Читать книгу Fingerprints of Previous Owners - Rebecca Entel - Страница 9

Chapter One

When the planes landed out on the key, we would gather on the beach. We draped ourselves in sheets, the wind turning us into shifting shapes of brown and white, like sea creatures wrestling our own bleached shells.

I’d never arrived here from somewhere northern, frosty. But I imagined that when they filed out of the plane, it was hard not to go rigid, expecting the January cold. The sun would come down to massage their shoulders. They would relax against its warmth and squint through their sunglasses against its glare. From there, they headed to the resort on Furnace Island, though their boarding passes had said the destination was Cruffey. They didn’t know what it meant for this place to have two names.

I’d never even been on the key where the resort landed its planes to see the island as a dot out in the ocean. I’d never arrived here from anywhere.

When they moved toward a gravelly area labeled Baggage Claim, a flurry. A team of people with the name of the resort scripted across their chests would appear, arrange its bodies as prosthetics for whatever they needed to do: move luggage, climb into the small boat that awaited them. Scaffolded in wooden masts and adornments, bearing a flag with the resort’s sunset logo imprinted over a red-and-yellow castle. Across its side in regal script: The Pinta. The boat would jostle against the dock, clacking and swishing, as they waited to be unmoored.

After heaving all of their luggage in a human assembly line onto a twin boat labeled The Nina: Luggage, some team members would don felt hats with feathers and put on the bug-eyed faces of actors. Those staff members without costumes—the ones who’d done the lifting, the ones from the island, the ones like me—would sit down on the floor of the boat and wait.

Some of the newly arrived faced toward the island, some faced backward toward the airport key or the open water. Their backs would touch. The stepping-stone trail of clouds in the sky would lure some of their eyes out to sea while others would lean away, waving their phones around for a signal, frowning. The boat would begin bobbing along.

A throat clearing, followed by a sandy boot planting itself on the bench next to them, bringing all the eyes back.

“Then the Pinta!” the befeathered man would bellow. “Being faster and in the lead! Sighted land!”

Some of the other men would jump up around him, pointing excitedly at the beach that had been in view even from the key.

“In the presence of all of my crew!” the bellower would continue, Columbus embroidered across the front of his hat. “I ask you to bear solemn witness that I am taking possession of this island for their lord and lady, the King and the Queen! And I will call this island, in all her glory, after our sovereigns Ferdinand and Ees-abella: Ferdin-Ees Island. And oh, the glorious heat of the sun that circles our God-given Earth: Furnace Island, then!”

Kids would clap. I imagined the adults, too, cheering.

“Lo and behold, sir!” One of the hatted crew members would put his arm around Columbus’s shoulders. “Natives!”

Finally every head would turn to the beach. The beach where we waited. They’d see a cluster of women gather slowly to face them. Just the local women, no flown-in-from-the-States staff with skin lighter than our driest sand.

“Why, they go about as naked as the day they were born!”

Laughing, they would all feel lighter. Drifting farther from home and its tethers as their boat rocked ever more slowly toward the shore.

They must have seen that the women on the beach were distinctly not naked. The draped gowns shaped out of white bedsheets would whip around in the unpredictably looping wind, both revealing and distorting the shapes of our bodies. Some of us would seem to be looking right at them, our faces hardened into expressions they couldn’t read. They would look away, to the smiling faces with the slightly downcast eyes instead. A hatted team member would begin handing out pennies.

“We will give them coins of small values,” Columbus would shout. “They will be so delighted, as they are so eager to please and will give us anything we should ask for!” His hands would take wing as he spoke, flashing rings with the sunset insignia carved into them.

We women on the beach would begin unlooping necklaces over our heads and pulling bouquets of suckers from bags sunken in the sand. The colored wrappers shimmered in the heat. Our stiff arms would reach toward them like branches. Murmurs of approval would flutter through the crowd.

“And now all of you!” Columbus would flourish his hand around the boat. Even the people who’d been grumpily waving their phones around on the key would relax, docile hands at their sides and their chins pointed ever so slightly toward Columbus. “Our natives take anything and give willingly whatever they have! Our staff shall be so eager to please you during your stay on Furnace Island. They shall be called eeeeyes. A-Y-S: At Your Service. You need eeeeyes? They will provide!”

