Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (33 page)

“A light come on. The house bright like daytime, yes. I surprise them children ain wake up, for how blinding this thing is.”

“You mean the electricity? The current came on?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “What you think I mean?”

—

There was no screen on the windows at the inn and that night the bugs came at Anette like they had been starving. She kept the standing fan on all night, thinking the mosquitoes would grow tired flying into its wind and drop dead. The fan whirred an oscillating rhythm. Through the walls Anette could hear the newlyweds melting into each other in a great boiling.

Baby sister Anette dreamed of waking up to her elder sister beside her when Eeona had disappeared for so long that other time. But when Anette awoke, Eeona was not there in the bed. Instead, the sun was coming through the louvers. Despite the nightmare and the mosquito bites bubbling on her legs, Anette felt grand. After all, she’d taken a boat and had not been drowned. She’d slept in this too familiar house and hadn’t been sucked back into childhood. Yes, this island of St. John was nice as everyone always said. Maybe she’d even find a beach and go for a swim.

She smelled sweet bush tea and pork sausage coming through the windows. She put on lipstick and shuffled into house slippers and the matching housecoat. She walked down to the main room and saw the groundsman, the maid, the police officers, and the newlyweds all at the breakfast table like a family. A gathering of empty utensils and plates lay like new bones before them. The groundsman, standing to clear the table, looked at Anette and then raised his eyes upward.

Anette, who was not a young woman anymore, took the stairs fast, like a fish against the current. Ahead, at the end of the hallway, Eeona’s rooms did not release a glow as though a witch were there waiting. The door did not pulse or make odd sounds. It was just the room of an old lady who had faced her past. Anette knocked on the door. Eeona did not answer. She called, “Eeona. Sister.” There was no answer. Anette stared at the lock and thought perhaps there was a time when she could have turned the dead bolt with her mind. But today she stepped back and charged the door with her shoulder. “You motherscunt!” she yelled out, and gripped her shoulder with the pain. She was not a young woman anymore, and the door did not open. Anette put her face in her hands and moaned; it was not crying, it was just
a sounding. Then she reached forward and turned the handle. The door opened.

“Sit down,” came the elder sister’s voice. The windows were closed, but the balcony curtains were fluttering. That door was ajar, allowing a little light. Anette sat down in a chair she found in the shadows, for she had placed it there last night during her cleaning. “Oh, Anette. Do cross your legs at the ankle, not at the knee like some common tart. If you insist on being a tart, my dear, you might as well be a classy one.”

Anette could see that a big comfy chair had been pulled close to the small balony. It couldn’t fit out there, but it was close enough. Sitting in the chair, Eeona looked small and regal. Anette pulled her chair closer and pushed her chin forward to face her sister.

“How are you, Eeona?”

“I am fine, dear.”

The sisters stared at each other’s bodies through the chiaroscuro.

“Where were you?” Anette asked, trying, like Youme had, to read minds. “America? That’s where Mama went to run away from us. You’ve been to America? You see Ronalda when you there?”

“You think such foolish things.” Eeona stared at her sister and right into her.

Anette grew quiet. Though she did not feel an intruder in her mind, she still tried to clear her thoughts. “Eeona, you went to Villa by the Sea?”

“Now why would you think such a thing?” Eeona eyed her silent sister for a moment. “No, little sister. I have my villa here. I went after something more.”

On Anegada there are more crabs than people, we say. More shipwrecks than crabs. Eat lobster for breakfast and lunch and dinner, we say. You can fish for shark when in need of variation. Submerged island, we say. The tip of Atlantis. Onegeda. Anigeda. Anegada. Perhaps you’ve never heard of this place. Perhaps that is for the best, because if you hear too much you will hear it calling, like
anegando en mis llanto
—your own tears drowning you. But we’ve come this far.

Besides, it called Eeona.

The truth is that Anegada was still beautiful. Was still bare and barren. The people lived in homes stacked on a gathering of loose rocks with sandy land around them. The people who lived there were the people who belonged to the land. People who the land claimed as its own. There was no golf course. No all-inclusive hotel. Eeona had stepped off the boat and an old woman, a woman, for God’s sake, laid her eyes on Eeona’s lovely face and said: “You family to me.” And she was.

There was one small inn on the island, which is where Eeona was heading, but this woman whose last name was Norman but had been born Stemme said, “Come stay by me. The best lobsterman on island is my man.”

