Here Comes the Sun

by Nicole Dennis-Benn

  “Hold on!” he says, his voice riding steady above the roar of the waves. “Jus’ hold on!” And Thandi obeys, holding Charles tightly as he snatches her from Pregnant Heidi’s grasp and carries her back to shore.

  Thandi feels exposed, walking next to a boy this way, with her dress clinging to her. She’s soaked from head to toe. But there’s something comforting in being led. Following one step behind Charles, she observes the back of his heels, crusted with dirt. He carries his shoes in one hand and Thandi’s shoes and sketchpad in the other, whistling lightly as he walks. Occasionally he looks back at her. Thandi bows her head shyly. Had it not been for Charles, she would have drowned. “Thank you.” She peers up at him when she says this, emboldened by gratitude.

  “Let’s get you a towel,” he responds. He leads her inside his yard, where two big hogs are walking around inside a pen. By the fence there is a chicken coop where the cackling fowls are squared away, high-stepping over each other and digging holes in the ground with their beaks. Thandi is familiar with this yard, her childhood memories rich with adventures with Charles’s younger sister, Jullette. While Miss Violet and Delores swapped ingredients from their kitchen (“Beg yuh a cup ah salt. Gimme jus’ a throw ah rice. Fill dis up wid some syrup. Yes, yes, dat will do. Likkle more.”) Thandi and Jullette would climb the soursop tree that once hovered above the chicken coop, pretending to be leaders of the squawking birds. What remains of the tree is a stump. Through the wire fence Thandi sees the ocean in which she nearly drowned. Miss Ruby’s shack is not too far away. Like Miss Ruby, Charles and Jullette’s father made money selling fish. Asafa was a fisherman who used to walk around River Bank with lobsters and crabs. He used to scare all the children by reaching into a white plastic pail and holding up the creatures with their scissor claws and antennas poised for attack. The children screamed. Dread would send their little feet running, some tripping over stones and gashing knees and elbows in search of safety behind their mothers’ skirts. Though this was a terrifying event, every child in River Bank looked forward to Asafa cutting across the lanes with his bucket. They eagerly anticipated it like they anticipated Christmas market and the Junkanoo parade in the square. Asafa was the only fisherman who went beyond Pregnant Heidi to catch fish, his thick dreadlocks knotted on top of his head and shorts hiked up his long, skinny legs. Every morning he would be out at sea, patiently sitting with his rod or snorkeling, his bright yellow, green, and red boat docked in the bluest part of the water. The last time Thandi saw him was eight years ago, before he met a woman who bought a lobster, took him back to her villa, and invited him to go with her to America. He never returned.

  Thandi remembers Delores offering Charles and his siblings some of her chicken-back soup with lots of boiled yam, boiled bananas, and dumplings on Saturday evenings the year Asafa left. Jullette went to live with relatives, since Miss Violet could not afford to feed all her children and send them to school. It was easier for Miss Violet with the boys, since boys can survive on their own. Charles, the oldest, was hired by neighbors to wash fences, move stones, haul fallen branches, cut grass, carry bags, and push vehicles that got stuck in the potholes up the steep incline on River Bank Road. But Charles couldn’t feed his mother and his three brothers with the little money he made, so Delores and Miss Gracie offered to help. Charles would be the one sent to collect the food, his eyes lowered to his bare feet, his broad shoulders raised like a protective wall against the many whispers and the shaking of heads. Of course, they must have blurred in the periphery of his vision as he carried the pot of food the way pallbearers carry a coffin. He used to mumble his gratitude to Delores as though he expected such generosity and resented it at the same time.

  Four dogs roam the yard, two of which follow Charles and Thandi. Charles shoos them away, picking up two sticks to throw. “Fetch dis!” He throws each stick as far as he can and the dogs limp and wobble after them. “That’s Cain and Abel.” Charles points to the dogs.

  “You name yuh dogs?” Thandi asks.

