Syria turns her head. She sees books. There are many of them. On a dark wood shelf, filled to its brim and leaning against the wall. A wall that her mother said she’d repaint: “I hate all this white.” At the foot of the wall is the umber carpet and from the carpet her mother cries. Bleating, arms extended (Syria thinks) to pull something in. Or maybe it is to push something back. And standing on the carpet is her father too. His breaths match her mother’s cries.

•

Before her mother cried into the night, it had been day, summer, and hot. Syria sat between her Mother’s legs, her hair being braided. She liked the way her Mother took her time mapping the landscape of her scalp: lines of latitude, then of longitude that overlapped each other, making strand on strand of winding road. Her mother—if in a good mood when she was asked—would destroy whole road works and intersections. Then she’d start again, building the roads wider, amused at Syria’s choice of route and direction.

•

Syria sees her mother’s face and neck. She sees her scarlet flesh. Sees the neck loll, sees her Mother slump.

Jude sees too and opens his mouth. It looks like a chasm and silence comes out. Jude squats down and reaches out; then pulls himself back; then out then back. Syria watches as Jude plays and replays, his hysteria mounting. She remembers last year when he had a ringed fungus on his arm that took forever to heal because he’d kept it covered. She’d sneak up to his room late at night and peep through the crack of his door. He’d just sit there, arm exposed, looking down in scorn. For some reason this thought makes her scared and angry, so she walks over and slaps him.

Now Jude is on the go. He’s tender with their mother and when Syria blinks he has her in the tub: there’s the tub’s faucet, there’s the running water, there is Jude’s hands cupped. And there is their mother; she is smoking from the inside out.

•

Before the summer day, before it had been hot; it was early morning. Syria was standing in water waiting to be drowned. At eleven, the youngest of the Church’s Easter group, Syria stood proud. Their junior pastor had told her, told them all that through water they’d be cleansed. What she heard was, one Syria would go under and another would come out.

She’d liked baptismal classes, believed in what they told her, believed in what she’d learned: That Jesus suffered for the sins of man—this was known as the cross; that the other way a person could be baptized was by burning fire; that man, born to original sin like Jesus had to suffer and carry his own cross.

As the sun began its walk across the water, Syria looked to shore at the congregation, where her parents stood, where the light seemed to have gathered. She also saw the cast of their long unmoving shadows that looked like different people and felt for a moment that she was their child. Maybe the shadows were her real parents and not the two people stitched to the light.

•

Before the baptism, before the morning, it had been night. Syria’s father sat on their porch, in his low pitch, talking. She noticed, startled, that winter had laid siege to his head and looked then to her mother who stood, hushed, across from him. Her hair was a curtain of color giraffing down her neck and Syria, bewildered; staring at them felt a sharp attrition: the swift shift of tectonic plates.

Syria knew it was not just his head captured by winter. His mind skidded too. On Sunday’s he struggled to hold the thread of his sermons, swinging, like the church incense—gentle to fervent; changing in pattern so suddenly that its seams would ruck and gather. No one objected; silence congregated in the crowd. And Sunday after Sunday they covered his transgressions like footprints in the snow.

•

Syria looks at her Father, on the floor now, next to the hot stain. She wonders if what’s happened has just happened to her; or, if it’s happened to another: Another someone who lives on a small island, in a small home, up a dirt road. To someone else who stands and looks in their Father’s eyes, to another someone who’s surprised that he looks just the same.

Syria thinks of Jude and of how he gave the end of year speech for his class. He’d talked about the start of the rest of their lives. When he’d ended Syria had felt a burning in her stomach and knew she was jealous of him. He’d made it sound like some path not for everyone, like he was going somewhere and she couldn’t come.

Syria has watched Jude all since his speech. She takes notes of what he does: June 27—Jude decides he won’t go to church. July 11—Jude gets a summer job. Aug 1—Jude comes home from dancing and sneaks back out to meet a girl from the club. She writes this down a day late when she hears Jude say to a friend that the girl polished his front with her back like an apple. At night she takes her notes out and memorizes them. When her time comes, Jude will be her map.

