by Kathy Brandt
Typical O’Brien. I was more concerned about living on the thing than I was about how much it heeled over under sail. I had no intention of taking her out until I could tell a reef line from a jib sheet.
O’Brien stepped on board and offered me a hand. With some coaxing, Sadie finally jumped onto the boat. She’d been a mountain dog her whole life. The idea of leaping onto a structure surrounded by a bunch of water was counter to every dog instinct in her being.
The boat felt like home the minute I stepped below. It was cozy, warmly lit, reflecting deep hues of fabric and wood. Nestled at the base of the stairs across from the desk was the galley, with a four-burner range and an oven, a tiny refrigerator and a freezer. Bookshelves lined the walls of the salon, which was adorned with richly colored tapestries.
On one side of the salon was an L-shaped settee. The seat cushions around the teak dining table had been re-covered with sturdy fabric in reds, blues and tans. On the other side another small teak table was nestled between two overstuffed chairs. A lamp hung from the wall above. The perfect place to read, though Sadie was already claiming one of the chairs as hers.
The aft sleeping quarters had been converted into a little office and storage area. The forward quarters with head were beyond the wall divider in the bow, the bed coming to a point to fit the shape. Along the walls were more built-in shelves. A small triangular table filled a space next to the bed.
Unbelievable aromas permeated the boat. Something was simmering on the stove.
“A bit of welcome-to-the-islands supper,” Tilda said. “Enjoy. We be leaving you to settle in. If you need anything, we live on the second floor of the marina. The bath house is just there on the first floor, the green door right past the store.”
O’Brien and I went up top with them and watched as they strolled back down the dock, the girls skipping ahead of them.
“Nice people,” I said.
“Yes, this is a good home for you,” O’Brien said, wrapping his arm around me. “God, I’m glad you’re back, Hannah. I’ve missed you.” He leaned down and kissed me. “Tilda made enough for both of us, and I brought a bottle of Cabernet. Hope you don’t mind my company.”
“Come here, O’Brien.” I pulled him into me. “I missed you too.”
We ate on deck as the sun sank behind the western hills. O’Brien didn’t leave after dinner. I was happy to have him in my bed that night. I lay awake long after he drifted off, listening to the night sounds, gentle waves lapping the beach, the cry of a distant bird. A fish splashed out of the water, darting from the hunter that prowled beneath the surface.
Chapter 3
O’Brien was gone when I next opened my eyes. I made coffee and went up on deck. It was a gorgeous Sunday morning, quiet, a hibiscus breeze cooling the morning sun. Sadie was standing on the deck with her Frisbee between her teeth, wagging her tail and whining.
“Jeez, Sadie, can’t I even finish my coffee?” She nuzzled my arm, forcing coffee over the rim of my cup and drizzling down my arm. “Okay, okay, let’s go.”
I refilled the cup and we headed down the dock to the sand. Rebecca and Daisy were romping on the beach in their Sunday best, matching taffeta dresses with lace collars and hems. Around their waists, impeccably tied bows flapped as they ran.
“Hannah, Hannah,” Daisy yelled, running toward me through the sand. “Don’t I look pretty?” She twirled, her skirt encircling her in a pink blur.
“You’re gorgeous! You both look beautiful.”
Rebecca stood quietly, hands behind her back until Sadie nudged her belly.
“Sadie,” she giggled and wrapped her tiny arms around the dog’s neck. Sadie nuzzled her nose under Rebecca’s chin and licked.
“Mornin’, Hannah. How was your first night on the boat?” Calvin and Tilda walked toward the girls hand in hand. They were also dressed for church, he in a dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, Tilda in a tan linen suit that reached mid-calf with matching heels and a straw hat.
“Fine, I love the boat. But I think I’m about to lose my dog,” I said, smiling at Rebecca.
“I’m afraid you could be right. Becca loves animals. I hope you don’t mind her playing with Sadie,” Tilda said.
“Not at all. We all need every friend we can get. Becca, you can play with Sadie whenever you want, as long as it’s alright with your parents. Okay?”