The staff would motion for them to climb from the boat and would press pennies into the squishy pockets of their hands. Kids would cry for suckers, jump happily at receiving them, cry again when they ducked into the sand, sticks up.

Our group in white would begin to disband, pulling sheets from our shoulders, revealing the maid uniforms that would make them think of fifties sitcom reruns on late-night TV. We, the women, would disappear through a break in the fence they would never see behind.

They would tell one another and themselves to forget any dropped pennies as they were directed away from the fence, up a graveled path to where the pool sat on the beach, hugged by either wing of the hotel. Speakers hung like bats under the roof’s edge, vibrating with the pock of steel drums. They’d hear the faint sound of someone sawing very dry wood.

At night the speakers and the sawing would fall away, but the sounds of Furnace Island would keep them alert. The whoosh of the waves, a sound that was supposed to put them to sleep but was called a roar. After a night or two, they’d dream through everything.

Archipelago, the maps in their rooms would tell them: scattered seeds floating away from the finger of Florida, that imperative pillar to our point of exclamation. A tiny island way out from any mainland, quivering like an unattached period in the water, seemed like an invitation to decide how to complete the sentence that had brought them here. Sentences started elsewhere; we were just a dot. A dot named twice, neither time by us. They would hone their geographical grammar, tracing the explosion of islands across the map’s flat sea. Or they would turn away, be no place. The rooms would be full of no one’s history, never belonging to anyone.

They would end up sitting by the pool most of their days at the resort, reaching out for drinks on trays. Flipping through magazines, maybe forgetting the books weighing down their oversized pastel bags they’d bought to bring here. Most of them would never swim. Those who did would dip in the pool, never the ocean. Their loungers would face in toward the pool, the hotel. Never out to sea. Some would do laps, strapped with full snorkeling equipment. Back and forth, slow-motion lawnmowers, finally emerging like primordial creatures with the baggy seats of their bathing suits leaking water down their legs. Plastic masks and the snakes of their snorkels like plumbing for their heads. The soupy words they called out to the staff would sound like complaints or warnings.

They would eventually discover that the sawing was the sound of the maids sweeping crabs from the deck with wire brooms. Back onto the sand to scuttle in loops down to the beach or into the truck parking lot.

I was one of the maids they heard but didn’t see, sweeping away.

By day.

By night I swooped with gravity like a ghost was crocheted around my arm, the machete its extension. Not hacking away like a crazy bitch. My brother, Troy, did that. He couldn’t be taught, Mother used to say, and she had been a teacher. He was the bad one, the one who’d left her for work in the capital on Wells Island and wouldn’t ever be coming back. I was the good one, the one who came home every night, bringing money. I was the one who would never leave.

She had no idea I went where I wasn’t supposed to go. Wandered along the stones that peeked from the earth like calluses hardened from time. Slicing a path big enough only for me, not caring if the nettles picked at my work uniform, which would cost us money when it had to be replaced. Sliced and climbed and grubbed and tiptoed around anthills to walk inland among the dead.

Those are not our bones, she would have said to me. She would not have meant people. She would have meant the ruins: the stone walls creeping up within the brush, which led nowhere, which told you nothing, which were built only to keep in. I knew; I had followed them.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. Mother loved the knowing. Knowing Bayard a third of a mile down the road in the limegreen house could fix your car. (We didn’t have a car, but Mother knew Bayard could fix it if we got one. And she liked knowing exactly how far it was to walk if someone else broke down in front of our house.) Knowing a whistle in the air meant Hebbie was coming around the bend. Knowing her hair’d be some shade of red you’d never find growing in your garden. Knowing Miss Patrice’s store would always reopen after lunch and would always have ibuprofen when you couldn’t find it anywhere else. Garrett would always stop by when he’d been catching crabs, and we’d always eat well each night that he did. Miss Minnie would ask every time I saw her if Mother would join her in selling at the Straw Market that coming Wednesday or singing at church that coming Sunday. And the answers would always be yes and no. Knowing her brother, my uncle Q, lived as far from us on this oval as you could get, but he wouldn’t go three days without seeing on her. And Mother knew I’d wash all the plates if she’d grab a needle to fix up the edges of my work apron until her hand was too stiff and came to rest in her lap, a knobby cavern. She didn’t wonder how it got torn up, because she hadn’t been inside the resort to see they’d cleared away the brush so you’d walk through the entire stretch of the place without anything touching you. For all she knew my uniform got snagged all day at work.

