“You’re only four hours away. You always used to have time for me. I need you here too,” Ella would say, begging Verdene to visit more. And Verdene would feel guilty about how much she preferred to be at school.
Akua would bolster Verdene’s resolve. “Listen, she’s yuh mother. She’ll understand if yuh can’t go home this weekend.”
“But she needs me.”
“What she needs is to get used to the fact that you have yuh own life now.”
Verdene wanted to be around Akua more and more. As an only child, Verdene had no reference for true sisterhood, but she had observed her aunt and her mother. They were close like the girls at school, cackling about this and that over the phone, sharing everything with each other, down to the intonations in their voices and the expressions on their faces. But Verdene learned that there was a thin line between sisterhood and something else she had no name for. She and Akua ended up crossing the line numerous times, taking things further than the other girls. Their hugs became kisses, and their gentle brushes became direct touches. Not to mention the fights. They were messy, each girl’s tongue sharply edged, capable of puncturing the ego. They knew which buttons to push. Likewise, they knew which string to tug to reel the other back.
To Verdene, their act was natural, a physical expression of how they felt about each other: the scorching love and cooling hate, the abysmal highs and outrageous lows. But to the university, and to the residence hall director Miss Raynor, who discovered them one late afternoon in the dorm, they were no different from witches warranting public execution. Seeing them in their loving embrace, Miss Raynor’s face caved in as though a sinkhole were embedded at its center.
Verdene was disgraced, her poor mother shamed. The news spread like a cane-field fire and made its way to River Bank. It hovered like dark soot for days, months, years. Ella never again left the house after she found out. Verdene thinks to this day that her mother’s cancer started then. It was a slow, painful death brought on by heartbreak. More than the heartbreak and shame was Ella’s guilt and loss. After Verdene’s explusion, Ella had to send away her only child. She did it to save her life. Back in River Bank, Verdene could’ve been raped or killed. If she were a man caught with another man, she would’ve been arrested, maimed, mutilated, and buried. So she was sent to live with her aunt Gertrude in London, where she finished school. Verdene had boarded the plane with only her two long hands. No luggage. She wore a deep purple wool dress, the only clothing Ella thought appropriate for England’s brisk winter. In her hand, Verdene held on to the smooth black river stone Little Margot had given her. “To remembah me by,” the little girl had said. She had snuck out of her house and run up to Verdene as Verdene got into the taxi to the airport. Verdene took the stone and thanked her, and for years she kept it. She never told Margot this, but once in a while she would pick it up and sit with it until it warmed in her palm. Other times she would resist the urge to go to a nearby lake in London and fling the stone as far out in the water as possible; for it held inside it the memory of the bitterness that settled inside her, and solidified.
When Akua went home to Forrester, a town five miles from the university, she was beaten and gang-raped. Her body was found in the bushes, mauled and naked. She was barely breathing, but because of the shame she endured, she begged the Good Samaritan to leave her there and let her die. He refused and rushed her to the hospital. In a letter to Verdene many years later, Akua included photographs of her four beautiful children and the policeman she married in the same church where she was an honorable member on the usher board and the women’s ministry. She ended the letter with: “May God be with you, always. He works miracles.” Verdene crushed it inside her fist. For many years, she could not bring herself to return to Jamaica to visit, too ashamed to show her face until she had to. When Verdene came back to River Bank with a lifetime of regrets and a small suitcase, Margot was the first person at her doorstep.
Verdene resists the temptation to kiss Margot, settling for just listening to her breathing next to her. Carefully, Verdene leaves the bed. Standing in the living room where she usually goes to meditate, Verdene realizes why Margot would think she’s choosing Ella. Everywhere Verdene looks, there is a picture of Ella. The walls of the room are covered; so is the wooden whatnot that holds figurines of the Virgin Mary rested atop crocheted doilies, and a small television, which Verdene never watches. Ella smiles without parting her lips in each photo: a demure bride posing next to a Volkswagen Beetle; a new mother cradling a small baby, sitting stiffly before the dark, serious man behind her; a carefree sibling laughing with her sister — the only time Ella shows flashes of teeth — both women identical with Audrey Hepburn updos and light skin that glows almost white in these black-and-white photos; and finally, a picture of a modest, older woman whose face shows hints of the former blushing bride, but rounder and devoid of life — a vacant, colorless room.
Verdene runs her fingers through her hair. How strange she had not realized — the way Margot did — Ella’s dominating presence inside the house. There is something wrong with this. It’s as though Verdene doesn’t exist — never existed — of her own free will. Here she is in her mother’s house, surrounded by her mother’s things, and her mother’s inspection. Verdene had already missed a good part of her youth doing what was considered by Ella to be the right thing. Perhaps she was oblivious to this loss because she was too busy trying to bury memories of the past, using their brittle bones to construct a future.
One by one Verdene takes down her mother’s pictures. Carefully, she lays them on the sofa and wraps them in newspapers and plastic she has kept from the market. She searches for a box to place them in, but when she cannot find one, she puts them inside the small suitcase she brought home. The room appears empty without the pictures, but now there is space for Margot.
8
ALPHONSO TELLS MARGOT TO MEET HIM FOR LUNCH AT A RESTAURANT far from the hotel. He drives his Mercedes-Benz while she opts to take a taxi, arriving five minutes later. He doesn’t get up when she approaches the table. There’s chatter around them — a few European tourists eating fried fish and bami for lunch, their backs, shoulders, and faces red from sunburn, their tour buses parked out front, where the drivers smoke cigarettes and kick pebbles in the sand. Third World plays on the sound system: “96 Degrees in the Shade” fills the small, open space like the smell of fried escovitch fish and the salt-tinged breeze from the sea. Alphonso appraises Margot with his eyes as she sits across from him. She had applied another layer of red lipstick before leaving the hotel. She also brushed her hair down with more gel so that every strand stays in place.
“You look better every time I see you,” he says, ogling her. She smiles with her lips. She has never been out with him or any of her clients this way. A black woman dining with a white man, though Alphonso is just as Jamaican as her, is viewed with suspicion. It might appear as though she’s propositioning him. Margot crosses her legs and leans back in her chair, creating distance. She’s aware of the people around them, especially the staff. She catches the eyes of the man behind the bar serving drinks and sizing her up.