  “Yeh, man.” Charles looks at his dogs, scratching the tip of his nose. “That one there wid the chain ’roun him neck is Cain,” Charles says, pointing to a spotted white dog. “An’ di brown one is Abel.” He points to the other dog. He then turns to the hogs in the pen. “That’s Mary wid di titties, and that’s Joseph wid one eye.” Thandi looks at each hog, paying close attention to Mary, the fat one with taut nipples who wobbles around. “We sell her babies last summer,” Charles explains. “But she breeding again.”

  “Yuh talk about them like people,” Thandi says.

  “Of course!” His enthusiasm elevates one side of his face and spreads to his eyes. “Dey jus’ as smart, if not smarter than us.”

  The outhouse is a few feet away from the shack, which is built on stilts like many of the other shacks. The planks are still painted in that same red and blue paint that Asafa layered before he left. Under the dense shade of trees, a zinc shack stands away from the main shack. “This is where ah sleep,” Charles says.

  “You don’t live in the house too?” Thandi asks.

  “Me is a big man. I get my own place,” Charles says defiantly. He opens the door to the small shack. It’s cozy, with a mattress on a spring box made from four planks hammered together. The mattress is covered halfway by a white floral sheet, soiled with that yellowing hue of old sweat. A kerosene lamp rests on a wooden table next to the mattress. Her eyes climb the walls to the window through which a gentle breeze blows the banana leaves. Thandi wonders how he sleeps at night with no curtains. Standing in the shack next to Charles, Thandi feels exposed. She hugs herself and watches Charles put down the two pairs of shoes on the basket-woven welcome mat that’s frayed at the edges. He then searches around the place for something, opening and closing the wooden chest by the bed. When he finds it he lets out a whistle.

  “Take this.” Charles hands Thandi a big bath towel. Thandi doesn’t know how long it has been sitting at the bottom of that chest. She dabs her face. It smells like shampoo.

  “It used to belong to my father.”

  He takes the towel from Thandi and covers her shoulders. Very gently he sits her down on a wooden chair. He sits on the makeshift bed, his long legs jutting up like the legs of a praying mantis. Thandi tucks a lock of her hair behind her ears and looks down at the space between her legs.

  “How is Jullette?” she asks, breaking the uncomfortable silence. She sits back against the hardness of the chair.

  “Last ah heard, she’s doing fine,” Charles says.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Still in Mobay. She’s a housekeepah fi one ah di big hotel dem. Half Moon, ah t’ink.”

  “She not in school?”

  “Nah, sah.” He rubs the back of his head. “Jullette drop outta school longtime.”

  “Oh.”

  “She doing good fi herself, making har own-ah money. Good money too.”

  “As a maid?”

  “It gi’ har nuff independence. She ah handle har business.”

  “Good for her. Tell her I say hello.”

  Charles tilts his head and regards her sideways. “Yuh can tell her that yuhself.”

  This is followed by another silence that leaves Thandi empty of words. Perhaps Charles is torturing her. That he knows she hasn’t even spoken to Jullette in, what? Five years? But this is not something Thandi or Jullette would ever acknowledge, for their separation is unspoken. She’s embarrassed about the beating of her heart, which punches with the force of gloved hands inside her rib cage. “I—I have to leave,” she says evenly, using every muscle, every ounce of willpower, to appear collected. “It’s getting late.”

  “I can walk yuh back,” Charles says, lowering his knees.

  “No. No need.” Thandi springs up from the chair. She can hardly bear to imagine what would happen if word got back to Delores that she was hanging out with Charles this late. Charles leans back on his elbows, watching her through long, thick eyelashes.

 
“Yuh really did intend fi swim?” he asks.

  Thandi shrugs, her shoulders tensing under the weight of his question. “No.” She moves with his towel, not offering to give it back. And he doesn’t ask.

  “And before dat, when I saw you?”

  “I just wanted to be inspired.”

  “You’re pretty good,” he says.

  “Who told you could look in my book?”

  “You left it. Di breeze blow it open.”

  She lowers her eyes, embarrassed by what he probably saw. She touches the nape of her neck, feels her skin dissolve under the warm caress of his gaze. “Thanks,” she says.

