“That way, missus,” one woman said, pointing away from them.
Perhaps Derek’s stiffness was that same resentment. But some of the children along the road smiled and waved at us, and one little boy ran alongside the car until his mother called sharply, “Lawrence!” and he slowed and disappeared. On either side of the road there were small low houses with metal grating protecting the porches, and alongside a few of them were raised burial plots, rough stone tombs sunk down a bit in the ground as though little by little they would bury themselves.
Tequila was from a town like this, she’d told me, and her mother buried alongside a house like one of these. Like the people who had boarded the flight with me, people who now lived in East New York, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens, she had once gone home every summer with a duffel bag of clothes and an enormous assortment of consumer electronics. As the children had waited in the check-in aisle at Kennedy Airport, they had used appliance boxes as benches.
I had nothing for Meghan except detective novels. I didn’t know what she needed or, more important, what she wanted.
“Do you know my sister?” I asked Derek. He nodded. For a long time he said nothing. Finally he cocked his head toward the backseat slightly and added, “She is a very good swimmer.”
A minute later and we crested the mountain and saw far ahead of us the blue Caribbean. Below us the road twisted and turned as it made its way downhill, and far out on the horizon I could see a sailboat. The air was thick, and a long rodent crossed in front of the car as we stopped for a pothole.
“Mongoose,” Derek said softly. “If he go to the sea, it is good luck. If he go to the mountain, bad luck.”
“Which way was he going?”
Derek looked from one side of the road to the other. “Neither, I think.”
Twice we passed small guesthouses, once with a young couple with hikers’ backpacks out front consulting a map, but otherwise there was no sign of tourists and tourism. The road began to parallel the sea and at one point was almost upon it, and on the pebbly beach a man was soaping himself while standing waist deep in the water. Finally the car pulled up to a wooden gate painted a deep red. On either side were two enormous trees with red-brown trunks, a canopy of dim shade over the entrance. It was nothing like I had expected, no palatial villa, to be rented by the week. Down a path lined with old conch shells was a small one-story place, almost a pavilion, with a center room open to the ocean and the air. A small couch and two chairs were grouped around a low wooden table piled with books. A lizard ran across the floor, leapt at an insect, swallowed, and disappeared beneath an enormous philodendron whose speckled leaves covered most of the slope outside.
There was a patio and steps that led down to a narrow dock and a small stony beach. The sun had thrown a golden pathway from the horizon to the shore, and caught in its glare were a clutch of dugout canoes. I felt disoriented. That morning I had had coffee and a bagel in my apartment in New York as the May rain fell chill and hard against the window and the family across the yard, by the looks of it, slept in. Leo had spent the night at the house of a friend from Biltmore. “Tell her I said hi,” he had said breezily of his mother.
“Do you want to send a note or something?”
“Saying what? Hi? What’s up? Where are you? I’m still alive? I exist? No thanks. She knows.”
“No wonder it used to take months for sailors to get here from England,” I said aloud to no one. “It gave them time to get used to it.”
A boy was standing on the end of the dock, his fists on his narrow hips, his thin legs apart. His head was in shadow, his hair rough and shaggy, and suddenly he raised his arm and waved back and forth at one of the dugouts, shouting something I couldn’t hear. He was wearing khaki shorts to his knees and a shrunken T-shirt, and finally he let the shorts fall and dove into the water. He came up into the stripe of bright sun and began to swim, and in the light on the ruddy head and the sure length of the breaststroke I realized that what I had thought was a boy just short of manhood was my sister, wasted and shorn.
“Holy God,” I said.
“You will have to wait a long time,” said Derek. “She swims for many miles. My wife is cooking for her every night except for Saturday. She says someday she will swim to Cuba.”
“And interview Fidel,” I said.
On one side of the pavilion were two small bedrooms and a bath. Plantation beds with mosquito net canopies were in each. I could not tell which Meghan used because there was a framed photo of Leo in each with a small bouquet of some strange salmon-colored flower in a vase next to it. I changed into a bathing suit, some shorts, and rubber sandals, and followed the steps carefully to the dock. I looked out over the ocean. There was nothing, nothing, as far as you could see except for the dugouts. In one of them a man pointed at me, then spoke to his companion, and the two of them laughed. The coastline curved to a broad beach and the road running alongside it, and I could faintly hear the voices of the people bobbing up and down in a faint swell. I lay back on the dock. Above my head was a banana tree with green fruit. Somewhere in its branches a bird made a harsh braying sound. I fell asleep.
When I woke it was because of the sound of laughter again. Meghan was treading water near one of the dugouts. They handed her a net bag, and she looped it over one ankle, then struck out for the dock. As her arms curved overhead, her muscles were as clear as those in an anatomy book, and her freckles had almost merged into one expanse of mahogany brown. When she approached the pilings, her left hand rose from the water and wrapped itself around my ankle. Her right grabbed the splintering wood, and she arched out of the blue water like a red-gold fish. The men in the dugout watched. With one motion she pivoted, spraying water all over me.
“How is he?” she said fiercely. “That’s all I want to know.”
