Eric threw himself into the chair. “God, every time I climb this hill it gets steeper.”
“I’ve been telling you, if you’d go to the gym in Port Antonio . . .”
Eric took a slurp of lemonade. “And I’ve been telling you, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I do.” They smiled at each other, two refugees from the north.
Jennifer’s blond hair blew across her face in the light breeze and she shook it back into place. There was a confident elegance to the simplest thing she did, a clear understanding of what was right at a particular moment in time. She lowered to a chair beside him, her thigh muscles getting taut.
“Roast beef sandwiches and salad—that good enough for you?”
“Of course.” Eric glanced over his shoulder toward the living room, needing to look away. “Where’s Lambert?”
“He’ll be home soon. He called from the site to say you were coming and I was to have lunch ready for you. Miss Bertha’s getting it ready.”
“I heard your mother wasn’t doing so well. Sorry about that.”
“She’s stabilized now, so I thought I’d come back for a couple weeks,” Jennifer said, her voice softening. “Keep the home fires burning, you know?”
“Good idea, although I’d make sure that Lambert—”
“Uncle Eric!” A small boy barreled out of the house and threw himself at Eric’s knees.
“Little Wayne, my man!” Eric hugged the child’s head and shoulders. “You’re getting so tall, we’re going to have to ship you off to school soon.”
“School, school!” The boy looked up at him, nodding hard, his face shining.
Jennifer reached over and rubbed her son’s wavy black hair. “He keeps asking if he can go to boarding school with Casey. Isn’t that right, son? You want to go to school with your big sister?” She straightened Wayne’s shirt. “You’re going to school in Port Antonio this fall, sweetie. Remember the one we visited, the school with all the kids?”
Lambert’s Range Rover roared up the driveway, a trail of brown smoke in its rear. After parking in front of the steps, the contractor climbed out.
“When are you going to stop polluting the place?” Eric yelled, fanning the air.
“When you find me something cheaper than diesel fuel,” Lambert replied. He mounted the steps and kissed his wife’s upturned mouth. Little Wayne raised his arms and his father scooped him up and held him above his head so the child could touch the sloping ceiling.
“A few more of those lifts and you’ll be flying up to the States for a rotator cuff operation, boy.” Eric chuckled. “Don’t you know that old men shouldn’t be—”
“The only old man around here is you, my man,” Lambert said, swinging his son to the ground.
“Okay, you two, time for lunch.” Jennifer stood up and led the way inside. “And you, Mr. Wayne, are going to have lunch with Miss Bertha in the kitchen. Daddy and Mommy are going to eat with Uncle Eric in the dining room.”
Throughout lunch, the conversation stayed local. Jennifer mentioned the unannounced departure of Roper’s guest, the Englishwoman. She seemed upset about something, Sonja had said. Lambert talked about the impact of the new government on the village, only the main road paved before the elections.
This felt like home to Eric: the easy chatter with people who cared about him, the well-decorated rooms with their soft chairs and tasteful paintings, the leisurely lunch served on good china. It was almost as if his daily existence among bare walls and cheap furniture was a temporary one, and this was his reality. While Lambert was talking about the plans for a new open-air market in the square, Eric realized that he could never have made it in the years since the hurricane without these two people, even if that help brought with it Jennifer’s ongoing curiosity about his personal life.
“How’s Joseph?” she inquired after they’d sat down in the living room for coffee. She lifted the silver coffeepot, biting her lip with the weight of it.
“Just got a big consulting contract, he tells me.” His son was back on track, he wanted to say, and he was in touch with him now, like any good parent.
“And Simone?” she ventured, her eyes fixed on the coffeepot in her hand. “Is she coming back soon?”
Vintage Jennifer, Eric thought, watching the woman’s elaborate Indian-style earrings splicing through the strands of her hair as she passed a cup to her husband. There were times, usually late at night when he sat alone on his verandah, when he thought of Lambert’s winter-spring marriage and wondered if he could do the same. But a man had to think ten times before he launched into the Big M, he’d often mused, because commitment came with a price. A woman in a man’s life was both a blessing and a curse. A man focused on the blessings first, realizing too late that there were unpleasant little habits that came with the package, like nosiness and unpredictability.
Eric had decided years ago that he’d never understand women, largely because they were totally irrational. The decision had come after his ex-wife, Joseph’s mother, had announced one night, just when he arrived home from work, that she was leaving him. She’d said it in a matter-of-fact way, stated that she, a devout Catholic, had no interest in holding it together because of the pope, and it had struck him like a bolt of lightning as he stood in the hall, still holding his briefcase, that Claire, all women, in fact, were unfathomable. He’d refused to try to understand them ever since. Enjoy them, yes, understand them, never. And just yesterday, in one of his rare moments of giving Shad advice, when the bartender had told him that Roper’s guest, the English artist, had suddenly disappeared, he’d advised him not to get involved.
