“Likkle cocoa-tea?” the woman had repeated, louder, and Sarah had shaken her head, not wanting anything anyone would offer her here.
For a long time after, there’d been no other visitors. She’d finally shuffled to the bed—her hands shaking—where she eventually lay down on her side in the fetal position. The first rational thought she’d had was that someone had entered her room at Roper’s uninvited, had pulled her underwear and painting clothes out of the drawers, taken her dresses off their hangers, and packed them up. Everything had been planned in advance, and the men had been waiting for her to leave her painting spot. Her mind kept circling back to Janet and she’d gone through a series of protests, in case the woman appeared and accused her of carousing with Danny.
“I teach him art, that’s all,” she was going to say. “I haven’t even seen him for days.”
After it got dark, she didn’t switch on the light, but lay in the same position, willing someone, anyone, to come and rescue her. When the door was unlocked and reopened, she’d pretended to sleep until the door closed again.
She hadn’t slept that first night, her whole body rigid, waiting for whatever, sure something would happen. It didn’t seem right that someone could disappear and be locked up without the police being called. She lay in wait for a siren. Surely, surely, she’d soothed herself, Sonja or Ford would report her missing and the police would come. But there was only the dripping of the bathroom tap. At least once an hour she’d raised her head, listening for cars real or imagined, hearing footsteps coming down the corridor. A door had opened and closed. Someone speaking loudly had passed, the syllables harsh and disjointed.
Just before dawn, a rooster had crowed loudly somewhere. She’d felt her way to the bathroom and turned on the light. While she relieved herself, she looked around the stark, windowless room, even whiter than the bedroom. It had no shower curtain or mirror and only a bar of soap and one thin towel.
She must have fallen asleep after, because she’d awakened to find the old woman bending over her, the round cheeks and stubby mustache making her look like a walrus. She was wearing a striped dress this morning and her breath smelled of coffee.
“Likkle breakfast,” she said, a drop of saliva falling on Sarah’s arm.
“Where am I?” Sarah had ventured, but the Walrus had only shrugged and left the room.
The day had passed uneventfully, the prisoner waiting for something to happen, wondering why her abductors hadn’t come back, refusing to eat again, drinking from the dripping bathroom tap. By afternoon, she couldn’t stand her own grime and decided to take a shower, even if the water splattered on the floor. She’d found clean clothes among the mix of things thrust into her suitcase and showered with as little water as possible, looking over her shoulder through the open door, thinking of the movie Psycho, which she’d watched with a cousin, and drying off with the pink towel on the rack.
After dressing, she’d taken her first look out the window. To her left was a tree that rose higher than the louvers. About twelve feet in front of her was an expressionless blue wall, separated from the house by dry dirt interspersed with weeds. As tall as a man and running parallel to the house, the solid concrete wall held a sparkling and terrifying detail. Cemented into the top of the wall was a sinister line of broken bottles, the jagged brown and green points translucent in the afternoon light, scoffing at the distant ocean visible above.
She’d turned and walked to the door, the porcelain tiles cool beneath her bare feet, and put her hand on the knob. It turned easily, but a latch prevented it from opening. Peeping between the door frame and the door, she’d seen a shadowy obstruction above the knob, a thick bolt, it looked like. No one appeared to be around, no sound of movement or footsteps.
Imagining who else was in the other rooms along the corridor (residents, captives, other women?), the artist had passed the rest of the afternoon sitting on the bed, first cross-legged, then with her back to the headboard and legs straight, and then on the edge of the bed. She’d drunk water from the noisy tap, made her first scratch on the wall to mark the days. At one point she heard distant noises from what she assumed was the kitchen, the clanking of a pot on a stove, the rattle of china. When the tray was brought in, the woman had removed the last untouched meal and gone away down the corridor, sucking her teeth.
That second night she’d slept fitfully, aware finally of light creeping into the room and the rooster crowing again, over and over. Breakfast had been early that morning. Walrus had been wearing a pale yellow dress with long sleeves and a large hat.
“You haffe eat,” she’d declared. She deposited the tray, removing the uneaten meal, and left. What looked like salt fish, ackee, and breadfruit, recalled from breakfast at Roper’s house, sat on a white plate, the concoction swimming in oil, forcing Sarah to put the tray in a corner. Shortly after, the still of the house was broken by a church choir singing a cappella, the church perhaps a few hundred yards away. One woman’s voice rose above the rest, pleading with God to aid her somehow. Sarah had paced for a while when all was quiet again, then lain down and slept. When she awoke, there was a fresh tray on the bedside table. She was still lying in the fetal position when the latch was slammed open.
“You have money on you?” It was the driver, asking the question even before he got into the room. He stopped just inside the door and left it open. The corridor behind him was empty. Sarah sat up on her elbow, her heart jumping to her throat. Driver leaned on one leg. He had a scar that ran from the front of his ear down to his throat, unnoticed before.
“You deaf or what? I said, mon-ey.”