“Thank you, Hannah,” again that shy smile.
“Come on, girls. We don’t want to be late for church, Tilda said. “Store’s open if you need supplies, Hannah. Just write down what you get in the ledger on the counter. You can pay later.”
“Thanks, Tilda.” Christ, the honor system. I hadn’t been in an environment this trusting since the third grade in Sister Evanelina’s music class. She’d let me borrow a viola for an entire year. Most of that time it had gathered dust under my bed.
Calvin lifted Daisy into the car, Becca scrambled in behind, and they headed off to church. I felt a twinge of regret as I watched them pull onto the road and drive away. I envied the Pickerings. They were happy. Tilda and Calvin were committed to each another and in love. They were a good team, working together to make a living and raise their two girls.
They’d developed this little enclave—the marina and store and their home. Who could want anything more? It was something I’d never have. I knew myself well enough to realize I’d get antsy, bored with the day-to-day routine. At thirty-seven I’d given up any idea of children of my own.
I sat in the warm sand, digging my toes in, pushing the regret away, and let Sadie run on the beach. This was all new to Sadie. Her turf had been the park near the Denver Zoo, chasing the Frisbee through a foot of fresh January powder or the newly mowed grass of July. She was a quick study, though. One mouthful of sand and she knew this stuff wasn’t snow. She didn’t hesitate at the water’s edge. Nothing like a golden. Again and again she raced into the surf and swam out to capture the Frisbee.
When she tired, I left her under a tree licking sand from between her paws and went into the store. Inside it was dark and cool. I wandered down one aisle and up another, gathering boxes and cans with familiar labels—Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Folgers, and tea cookies and biscuits, delicacies made in some far away English bakery. A rainbow of vegetables rested in vibrant rows along the back wall—lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, mangos, bananas, and guavas. I found eggs, a loaf of fresh bread, dog food, and a Sunday paper, wrote it all down in the ledger, and headed back to the boat, Sadie at my heels.
It took me a half hour to find and turn on the propane for the stove, then another fifteen minutes to figure out that the gas switch on the electrical panel had to be on before I could light the damn thing. Everything was more complicated on this darned boat. Finally, a decadent breakfast in hand, I took it up on deck and settled in the shade of the bimini.
“Sweet Sadie,” I said, scratching soft, downy ears. Tired and full, she lay at my feet, a wet, sloppy tongue periodically slurping against my ankle.
When I finally opened the newspaper, the headline shouted at me, Crime Wave Hits Tranquil BVI! Damn, I was not ready to let reality ruin my morning. I ignored the entire front page, turning instead to the sailing news inside. Always good for a picture of a boat, sail filled, tipping in the wind, accompanied by the results of the latest sailing regatta.
Eventually I forced myself back to the front page. After all, I was starting work on the police force the next morning. I needed to be informed. Police Commissioner Avery Wright is appealing for public support as the Royal Virgin Islands police force fights an upsurge in crime in the territory. The crime wave consisted of a dozen or so burglaries in the last three months. Evidently the latest occurred last night near Cappoon’s Bay on the west end, when two armed intruders broke into the home of William and Elyse Elbert, robbing them of $200 in jewelry. During a tussle, Mr. Elbert was shot in the foot.
The commissioner, the paper said, has announced that all vacation leave for police officers has been cancele
d, and those already on leave have been ordered back immediately. He urges anyone with any information about these robberies to contact the police. The governor is talking about increasing funds to the police force to “nip this thing in the bud.”
I wasn’t looking forward to my first day on the job. Those guys being pulled in from vacation were going to be upset. But I was not going to let it ruin my day. I spent the rest of the morning stuffing clothes in drawers and trying to figure out the intricacies of the boat. Finally I gave it up, went back on deck, and stretched out on the bow, relaxing with the rocking of waves that splashed again the boat. The newspaper I’d been scanning for used cars covered my face.