Mrs. Norman was an oldish lady. Old like a grandmother, maybe, but she walked with her back straight, and her legs were thick and smooth. And as the two women passed the water, Mrs. Norman poured her arm out toward the sea where her lobsterman could be seen. He was nothing more than a silhouette at the edge of a little dock. The black shape of a man against the setting sun. His backward-facing feet under the water where no one but the fish could see. The sea was waving at his shins as he raised his machete to the lobster and chopped it into pieces.

Mrs. Norman hollered at the shadow man. “One more, my love!”

Then the man stepped up the dock and out of the sun’s darkening.

It was Owen Arthur.

Or rather, he looked to Eeona just like Owen Arthur. His hair was silver and his face was worn, but it was the same sand-colored skin. The same shape of nose. His same face uninterrupted by a mustache.

“What mood are you in, pretty lady?” called the lobsterman. “I want to know before I approach.” Eeona thought she must be the pretty lady, but no . . .

“I in a sweet mood,” said Mrs. Norman. “Come meet my cousin.”

But surely Eeona had come to face her deeds. Surely her running away had finally taken her to a haunted place where the past greets you at the door. The man who was not her father but looked so much like him held a bucket of lobster bodies in each hand. His feet, on land, faced forward.

“Nothing new in family,” said Mrs. Norman, as they walked to The Settlement and to her house. “People always coming back here trying to find out who they belong to.” She smiled at Eeona with her mouth turned down, as though they had a secret. “Lyonel came back years ago. We’s cousins. Third or fourth with thrice removal, but family still.”

Eeona walked between the two of them. She looked at the man. Then at her own hands. She felt dizzy, which was something that Anegada could do—make someone dizzy with its beauty.

At the house they ate lobster out of the shell. Eeona finally introduced herself. Gave her name, gave her parents’ names. The lobsterman nodded at her. “You come to find your grandparents’ graves?”

“Yes, of course,” said Eeona quickly.

“They was good, simple people,” he said to her. “And your parents are still remembered here, too. We still talk about the crash of
The
Homecoming
.” His mouth tensed for a moment and then calmed. “The ship still there. People always finding bones in the sand from that very ship. Ghosts like you always washing ashore.”

Had she just been called a ghost? Eeona had the urge to reprimand this man, but how could she when his face was there looking like the love of her life. Instead, she cleared her throat to swallow her words. Besides, she needed to gain any alliance. This lobsterman might be her guide. She was here for
The Homecoming
.

Mrs. Norman stood to clear the dishes, but then the lobsterman, wary of Eeona’s stare, took them and went to wash them himself. Mrs. Norman sat back next to Eeona. “There is a beach here that is named after a girl who visited with her French sweetheart some years past. You know it?” Mrs. Norman said this with her face blank of any suspicion.

“I do know it,” Eeona said.

“Good. Is where we always go for our evening dip.”

Flash of Beauty had not been originally named after Eeona and Moreau, but that was the story told, and so now that was how it was. And it was the same beautiful thing it had been decades before. How was this so achingly possible? The white sand with flecks of pink, like baby tongues.

“I cannot quite believe that I am here,” Eeona said, swallowing the “again” at the end of the sentence. She waded out in the water with Mrs. Norman as the old lobsterman watched them from his perch on the sand. The two women swam fully clothed as was the old tradition.

Mrs. Angela Norman, who was a Mrs. because she had been married to Norman, looked out into the ocean. Miles out where the reef began, the waves crashed without a sound. “Anegada isn’t real,” Angela said. “It’s magic.”

“I am not, perchance, dreaming, am I?” Eeona was being lighthearted, but she also worried about the extent of her episodes.

“Perhaps you are, Cousin Eeona.”

True, Eeona was not herself. Not herself at all. Cousin Angela Norman did not seem to really understand or care who Eeona Bradshaw was. Angela only seemed to care about the fact of their relation. As if that was
anything. As if that was everything. And that Lyonel, the lobsterman. The only time he’d looked at her, he’d called her a ghost. But
he
was the ghost. A man handsome enough to be her father.

Mrs. Norman and Eeona began to walk out of the water. Their clothes stuck to their older women’s bodies in immodest ways. Eeona was not a woman to cry, but when Angela passed her the towel, she found she needed to dry her eyes. The lobsterman respectfully looked away.

That night Eeona slept in a large mahogany bed in the couple’s cottage. It was the kind that Antoinette and Owen Arthur would have slept in. It was high off the ground, and when she sat on it, Eeona’s feet hung over the side of the bed like a child’s. That night she dreamed. Because she dreamed, she knew that this Anegada was not, after all, the dream. She dreamed about a school of women walking out of the ocean. Then she dreamed it again. And again. Until in the dream she was finally one of the women.

