She laughed. “This is much as Mata would say.”
“Yeah,” I joined her in the laugh. “My momma too.”
There was a pause. “And your brother … he is one of the good ones, no?”
I patted her arm then. “If you promise not to tell him I said so: yeah. My brother is one of the good ones.”
_________
As we walked, the night seemed too quiet to me. Our feet on the road’s shoulder crunched as if we were grinding the world as we knew it into powder. I wondered if this was how blind people felt, their senses heightened so that every crack of a twig or beat of a wing sounded alarm.
Sanna, who’d been less occupied in the business of ruining my brother’s evening, had long since finished her cone. I was gnawing the final stump of mine when headlight beams swung out from behind us with the open-throat roar of a gunning engine.
I turned and saw the bright parallel beams level out at my face and fly forward, lighting up the shoulder where we stood.
The last thing I remember after that moment was grabbing for Farsanna’s arm to pull her with me off the road and into the woods. But Sanna wasn’t beside me.
I dove for the ditch—a decision I hardly recall making. Gravel from the highway’s shoulder sprayed over my head and pelted me down. And I tumbled from the road’s shoulder down a steep bank toward the woods.
And then the roar seemed landmasses away, far up on the road and retreating. Where I lay down at the edge of the woods was impenetrably black and silent, like someone had pulled the power cord to my world.
14 Pearl of the Indian Ocean
When I came to, I lay still for a moment testing my limbs for signs of life. Everything seemed accounted for and functioning.
“Sanna?”
Nothing.
“Farsanna?”
Still nothing.
Now I was screaming. “Sanna! SANNA!”
Then there were footsteps. My heart threatened to hammer its way out of my chest.
“Sanna? Is that you?”
Without speaking, she hooked her arm through mine, nearly scaring me clean out of my skin. “Hey,” I said, when I could speak. I stepped away, glad I couldn’t see her face in the dark. Especially thankful I couldn’t see her eyes. “Hey, you all right?”
She didn’t answer.
I could hear the question, the What Happened, that neither one of us said, there between us, those words sapped of their strength lately for us. I pulled a row of thorns from my forearm and waited to know what to say, know what to think.
I tried to lay a hand on her arm.
“My Stray?” she asked then. The panic in her voice pushed it higher.
“I … he hasn’t …”
She whistled. We waited.
Something moved close beside us, something slinking out from the woods.
Then Stray touched his nose to our calves. He’d emerged, apparently, from wherever he’d been blown from the road. The dog sat at Sanna’s feet and she threw both arms around him.
The relief of his safety and Sanna’s gave me strength to say what surely couldn’t be true, but needed saying. I took a deep breath. “I reckon maybe somebody was playing.” It seemed the thing to say just then to build a seawall against the fear I could feel swelling.
“Playing?” She didn’t believe me.
I didn’t believe me either.
“Or,” I tried again, “or just, you know, not watching where they were driving. Maybe switching out tapes and looking up almost too late. But not aiming. Not aiming for us. Not even to scare us.”
She would not speak after that. The air between us vibrated with the sounds we weren’t making.
We walked the remaining stretch of highway back to her house in silence, sticking close beside each other, Sanna’s dog close by our feet. Every far-off growl from a motor or the woods sent us ducking for cover.
For the first time I could remember—and maybe the last—the Moulavi house looked attractive up ahead, its curtainless plate-glass windows’ yellow rectangles we ran toward like beacons of safety. Mr. Moulavi was kneeling, I could see, on the living room floor. Farsanna, still trembling, touched my elbow and we both skirted toward the back door. She knelt to stroke the Stray, and let him kiss her cheek and nose and chin. She may have been crying again, but she seemed not to want me to see, so I didn’t look. I bent to stroke his back and was startled to find his coat soft, homely as he was.
Sanna put a finger to her lips. Glancing right and left, she cracked open the back door and let the dog go in before us. Apparently not unused to this liberty, he skirted the one light thrown from the living room, and keeping to the shadows, padded down the hall.
Her mother nodded as we entered, and I held my breath waiting to be called upon to recount what had happened on the highway. If she saw the Stray slip past, she said nothing.
And Mrs. Moulavi didn’t ask if we’d had a nice time, and her daughter didn’t volunteer anything. Kissing her mother on the forehead, Sanna walked through her bedroom door that lay just off the kitchen. I nodded and cranked up one end of my mouth in an attempt at a smile and followed.
Watching Sanna’s mata limp back through the kitchen, I closed the door and collapsed on Sanna’s bed. I wriggled my legs between the sheets, rough and pilled, like I was tired, hoping maybe my body would take the clue. It didn’t. I lay awake in the dark, my head hurting with the crush of too many thoughts.
Sanna had lain so still and so quiet I’d assumed she’d long been asleep. The Stray certainly was, his snores rising and receding from the end of the bed. But Sanna rose and walked quietly to the window. Maybe sleep felt like a distant, unreachable place for her, just like it did for me. When she glanced once over her shoulder, she seemed as if she were checking to see that I wasn’t awake.
