The New Moon's Arms (33 page)

Uh-oh. In only three words from her, I could name that tone. Ifeoma was on the warpath.

She shoved the front door open before I could get to it. Right in the entranceway, she put down the plastic shopping bags she was carrying. What the hell was her problem?

“Thank you,” I said prettily, picking up the bags. “And don’t worry if you couldn’t find any smoked herring. I’m sure that everything you brought is fine.” First step: try harmless disarmament.

She glared and walked past me into the living room. She pulled Agway away from the bookcase he’d started climbing in the few seconds I hadn’t had my eye on him. She put him on her hip. “What’s your problem with Hector? Eh? Why you told Stanley not to do his science fair project with him?”

I put down the bags and took Agway away from her. “
I
will help Stanley with his project! You don’t let me spend enough time with him as it is.” If step one fails: self-defense.

Then I couldn’t resist saying: “Besides, Hector’s not a nice person.”

She sucked her teeth. “Bullshit, he’s not nice.”

I blinked. She hardly ever swore. She picked up the bags. I turned the television on for Agway and followed Ife into the kitchen.

As she unpacked the produce onto the kitchen counter, she said, “I have plenty of opportunity to see what Hector is like. I’m the one who hired him for Caroline.”

“
You
hired him? For that politician woman? She trust you with a job like that?”

She took a dozen eggs out of a bag and very carefully set the box down. She growled, “You even know what it is I do?”

“How you mean? You work the front desk at the Tamany.”

She sighed. “Not any more. I told you that a couple weeks ago.”

“You didn’t tell me you left! I thought you were doing the other thing in the evenings, or something! That little piece of work is enough to support you and Stanley? Especially now that Clifton gone?” Step three: destabilize.

“You right, I didn’t tell you. Didn’t want to give you more ammunition against me. And what it is I do in Caroline’s office?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Answering phones and so.”

“I am the junior research assistant for the leader of this country’s opposition party. They made me full-time last week.”

“What?”

“You even have any idea why I want to work for Caroline Sookdeo-Grant? Enh? When I joined the 4-H club in high school, you laughed at me. When I organized that letter campaign in ’02 to protest the death penalty, you told me I was wasting my time. Nothing I do is good enough for you. I don’t think you ever had a word of praise for me yet.”

I think I actually rocked back on my heels with the shock of that one. Who had taught her step three?

She started unpacking one of the bags. “This nonsense about Hector is really because he not interested in you, nuh true? It don’t have anything to do with Stanley’s project.”

Shame heated up my face. I covered quickly: “Chuh. I wouldn’t want Hector if he was the last man on earth. Next thing I know, he go and leave me for some man.”

She grimaced. “God, that attitude is so backward.”

“You need to watch yourself with me, Ife. I not in a mood to hear no stupidness today.”

“You know what your problem is? You jealous.”

I guffawed. She wanted to play rough, I would unleash step four on her ass: berserker rage. “Me, jealous? Of what? Tell me, nuh? Your flour sack dresses and your bad diet? Your marriage that dying on you? Maybe I jealous that the two-three men in your life more interested in each other than you? Or that your own mother could thief a man right out from under your twenty-one-year-old nose? What I have to be jealous of, Ife? Enh?”

To my astonishment she surged right over me with: “You give yourself as a gift to your best friend one day, and you still can’t forgive him for saying ‘no thank you.’”

She dare to talk to me that way? Meek little Ife? She went on, “Nearly forty years now you chewing on that grudge like a wad of old gum that have all the taste suck out of it.”

“And who it is still whining about how her mother didn’t buy her the right colour dolly when she was nine?”

No reaction from her. Ife was as cool as running water, and as impossible to make a mark in. I’d never seen her like this before. I didn’t have a step five. Stammering, I improvised: “I still don’t hear what I have to be so jealous of.”

“Anybody Daddy have in his life, Mummy! You ever watch at yourself? The way you carry on? You look at Orso like you starving and he hoarding all the food.”

I gaped at her, completely off my stride.

“Tell me,” she said, “when exactly it is you got stuck? ’Cause it seem like you reached a certain place in your life, and you never managed to move on from there.”