  She walks out of the shack and all the way home with his towel draped around her shoulders, a smirk hinged on her face; and, under the gossip of watchful women, ignoble.

  “Did you go swimming?” Margot is sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed. Thandi takes off Charles’s towel and folds it. Each crease traps bits and pieces of her secret that she will unfold in private. “Yes,” she replies with her back turned to her sister.

  “You hate swimming.”

  “I was hot.”

  “Thandi, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  Margot’s face is illuminated by the light of the kerosene lamp. Thandi never sees her during the day. She forgets what she looks like in daylight. Tonight her eyes and lips are dark, and in this lighting, her glare is ferocious, the charcoal she draws above and under her eyes making her look like a dog with rabies.

  “Sit.”

  “You okay?” Thandi asks, concerned. Her sister looks as though she has been crying.

  “Don’t ask me anything. I said sit.”

  Margot gestures to the chair at the table. Thandi hesitates. Her clothes are still wet and she needs to take them off. She sits anyway. Margot’s eyes fall to Thandi’s dark nipples. They stand erect through the thin material of the dress. She covers herself by folding her arms across her chest.

  “Who were you with?” Margot asks.

  “No one.”

  “Thandi, look at me.”

  Thandi raises her eyes. Margot appears to swallow something small, the base of her neck pulsing. “What’s going on, Thandi?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Margot walks to the kitchen and fishes several balls of paper out of the trash. The crumpled papers with the sketches that Thandi had ripped from her sketchpad.

  “Can you explain this to me?” Margot asks, pushing them forward.

  “What were you doing in the trash?” Thandi asks.

  “Never mind that. Answer me. What is this?”

  “An art project.”

  “Thandi, all these years we’ve been sending you to school, and you’re wasting time and paper on ah lousy art project and disappearing to do god knows what? Do you know how much ah sacrifice!”

  Thandi clamps her hands over her ears and shakes her head. “Just stop! I don’t want to hear this speech.”

  Margot reaches over the table as if to smack her, but instead pulls Thandi’s hands from her ears and holds her wrists so tight that Thandi yelps. “You listen to me, an’ you listen to me good.” Margot lowers her voice into a hiss. “You have no idea what I do to make this happen. No idea.” She’s talking through her teeth, the words like strings being pulled through the tiny gaps. Thandi has never seen this glint in her sister’s eyes. It burns into her with more force than her sister uses to squeeze her wrists. “Do you know the sacrifices I’ve made so that you don’t end up . . .” Her voice trails off, but not before Thandi hears the tremor in it. She blinks it away, then releases Thandi’s hands.

  “What has gotten into you, eh? What is all dis?” Margot scatters the crumpled papers with Thandi’s drawings on the table. They bounce off each other like balls on a pool table, some falling to the floor. “I thought yuh dropped art last term to focus on science for the CXC. Is dis what I’ve been paying for?”

  “None of your business,” Thandi says, using one hand to massage a wrist.

  Margot slaps her across the face. The slap echoes inside the empty house, reverberating against the walls, the ceiling, out to the veranda, where Grandma Merle sits, mystified by the night sky. “If it was Delores who found this . . .” Margot rattles one of the papers for emphasis, without apology. “You’d be dead. You have no idea what that woman is capable of. None whatsoever! Yuh don’t feel pain yet.”

  Thandi clutches her cheek and runs out the back door, into the darkness. She sits on one of the steps with her knees drawn to her chest and her head resting on them as she cries softly. How could she have gone from the most exhilarating thing that has ever happened in her life to a moment filled with pure humiliation? She tries to conjure up the light that skipped in her veins earlier when Charles held her. But it only fades in the familiar darkness.