“What are you looking at?” I asked her.
She jumped a little at my voice, but didn’t take her eyes off the black outside her window. “Tonight, the moon is like a pearl.” She must’ve had a better view of the sky than I did, still huddled in bed. “Like the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”
I could barely make out what she said, her face turned away like she was whispering words off a black screen.
“What?”
“My home. Sri Lanka is called the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”
Her pretty face—I caught myself thinking how pretty it was—had gone hard, like she’d been whittled from onyx. “I miss the Pearl. I miss my home, Turtle.”
Her accent hitting my name like rapids at a rock stopped me cold in the midst of whatever flip thing I’d have said just then. With that one word, her Turtle, we’d passed somehow to a different place, crossed some threshold of understanding or trust—not one I was sure I wanted to cross. But there it was, already passed and no turning back.
“Hey, Sanna….” I began as she sat down on the bed. “Lemme ask you something: How come you hardly talk about Sri Lanka? Not even when somebody asks you, like L. J.? I mean, if you miss it so much—”
“Because I miss it so much.”
“Oh.” I thought about that.
“My father,” she said, her face toward the window. “My father said everything would be for us different here. In America, everyone is equal. In America, everyone is free. In America, everyone does as he wishes, and no one for stopping.”
“Hmmm,” I said, not sure when, or if, I was supposed to agree.
“When my father was young, he loved a Sinhalese girl. Her parents were wealthy and the Goigamas caste, the highest.”
“But I thought the caste system was … Never mind. Go on.”
“They wouldn’t allow with him marriage.”
“Because he looked … Arab? Or because he was Muslim? Or didn’t have enough money?”
“All.�
�
“Oh.” I thought about this. “That’s rough. So what happened?”
“So—” Her eyes stayed on the window. “So he said his daughter must be,” her voice curdled, “an American. Free.”
It was the kind of statement Momma would’ve assigned to the care of a hug. But I said: “Reckon it’s not always so great for you here.”
She had her face towards the moon again—which was just fine with me. “What do you think for me it is like?”
“You always look like … like you don’t care jack what anybody thinks. You always look, you know, like, like you don’t give a rip about public opinion. I’ve always liked that about you.”
“To pretend—this is for me to survive.”
I watched her profile, still and hard, which told me nothing. I followed her eyes to the moon.
“Is it beautiful?” I asked after several moments’ silence. “What’s it like, your home?”
She shrugged, a habit she must’ve gotten from me—and didn’t much suit her. “Colombo, the most big city, is full always of many people, and loud. And hot often. The roads are buses, cows, people in bare foot, bicycles, tuk-tuks—”
“What’s that?”
“Like a taxi, with three wheels only. The gutters are full. My father was a shopkeeper. But sometimes we traveled to the most high point, Mount Pidurutalagala.”
“What’s that like?”
“Waterfalls. Forests of big trees, old trees: pine, mahogany, ebony, teak. Women sold by the road cashews. Little villages I saw there. Very more cool than Colombo. At the end, we moved down the coast near to Beruwela. A very old mosque is there.”
“Your father got a better job?”
Farsanna shook her head. “My father rented to tourists equipment for sports in the water.”
“Oh. But you got to live at the beach. That must’ve been nice, huh?”
She leaned against the window frame. “I loved the rattle of the palms. Everywhere coconut palms. We drank from them, from coconuts, with straws. Everywhere was fruit: pineapple, watermelon, papaya, mangosteen, guava—you have these here? We, I mean. We have these here, no?”
“Some, I reckon. Nothing much exotic.”
“There are many rocks. The water was everywhere clear. And blue. So blue.”
I put on feigned surprise. “Bluer than our Blue Hole?”
She smiled, still gazing outside at the moon.
“Sounds like paradise.” That part I said more gently. “No wonder you miss it.”
“My family could not make a living there.” She turned toward me then, but seemed not much to see me. “No place on this earth,” she said, “is paradise.”
And over and over again that night, as I stumbled toward sleep, I slipped into faded dreams of Stray’s silky ears across Jimbo’s thigh. Of the screech of Em’s truck tires on Seventh Street as we tore away from gunfire and hailing streetlights.
I tried counting sheep, and then ticks of the Blue Hole’s rope swing with nobody on it. But then there was Mort’s face leering from the top of the sweetgum.
I tried smelling the sunbaked hemlock and decaying wood of the Hole, but I smelled instead the exhaust of the good Reverend Riggs’ El Camino as he, one foot on the running board, one foot on the road, straddled, indecisive, his intention to go.
As I crept closer to sleep, I saw Farsanna and me laughing and eating ice cream. And then came truck headlights like battering rams.
And I was reminded again that maybe things were worse than we thought, than we’d any of us been willing to say.
Those last words of hers swelled in my mind and wouldn’t leave room for sleep: No place on earth is paradise.
There was more, I was sure, that she hadn’t told me. Something more that had happened out there on the road.
No place on earth is paradise.
