Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (21 page)

On the day Jacob left for America, Anette wore a white cotton dress. As a farewell gift, or rather a stay-behind gift, a promise of sorts, Jacob had bought this simple white cotton for her, along with yards and yards of an extravagant red dupioni with yellow flowers. He imagined her in a long skirt, like the kind his mother wore. Red being his favorite color. The yellow of the flowers, he had said, was for the island’s ginger-thomas and bananaquit—the national flower and the national bird, respectively. He wanted Anette to be the island—waiting for him, unchanging in the sea. The white cloth he thought she might make into a wedding dress someday. But Jacob Esau, being male, didn’t understand that a divorcée could not wear white to her second wedding.

Eeona had made the white cloth into a day dress for Anette, but had refused to make anything in the dupioni. Eeona believed it was a harlot’s fabric. The white dress had classy embroidery at the bottom and at the end of the sleeves.

Jacob was in gray trousers and a matching blazer even though it was too hot for the formality. His shoes had been shined. He was holding Ronalda’s hand; the little toddler’s hair was full of tiny wild flowers that he had picked for her mother. Eve Youme was in her mother’s arms, swaddled in the remains of the white cotton cloth. They were all standing in what had been the Navy’s hangar but was now the island’s sweaty and loud and dark airport.

Passengers were arriving, checking in, waiting, picking up luggage from mountainous piles in the corner; some were dragging the heavier suitcases by leather ropes. A clutch of tourists stood chatting so loudly it seemed as if they were in a quarrel. Their faces were pink and slimy. The ceiling was too high even for birds to have their nests, but it was still humid
inside. There were bats in the high corners, but they were too far above to bother anyone with their blind diving. Some light came from standing lamps that stood not much taller than a man. In the mix of people, Jacob and Anette and the two children might have been a legitimate family.

No loudspeaker had told them it was time to go, but being there waiting was worse than leaving. What does one converse about in such a time? It’s over. Good-bye. Will we see each other again? Pray. Believe in God or something. So they walked toward the exit, toward the airplane. In the heat Anette’s white dress stuck to her legs. Jacob was glad for this. He didn’t know when again he would see the imprint of her thighs.

“I going to be back soon,” Jacob said. “Soon as I can.”

They reached the end of the walkway. Out there was just open space and big planes, the air feeling wound and spinning. They moved aside for others to walk by.

“I love you.” Jacob said it to remind Anette that he wasn’t leaving her. He was just leaving. And there is a difference. He thought to explain the difference to her, but he knew, he believed, that she understood. Anette hugged their baby to her chest. Eve Youme’s face peeked out of the swaddling cloth and stared at her father without blinking.

Anette hadn’t said a word. Her man was leaving. He was going to medical school, he told her. He’d come back soon, he told her. And then he could work a real job and not be dependent on his mother or his uncles or anyone. And Anette had smiled and smiled to keep from cracking apart.

On the day Jacob left, she’d worn the dress from the white cloth he’d bought her. She’d let the red in her hair come in a bit, which he liked. She’d allowed him lovemaking that very morning, despite that the ban after giving birth wasn’t yet over. She had brought her daughter and his daughter. She had even managed to convince him that the right thing to do was to say good-bye to his mother before going to the airport—so that she would have him in his last island minutes. But he was leaving Anette anyway. Medical school wouldn’t bring him back just now.

Anette had left a husband who loved her. A husband who would have been a doting father. And now the man she loved was leaving—not on a boat, but on a plane . . . but still. There in the hangar Anette was busy doing the opposite of thinking. She was forgetting. Forgetting the seduction magic the Bradshaw women were rumored to have. It was all old talk and stories.

Jacob leaned over and kissed his daughter—his first child who later would be left out of the family photos. But now she was a baby who knew only that love, like food, was given to her when she cried for it. Eve Youme smiled at her father, for she was an early smiler, as her mother had been. Jacob leaned forward and kissed his Anette—in public—owned her—in public—was her man—in public. Kissed and held her to wake her up, to make her speak. She couldn’t hold him back, their daughter in her arms. But he put his mouth on hers. It felt as if she were giving him strength—even though she was too unherself to give anything.

He eased Anette’s left hand out of its cradle, the hand that he had not put a ring on, and passed Ronalda’s little hand into it. Then Anette watched his body disappear into the plane.