Syria does not take notes of this night or the nights after. Not about the way her mother later sleeps, body curled in forgetting like a sweet cashew. Not about the gummy feel of stripped flesh against gauze or how its smell—years and distances later—would still cling to her. Not about the acute embarrassment that was all she felt when her father, in tears, said he had not meant it. Not about how, as their father fled, no one but Jude noticed the rank fear that ran down their mother’s legs.

Instead she thinks of that someone—on that island, in that house, up that dusty road—and feels sorry for their family. Quartered and drawn, scattered to the wind, never to be summed. Instead she thinks of that someone and feeling nothing at all buries the seeds of this night.

•••

Originally featured in “A Sudden & Violent Change”, a cross-disciplinary exhibition at the Hub, March 12th-31st, as part of Transforming Spaces 2010 in Nassau, The Bahamas.

•••

Potcakes whelp babies in the sand or on roads
while secrets held in girls’ mouths
sink down in stomachs to the hum of the zip.

Undo with an awl loose stitches
sewn at the launch of freedom. Walk
from church to the bar cross the road,

both places dark, shaded from the heat
of horizons. No need for eyes to adjust.
In the past, when we were proud,

we talked to the beach.
Now, against bald patches
of pock-ridden plains,

a cruise ship docks in pierced borders.
With contorted speech, we bid them come.
This is the home I recognize. My body sides with it.

•••

We reach my house, soaked and panting, and streak through the gate heading to the back yard. It is early spring, but the rains have already started gushing out on us like Noah and the flood.  Cami and I stand under the lone casuarina where the dirt in my back yard turns to sand and meets the sea, while the high wind ropes around and slaps us in the face.  Then Cami points her finger out toward the ocean and calls to me “Can you see the sun?”

I shake my head “No!”  But Cami keeps pointing so I stick my neck forward, and narrow my eyes.  It’s hanging low in the sky, leaving a ginger trail behind, a solitary traveler on its way toward the horizon. As it sinks and lights different parts of the sea, I know Cami is scanning the waters for Lusca.  The folklore is that Lusca—the sea monster—lives in the waters of The Bahamas.  But Cami believes that her spirit also travels through the rain.  She lets out a whoop and spreads her arms open like she expects to be gifted with something. I take off my shoes that are heavy with water and stomp around in the sandy mud.  A lighting bolt crackles quick through the sky.  We stop and suck in our breaths.  I look over at Cami whose face is lit up so it seems that the lightning just struck her.

One of the first things I noticed when I met her was how fast she talked.  She was sitting on our front porch the day we came to Cat Island.  The first thing she said was, “Y’all come from Nassau? By plane or by boat?” She always did that, asked strange and personal questions in quick succession. When I later asked her why, she looked at me like I was stupid and said simply, “Because I want to know.”

After we’d told her that we came by plane, she stood and hopped off the porch. I saw that she was taller than me and I figured older too: her body ripe with curves in all my flat areas.  Her hair was rowed down tight from the front to the back, and her face was cut sharp with the bones underneath her skin kissing all the right places.  I suppressed the urge to find a glass and look hard at myself.  It didn’t really matter anyway; I knew what I would see: a girl with an awkward stance and a round face that also managed to be flat.  Daddy always joked that if Columbus sailed it, his ship would definitely fall off.

She came up close and put her back to mine announcing to my family the similarity of our height, then she hooked me with her arm, interlacing it with mine, and said, “We’re like day and night.”  I was embarrassed that she made such barefaced reference to our difference in color, but after a moment shrugged my shoulders, because it was true.  I was what most Bahamians would call hard red or high yellow or very light skinned.  My light brown hair and clear pale eyes were where I held my pride.

“You guh go far on this island with colour like that, but don’t let it get to your head, else I guh tell you bout yuh-sef,” she said.

I could see Mom took what she said as an affront, but Daddy turned his head, trying to hide a smile. I took my cue from him and decided that I liked her.  I asked her name and her age and was shocked to find that like me she was twelve.

Cami and I are still out in the middle of the storm when I guess my Mom sees us because I hear her scream from the house to, “Come inside.”  I act like I can’t hear her, and Cami does too, but then she calls to Cami, “Do you want me to call Vie?”  We don’t want her to call Cami’s mother so we run toward each other and interlock our hands and reluctantly run over to the house.