Haulback, we called those nettled plants. They dug into your skin and your clothes when you tried to get by, hauled you back.

Before the resort, most of the men went to the capital for work. Many still did. My dad had. And my brother, Troy; Troy’s best friend, Andre; so many. Some women, too. And way before that, there was only the land you were in a relationship with for anything you could plant or pluck. Everything else had you waiting for a boat to come in. Those boats came slowly, infrequently. Still did.

And before that, long before our time, life—if you could call it that—was only on the inland. Working the land for someone else who’d claimed you, corpse that you were, from the ship that docked in the capital and put you on another boat to this bitty outermost island. Once you were here, you were theirs. Even if you could slip the inland to reach the shore, there was nowhere to go, nothing to take you away. The horizon surrounded you. The sun and the water promising escape only in surrender, only in giving yourself up to the waves instead of to your master. The platform of sale in the capital was now where the cruise ships docked, and with every arrival Americans in visors filed down to the beach. That’s what Troy had described.

Even Ole Mr. Vit was too young to remember the move down from the inland, but he once told me about it when I was young enough not to know I shouldn’t ask. He was just a boy when the oldest people around would remember their parents reminiscing about it. Each family turning its back on the high inland, a while after the masters had deserted this place and its miserly soil.

New houses were put up just back from the beach trim, and a road ringing our oval island was built in one swoop. Still our main road. After a storm its potholes became mini-oceans, and rocks rose like icebergs. They ruined cars that went too fast.

Water and electricity came more slowly, each family saving up week by week to pay for the connections. Those of us who still weren’t on the water grid came to the spigot at the gate of the resort with jugs the size of calves. Six dollars came out of my pay each month.

I had a water bottle from the resort’s gift shop that I took with me when I went inland. (I found it, still shrink-wrapped, behind a bush by the resort’s main gate.) See you, Mother would have said if she saw me using it, you don’t belong up there. See you, like a tourist. You’re making yourself a tourist up there.

But she would never say that, because she stopped speaking once Troy was gone, and because I would never tell her where I’d been. Except in my imaginings: when I sat on a wall and collected her next to me, a ghost girl with old eyes, sucking the thiflae flower for sweetness. I never liked it, this red bud that felt like fabric in your mouth, until I saw all the kids at the resort—couldn’t keep their mouths from taking on the colors of their suckers. All sticky. Thwuck, thwuck sucking. Made me see that we had to work our mouths a little for our sweetness, and it was a sweetness that grew on your tongue, didn’t just spike your mouth. Made me see who I was a little bit.

Mother would be right, though, that only tourists went inland. The resort had cleared a path to a ruin that looked like a house—the only one that looked like anything—and took packs of guests up to see its walls. They didn’t tell the tourists what the walls had been a part of, what they sat on. Just an old house, just a formation of stone to pose yourself against. Stone spangling in the sun until it was cooked into something else. I didn’t know exactly what they told the tourists, their path off-limits to me. I could see only the ruins still shrouded in the brush that shrouded me, too.

The resort owned most all the inland. No one was allowed to go among the ruins beyond this little tourist patch. The ruins of the estate that all of us on the island, way, way back, came from—now a trap of trespass. I waded through the brush like a ghost, a nocturnal animal, a thief.

Except for the house they’d claimed for the tourists, all I could find remaining from the plantation: these stones and stones and stones piping the hills, holding themselves against the overwhelming brush.

I pictured what it must have been like moving down from the inland to the edges of the island. I pictured everyone moving all at once, like an exodus, though I knew it wasn’t really like that. I pictured every single family creeping down the same ways I went up, carrying sacks of all they owned—not much—the ones in front swinging their machetes. Reverse invasion, I thought, a dispersal. Moving from the center out, out, finding space between all of them, to set up where they could actually see the sky and the sea. The brush filling in behind them almost as soon as they passed through. Almost like water, how you couldn’t keep it from taking any little space you might try to carve out for yourself around here. This tiny oval, quiet and loud at once.