  A few minutes pass and Thandi hears Margot’s footsteps approaching her from behind. She looks away when she feels the warmth of Margot’s body next to her, the jelly of Margot’s hips pressed to her bony ones. Margot has brought the kerosene lamp outside. They sit in silence, Thandi’s sniffles being the only sound. Margot finally speaks. “In the real world, drawing cannot get yuh anywhere.” She puts one hand on Thandi’s shoulder, then very gently cups her chin so that she meets her soft gaze. “I still have that heart you gave me. Remember it? It was the first an’ only time that someone ever gave me a heart.” She chuckles softly. “You know, by the time I was your age I was working? I started at fourteen years old. Had no time to think about what I like and didn’t like. I jus’ had to work. I learned the value of making money. Is our only way to survive. An’ even though money can’t buy everyt’ing like class an’ common sense, it can buy acceptance. That’s when people pay attention to yuh, accept yuh as you are. Yuh could be half ah donkey or ugly as a mus-mus, but every man, woman, and child would show yuh respect wid a likkle money in yuh wallet. When yuh work hard, something good would come of it.” The sides of her lips twitch, forming a smile or a scowl, Thandi doesn’t know which. She looks up at her sister in the faint light as she continues to speak. “But if yuh not careful, yuh lose yuh own shadow. Yuh sense ah purpose. So that day when you gave me that heart I folded it up and kept it. Because ah remembered why I work so hard doing what ah do. You gave me something I never knew could come from a person without strings attached to it. I didn’t have to do anything for it.”

  Margot straightens one of the crumpled papers, the sound of the paper crackling in the dark shadows like sparks from a flame. She stares at it for a while. “You draw this?” she finally asks.

  “Yes,” Thandi says. It’s a sketch of clouds moving across the sky at dusk in the form of a woman. The woman appears to be leaping or running as the sun sets in the background. Below is the sea that stirs with her movement; and the hills and mountains that fade behind her. Margot studies it, her face opening up all kinds of ways. When she looks at Thandi again, her eyes slide lovingly over Thandi’s face. “You’re really good,” she says. But then she folds the drawing and tucks it away inside her blouse. “School comes first. Leave this behind an’ focus.” Margot pats the left side of her chest where the paper is folded. “First thing in the morning I’m going to Sister Shirley and I’m going to tell her that I’m not paying for art. You’re doing only science subjects in that exam. Ah g’wan see to this. Delores doesn’t have to know anything.”

  Thandi turns away from her, her body shaking.

  “Look at me, Thandi,” Margot says, forcing her face back. The charcoal Margot wears has made its way into the pits of her eyes. “You’re only going to focus on schoolwork. No art. No boys.”

  Thandi doesn’t respond to this. She thinks of Charles carrying her back to shore, telling her to hold on. Him lifting her up and out of the water, their bodies wet and touching.

  “Is it really true?” Thandi asks, thinking of Charles and the trust he bestowed upon her like a cherished gift.

  “Is it true about what?” Margot asks.
/>   “That I was the only person to ever give you a heart.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  Margot’s mouth opens and closes as though she has lost her ability to speak. She presses her hands and lips together. Then very firmly she says, “Go change off before Delores come home an’ see yuh looking like something a dog dragged in.”

  10

  THE LARGE BLACK AND GOLD GATES OF ALPHONSO’S VILLA OPEN for Margot to enter, and she takes confident strides down the walkway, through the courtyard. The sound of laughter floats toward her and swirls into the pitch-black sky. Margot runs her hands down the length of her form-fitting green dress before she enters. The door is always open when Alphonso is inside. During the day one can look straight through the front door to the back patio, where the turquoise sea is spread like a welcome mat at the end of the hallway.

  Margot enters the villa, where the coral walls are decorated with Caribbean artwork. Alphonso likes to collect. The furniture is sparse, arranged to accentuate the airiness in all five rooms, where mahogany sculptures stand in corners (women with enhanced African features carrying children or baskets, couples bent in shapes that aren’t humanly possible, beheaded humans with sizable breasts and penises). Terra-cotta pots hold green plants with large leaves. The rustic Spanish tiles have a waxy shine, with strategically placed woven mats. When he’s not hosting parties, Alphonso rents the villa to tourists—those who would prefer its relaxed atmosphere to the fenced-in, all-inclusive hotels like Palm Star. Alphonso profits either way.