Inside Mom asks, “What the hell were y’all doing?”  So I tell her about the milk river, and about Lusca, and about the lightning, and about us being alight.  She looks at us hard for a moment, and then shakes her head, sighing that we’re both crazy.

Cami walks around the kitchen hands on her head, pressing hard to flatten her hair.   The second she stops, her hair, resuscitated, breathes with life and springs back.  It was only last week that inside my bedroom we stood opposite the mirror and with Cami demonstrating how ‘Blue Magic’ grease smoothed hair down.

Cami believes that with good hair like mine, you have an easier life and mostly I agree.  I don’t tell Cami about the other part, where I think that this may not be true.  I don’t tell her how having good hair did not seem to work for my mother, who hates it so much that before we came here she chopped all hers’ off; or how when Daddy saw, he was so mad; or how she shouted and shouted when he asked her why.

I see Mom eyeing Cami whose hands are still in her hair smoothing the angry storm down.  Cami props herself against our two stainless steel sinks, leans over, and turns on the faucet.  She’s still turning it, confused, when the water comes only in a trickle.  She shrugs her shoulders and cups her hands until she’s caught enough, then dabs the water on her already damp head performing what she calls her quick fix: “When you don’t have grease to put on yuh head; better try hard use water.  It’ll at least keep yuh hair in place for a lil while.”

“What’s for dinner, Mom?”  I ask, and for a while Mom doesn’t answer, then she shifts her gaze from Cami’s hair to the faucet.  As the water drips I see Mom’s mouth get thin and tight and I know she’s thinking of how the faucet is broken, and of all the times she’s asked for it to be fixed. Mom stays quiet for another minute then turns to the freezer, opens it, and pulls something out.  She faces us again, mouth still tight and holds up a steaming cold chicken.

Cami is forced to shift her position and stand next to me when my mom drops the chicken in the sink.  Mom puts her hand on the other faucet and with a snap of her wrist, she turns it on.  It shakes and stutters like a meek child before rusty water comes out.  Mom sucks her teeth and motions to her wet kitchen floor.  “You two girls are making a mess, come out of my kitchen.”  We glance at each other and beat a hasty retreat but before we can get away Mom’s voice cracks over us: “Go dry off in the garage and if your father’s there let him know the fool you’ve been up to.  Then come right back here and start cleaning this chicken!”

On the way to the garage, Cami punches my arm.  “Why did you have to tell her?”

“I wanted her to know that we were doing something special and not just being fools in the rain.”

“Well it didn’t work; she thinks we’re stupid anyway.”

Cami likes to tell people that she doesn’t have a father. She does, but she doesn’t get to see him.  Her favourite teachers are Mr. Tate and Mr. Lant, and she likes to hang around Daddy.  She asks him about his cars and closes her eyes while he talks to her about them. When she does this there is a sensation of hornets nesting in my belly.  Sometimes one gets loose and floats up, stinging inside my throat.  Then I get nervous and make all sorts of noise and speak everything that comes to my mind.  Like how Cami reads comics and talks to herself and believes in what she calls the old gods, and other things that I’ve seen Daddy laugh at. When it gets like this Cami and I both stand opposite each other in charged silence while things melt between us. And when she leaves our house, Mom says, her voice stretched, “That girl is searching for something.”  Daddy doesn’t say anything but twenty minutes later, he’ll make me call to see if she got home.

Cami’s always going on about the plight of being father-less and says being illegitimate on Cat Island is the worst.  I looked up the word illegitimate and told Cami the meaning and said it didn’t sound so bad.  But she said that Webster didn’t know what he was about and told me the real definition was leper.

We walk through the side door a little ways from the kitchen and into the garage.  I don’t feel like announcing our presence so I let the door slam.  Daddy looks up from his work station and at seeing us; gets up and pats on the stools. While we sit down he saunters over to the car he’s working on and sticks his head under the hood.  He braces himself with his hands on either side and to me they look like monster hands: big and ugly and greasy and worn like the undead risen from graveyard soil.  His fingers splay across the car, leaving grime in their wake.  Then he pops his head back out, looks over at us, raises his eyebrows and asks, “What?”

