The New Moon's Arms (14 page)

“You feeling sick?” he asked. “You didn’t look too good just now.”

“I feel wonderful,” I answered. “Don’t fret. Tell me more about your seals.”

He frowned a little, but he didn’t say anything. Just turned and started pointing out the seals again. “The babies not weaned yet.”

“How you know?”

“Their coats still black.”

A baby seal was humping its way over to one of the adults.

“He’s fat. Like Agway.”

“Agway?”

“The little boy on the beach yesterday morning.”

Whose dead family Hector had found. He looked stricken.

“Sorry.” My damned mouth. “I didn’t mean to make you think about them.”

“It’s all right.”

The baby reached the adult, butted its head against her belly. She rolled so that it could get at one of her teats. She propped herself up and looked at the baby as it latched on and began to nurse. She lay flat again, to continue her basking. I watched the baby pull, and my own nipples ached in response.

“I have to go,” I told Hector.

“So quick?”

“So quick. Visiting a new friend. But maybe you would like to come by the house some day? I could cook you a meal.”

His face brightened. “Sounds nice.”

“All right. Call me when you’re free.”

Then I rushed home to change out of the torn-up pants and grab my purse. I had time to catch the next waterbus. Maybe I could see Agway one more time before they moved him out.

On the Saturday that Mumma didn’t come home, I woke up early. Couldn’t hear Mumma or Dadda moving around yet. I went to my dresser and found a t-shirt and my favourite climbing shorts, the red denim ones with the shiny gold buttons on them like pirate doubloons. The back left pocket was half torn away, and Mumma had told me not to wear them again until she’d mended them, but Mumma hated mending, and Chastity loved those shorts. I was very quiet. Mumma was probably still mad at me after the day before, so I didn’t want to give her any reason to notice me.

I tucked my new book under my arm.
Three-Finger Jack,
it was called. Deliciously scary. About a robber man from long time ago, over in Jamaica. I tiptoed out of the house and went down to the shore. I picked sea grapes from the bushes and stuffed myself till my tummy rumbled and my fingertips were purple. I walked barefoot on the wet sand, feeling it scrunchy and cool between my toes, and watched the little crabs skitter into their holes. I felt a small, guilty glee that Mumma hadn’t called me yet to breakfast and do chores. She would probably give me extra to do today, as punishment. I would have to face the music soon, but not yet. On borrowed time, I hiked back up the rise and around the bend to my special almond tree—the one on the cliff that overlooked the beach. I wasn’t supposed to
go past
the almond tree to the edge, but nobody had said I couldn’t
climb
the almond tree. I had slipped my book into the back waistband of my shorts and climbed up the tree to that comfortable spot where three joined branches held me up like a hand. I settled in and stayed there the whole morning, watching the sea breathe, reading my book. All that time, I felt nothing. No finger tingle. I didn’t notice that Mumma’s dinghy wasn’t pulled up on the beach. I felt nothing but the joy of a solitary Saturday, left to my own devices. You can’t find something if you don’t know you’ve lost it.

When it got to be late morning and still no Dadda or Mumma, I began to wonder. Plus I was hungry, for a real breakfast or an early lunch. I went back to the house. In the kitchen was a grumpy Dadda, washing dishes. He usually did them at night. Dadda snapped at me to go and plait my hair and wash my face and come back for lunch.

The fried breadfruit slices were burnt and the eggs were hard. Dadda barely touched his. He kept glancing out the window that looked towards the beach. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked him if I should go and do my Saturday chore of picking up the fallen cashew apples, juicing the flesh, and putting the nuts out to dry. He said yes. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to me. By now I was wondering where Mumma was. I asked him. He said, “Gone. Out.” I didn’t dare ask him the question that was worming away at my gut:
Mumma mad at me? Is that why she’s staying out so long?
If he didn’t know what I’d done to make her mad, I didn’t want to tell him.

Later, I brought in the bucket of cashew juice and another one of pressed cashew apple flesh. Dadda was on the settee in the living room, glowering at the tv. I put the buckets in the kitchen. Chores done, I took the phone to a corner of the living room and sat on the floor. I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting with Evelyn.
Three-Finger Jack
was on my knee, and I read in the spaces between our words.

Then it was dark. And Dadda was calling me to supper, and smiling a determined, too-frequent smile, and telling me that Mumma had said she might spend the night in town if she missed the last waterbus. That made sense. Mumma would come back in the morning, and we would all be friends again. I ignored the little knot of uneasy I always felt under my breastbone when Mumma stayed away. Tomorrow I would ask her if we could have a picnic on the beach, just her and me.

What book was I reading, Dadda asked. I chattered away happily to him about
Three-Finger Jack
. He took advantage of the book’s setting in Cockpit Country to quiz me on my geography, but I was ready for him: karst topography, limestone dissolves, which creates underground caverns. We played Snap, and I won two games and he won two games. True, he was a little preoccupied, but he always was when Mumma was gone like this. Then a bit more tv, then I went to bed.

Mumma’s dinghy drifted back to shore the next day, empty.

A week later, Dadda was in jail under suspicion of murder. That same day, I was taken from our house to go and live with Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward.

