“I draw anything I feel. Don’t have to have meaning. I mean, I can’t really seem to capture what I really want to capture,” Thandi responds, searching for a reaction in his face. But she can’t tell what she sees. Charles listens to her with the intentness of a wizened old man, watching her gestures, affirming her ambivalence. She wonders how old he really is. She’s afraid that she has revealed too much too soon. “I don’t know why I even care. This might sound stupid, but I just want to win this art competition at school.” Her nervousness makes her talk too much. Very rarely does she say this much to anyone about what she wants, much less to a common boy she barely knows.
“If it is dat important to you, then why would you t’ink it’s stupid?” he asks.
Thandi shrugs her shoulders.
Charles reaches for her hand and holds it as though he has done this many times before. “Somehow ah get di feeling dis is more important to you than winning.”
Unlike her sweaty ones, Charles’s palms are dry and surprisingly warm, like sun-warmed stones. She doesn’t pull away, though a girl like her — a Saint Emmanuel High School girl — should have rebuked such audacity. A series of thoughts chastises her: Who does he think he is? Since she’s getting lighter, shouldn’t she be looking elsewhere — at the boys in Ironshore, with big houses and cars? What now? But sitting here with her hand in Charles’s feels oddly natural. Their brown skin seems connected; and a lump of uncertainty over her cream rises in Thandi’s throat. Her inhibitions melt like candle wax under his heat. She imagines this is how girls with boyfriends feel. Thandi leans into Charles, closing her eyes. But Charles pulls back, his sudden motion rustling the sticks at their feet, snapping them in half.
“Yuh all right?” he asks.
“Sorry.”
Thandi picks up the sketchpad, which had slipped from her lap. Charles puts his hand on her shoulder. She cannot read his expression.
“You’ll figure it out,” Charles says, moving away. She wishes she were still wrapped in plastic, for it might have worked to keep her broken heart intact. If this is a test, then she has failed miserably. She gets up and flees in the direction of the water.
“Where yuh going?” he asks.
“For a swim,” she says, hoping to sound casual, though in fact she cannot swim. She takes off her shoes, and dips her toes into the water. The sand is warm and the water isn’t cold at all. She takes off her dress, leaving her shorts and tank top like the local bathers do. She knows Charles is watching, waiting to see what she will do. Behind her is the skeleton of a majestic castle — one of the resorts emerging right here in her backyard. No one is in sight, but in months the white sands will be populated by the sunburned bodies of white tourists. From a plane flying overhead they might look like seals, their heads tilted toward the rays, bodies open for as much exposure as possible, basking in luxury. The castle fades away like a mirage as Thandi drifts and drifts farther away from shore. She moves forward as though going toward the middle of the sea — a dare she soon realizes was not a dare, but an impulse.
Charles hasn’t followed. The disappointment disorients her, but it is quickly replaced by fear, which creeps up on her with each wave that rises like a giant blue wall. They tumble toward her, each one bigger than the other. Thandi loses her footing and goes under. She tries to float as long as she can, her eyes on the sky, angry at herself for acting a fool. Her hands flail against the avalanche of waves as she tries to swim. She’s not sure which direction she’s turned. The undercurrent pulls her with possessive force. She remembers why the fishermen call this area Pregnant Heidi — for the waves are majestic, rising like the concave belly of a woman with child. The tale dates back to the days of slavery, when a slave girl named Heidi flung herself into the sea after finding out that she was pregnant with her master’s baby. Her body was never found. At night Pregnant Heidi gives birth in a surge of waves rushing to the sand, her screams carried in the swift breeze that whistles against every window of every shack. By day she seeks a victim to drown. Just when Thandi thinks she will be propelled to the ocean’s floor into the crease of Pregnant Heidi’s bosom, someone grabs her by the waist and pulls her. Through the water and terror, she sees the head of the person pulling her with impressive strength and dexterity. She might have imagined it, but he cuts through the water like a fish.
“Hold on!” he says, his voice riding steady above the roar of the waves. “Jus’ hold on!” And Thandi obeys, holding Charles tightly as he snatches her from Pregnant Heidi’s grasp and carries her back to shore.
Thandi feels exposed, walking next to a boy this way, with her dress clinging to her. She’s soaked from head to toe. But there’s something comforting in being led. Following one step behind Charles, she observes the back of his heels, crusted with dirt. He carries his shoes in one hand and Thandi’s shoes and sketchpad in the other, whistling lightly as he walks. Occasionally he looks back at her. Thandi bows her head shyly. Had it not been for Charles, she would have drowned. “Thank you.” She peers up at him when she says this, emboldened by gratitude.
“Let’s get you a towel,” he responds. He leads her inside his yard, where two big hogs are walking around inside a pen. By the fence there is a chicken coop where the cackling fowls are squared away, high-stepping over each other and digging holes in the ground with their beaks. Thandi is familiar with this yard, her childhood memories rich with adventures with Charles’s younger sister, Jullette. While Miss Violet and Delores swapped ingredients from their kitchen (“Beg yuh a cup ah salt. Gimme jus’ a throw ah rice. Fill dis up wid some syrup. Yes, yes, dat will do. Likkle more.”) Thandi and Jullette would climb the soursop tree that once hovered above the chicken coop, pretending to be leaders of the squawking birds. What remains of the tree is a stump. Through the wire fence Thandi sees the ocean in which she nearly drowned. Miss Ruby’s shack is not too far away. Like Miss Ruby, Charles and Jullette’s father made money selling fish. Asafa was a fisherman who used to walk around River Bank with lobsters and crabs. He used to scare all the children by reaching into a white plastic pail and holding up the creatures with their scissor claws and antennas poised for attack. The children screamed. Dread would send their little feet running, some tripping over stones and gashing knees and elbows in search of safety behind their mothers’ skirts. Though this was a terrifying event, every child in River Bank looked forward to Asafa cutting across the lanes with his bucket. They eagerly anticipated it like they anticipated Christmas market and the Junkanoo parade in the square. Asafa was the only fisherman who went beyond Pregnant Heidi to catch fish, his thick dreadlocks knotted on top of his head and shorts hiked up his long, skinny legs. Every morning he would be out at sea, patiently sitting with his rod or snorkeling, his bright yellow, green, and red boat docked in the bluest part of the water. The last time Thandi saw him was eight years ago, before he met a woman who bought a lobster, took him back to her villa, and invited him to go with her to America. He never returned.
Thandi remembers Delores offering Charles and his siblings some of her chicken-back soup with lots of boiled yam, boiled bananas, and dumplings on Saturday evenings the year Asafa left. Jullette went to live with relatives, since Miss Violet could not afford to feed all her children and send them to school. It was easier for Miss Violet with the boys, since boys can survive on their own. Charles, the oldest, was hired by neighbors to wash fences, move stones, haul fallen branches, cut grass, carry bags, and push vehicles that got stuck in the potholes up the steep incline on River Bank Road. But Charles couldn’t feed his mother and his three brothers with the little money he made, so Delores and Miss Gracie offered to help. Charles would be the one sent to collect the food, his eyes lowered to his bare feet, his broad shoulders raised like a protective wall against the many whispers and the shaking of heads. Of course, they must have blurred in the periphery of his vision as he carried the pot of food the way pallbearers carry a coffin. He used to mumble his gratitude to Delores as though he expected such generosity and resented it at the same time.