The next morning, over a lobster omelet with seaweed, Eeona said to the lobsterman: “I should like to see
The
Homecoming
.”

The man squinted his eyes at her. “It beneath the water.”

“That is of no concern.”

He looked at Angela, his woman, and she nodded. “You a water woman,” he said to Eeona. “Is your father ship we talking.” Then he shrugged his assent.

So Eeona went out to the ocean on a boat with the silver-haired man who looked to her like her father. It was an ill-conceived idea. But it was true that, though Eeona was a middle-aged lady who could not drive a car, she could slip on a mask and fins and slide into the water like any amphibian.

The water was dark with the bodies of the boats. It was a place of quiet. The old lady and the older man snorkeled above it all, unable to speak for the mask. But for Eeona’s safety, they held hands. Like lovers.

Beneath them, the boats were skeletons of their former selves. How would she ever find hers? But then the lobsterman pointed. Eeona looked. She struggled to see but didn’t see. He kept pointing and pointing. And then
The
Homecoming
revealed herself there in the cemetery of ships. No longer painted white, there was a deep green to her shell. The seaweed of the ship’s underbelly that had once made Eeona uneasy had now taken over her whole body. It still troubled Eeona. But she gulped the unease down into her belly.

Instead, Eeona flew, like a witch, above
The
Homecoming
. She saw the galleon as though looking through glass. The boat that had been hers was hers still. She flew, with her lobsterman, around the molding deck. The fish flew with them. Eeona’s hair had been tight and flat to help the mask stay in place, but now the hair fought until it released itself and then it, too, flew all about her like tentacles. The ship was drowned shallow enough to catch the sun through the waves. Eeona could see the deck and the mast. Eeona could see the ship, like a body, leaning over on its side as though it were just a beloved reclining. Simply resting and waiting all these years.

This was her father’s ship. And this was Eeona’s ship. And though she was no underwater expert, she now held her breath, let go of Lyonel’s hand, and shot her body down, so at least she might touch the mast. Or maybe she might reach the ball of her foot to the deck. Lyonel had to follow her, for despite his age, he still made a living off of this very sea. He knew it better than she.

Oh, Eeona. She was not ready to be snorkeling and diving on a hot day in the sea for so long. She wasn’t young anymore. But she was of a sea people. So she did not panic as she fell, up, up, up toward the silvery surface. And when Eeona’s body buoyed up facedown, Mrs. Norman, waiting for them in the lobster boat, did not panic either.

When the lobsterman saw Eeona falling up, not diving down to the boat at all, he watched her for a while. Her fall in the water was slow and gentle and full of grace. He watched and watched through his own eyes, for he never wore a mask. He saw her fall back up and up.

Of course, the man knew who Eeona was and whom she belonged to. All that was so long ago. He had been trying to give some distance, but the
girl, the woman, had been giving him a flirty look since she arrived and then she’d grasped his hand during the swim and he just hadn’t the heart . . . So he just watched her now. Watched her go, go.

But then he noticed the loose way she soared, noticed that her body butted against a jut of coral and didn’t tense but simply slacked and bounced and kept falling up. Like she was dead. So he shot after her, sucking in fresh breath as he pulled her into the lobster boat. The same boat, it turned out, in which he had proposed life and love to Antoinette Stemme.

Eeona stayed in her cousin’s cottage. She dreamed and dreamed. She was there in the school of women. There was no hospital, but the island medic who was not a medic at all but what the less Anglicized still called an obeah woman, directed Angela to pour garlic water and lobster soup down Eeona’s throat throughout her unwaking.

And then Eeona awoke. And she was not herself. Not herself at all. She knew where she was. She knew how she had gotten there. She knew she had not made it to touch
The Homecoming
. But she took one hazy look at the lobsterman standing over her with a bowl of lobster soup and she realized that he did not look that much like her father after all.

Who the lobsterman looked like was her mother. He looked like Eeona’s own beautiful mother. And Eeona saw how the lobsterman stared at her now as an uncle might have. Those were Antoinette’s eyes. That was Antoinettte’s mouth whispering her name. Eeona had never really considered how beautiful her mother was at all.

What on earth? Was everyone related in these Virgin Islands? Was that the strange secret to freedom and belonging? Eeona had never wanted, really, to be anything but her father’s daughter. And she’d been her desired self for nearly two decades and then in less than a year her father had died and her family had been deadened. And she’d never really considered what this might really mean. Never before.