She tried to swallow. “I don’t—a hundred, maybe, a hundred and fifty American dollars.”
“I going to need it to buy food for you. The boss don’t pay us yet.”
Sarah stood up, steadying herself on the bed. “In my wallet, but I don’t think—”
The driver opened his mouth—about to curse again, she could tell—and she ran for her handbag and handed it over.
“You—you can’t keep me locked up,” she blurted out as he rifled through her wallet. “It’s against the law.”
The man’s wide mouth slackened and one side pulled up in amusement. “Is foolishness you talking. You don’t see where you are? You lock up, you can’t get out.” He waved toward the window. “You see any police coming for you? Blood claat,” he said, after he’d withdrawn the money, “only eighty dollars.”
“Why am I here?” she pleaded. “You can’t just kidnap me like this.”
“You think anybody care?”
Tears bubbled up inside. She sank with them to the floor, determined not to cry. “I haven’t done anything wrong, believe me. Somebody has made a mistake. Please let me go, please, please. I haven’t done anything, I swear to you.”
“Get up!” the man barked.
Walking on her knees, Sarah approached the man holding out her hand. “I’ll do anything you want, anything,” she pleaded. “Just let me go, I beg you.”
“Anything?” he asked, and threw the bag on the bed.
“Anything, whatever you want.”
“Cook my food, wash my drawers?” He snickered, enjoying his own wit.
“Anything, but please, please let me go.”
“I love it, Englishwoman on the floor begging me.” A sudden frown brought his eyebrows low over his eyes. “You ever see my trial? Nothing I can’t stand more than a begging woman.” He slapped her outstretched hand away.
“I promise you, I won’t tell them anything. I won’t tell them what you look like or what the house is like. I’ll pretend that I don’t remember.”
They stared at each other, not moving, she not daring to breathe, outside the window only the sound of a scratching dog.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
* * *
Just a couple hours to Montego Bay now,” Shad said, shifting down and glancing
at his passenger. Danny was staring out the window, his big hand on the side mirror. He was somewhere else, Shad could tell—back in New York, perhaps—not seeing the inverted canoes and rocky beach passing the vehicle. “Your mother going to be glad to see you, man.”
“Yeah.”
“You really want to go home, though?” It was worth pushing the American a little before depositing him at the airport.
Danny looked straight ahead. “Back to reality, you know.”
“But Jamaica sweet, man. Every tourist who come here say they don’t want to go home. You going to see for yourself when we open the hotel. Two drinks at the bar and they start planning how they going to move down here. And when they leave, they always say they coming back.”
“I don’t even know if I’m coming back, man.”
Shad opened his eyes wide, wanting the man to see, if not feel, his disappointment. “What you saying, that you not going to build the hotel again?”
The man shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“But you like Largo, though?”
“What’s not to like?”
“So is what?”
Shaking his head, Danny sighed and hit the mirror. “Things just seem so—kind of crazy. I don’t like to do business when things don’t go smoothly, and nothing has gone right with this hotel. Horace has been like a mule from the get-go. Then the government red tape is never ending. The cost of everything seem to go up every time we discuss any changes. And even if we get through all of that, Lambert was telling me that strikes during construction happen sometimes. That’s more money. I’m superstitious. If things don’t happen like that,” he said, sweeping a flat hand above the dashboard, “then they’re going to be sticky all the way.”
“But that’s how it always happen in Jamaica, star. If you want to succeed here, you have to hang on until everything go like that.” He imitated Danny’s sweeping hand.
“I don’t know, man. I’m not feeling it.”
“I think you hurt because your painting teacher gone, too.”
His passenger turned away, gave his distraction to Port Maria’s parish church, the stone walls holding two hundred years of secrets. “I—yeah, I don’t know. It was kind of weird, how she just left and didn’t say nothing.”
Shad shook his head. “She was so polite, she don’t seem like a person who would just disappear.” He shifted to a lower gear. “If you like her, you should call her when you get to America.”
“Like I told you, I don’t have—”
“Can’t you just look her up on the computer? I hear you can look up everybody on the computer, so my daughter says.”
“I guess I could.”
“Yeah, man, every woman like a man to go after her—if she like him. And I think she like you. She used to follow you with her eyes, and when you talking she would nod her head, like everything you say was important to her.”
Danny tucked his chin in. “You think so?”
“I’m telling you, the woman like you.” Ahead of them, a donkey cart full of breadfruit slowed them down. After two cars rushed by, Shad overtook the cart, waving to the old man sitting up front with a switch.
“You see that man?” Shad tilted his head back at the cart as he sped up. “He always riding up and down this road. He don’t have no Jeep to take his breadfruit to town, but all these years he using that cart and that donkey. And sometimes the donkey get sick, and sometimes the cart wheel come off, but all these years he making his little money and feeding his family. And now his youngest son getting ready to go to school in Kingston to be an accountant, so he tell me in the market. That is how everything in life go. You don’t think so? Slow and steady. You do what you have to do to keep going, work through the hard times.”