Most of those very first houses had been abandoned. People just left whole houses behind, took what they could carry. There was a piano in one of them. We used to have parties there when I was a little younger. Somewhere to sit and get out of the sun, hear someone plucking at the keys. Even if my friend Hebbie was the only one who really knew how to play, it was something to hear besides the dogs bickering on the road, the scribbling sound of the waves reclaiming sand. Mother hated when people would go in those deserted houses to take stuff, practical though she was about us collecting trash on the beach to use at our house. Just didn’t like the idea of transplanting some piece of that loneliness into your own space. Me: couldn’t get enough of the memories of things. Everything I touched dripped with the syrup of the past, even at the resort where the brand new strapped over everything like duct tape.

Last year, just a few months after Troy had joined him in the capital, our dad was dead, and Troy briefly back among us for the funeral. (Not a real funeral, since Dad’s body had been buried in the capital—who could pay for otherwise?—but what Mother wanted anyway. Mr. Ken came on behalf of the funeral committee. I walked the perimeter of the house while they sat across from each other at our wobbly table. Took walking only nine of those small squares for them to settle the details of the grave marker without a grave. The empty that would be inside of it heavier than his body had ever been.) Two days, that visit, and then Troy was off again, and the night before he left he didn’t even come home. Out with friends all night. Miss Philene had given me a ride to work that morning, and I saw him standing, waiting for the boat to the airstrip. Saw his back and one knee leaning toward the other, unsure. Turtled with his overstuffed red backpack; one frayed strap hung limp. Someone else also waiting stepped into my view, blocked him out entirely.

Right before Troy left he managed to run our cousin’s car through the fence and let the cows out. Used to be his best friend Andre’d keep him reined in those nights out, but they’d gone to the capital together, and only Troy had come back that trip.

Guessed Lionel felt bad it had been his truck that did the wrecking, since he offered to take me inland to search the path of broken brush the cows had stomped out. We gathered the machetes our fathers had used for gardening and headed up. Or in. The middle of our island was a big hump you couldn’t really see unless you got way out to sea in a boat or way up in the air in a plane. From the road and the sandy strip around the island we lived on, it was just a hill of snarly brush we sometimes dipped a hand into to pluck leaves for teas.

The cows were so big, how could they hide? So big, how could we not hear them? So big, roaming the inland like they themselves were the ghosts that lived up there.

First time I fell over a stone wall was when we were searching for those cows. Thicket so dense I didn’t see a two-foot-tall wall in front of my legs. Fell over and got a ridge of red scrapes on my knees.

Lionel was only four years older than I was, but he kicked the wall as if he’d known something, lived in a different time when people told you what the walls were for, when you could walk inland for something other than chasing your food. A different time when you could walk inland to add background to the whispering of the elders who’d been around long enough to have their grandparents’ memories of moving down and letting the inland seal itself behind them. There was a time, Ole Mr. Vit had told me, that time I was young enough to ask, before my time, when folks knew who was or wasn’t Africa born and when folks recalled moving down from the estate and calling themselves “stateless.” Then people didn’t want to talk about that anymore. Didn’t want their little ones strapped with sandbags while trying to wade across this life. Then he’d stopped talking, too, and nothing you could do to open those lips again. Sent me on my way.

“Why’d you do that: kick?”

Lionel looked at me like I was a stupid kid, putting him on with my ignorance. “These used to keep cattle in anyway,” he said.

The walls were intact in some spots but mostly crumbling and intermittent. There were so many breaks where the cows could have gotten through. He rolled his eyes at me. I didn’t think he’d say more, but he did.

“We’re on the estate, Myrna, don’t you know that much? These walls were built by slaves.”

Word like a bogeyman. Something in the past or in the darkness or in nightmares. Bogeyman Slavery. Worse than a yeho, a monster. Monster of death who knew what he was doing. Bogeyman whose name wasn’t said. Sandbags we all wore but didn’t see.