Three weeks after that, Evelyn stopped speaking to me.

I knew something that poor Agway was finding out: being an orphan sucks ass.

Evelyn lifted her stethoscope off Agway’s chest. She took the earpieces out of her ears and hooked them around her neck. “Apart from the bruises and the fracture, he’s actually pretty healthy,” she said. Agway was sitting naked on the examination table in front of her. She tapped the bowl of the stethoscope against her chin and smiled at him. “He has worms, but we can fix that.”

“Worms?” I shuddered. Dadda used to give me a dose of cashew bark tea twice a year, just in case I had worms.

“Intestinal parasites, really.”

“How he got those?” All our parents did it: senna pod tea, castor oil… A day’s worth of diarrhoea twice a year, just as a precaution.

Agway reached for the stethoscope. She took it off and gave it to him.

“Well, that’s the odd thing. Normally you would get those parasites from eating undercooked fish.”

Agway pulled on the rubber tubing of the stethoscope. He stretched it a good foot longer than its natural length. Gently, Evelyn took it from him.

Dadda would try to hide the taste of the cashew bark tea by mixing it with cream soda. I still couldn’t smell cream soda without gagging. “Hang on, undercooked fish?”

She made a face. “Yes. Or raw.”

Well, that made sense.

“God, what horrible people,” she said. “They wouldn’t even cook the food they gave him. I don’t say I wish anybody harm, but maybe it’s for the best that his parents, well.”

Agway pissed, completely unconcerned. The urine made a beautiful yellow arc in the morning light, heading straight for Evelyn’s smock. She danced away, grinned and shook her finger at him. From the blank look in his eyes, he didn’t connect her gesture with what he’d done. She patted his chest.

I took a fresh diaper off the folded stack of them that Evelyn kept in her office. Evelyn watched me diaper him. “You really want to foster him?” she asked

I nodded. “Thinking of it, yes.” I tried wrestling him back into the t-shirt they’d given him. He wasn’t interested. Blasted boy been practising wriggling with the eels.

“Children’s Services prefers them to go to whole families, you know.”

“I’m not broken, Evelyn.” Agway had managed to get his head and one arm jammed through the neck of the t-shirt.

She looked embarrassed. “Of course not. But they like families that come with a mummy and a daddy and two well-behaved children, preferably one girl and one boy.”

“Ifeoma was as well behaved as any normal child her age,” I told her.

“Who?”

“My daughter. The reason I left Holy Name.”

The tips of Evelyn’s ears went pink. “Right. Some of the girls told me why you didn’t finish out your final year.”

“I raised her well. All by myself.”

She gave me that nod, the wobbly “yes” nod that really means no.

I gave up on the t-shirt; pulled it off and hoisted Agway onto my hip. He immediately stretched up and tried to grab my hair, and threw a tantrum when I wouldn’t let him. I sat him back on the examination table to calm down. He stormed and slapped his hands on the table. “What a fuss and a fret!” I said to him. “Evelyn, I can look after one little boy.”

“I’m sure you’d be wonderful.” She broke my gaze, looked off to the right as though there was something to see there. Was it up and to the right for lying, or down and centre? She said, “There’s a proper procedure for doing these things, you know.”

I wasn’t going to beg Evelyn Chow to do me favours. In my mind’s eye I saw her at fourteen, dewy-perfect, looking up from her desk as I walked into class late, still sweaty from rowing the dinghy from Blessée to Cayaba and walking the two miles to school because I didn’t have bus fare. In my mind’s eye, she was flinging a swathe of beautifully groomed, glossy black hair behind one ear, giving me a breezy smile, and saying loudly enough for the whole class to hear, “Oh,
there
you are, Charity Girl! Been rowing around Cayaba in your old boat again?”

I tickled Agway’s tummy. He chortled and kicked. Evelyn said, “He’s so happy when you’re here.”

“Did you ever have children?” I asked her, curious. “Did you want any?” I didn’t ask her if she’d gotten married. That was a tender subject with me.

She didn’t answer immediately. “He’s not having a good time here, poor soul,” she said. “We’re only trying to look after him, but he doesn’t know that. We poke him with needles to draw blood, and it makes him so frightened. The X-rays, the ultrasounds; they terrify him.”

I nodded. “And he doesn’t understand about knives and forks, or many kinds of food.”

“Samuel—that’s my husband—is lovely. And no, we don’t have children. I look after children here at work every day, and Samuel has a whole side of nephews and nieces. That’s enough for us.”

“Oh.” She’d been a perfect girl, was now a perfect wife, and had a perfect life with no encumbrances.

“My job in a case like this is to consider the best interests of the child.”

And I was a broke, aging single woman living on an isolated island. “I understand.”

“When you’re with him, he isn’t so frightened.”

I looked at her. A ribbon of hope uncurled in my belly.

“So I just want you to know that I’ve told Children’s Services you can visit him as often as you want,” she said. “Until we find him a permanent home. Okay?”

And that was it. She would let me visit him to gentle him, but she would not let me take him. “Yes,” I answered. “Okay.” She was going to throw me only one dry bone. And, damn me, I accepted it. Calamity.