The small man’s voice rose a notch. “You understand what I saying, Danny? You can’t just give up. Whether it a love thing or a business thing, success don’t come quick, it take time and effort. Then you get little experience under your belt and you gone clear, that what I tell my children. Sometimes you don’t succeed right away, but you have to keep trying, man.”
It felt odd giving this strapping man advice, a man older than him who owned malls in New York, but Danny’s eyes were swiveling between the passing scenery and the speaker as if he was listening. Shad kept coming back to the subject for the rest of the journey. This was his last shot, he knew, his last opportunity to let Danny know he held the village’s dreams in his hands. Better that he do his preaching, like he used to do in Kingston Pen after he’d gotten so riddled with guilt that he couldn’t help it—preaching to the other young men who couldn’t wait to get back on the streets—than do nothing and regret it for years to come. The worst that could happen was that Danny wouldn’t come back and then it wouldn’t matter if he agreed or not.
Turning into the road to the airport, Shad glanced at Danny. “Think about it, star, just hoping that the hotel coming is keeping a whole lot of people alive.”
“I’ll think about it, bro, but don’t hold your breath.”
Shad screeched to a halt at the check-in, off-loaded Danny’s suitcase, fist-bumped and hugged him, praying for his return.
“He going to think about it,” he assured Miss Mac later.
“That’s good,” she said, examining a book he’d picked up for her in Port Antonio. “I have to sell this house, man. I getting tired of fixing this and fixing that.”
“What you need to fix now?” Shad pulled out a chair and sat down.
Miss Mac pointed upward. “The roof leaking in the bathroom and I always have to put a bucket in there. A guest shouldn’t have to use a toilet next to a bucket, you know? It not civilized.”
“Good thing Danny didn’t come in rainy season.” Shad laughed.
“But rainy season coming next month, and I need a new roof. Is plenty money to do it, but I don’t have it. I trying to hold out until I can sell the place.”
Shad promised to come back with his friend Frank to take a look.
“You always take care of me, eh?” The old lady nodded. She cut into the coconut cake on the counter and placed a slice in front of her visitor. “I hope all the reading and signing not in vain and that the hotel going to get built, because if it don’t, I going to have to move to Horace’s house and leave this house empty. Next thing, some squatter going to come and live in it. They did that with the Franklins’ house in Manchioneal and squatters burn down the house. My father would roll over in his grave if that happen to my house.”
“You know what I thinking, Miss Mac?” Shad mumbled through cake. “I thinking that if Danny don’t want to invest in a hotel here, there must be other people with money who interested. We have a beautiful beach, nice scenery, good people. What you think?”
Miss Mac sat down with her own slice of cake. “Maybe Danny was not the person. You could be right.”
“Why you say so?”
“I don’t know.” The old lady sighed. “I not supposed to talk my guests’ business.”
“Whatever you thinking, you should speak it now, before it too late. Beth always say it not good for a woman to keep something on her chest. I don’t know what would happen if she keep it on her chest, because every woman I know speak they mind.”
Miss Mac munched on her cake. “I didn’t like the kind of people Danny was dealing with, you know? He bring that facety woman here, Janet, and she act like she better than me. I mean to say, she come in my house and ask me if I don’t have anything to drink. You ever hear anything like that? I tell her if she want to buy a drink she can go next door to the bar. Then she look at me with her eye kind of funny, and since that day she walk straight past me in my own house and don’t even say a good evening. She walking into my house, making noise in my bed in Danny’s room, acting like she own the house. You ever hear such a thing?” The home owner dabbed at her mouth with a napkin in disbelief.
Meredith MacKenzie looked up to the ceiling. “And then there was those two men who came to see him couple weeks back. Remember, the big man with the cross and his brother? They didn’t talk much and they say they prefer to wait outside on the verandah for Danny. What business they have with him? I don’t know, even though I want to sell the property, maybe is a good thing he gone, yes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
* * *
Eric plodded up the steep driveway, his breath getting short, perspiration breaking out on his upper lip. There’d been a time eight years ago when he’d fought winds of 180 miles an hour to climb this hill, with no thought about whether he would make it or not. But he felt like he’d aged thirty years in the last decade. Running up mountains was for men like Joseph and Danny now, men who didn’t have paunches and didn’t smoke pipes.
“You look like you need a lemonade,” Jennifer called from the verandah as he approached. She was holding a frosty glass in her hand, the white shorts a perfect contrast to her tan.
“And you look like a nurse to the dying,” Eric answered, climbing the steps. He’d always liked Jennifer and he’d always been envious of Lambert for having a shapely, young wife from Florida who’d taken to upper-class life in Jamaica like she’d been born to it.
She pulled a rocking chair forward. “You better cool down a few minutes, boy. I don’t want you having a heart attack on my porch.”
The Sea Grape Tree Page 20