And that was the first side of their
saga.

After Jacob had walked away, Anette waited in the airport for another twenty minutes. She had two girl children now in her solo care. It wasn’t until Jacob had gone from her sight that the announcement was made that it was time to board. Anette watched the clutch of American travelers break apart in loudness. They had been drinking, it seemed. As far as we could see, that’s all the Americans seemed to do—drink rum and buy up land. One half of the group sloped toward the plane. The other half was staying. These were not Frenchies or American politicians or military personnel or old Danes who hadn’t quit. They were the worst kind of white. They were tourists.

Anette cradled Eve Youme and led Ronalda past the wall of luggage. The American whites who had stayed behind were now climbing into a car almost as big as a truck. They honked at Anette as she crossed in front of them. She nodded, as was the courtesy. They started talking loudly at each other. She was sure they weren’t speaking to her, as the Americans didn’t often speak to us unless doing business. Anette kept walking slowly so the toddler could keep up. Lindbergh Bay, where she and Jacob had first been together, was a long arm of sand and sea at her side—beckoning or
dismissing, she couldn’t tell. But she didn’t look to it. She would walk down this street with her eyes straight ahead. March down to Savan to sit with her sister and wait for Jacob. Even though she knew she must not wait. Even though Eeona would make that waiting a misery. But the big car of Americans seemed to follow Anette down the road. And then they were, most certainly, following her.

Anette stopped; perhaps the newcomers needed something. There was a woman in the passenger seat, but it was the man who spoke to her.

“Yes, hello. I own the Gull Reef Club over on Water Island.” Anette blinked and tried to smile. She hadn’t heard of the club and she had never been to Water Island. “We’re looking for a chambermaid. Ours, it seems, has just been deported back to Antigua or Anguilla or somewhere. You can imagine we’re in a bind. If you’re free, we could take you right now, tykes and all.” The woman in the passenger seat nodded vigorously to this last part and gestured toward the large space of the backseat.

If Anette was not at present in mourning over Jacob and if at that very moment Jacob’s very plane had not roared above them, she might have done the fiery thing—which was to release Ronalda’s hand, reach over the driver, and slap the woman in the face. A woman should have known better than to allow such an insult in front of the children. But Anette was too brokenhearted for heat. Instead, she and the woman looked at each other and then the other followed Anette’s eyes up to the roaring plane.

“Cat got your tongue?” asked the woman, using an expression Anette had never heard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said finally. “You’ve made a mistake with me.”

That night Anette lay on the bed. Her daughters stacked there between her and Eeona. Eeona had a satin mask over her eyes. They were in the same place they had been. Just the same. Only now there was another child. Only now Eeona, protecting her beauty, wore a satin mask as she slept. Anette lay there and she thought, finally, that she had been a fool to
love that man. But she knew, and hated the knowing, that she would be a fool for that man again and again.

Anette tried not to think about the Americans in the big car and their Gull Reef Club on Water Island. Weren’t they the ones who had really tried to make a fool of her? Anette would never have imagined that a year later she would find herself over on Water Island at that very club.

In America, Jacob went to his dentist brother and had his red tooth bleached white and his wisdom teeth removed. When he woke up from the gas, he was screaming and screaming. His brother stood by and held Jacob’s head down so he wouldn’t flail and break anything. And what Jacob was screaming was something very strange.

“I am real! I am real!”

And he screamed until he grew tired and calmed. His brother told him that such screaming was normal. Really, quite normal. Though it wasn’t at all.

As a babysitter, Eeona was strict and full of old-time manners, but the girls enjoyed her enough because she let them play with her hair. Even as Ronalda was braiding neatly and Youme, just a baby, was pulling out the braids, Eeona would sit with her back straight and face set. Eeona did not have smile lines around her mouth—she was never in danger of those. But
there was something around her eyes now—they were called crow’s-feet—that revealed she was no longer quite as stunning. She would never marry. That still baby was the only child of her own she’d have.

She had not been around to watch out for Esau. But now she watched out for Youme. She felt as though it were her fault Eve Youme existed at all. Sometimes Eeona would brush Youme’s hair. Sometimes she would braid it and then she would whisper into the child’s head. A special chant for each strand as they plaited into each other.
My own,
she thought.
My own.
She never braided Ronalda’s hair.