“Ahoy on Sea Bird!” I bolted up, newspapers flying. I grabbed the pages before they ended up polluting the sea.
‘Hello,” I said, groggy and confused. Oh, yeah, boat, in the BVI, new job. It was all coming back. I wondered how long I’d been asleep.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” the woman said. “Thought I should introduce myself, and besides, you’re starting to turn the color of watermelon flesh.”
A black woman stood on the end of the dock, amused. She was small-boned, about five-three, hair short and stylishly cut, a pair of tinted granny glasses perched on her nose. She wore shorts and a beige T-shirt with a logo, a turtle encircled by lettering, Society of Conservation. “Now we have a tree hugger” is what Mack would call her.
“I’m Elyse Henry. Live on the Caribbe, she said, pointing to a wide-bodied motorboat tied to the other side of the dock. It looked like its top speed was about five miles per hour, even with the two one-hundred-horsepower engines on the back.
“Welcome to Pickering’s Landing.”
“Hi, Hannah Sampson,” I said, “Come on aboard.”
“This is a lovely boat,” she said.
“Thanks, guess it’s home!”
“Hey, if you ever want to go out for a sail, give me a holler. I grew up in these islands, been sailing since I was five.”
She noticed the automobile ads I had circled in the paper. Damned if ten minutes later, I didn’t find myself riding with Elyse up Paraquita Bay Road into the hills. Turned out her good friend had a car to sell. Just what I needed. I hated these kinds of things—friends of friends with something for sale. It always spelled trouble. And what could you do when the car turned out to be a lemon? Everybody ended up mad at everybody else.
Elyse didn’t get it, though. I had her pegged for one of those people who were always in the middle of things, trying to help people out, solve their problems. And she couldn’t take a hint. She heard “no” as “convince me.” Which she obviously had, since I was riding with her to go look at the damned car.
On the way I heard Elyse’s life story. Energy eked from every pore as she spoke. The woman was a dynamo. She’d grown up on Tortola and had lived here all her life except for the six years she’d spent at university in London. Now she was the one-woman office for the Society of Conservation, a London-based environmental nonprofit. She was paid to “keep an eye on things,” as she put it. I was sure she was good at it. She was the perfect type to have her nose in everything.
“At one time or another, I’ve been assisted by the U.S. Coast Guard, BVI Police, the Department of Conservation and Fisheries. Whomever I could enlist for help. Don’t be surprised if I call on you someday.”
That was what I was afraid of. Evidently her job was to light fires, blow whistles. At the moment she was ranting on about sharks.
We turned onto a gravel drive and headed up a winding road through trees and bushes thick with blossoms. At the end, a house was nestled in the trees facing out to the sea. It was perfectly kept, the gardens weeded, the grounds manicured. A woman who’d been working in one of the flower beds stood when she saw us pull up. She stretched, her arms on her lower back, then waved and smiled. A few snow white strands escaped a wide-brimmed hat. She had to be at least eighty.
“Elyse! What brings you up this way?”
“Hello, Mary.” Elyse gave the woman a warm hug. “This is Hannah Sampson, my new neighbor.”
“Good to meet you, Hannah.” The woman’s speech was heavily accented British. “Come in, come in. I’ll put the teakettle on.”
Mary had brought England to the islands with her. The living room was dark and filled with antiques, table lamps with hand-painted glass shades, Queen Anne chairs with intricately embroidered cushions, and delicate china figurines placed on an old marble-topped wash stand. The kitchen was a relief of light. It was painted white with yellow and blue accents, a vase of yellow tulips on the table.
She led us out to a shady back patio. While Mary and Elyse went back into the kitchen, I relaxed. Suddenly, a dark, fuzzy creature with a long tail and pointed ears scurried into one of the flower beds. A snake dangled from between its teeth.
I could hear the two women rattling dishes and talking. Soon Elyse emerged carrying a tray, Mary behind her.
“A mongoose,” she said when I described the animal to Mary. They were brought in to control the rats back when they infested the sugarcane plantations. Now the mongoose have overrun the islands.”