Only talk of the inland my whole life was when I was a kid too young to really understand much of what I heard, and when I was a little older, the residual trickle of gossip. About the night Miss Philene’s youngest son, Jimmy, never came home. His body was found somewhere inland. Came out later that Minister Callaghan had found some teenagers drinking up among the stones. And when Jimmy refused to get going, the minister spun himself into a rage. Beat him, left him bleeding, took his flashlight. Jimmy never found his way out and never went anywhere again, inland or otherwise. No one talked about it that much after it was all settled. Only remembered Jimmy’s death same as a person who died in hospital or from old, old age. Seemed like it had always just been the way it was: Jimmy and the minister both gone from the island in different ways, the minister’s wife, Miss Wayida, barely coming out of her church, and neither Miss Philene nor Mr. Ken speaking much about their youngest, long gone now. Then as now, that rage about the inland that grabbed the minister? Was a mystery to me the size of the ocean. Felt its depth each step I took through this brush.

And I was also coming to understand something about confusing swirls of anger that could gather in my own gut. Like what I felt when news of Dad’s heart attack came to us.

We kept walking, inching along behind our machetes. Thorny branches scraped the tops of my arms, leaving thin lines of white. It was the dry season, and the haulback had lost its leaves. Just gray branches now like a skeleton of itself instead of the cloud of emeralds it looked like in full bloom. (In full bloom leaves wouldn’t make a tea any less bitter than the branches would. Coughed a little, thinking of the prickles ricocheting down our throats.) In some of the particularly thick places where Lionel told me to stay back while he swung wide for a good slice, I found angles to stick my arms through the brush to feel the stones of those walls.

Felt some need to run as far as I could and be like Mother, never talking about any of it. Felt some other need just as strong to clear all this brush away to expose it all, clear the brush to explore the nooks and crannies the way Dad had done as the island dentist. He’d once described to me, when I asked why anyone would want to go digging around in other people’s nasty mouths, how it made him feel to find where the pain was coming from, to know exactly what to do, and to dig out the source of it. How it made him feel, when people brought their X-rays from the dentist in the capital, to match them up to the mouth in front of him, as different as they seemed just to his eyes. And then using his fingers to carefully feel out, trusting.

I felt dust on my tongue and held it as I watched Lionel’s back, T-shirt stuck with what we called island glue, turn this way and that to avoid the haulback. All around me, even with the island glue sticking my shirt up under my breasts and around my belly button, I felt the chill of the past like a ghost pushing its way right through me. Here I was, days after Dad’s funeral, feeling out the secret source of pain.

After we’d been at it for a long while, Lionel said, “No way we’re finding those cows. Let’s get out of here. And don’t be coming up here. And don’t tell your ma where we were looking.”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” I said, now rolling my eyes at him.

“Look, no one wants to hear about this shit anymore. Leave it gone,” he said, interpreting my body language.

I didn’t need him telling me that, older cousin or not. Never once heard the word slavery spoken above an accidental whisper, not even in school. In history class used to run my finger along the edges of the textbook’s sliced-out pages, half hoping for a paper cut that’d remind me later something was missing, something almost invisible that bled easily. Hebbie, my best friend when we were kids and Andre’s sister, used to call me Hyphen Hands for all the straight bitty slits on my fingers.

Say the word estate at work and look down at your palm for your firing papers.

“Aren’t you the Landfill Manager? Dealing with everything that’s thrown away?” I didn’t know what I meant exactly, but he seemed angry, and I felt like pushing back.

“Yeah, exactly, Miss Smarty. I know how to get rid of everything no one wants and keep it from ruining the whole island. Besides,” he said, his tone changing, “the resort owns all this land now anyways. You get caught up here, you trespass. Lose your job. Then how you gonna feed your ma?”

“We’re here now,” I said, but I mumbled it to myself.

The thing about my cousin Lionel was he was smart, and he did lots of stuff for Mother, especially in the weeks since my dad died. Stuff like that made me swallow what he told me, even if I told him to his face that he should mind his own business.

I kept following behind him, letting him do the machete work while my hands felt through the brush for more traces of walls, places where I could feel the absence of where a wall had been. By the time we emerged from the brush, my arms and hands were maps of where I’d been cut up.

We stood on the road looking at each other. No cows. Lionel pointed up around the bend.

“Thiflae Bar?” he asked.

We kicked dust in front of us as we walked along the road. Lionel pulled his shirt up to wipe sweat off his forehead. The wind had died, leaving the ocean flat with stillness and bugs hanging in the air. The only sound that reached us was of distant cars, but no one drove by as we were walking. Walls of brush on either side of the road looked so thick, almost like it was impossible we could’ve ever been where we’d been. A skinny blondish dog we both recognized from the landfill, Freddy, zigzagged the road about a quarter mile ahead, probably waiting for someone to come out the bar and drop something. The sky was going pink just as slowly as we were shuffling along. I was thirsty, and I kept my eye on Freddy to see how close we were getting.