“I think she left of her own free will, man. Something was bothering her. She found Jamaica hard to—she had a lot going on in that head of hers. Artists are like that, anyway, deep thinking, but you can never tell with women. They give us only these little glimpses into their minds and, to tell you the truth, it looks like twisted, tortured stuff to me. They agonize endlessly over things that men would just forget about. The woman left, just accept it.”
Jennifer was no different from other women—a prettier package, maybe, but just as nosy and scheming, asking about Simone, no doubt wanting to know if they still had a relationship.
“She might come for the groundbreaking,” Eric replied. Lambert raised one bushy eyebrow at his friend, signaling that he wanted to talk more about the hotel, and Eric launched in with updates about the quantity surveyors’ reports, relieved to move from the quicksand of his love life to the solid ground of facts.
After Miss Bertha had waddled away with the coffee tray, Jennifer disappeared inside. It was only then that Eric confided his fears to Lambert.
“The whole thing is looking shaky,” he ended. “Nobody but Shad seems enthusiastic at this point.”
“What about Horace?”
“We took him over to the island, Danny and I. He asked a lot of questions but he didn’t say much. I think it’s gotten too complicated for him with the solar panels and cisterns.”
Lambert patted the sofa’s cushion next to him, its tulips cringing under his burly hand. “These things are always touch and go at the beginning. That’s normal.”
“I don’t think we have a prayer now that Danny’s taken off.”
“The important thing,” Lambert said, stroking his mustache down one side and then the other, “is whether you’ve lost interest. Do you really want this thing to happen?”
Eric sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “There was a time when I just wasn’t interested, but the bar is losing money like water through a sieve.” He leaned forward and put his cup on the coffee table. “I don’t want to close down, because people need it, you know. It’s the only place in town where they can have their wedding receptions and parties, you know, Lam. It’s kind of the community center or something. I don’t care for the place that much myself, but it’s part of Largo now.”
He’d disappointed the villagers once before, reminded every day by the ruins of the inn that had thrown dozens out of work when it closed—and he wasn’t going to do it again. “And I couldn’t do that to Shad and Solomon—they have families, you know.”
“I thought you were going to live on your Social Security at Miss Mac’s,” Lambert said with a curling lip.
“Who am I fooling, Lam? The woman is older than me. One way or the other, she’s going to sell up and leave town; then where would I live? At least I have my apartment now, even if the bank could close us down any day.”
“What’s your option then, if Danny loses interest?”
The bar owner leaned back. “If he doesn’t want to go through with it, maybe we can find another investor.” It was Shad’s idea, a shot in the dark.
Lambert frowned. He seemed to be digesting the idea, telling from the way he was staring at the view through the open front doors. “Where are you going to find him?”
“Or her,” Eric said, and shrugged.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
Listening to the Walrus slide the top bolt closed after bringing in the breakfast tray, Sarah held her breath for a second, waiting until the second slid shut. The assault of locking noises outside her door had sorted themselves out after the first few days, and she knew there were two bolts outside. She always waited now to hear if both bolts had been slid shut when someone left. It sounded as if sometimes the bottom bolt was closed with one foot or hand simultaneously with the latching of the top bolt, making it sound like a single noise, but sometimes they were closed separately, and sometimes the bottom bolt wasn’t closed at all.
Her visitors never knocked. She seemed to be a job that had been thrust upon them. Respecting her privacy would have been one task too many. Conversation was limited and brusque, which suited her since she could barely understand what they were saying. Walrus had been her most consistent visitor in the four days she’d been held captive. She’d push the door open with one shoulder, always with a frown and a puffy upper lip, the red plastic tray clasped tightly between her arthritic hands.
The thin man had appeared once with another man, who’d fixed the leaky bathroom faucet. With all of his front teeth missing, the plumber had chatted to his companion as if he were conducting a major repair while he replaced a washer, and he’d smiled at her when they were leaving.
“You can’t keep me here,” she’d said, holding her voice steady, before the men got to the door. “The British High Commission will come looking for me.”
The plumber had looked uncertainly at the thin man, who’d pushed him out and slammed the door behind them, sliding both bolts noisily on the other side.
On Sunday night she’d heard a discussion coming from the living room. She’d tiptoed to the door and put her ear against the tiny gap between door and frame. The low, guttural voice of one man, the driver, it sounded like, was followed by the older man’s higher, clearer words.
“—can’t do that here,” the thin man was whining.
“The boss say so,” the driver had grunted.
“Remember she English, and next thing Scotland Yard come down, and all of us end up swinging from a rope. Is not everything the boss tell you to do you have to do. Remember, she don’t even pay us yet.”
The driver said something inaudible and the skinny man said something about a passport. He seesawed up and down, louder now. “Like how she don’t see nothing coming here, she not going to know how to find us if we leave her near the airport.”
“Don’t give me no bumba claat—” the other shouted.
The conversation got more heated, impossible to translate. The men seemed to be coming to blows and she pushed her ear harder against the gap, straining to hear more about the recurring she of the conversation. The debate ended as quickly as it had flared up with the slamming of the front door. Afterward, she’d sat in the middle of the bed for over an hour, waiting, her arms wrapped around her legs, heart thumping, listening intently to the muffled noises outside.