She placed a delicate blue china cup before me. I was afraid to pick it up, sure it would shatter with the mere touch. Jeez, the last time I’d attended a tea party I’d been about eight. My sister had set out on a blanket under a huge elm and invited me to join her. This was almost as nice—china instead of plastic, and real tea.
“Hannah needs a car,” Elyse said. “I thought right away about the Rambler. You’ve been thinking about selling it. No sense letting it rot in your garage.”
“Well, let’s go look at it after we have our tea. Let me talk to you a bit, Elyse. It’s been almost a month.”
“Oh, Mary, I’m fine. She turned to me. “Mary watches over me like a mother hen. But I have to let her. She saved my life. Now she feels responsible.” Elyse gave Mary a look of mixed humor and affection. Mary glanced my way, unsure.
“Would you like to talk alone? I’d be happy with a stroll through your garden. It’s absolutely fantastic.”
“No, Hannah. You might as well know the real Elyse Henry,” Elyse said. “We will be neighbors after all, and I’m not ashamed of who I am.”
Jeez, I had been dragged up here to buy a car and now I was to be privy to some sort of intrigue between Elyse and an eighty-year-old woman.
“Mary is my psychiatrist as well as my friend. She retired a few years back, but she couldn’t get rid of me.”
“Psychiatrist?”
“Elyse has bipolar disorder. The older term is manic depression. Do you know about such an illness?”
“Very little.” I told them about one of the girls in the dorm during my sophomore year in college. She was extremely bright and aced most of her classes, but quiet. Then she started acting completely out of character. Friends whispered about her increasingly bizarre behavior for several weeks before it became obvious she needed help.
“I’d guess she was having her first manic episode,” Mary said. “Onset often occurs in the early twenties and can be associated with stress like being in college, away from home, pressured by grades. In a case like that, the manic episode is usually followed by profound, debilitating depression. About one percent of the population has bipolar disorder. It’s thought to have a genetic link. We still don’t know exactly what chemical differences exist in the brain. You hear a lot about neurotransmitters, intracellular second messengers, neuropeptides.”
“Fortunately, we know a lot more than we did fifteen or twenty years ago. Back then the treatment was to institutionalize. In the nineties we started learning about medication—mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants—that work to restore balance. But it’s still trial and error to find the right medicinal therapy for each patient. Every individual responds differently to these drugs.”
“I remember how scared that girl was when she came back to school the following semester,” I said, “and how embarrassed she was to
face her friends. She just didn’t know how people would react.”
Mary just shook her head, frustration and anger fixing her mouth in a hard line. “That’s the trouble,” she said. “There is so much stigma attached to brain disorders. I just don’t understand how people can see an imbalance in the brain as being any different from say, diabetes. It’s the historical/religious part, I guess—people once suspected that demons and devils lurked in those with this disease.”
“Mary gets kind of worked up about it,” Elyse apologized.
I smiled at her to let her know it was okay.
“Some of the most celebrated and talented people in history have been manic-depressive,” Mary said. “Winston Churchill, for example, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolf. Some even call it the CEO disease, because so many high-level Wall Street types suffer from it.
“One of the problems with bipolar disorder is that the person who has it can’t tell when she is getting sick, when her behavior is changing or their reality slipping. With time, people learn to look for cues—maybe feeling more agitated or sleeping less. Often they depend on someone close to them to watch for the signals, such as hyperactivity and pressured speech. Even if someone is taking her medication faithfully, body chemistry can shift.”
Mary was clearly passionate about the subject.
“Every person I have ever treated goes off their medication. They start feeling better, don’t like the side effects of the meds, are drawn to the high of mania. This is the most difficult aspect of the disease. When a person is manic, she feels fine, especially in the initial stages—elated, infallible, grandiose.”
I would have never guessed that any of what Mary was telling me applied to Elyse.
“That was me,” Elyse said. “I was in school too, in London, far from home, on a scholarship, a black Caribbean woman competing with students whose educations were far superior to mine.