“I haven’t seen him,” I said. “I’ve talked to him a couple of times on the phone.”
“What?” The insides of her frown lines were a paler color, as though she kept her face clenched when she was in the sun. “I thought he was living with you. Mercedes just sent me a fax saying he was living with you and working at the office in the Bronx. I was so relieved. I haven’t been able to track him down anywhere.”
“I thought you meant Evan.”
“Evan? Who cares about Evan?”
“Leo’s fine,” I said. “He sends his love.”
Meghan smiled and threw her arms around me tight, holding, releasing, holding, releasing, as though she was doing an exercise. The water was warm, but she felt cold. “You are one of the world’s worst liars,” she said. “I’ve always admired that. Learning not to lie is the hardest thing.”
“Did you learn not to eat, too?”
She ran her fingers down her sides. Meghan has always been slender, and in times of trouble perhaps more than that. When she went on foreign assignments, she would sometimes look a little drawn on air, but I suspected she cultivated that: Look, America. Look how difficult is the work of bringing you the news! When we were children, I’d read the term fighting weight somewhere and thought that it applied to Meghan. In the months after our parents were killed, she had become so thin that she’d had to pin a fat handful of fabric at the side of her uniform skirt to hold it up. Every morning at breakfast, every afternoon when we arrived at our new home, she would make me food: cinnamon toast with cups of hot chocolate, cream donuts with glasses of milk. She even learned to make milk shakes in the blender, and she would sit at the table, hunched slightly forward, and watch me eat until I was done. By the time the school year was over, a roll of pink fat hung over the waistband of my underpants and the school nurse called my aunt and uncle in to say that Meghan must eat or she would have to leave school.
“I eat,” Meghan said then. “I eat,” she said now. It was probably true. You would have to eat a lot to underwrite the calories needed to swim to Cuba.
Derek’s wife at first had cooked and served, but she and Meghan now had an arrangement in which she left the
food in an ancient oven in the small kitchen. I couldn’t understand how Meghan had lost any weight at all. That first night we had lobster stuffed with onion and bread crumbs, potatoes mashed with cheese, a local vegetable called callaloo, and some key lime pie. Meghan made me a rum punch while she drank beer. She wore an unfamiliar shift dress of cheap yellow cotton that hung straight to an inch or two above her knees. “I bought some stuff at an outdoor market a couple of weeks ago,” she said.
After dinner we went out to the patio and lay on two old teak lounges placed side by side. The stars were so bright that they seemed to press down on us, and Meghan pointed suddenly to the sky. A shooting star moved in an arc away from us, then fizzled like a bum firework. Bats moved in careful figure eights overhead. For a long time we just lay there silently. Meghan went inside and got another beer and a joint from a little box on her bureau. I shook my head when she passed it over. Now that I was here, I didn’t know how to begin. There was too much to say.
“What’s the deal with this place anyhow?” I finally said.
“It’s Edward’s,” she said. “Edward Prevaricator. He said you two know one another. He was at the Cove when I was there. One of the waiters took a picture of me with a cell phone and was peddling it to the tabloids. The waiter got fired, but the rest of the staff weren’t so happy about that. And Sunday was coming, with a whole new group of tourists. Never mind the prices at that place. He took me out for a drive one day and we wound up here. He and his wife bought it twenty years ago from a friend. He said they used it maybe twice a year. She died about five years ago of breast cancer, and he’s barely used it since. He just asked if I wanted to stay for a while. I went out running the first morning, and everybody was staring at me. Little kids, women carrying laundry baskets, the guy at the jerk stand up by the police station. I came back and said, You know, this isn’t going to work, they all recognize me. He’s such a nice man, he just gave me this little smile and said, I suspect few of them have ever seen a redhead before. That was it. Isn’t that pathetic? These poor people, who get maybe two channels if they even have a television, and I’d convinced myself that I’m so important that they all recognize me. And it’s all because I have red hair. Anyhow, I decided to stay.”
“For how long?”
Meghan shrugged, took a long pull on her beer and a long pull on the joint. She was staring up at the sky. “You know who I’ve been thinking about?”
“Who?”
“Mother. Do you remember the bedside table? There were magazines and paperbacks and aspirin and a silver insulated pitcher of tea and a carafe of water and some prescription vials—I’m still not sure what those were—and the telephone and that little date book she had, it had a pink cover and the word Secretary on the front in gold script, and God, so much other stuff, sometimes there was a bakery box with cookies, sometimes there was a box of chocolates. And Life Savers. There was always a roll of peppermint Life Savers.”
“I remember,” I said, and for a moment I did. Not the pitcher or the date book, but the smell, of warm skin, Chanel No. 5, and peppermints. It hovered there on the edge of my memory, then skittered away the way the shooting star had done. The bedroom with its floral spread and slipper chair, the striped walls and the landscape above the bureau, the soft, rather puffy woman saying, “That’s a sticky little face! Why is that little face so sticky?” For just an instant I had it. Somewhere it must live within me, but so deep that I would only ever glimpse the edges.