My Grammy doesn’t like that Daddy is a mechanic.  She says that profession belongs to a certain type man.  Whenever she says this, the wrinkles that bracket her mouth get really deep.   When Mom told her that we were moving to another island, she said, “I thought over there people mostly walked.”  Mom’s voice got sharp in that angry way it does and she said that he could fix more than cars.  Grammy just sighed and said, “I hope that you’re right about that.”  Since we got here he’s fixed plenty of things and has made lots of friends.  But I think he must be missing something because every Sunday when Grammy calls she asks my mother, “Y’all fixed things yet?”

“Mom says I’m s’pose to tell you what we were doing.” Daddy looks at me expectant so I do.  He chuckles when I finish up with explaining how it looked like Cami’d been struck by lightning.  Then he tells me to go get his cigarettes and not to let Mom see. I tiptoe past the kitchen where I catch a glimpse of her; she’s mopping up the water we left on the linoleum.  I stop for a while and watch her shift back and forth; her face calm and relaxed.  I continue up the stairs telling myself that everything with her is all right.

At the very top of the stairs I go to my room and reach into my shoe box that I keep at the back of the closet.  Daddy says that if he keeps the packs in their room, Mom will be sure to find it.  At first I kept the cigarettes in my underwear drawer, but Mom’s in and out of there all the time too.

When I get back, Daddy’s looking at Cami, who’s standing at the front of the garage, peering out into the rain.  It is barely coming down now and her face looks like she hates to see it go.  The wind turns around and blows in her direction so that speckles of water wet her face and neck.  She jumps back in delight squealing.

Daddy wipes his hands off on a towel and leaves it on the car hood.  Then turns toward Cami and asks, “Aren’t you too old to be playing in the rain?”  Cami thinks about her answer, but before it can come he walks over to her and wipes the water from her neck.  His hands stroke her from the base of her chin down to her collar bone.  I remember how in my first week of school, they had to call the Doctor cause she broke it.  She was running and looking back at me so she didn’t see the tree coming.  Then Daddy moves his hands away, lifts them up, letting droplets of water fall into his mouth.

Cami tells him, voice halting, that she’s just as old as me and I slip the cigarettes in my pocket and get into the car.  Daddy looks at me and says, “Turn on the engine.  I want to hear what’s wrong with the car.”  I stick my hand out the window and grab the towel that he left on the hood.  I wipe the grease smudges left on it onto my fingers and I stick the keys in the ignition, turn them in a half circle and press gas revving the engine.  Daddy nods and looks away and I imagine that I’m driving.  It’s just me and Cami.  We’re heading down Bay Street cause we’ve moved to Nassau and we’re all grown up.

Daddy’s still talking to Cami but I can’t hear what they’re saying over the sound of the engine, plus he’s turned back his turned.  Cami’s still facing me so I see her peel her shirt away from her chest and imagine the suction sound it might make.  Her shoulders collapse like she’s been shot in the stomach and her eyes search for and find mine.  I think I’m gonna go she says to me, I know this ‘cause I read her mouth.  I turn the car off and open the door just in time to hear her say, “Mummy’s making mutton.”  I wonder if she knows how stupid she sounds: her mother never cooks.  I get out to remind her, but she’s out of the garage swiping her bag up from the plywood porch.  She doesn’t run, but she walks fast with the unsteady strides of a new born goat. And the porch groans with relief as she jumps down.  She puts both hands through her backpack and hurriedly unlatches the gate, then lifts her hands wringing and flapping—I guess shaking off water.  She stops like she remembers she forgot something, pulls at her pants and tugs at her shirt, and after a while keeps on walking.

I let her go and walk back to the garage where Daddy and I watch her.  I reach in my pocket and hand him his cigarettes and he puts one in his mouth.  He strikes a match and takes a long slow pull and I watch as he blows out smoke.  When he’s done this a couple of times he passes the cigarette over to me.  “You can take a small puff.  Just one breath.” My mouth closes over where his has just been and a rancid taste fills it.  I want to cough when the heat burns my lungs and spit the cigarette out.  I look at Daddy looking out of the garage and decide that it’s better if I don’t.  I exhale the smoke just like he’s taught me: hold, then release, then hold.  Through the mist of the smoke I can’t see Cami and the clouds from the rain have gone.  In the distance I hear the roll of thunder and it’s hard to believe it was here at all.

•••