When we got to the entrance, the door hung crooked like always so you could see a slice of the room before you went in. I didn’t bother looking, knew there wasn’t anyone I particularly wanted to see. We could hear voices of all the men hanging out on what had been the bar’s back porch. All the slats gone, now just a piece of floor jutting toward the brush like a pier without water. I didn’t know how long it’d been since I’d seen my dad on that porch, talking it up with his friends. My memory of coming to find him there—so long ago—was only of legs at my eye level.

“Wanna go on the porch or inside?” Lionel asked.

Usually older folks on the porch, away from the music. How would we explain our machetes this time of night? The coating of the inland all over us?

“Inside,” I said, where I knew everyone would be tipsy. I pushed ahead of him through the door.

“Lionel!” Christine’s voice squawked above the din of voices in the room and on the TV as soon as we entered. Her hair glowed orangish in the fluorescent light where she had streaked it blond. It hadn’t been like that at work earlier in the week. We worked side by side at the resort, and she worked some nights at Miss Patrice’s store.

She was calling us over, though I saw only one extra chair by her. She’d always been sweet on Lionel, but I couldn’t tell whether he couldn’t stand her or was willing. Lately he’d been talking an awful lot about that vet who came from the capital to tend to the island dogs. But she came out to us only once a year, a few weeks at a time, and Lionel wouldn’t go to the capital.

Lionel and I sat at the bar instead, on stools he’d once rescued from the landfill when the resort threw them away. Christine walked over where we were anyway and slid closer than I wanted her. I reminded myself of all the times she helped me out, like when she spread early word to a few of us that a new shipment of the good tampons had come in at the store.

“Lem’s here,” Lionel whispered into my ear. I didn’t bother looking around. “Ah. Done with that already?”

I figured he’d known how long it’d been since I’d been done, everyone around here knowing everyone else’s business. I didn’t think Lem would come over to me at this point, since we hadn’t even talked much lately—though we both worked at the resort, him on garbage duty. But then there he was, by my shoulder. The heaviness I used to feel around my hips when he came near, and the furiousness following—gone.

“Hey, Myr.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Another beer, Mr. Ken,” he said. I heard the exhaling sound of the cap being released, and Lem put the bottle in front of me. I put my hand on it for the cold feeling, then rubbed the glass against some scratches on my arm. I didn’t feel like having a drink.

Lem’s head was shaved perfectly as always along a sharp line above his ear. Breath of beer that used to smell crisp and fun to me, now just stale.

“I could use a water, Mr. Ken,” I said, feeling the kind of parched even my hair was soaking up the smell of fritters sizzling in their baskets behind the kitchen door. Lionel and I’d been up inland since before it was even thinking about getting dark.

“Saw Troy before he left again,” Lem said. “Told me take care of his sister right.”

“What’d you tell him?” I was looking at him now.

“What? Can’t tell my old buddy I been hanging out with his sister?”

Christine started doo-doo-ing a little tune she thought sounded like something sexy. Lionel laughed, and I glared at him.

“We’re not—I— Seriously, what did you tell him that’s gonna get all back around to me now?”

“I see how it is,” Lem said, stepping back and looking less smiley. “Always too good for everyone else around here, right? That’s how it’s always been with you: biggity. Even before, when we were, you know.”

A sourness started collecting in my gut and wanted to come out of my mouth as something nasty, like telling Lem I had more fun by myself than I ever did with him. Wanted to shoot the sourness at Lionel, too, embarrass him about the way he was always running to get messed up with any girl at all set foot on this island from somewhere else. Couldn’t even be bothered with Christine and her tune. I took a sip of water and tried to shut off the trickle of meanness.

“Man, Lem,” I said. “We haven’t even been out together in a month.”

He looked at me for a long time. “Sorry ’bout your pa, anyway,” he said, and he walked away. Lionel was sucking down his beer, his eyebrows raised, whole forehead in a smirk.

“What?” I demanded, and Lionel shrugged.