Meghan was talking, her voice slow and soft and changed somehow, the consonants not as sure of themselves as they’d once been. “She’d gotten her whole world down to one room and one trip,” she said. “She almost never left that bed until she got up to get dressed and go out, and when she went out she never went anyplace except the club. Even at the club she never went anyplace but the dining room. I used to think she was just lazy. Stupid, too, for the longest time I thought she was stupid. Maybe she was. Hell, I’ll never know now. But some nights I lie out here and think she had it all down. She knew where everything was in her room. She knew where everything was in her bathroom. She knew the menu at the club. She knew who would be there. Out the bedroom door, down the steps, into the car, up to the portico at the club, in the door, into the dining room. Then do the whole thing in reverse. There was no reason to do more. There was no reason to go anyplace else.” She sighed, and I heard the clink of the bottle against the side of the chaise. The sound made another memory, and another, and I said, “She drank.”
Meghan exploded with laughter and grabbed my arm. The smoke from her joint sent a slow coil into the air, and the bats moved off to the perimeter of the patio, down toward the big banana tree. “There’s a news flash! She drank! He drank! Everyone drank! Manhattans, martinis, vodka gimlets, whiskey sours. Remember that sweet old man Daddy worked with, Roger Highwater, how plastered he used to get? How he would sing?” I shook my head. “Jesus, Bridget, you have a lousy memory.”
“I just remember you. I just remember me and you.”
I looked over at Meghan, and tears were bright on her cheeks. The moon was coming up and laying down a silver stripe on the ocean in what seemed like the same place as the gold one had been in the late afternoon. The repetitive trill we were hearing was either a bird, a cricket, or a frog.
“There’s something so satisfying,” Meghan said, “about living a life like this. You get up and you run a couple of miles. You come home and you eat. You read, you swim. There are three bathing suits, and you put one on. There are three pairs of shorts, and you change into one of them. There are ten books, and you choose one. You read, you swim, you eat, you drink. You sleep. No one needs you to do more. Maybe that was her deal.”
“Except for one thing. She had children. Two daughters.”
“Maybe she thought we didn’t need her. Maybe she thought we had lives of our own and we didn’t need her.”
“Are you nuts? We were little kids. Of course we needed her.”
“Did we? We were at school. Nelly made our meals. What did we need her to do?”
“You don’t need a mother to do anything. A mother doesn’t prove anything by being there. She proves something by not being there!”
“Ah, so now we finally get down to it.” Meghan said the last four words slowly, with ellipses in her voice. Her face was dry now, and her mouth was drawn tight like a drawstring. I realized that she was drunk. Maybe it was only in that blurry netherworld that she’d finally made her peace with what she remembered of our childhood, or with herself.
“I didn’t come to fight with you,” I said. “I just miss you so much. And Leo does, too. He doesn’t say anything, but how would you feel? He comes home from Spain, his mother is plastered all over the papers and his father is living in some hotel in Japan and the apartment where he grew up is empty and it’s like he’s supposed to roll with it. He can’t talk to Evan about you because he thinks it’s disloyal, and he can’t talk to you because you’re out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’ve left him lots of messages. Once a week I go to Derek’s and I use their phone and call Leo. I even bought a phone card so I could do it. I’m embarrassed at how many messages I’ve left. When I was at the Cove, I worked out exactly where he’d be and called and called and got nothing but a machine.”
“At what number?”
“I don’t know. It’s Leo’s number. His dorm room, I guess.”
“He never uses the phone in his dorm room. None of them do. I don’t even think they have phones hooked up to the jacks. They all use their cell phones.”
“I called him at the apartment, too. I left so many messages at the apartment. Really long messages. Probably ridiculous messages.”
“But he never goes there. Don’t you have his cell phone number?”
“I do but it’s in my own cell phone, and the battery ran out so there’s no way for me to get it.”
“E-mail? I know I packed your BlackBerry.”
“Aah, the Bl
ackBerry. You can’t get a signal here. But one day Derek was taking me into town and I turned it on. We were coming over that big mountain and all of a sudden, boom! I’m connected. My God, it was the scariest moment since I’ve been here. It was like my whole life was sitting in my lap. Two hundred and eighteen messages, and not one from anyone I wanted to hear from. Reporters, co-workers, people who would tell you at a cocktail party they’re my friends, only they’re not. I felt like the thing had claws.”
“So you just gave up on it.”
“I tossed it off the end of a pier in town. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. Where it belongs, in my opinion.”
“That’s mature,” I said.
My sister set her mouth and looked south over the sea. Finally she said, “Leo could have gotten on the plane with you and be here talking to me right now.”
“That’s not his job, Meghan. He gets to be the kid. You get to be the mother. He doesn’t take care of you. It’s the other way around.”
“Not always,” she said lazily, finishing the joint.
“Come home,” I said.
The trilling was loud and rhythmic, and while I waited for her to say something I found myself nearly lulled to sleep. But Meghan’s eyes were still open, staring at the stars. She ran her hand through her hair, which curled at the crown like the ringlets she’d had in her baby pictures.