“You and your boys hanging out weekend coming?” teenaged Chastity asked Michael. It was only Thursday, but I was already feeling sorry for myself.

“Yeah, I guess so.” His newly breaking voice squeaked on the last word.

Michael and I had been tight for four years now. He knew when I’d first had my period. I knew when he’d had his first wet dream. But it was when his voice broke that something in me changed. I began to see him differently, to
notice
things I hadn’t before: how large his hands were, and how graceful; how his arms and shoulders were filling out his shirts. The smell of his sweat when he came to hang out with me in the stands after his class’s weekly soccer game made the secret parts of me twitch.

The jangle of lunchtime voices in the school caf screeched, bellowed, and roared all around us. Two stray dogs, rib-thin, slunk through the open-air caf, hoping for crumbs. Most of the students just ignored them.

I looked in my lunch bag. Dadda had put in some of the dumplings from last night’s dinner, and the stewed fish, spiced with pimiento berries and browned onions. Cashew juice, of course, in a little plastic bottle. And the yam left over from dinner, too. I didn’t feel for yam that day. I forked it onto Michael’s plate. He didn’t look up. He called the dogs over. They came, suspiciously, fearfully. At the table in front of us, Neil kicked out at one of the dogs as it passed. He got it squarely on the flank, but it made no noise, just staggered a little and kept going. The two hid under an empty table a little distance away, looking hopefully at Michael. I glared at Neil, who grinned at me, that broad, I’m-so-sexy grin that had all the girls writing him notes during class. I shook my head and rolled my eyes at him.

“What allyou going to do?” I asked Michael. He was scraping the ground meat out of his patty onto the floor for the dogs. He was on a vegetarian kick recently. “You see that new karate movie at the drive-in yet?” I could hear the edge of envy in my voice. My Friday night would consist of a waterbus ride back to Blessée with Dadda, then a few hours of homework. Afterwards maybe a solitary walk to the cliff in the dark of evening to smell the sea. And to watch it respire in the darkness, and to hope something marvellous would happen soon and save me from dying of boredom.

Lately, I’d been examining Michael’s every gesture, every expression, for a clue whether he was seeing me differently now, too. That pensive look: was he thinking about touching me? When he called me early on a Saturday morning, was it because he’d spent the night in a lather, thinking about me?

“Ey. Dreamboat,” I said. “You don’t hear I’m talking to you?” I managed to keep my tone light and teasing, like it used to be before Michael’s voice broke.

Michael still hadn’t said anything, or looked up. He was only chasing the yam round and round on his plate. “What wrong with you?” I asked him. He’d moved his feet away from the patty innards on the floor. The dogs were jostling for the scant two mouthfuls of meat.

Michael wouldn’t meet my eye. “Carlton.”

“You and he fighting again? You know it will blow over. Come tomorrow, you two going to be thick as thieves again. You and Carlton and Delroy and Ashok like the four legs on that dog, always running everywhere together.” There. That sounded like the old Chastity, nuh true?

There was a shriek from over by one of the big tables. Consuela and Gillian were having a food fight, using it as a way of drawing attention to themselves. They were like twins, both with high chests and taut thighs. “Fucking hell,” I said to Michael. “If Gillian’s skirt was any shorter, you’d be able to see what she had for dinner last night.”

Michael grimaced. “Chastity, I think I like Carlton.” Finally he met my eyes. The doubt, the fear on his face made my throat catch. “Like I supposed to like girls, I mean. Oh, God, what I going to do?”

I stared at him and didn’t let my face change. Not one bit. Inside, I was wailing.

Michael’s top lip trembled. “You can’t tell anyone. Not one soul.”

“I won’t.” My mind was stewing. I didn’t know whether I was embarrassed for him, or embarrassed at myself.

“Please, Chastity.”

“For true! I won’t.” In Civics class just before lunch, I’d been trying on names, writing them in my notebook: Chastity Theresa Jasper. Chastity Jasper-Lambkin. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Jasper. Shame curdled the food in my belly and chilled my skin.

“Thanks.” Michael tried to mash the yam with one of the plastic forks from the cafeteria. The fork broke off in his hand. He cussed and threw the broken handle down on his plate. Stood up.

I touched his arm. “Michael.”

“What.”

“You know for sure?” My voice trembled. If he said yes, I was going to die right there, I knew it.

He frowned. Frisbeed his paper plate of food into the open garbage can a few tables away, alarming the dogs, who ran out of the caf. He got a shrieking round of overenthusiastic applause from Gillian and Consuela, who were both hot for him. He scowled at them, shook his head. “Don’t talk so loud. No, I don’t know.”

A chance, then. A tiny chance. “Why you don’t test it and see?” I asked him.

He shot me a look of pure panic. “What? You mad? Carlton would kill me. Then he would tell everybody.”

I didn’t point out that once he was dead, he wouldn’t give two shits who Carlton told. “No, not with him.” Carlton was a pimple-faced idiot who could only talk about cricket and girls. No way Michael could like him over me. Right?

I touched Michael’s hand. He jumped. “Test it with me,” I said.