That’s what I heard, propped up beside her against the pillows, both of us leaning a little in towards each other, staring down the blank face of the night. And that’s what I heard as I finally fell toward a sleep that was like tumbling down the slope toward the Hole: Paradise … I miss my home, Turtle … No place on earth …
15 Shadows in the Shape of a Coward
Farsanna had been asleep for maybe an hour, her breathing becoming a tide. The same almost-full moon we’d earlier used to guide our way down the Pike now taunted me outside Farsanna’s one small window, which faced the woods behind her house. I rose to look for some kind of blinds to yank down.
I stood at her window a moment, startled by the sheer size of the moon, impaled by a tall, dead pine trunk like in a ghost story. As I looked out, a shadow flitted across the bare strip of backyard. It didn’t at first strike me as strange. But no other shadows were moving. The shadow lengthened. And moved on two legs.
A breath logjammed in my chest. I ducked by the window, its sill even with my nose.
The shadow was approaching the house.
Dropping lower, I crawled on all fours to the kitchen. The only phone I’d seen in the house hung beside the stove.
But who could I call? I crouched beside the stove a moment—but only a moment—thinking. And felt the slam of my heart nearly rock me off balance.
I stood only long enough to find seven numbers, counting out their position in the dark and waiting for the everlasting spin-back of the dial. And then I squatted again, one hand cupping my mouth at the receiver’s mouthpiece.
The chances of Emerson’s being home, I knew, weren’t too good. There being Neesa involved. I was already wishing I’d dialed out Jimbo’s when the phone rang a first time.
I saw out the kitchen window the figure crossing the backyard again, moving from the far woods near the driveway towards the back kitchen door, not ten feet from where I crouched.
The phone rang again.
There was no jack in my parents’ bedroom, only the upstairs study and the kitchen downstairs. So only if Emerson were not still out with Neesa, and only if he were not already asleep in his room and only …
It rang a third time.
Of course he would still be with Neesa. I pictured her little white hot pants again, and the plunge of her halter.
I stretched my arm to hang up the phone but froze: Someone had bumped up against the Moulavis’ back kitchen door. He was on the back stoop behind the kitchen.
“Hello?” Em’s voice cracked through the receiver I was holding above my head. I jerked it down.
“Em!” I whispered.
“Turtle? What—?”
“Em, you gotta come.”
“What?”
“For real. You gotta come now!”
“If this is your way of making sure Neesa—”
“You gotta get here! Somebody’s outside.”
“Outside? Outside Farsanna’s?”
“And he’s acting like he wants to come in! Em, hurry!”
The line’s going dead told me my brother was already halfway out the screen door.
Creeping as silently as I could to the kitchen window, I watched the figure retreat again towards the woods by the drive. But he’d already slipped that way once before and come back. I crossed the living room to the front door, which was locked.
I’d no idea what to do. I slipped through the front door into the warm black of the night, my skin gone clammy and cold.
The figure was approaching again from the far woods by the drive. Keeping close to the block of a house whose warehouse brick I couldn’t see in the dark, I slipped along the front of the house to its side, then dropped to my stomach and slithered, like I’d seen men do in the army movies I watched with my brother. My elbows dragging the length of me across the dead grass and bare clay, I reached the edge of the drive closest to the house, then slunk quickly across its gravel arm to the opp
osite side, to where the weeds had grown long enough to help hide me.
Not only could I see better from this position—this struck me as real brave of myself—but also I was closer to where Emerson would pull in his truck—and maybe take me away. So if I was brave, it was still splintered with scared.
I lay still while the figure slipped back towards the woods.
In that instant he turned, and just before he ducked again into shadows, the pearl of a moon shone full on his face.
I heard myself gasp—maybe more of a gag, a scream that I muffled.
I knew the face, and knew I’d made no mistake, not even in the yellow of a carnival moon.
There was the round form and face of the good Reverend Riggs.
16 Overheard in the Dark
Its headlights off, Emerson’s truck crept to a stop on the gravel shoulder in front of the Moulavis’ house—as quietly as a Ford can growl across gravel, which isn’t very quiet at all. I leapt for the driver’s-side door, yanked it open, and dove across him into the passenger seat with Big Dog, who licked the back of my neck.
“Em!” I was panting myself. “You can’t believe … It’s not what—”
“First off, calm down.”
“Calm down! Em, I saw who it was! Who it is—he could be back any minute!”
“You saw who it was?”
I clutched my throat with my hand to keep my heart from slamming its way up through my neck. “It was …”
“Who?”
“It was the Jimbo’s, the reverend good daddy, the good Rev—!”
Emerson stared at me a moment before speaking. “What’d you have for dinner, Turtle?”
“Stop it, Em. I know what I saw.”
“Right.”
“Stop it! I saw his face!”
“In the dark.”
“By the moon. I know his face when I see it, ’bout as well as I do yours.”
“Come on, Turtle, why—?”
“Didn’t say I knew why. I said I saw him. That’s all.”
“All right, all right. Look, let’s get out of the truck. Which way’d you see him go?”
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