“Nothing. Lem’s a nice guy, that’s all.” The two of them hadn’t ever been close when we were younger, but with Lem on the resort’s garbage crew and Lionel at the dump, they’d worked themselves up some kind of friendship.

“I’m just so tired of all this. Of everyone.”

I stared at the glass of water Mr. Ken had put in my hand. A bottle broke behind me, and Christine seemed to laugh and shriek at the same time. Then her voice and Lionel’s started braiding together until I couldn’t make out anything they were saying, but the sounds were there, just nudging against my ears but not going in. Lots of shuffling behind me, too, like everyone had started dancing or moving in some game, but I just kept staring at my own hands.

When I looked up the room seemed shadowy, like a smudgy black-and-white photocopy of itself. Everyone was mulling about more slo-wly, transparent, as if I could see them but through them, only the bottoms of their feet looking heavy and solid. Everyone looking like glass but their feet lined with iron. I stopped hearing the sounds of the conversations in the room and just heard a white-noise sound like the wind or the waves coming in. Like none of this was real, but there was something just beyond. Just under us. Not like a bogeyman either, but something calling me to come see. Like I would come to feel about my dad’s gravestone: calling me even if the ground it marked was full of dirt, empty of him.

“I’m going home.”

Whatever Lionel said in response sounded too far away.

But I didn’t go home. I’d left both machetes at the bar with Lionel, and it was dark out, but I found myself pushing through the bushes, arms raised up, the way I’d seen tourists wade deeper into the pool, shuddering at the chill.

I was trying to follow the stone walls again through the tangled brush that clawed and scraped and twined and wrapped and pricked and caught. The stone walls were meant to keep the cattle in, not the slaves. That was done in other ways. The oval shoreline looped around us all.

It kept me in, too. A year ago I’d been planning to finally get off the island, looking into art history at the university, but then Troy went off, and now Dad was gone, and with all of it there was no way I could leave Mother. I’d never be going. Just walking the oval my whole life. (Always ovals, never perfect circles. Circles smooth and calm; ovals warped by some force. Those months with Lem he was shaving his head smooth, and my hands would absentmindedly run over and over the oval of it. While his fingers scrambled, and when he found the right spot, slowed and stayed, until my mind burst in shards of light. Now my brain was already different, held a thickness.)

No going off the island for me. Going inland, back in time, instead. These stones my ancestors—and almost everyone’s ancestors on this island—had quarried and carried and packed in place, like planting gravestones. (Each of them known as Cruffey’s soand-so: the same seven letters painted on Mr. Harper’s old rickety boat, the same surname so many on this island—this Cruffey Island—had, including my own mother’s family.)

That first night inland—more than a year ago—I thought the wall ruins would keep me on a path. I ended up lost in the dark, cowering, sweeping fire ants from my ankles and then from my hands and cursing myself for being dumb enough to try to go in without the right supplies, without even a flashlight. Imagined them telling Mother they found me, and where, both stupid and dead, so soon after Dad’s heart attack. I’d have to wait until the sun came up to move or risk getting in deeper. Crouched until the feeling in my ankles disappeared. Thought about Mr. Harper’s half-leg. Anyone ever ask what happened to it, folks would nod up at the hump of the inland and say nothing but Stones.

I didn’t know how long it’d been when all of a sudden I heard a car going by and realized, like a fool, I wasn’t all that far off the road after all. I ended up crawling toward the sound until I felt the pavement beneath my hands and pulled myself up to walk along the road. A bloody, bitten mess.

When I finally got home, deep in the night, I went through the motions my body had always known. Skipped the broken step; pulled the doorknob up just so to make the key catch; rattled it four times before turning all the way; turned back just a tick and heard the tiny click. Did it all without waking Mother. But my body felt different, heavier.

After that night I went up only if I could make it back out before the sun went down. But I went up as often as I could, most days for a year. Always had Dad’s machete by my side; after that night at Thiflae, Lionel had returned it to its place with the other tools in our shed. I started in the same place every time—by the low, stooped tree—so I could keep working on the trail I was making, and I hid the machete far enough in no one else would find it. Took it back to Dad’s old shed when it needed sharpening. Mother must’ve thought how much I was missing him, with how often I was in that shed, his old mill file in my hand going up and down the blade.