After a night of dark dreams with no details she could remember, she’d started eating on Monday. Even though her pulse still ran high day and night, even though her ears pricked up at the slightest sound, making her jump in the middle of the night, she’d decided to live, a decision not made lightly. Since she was being allowed another day of life, she reasoned, and since they were feeding her as if she was expected to survive, she needed to live as normally as possible. Not only would it demonstrate maturity, but it would also keep her sane. Cleanliness and sanity were bedfellows, her mother’s aunt used to say. Sarah had started by sorting the clothes in her suitcase into three piles—dirty, clean, half-clean—and started washing the dirtiest items with the cake of bath soap and hanging them over the shower rail.
Her mother had come to mind while she washed her underwear, her mother who insisted on taking packets of detergent on trips. Bent over the bathroom sink, she chastised herself for not writing her mother and Penny more often. They would have missed her postcards and emails and made inquiries, sent somebody to find her. It had never occurred to her before that she needed them, that she needed anybody. She’d often thought she could live entirely alone as long as she could paint, had even flirted with the idea of living on the outskirts of London in a less expensive flat, a place where she’d know no one. But now the absence of the two people closest to her was even more palpable than her hunger, joining the hollowness inside. She wanted to put an arm around her mother’s thinning shoulders, needed to laugh at Penny’s startling comments. But there was nothing she could do now but wait—and take care of herself as best she could.
Eating was a necessity, she’d decided, if she was to be strong enough to escape or fight or run. That afternoon she’d started nibbling at the tray’s contents and discovered that Walrus’s food was tolerable.
“You try the food,” the woman had commented, her frown almost disappearing when she saw that the prisoner had eaten.
“It was good, thank you,” Sarah had replied with a small smile. “A little less oil next time, please?” Walrus had pulled her whiskered chin into the folds of her neck, but the breakfast the following morning was less greasy.
“What’s your name?” Sarah asked the woman when she came back to get the breakfast tray. “My name is Sarah.”
Walrus reached down to pick up the tray. She had whiskers growing out of her ears, too.
“My name Clementine,” she said in a voice so low that her listener had to crane her head forward. Sarah thought later of the Jamaican mother who’d loved her baby enough to name her after a small northern flower, and she pondered the fact that her captors might be from the lower classes, as described by Eric, but that there was a kindness to Clementine that Roper lacked. And she was genuine, like Danny. Her mind sharpened by captivity, Sarah decided that kindness and authenticity trumped race and class for her now, would always trump it going forward. She’d tell her mother if she got a chance.
After Clementine left, Sarah walked to the plastic chair in the corner, still piled high with her easel in its traveling box and the bag with her paints and brushes. She’d thought about it the evening before and concluded that, if her jailors were ever to release her, they would have to see her as a person in control of her life, not as a quivering victim. She’d made two decisions. The first was that she wasn’t going to beg anyone ever again to release her, no matter what happened. As the driver had said, there was nothing more disgusting than a begging woman, and she was already ashamed that she’d groveled at his feet.
The second decision was that she was going to start painting again. Worrying about her fate, puzzling over why she’d been kidnapped and when she was going to be rescued, would lead to nothing but anxiety. After testing the burglar bars and ruling them out, she’d decided that her best course of action if she was going to escape was to let her captors get to know her. She woul
d humanize herself to them, get them to like her, and perhaps negotiate a release that way.
She set up the easel and the chair beside the window, resting her supplies on top of her other bags. In case she had to provide evidence of her imprisonment, to a police force that couldn’t care less about a missing woman, apparently, she began on one of her large sheets—only slightly creased, thank goodness—with a four-by-four sketch of her bed. She paid particular attention to the cheap, varnished headboard with oceanlike swirls carved along the top. On the same sheet she drew the open door to the bathroom, the curtainless shower a dark cave within.
The third sketch she made from the bed. It was of the three vertical windows and their parallel wooden louvers, which she’d started closing at night, unsure of who might look inside while she slept. She added the bars last, paying special attention to the hearts in the decorative overlay. The wall in the background and its glittering crown of glass she couldn’t bring herself to draw.
When she came out of the bathroom later, Clementine was leaning over the bed, looking at the drawings.
“You is a ahtist.”
“What’s that?”
“A ahtist, a say, you is a artist.”
“Yes.”
“It nice,” the woman said, and turned away quickly with the breakfast tray, like she knew she was overstepping her bounds. After Clementine left, Sarah pulled her chair up to the window, angling it to the left so she could sketch the tree.
It was a sea grape tree, Danny had told her, its presence bringing back a day with him on the beach. He’d loved the fruit and said that he and his sister used to eat the salty-sweet fruit that hung, grapelike, in the summer. But it was the flat, open leaves that had fascinated her from the beginning. They were almost perfectly circular, each with a red vein dissecting it, and she’d thought that it made the tree look more animal than vegetable, with warm blood running through its most intimate parts, and she’d wanted to paint one of its leaves ever since.
The Sea Grape Tree Page 21