For the months after Jacob left, Anette had waited, though she knew better. She could tell when people were coming and she could tell Jacob was not. Still, she waited for a letter on a ship from America or a long-distance phone call from America. Any sign from America. She waited for a surprise visit or a package at her door. But since he had left, she had not heard cat nor dog of Jacob McKenzie.

She cornered Saul in the street one morning. “He’s alive,” Saul said stupidly, “Mama’s always sending him stewed cherries.” And so Anette stopped waiting—at least outwardly. She started going out to dances. She thought, in a backward, magical way, that if she went to a dance the band would play “They Say It’s Wonderful” and then Jacob would appear. Anette left her girls braiding and unbraiding Eeona’s hair.

On this particular night Anette did not go to a church dance; for by now, even a short time later, St. Thomas had changed. There had been a war and then rumors of another. All the men smoked cigarettes. Everyone drank rum and Coca-Cola. Every family had a relative in America. There were Virgin Islanders and Americans on island, but imagine, there were also many, many people from other Caribbean islands! The down islanders were making beds in the hotels. In the market they were selling coconut water straight out of the nut. They even owned things: businesses, houses, cars. Everything was different. The Catholic dances had always
had competition with the Seventh-day Adventist game nights, the Lutheran skit series, and the Anglican bowling alley. But the fête Anette went to with hope of summoning Jacob was one of the newest types—this was something secular. She went alone.

The dance was held in a restaurant after serving hours. The tables pushed to one side, the chairs lined up all around the walls. There were too many chairs, really. Too many excuses to sit and be shy. Anette was sitting now. Not because she was shy, but because she was tired out from dancing all night with various men who were new to the island from other islands and surely didn’t know that she was a divorcée with two daughters from two different men. Gertie was on a dinner date with Ham, her American fellow, and so there was no one to help Anette mind her manners. Anette was sitting, cooling out, and trying to feel for Jacob when a dark-skinned man came up to her. “Good evening, Anette.”

She didn’t recognize him, but she had the grace, the Eeona brought-upsy, to be cordial. “Good evening.”

“May I have this dance, Anette?”

The fact that he knew her name and she didn’t know his was a problem. If she said yes, then she would be dancing with someone who knew her and whom she was supposed to know, which was something all together different from dancing with perfect strangers. And this man was quite dark-skinned, something Eeona would give her grief over if it was ever found out Anette had even danced with him. Besides, she was tired and her feet hurt. “No, thank you,” she said with a high-class smile, and turned her head so he might know he could take his leave. She was not anybody’s chambermaid. Her sister had raised her to hold a teacup as a lady should. Besides, she had a fiancé, didn’t she? He was in the States. He hadn’t even written her all these months, but still . . .

This man leaned in closer to her, speaking to the side of her face. “Anette, you should dance with me, yes.” And there was something like a
premonition in his voice. As if he were a ghost and not a man, which is, in a way, what he turned out to be. She was taken aback by his forwardness. Offended even, though his forceful voice intrigued her.
I
should
dance with him or else what?
She thought this to herself but said to him, “I believe you are being rude, sir. I do not know you.” She gave him her Eeona English for spite.

The man didn’t draw back as he should have. He leaned forward into her face. “Anette. You remember a boy who made you a tin house once in grade school? Your sister wouldn’t let you keep it because she thought I wasn’t your kind.”

Well, hot diggity damn. Franky. Franky Joseph, who’d made her that doll-size living room set. He’d made her a home. Of course she remembered. She pictured that silvery aluminum dining set. Resting on the very same old table that she and Eeona still ate their meals on. In the very same rented apartment that had been nice twenty years ago but was now, well, twenty years older. Of course she remembered. Hadn’t he left school early? Hadn’t he disappeared during the war? She put her hand out and he took her to the dance floor. She had not remembered him having green eyes, but there they were. Bursting out of his dark face like a promise.

The next day, the blue-collar man with the green eyes and green Cadillac leaned over the counter at the apothecary after accepting his change and asked Anette to the movies.

“Yes,” she said. “But my children will have to come along.”

But what did that matter? Franky had been in love with Anette since he was a child. He knew this was his time and his chance.