her mother’s head might be. She stayed there for a while, listening for the sound of Avril below the hill. She would have stayed longer, had Hyacinth not nudged her and told her it was time to go home.

  ASK A BAJAN where their navel string is buried and you will get as many answers as people you ask, and all of them will have to do with home. Hyacinth, while a believer in the medicine that her mother and grandmother had passed down to her, also knew that there was more than one way to skin a mongoose. So, after she and Phaedra called on Avril to help them, she decided to turn over one last stone. Whenever she needed something, it was nothing for Hyacinth to drop in on someone she had delivered, and find them either in their garden or in their house, at their work site or in their office. And even if they were a big man or a big hard-backed woman, there was none that could resist doing a favor for the woman who had seen their naked bottoms before even their mothers, who had bound their bellies and given them a tether to this world.

  So on the second day Dionne was missing, while everyone else was busy putting the final touches on their costumes for Grand Kadooment Day, flapping their mouths about which man or which woman they would be working up on while they went down Spring Garden, finalizing their party plans, stirring batches of rum punch with heavy hands, Hyacinth paid a visit to Inspector Joseph. The inspector was a burly man whose grumbling so thoroughly frightened his subordinates into doing their work that he’d built a reputation for running the most efficient police station on the island and become the go-to man for anything criminal in Barbados. Never mind that Hyacinth hadn’t seen the inspector since he was wearing short pants and going to Bird Hill Primary School, before his mother had the terrible business with his father that required her to flee first to the west coast and then to the States. The year before Phaedra and Dionne arrived, when women started turning up dead in the wells in St. George, it was Inspector Joseph’s face that flashed beside a news story about a crackdown against sexual violence in Barbados. And Hyacinth, who couldn’t understand how a country that could get so up in arms about elections and Crop Over and cricket barely sounded off about the phenomenon of their daughters and granddaughters and nieces being disappeared, felt some pride in knowing she had something to do with Inspector Joseph being a voice of reason and, more important, a man of action in response to the gruesome murders. Within two months of declaring that the island would not tolerate this kind of violence against its women, the wells were full only of water again. With Dionne gone, the inspector was the first person Hyacinth thought to call upon.