I was trembling. The roaring in my ears was too loud to let me think up a comeback.

“You know what the sad thing is?” she said. “You could have been part of Daddy’s life any time you wanted. But if you couldn’t have him all to yourself, you didn’t want nobody else to have him, neither. Wouldn’t even let his own daughter get to know him.”

I found my voice. “I did that to protect you!”

“The same way so you protecting Agway? By shutting him away from everyone?”

“The child is an
orphan
! He need somebody to look out for him. You didn’t need Michael. You had me.”

She kissed her teeth. “If you looking out for Agway so good, why you not finding out what language he speak? Enh? You quick to go and research what steel make of, but you can’t trace down one language? Why you not trying to learn what Agway saying to you? Stanley spend couple-three hours with the boy, and already he could talk a few words to Agway. Like you frighten?”

“Your rass. Frighten of what? What a three-year-old boy could say to frighten me?”

“He could tell you something about himself and where he came from. He could tell you what really happened to him. He could tell you his
name,
Mummy.”

I was breathing in little gasps. “He
have
a name! I give him a perfectly good name!”

“Make me wonder it’s who really wanted a black dolly to dress up and parade around and keep in a box.”

My hand actually twitched towards her face to give it a good slap. I killed the impulse, but Ife still saw. She didn’t even flinch, and she didn’t back down. She just drew herself up tall and looked me in my face.

I swallowed. “Leave my house,” I whispered.

“Not until I tell you this.” Gently, she set down the tin of salmon she’d been about to put in the pantry. “I am ashamed of you. You hear me good?
Ashamed
.”

As she was leaving, she stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked back at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Every good deed you do have a price attached,” she said.

A
GWAY WAS FRACTIOUS ALL EVENING
. I had hell to pay trying to keep his hands from his dressings. Looked like he’d reached that itchy stage they’d warned me about at the hospital. Nothing to do but put on the ointment they’d given me and give him some painkiller. That seemed to help the discomfort a little, but Christ, he was irritable! Eventually I just picked him up and paced back and forth across the living room with him, like I had done when Ife was teething. I kept the tv on just to distract him. I think it was more to distract me. The memories of Ife’s words to me before she left were churning and sour in my gut. Well, if life give you lemons, suck them, I suppose. People had said worse to me before, when I was a teenage mother. I’d survived.

Slowly, Agway quieted in my arms and fell asleep. I lowered myself onto the settee; the few steps into the bedroom seemed like a marathon.

I must have dropped off to sleep. A clunk woke me. I was drenched in sweat. Damn. So tired, I had slept through a hot flash. That one had brought me something, too; I’d heard it land. What was it? Couldn’t see anything, and I didn’t want to move and maybe wake Agway. Tomorrow. I laid my head back. If I slept right here so, I would wake up so cricked I wouldn’t be able to crack. But fatigue was like waves washing over me.

“Are there mermaids swimming in Cayaba’s waters?”
chirped the television.

Oh, bite me. The eleven o’clock “news” with the same old filler crap.

“Finally,”
said the announcer,
“we may have proof.”

I raised my head. On the tv screen was a blurry, green-tinged photograph of two naked brown women floating in the sea. One had a baby lolling on her breast. The other one was doing a frog-swim. Her long, ratty hair rayed out from the top of her head. A second baby floated in the water, clinging to her hair. The two women were looking up, presumably at a plane or helicopter above them, where someone with a camera was taking their picture.

“Shit,” I said. “This is bad.”

The photo shrank and tucked itself to a corner of the screen so that we could see the announcer.
“This nighttime photograph was taken by an ingenious young man whose name is Stanley Fernandez.”

Oh, God. He did his project already? Without me?

The announcer continued,
“It is only one in a series of photographs of Cayaba taken by Stanley’s airborne glider-cam.”

Blurry photo stills, very close-up, started flashing by on the television: two men in police force uniforms sitting on a sea wall—one was in the act of handing a forty-ouncer of something to the other; what looked to be a very startled fishing bat, clutching the silver flash of a minnow; a thin-faced, big-eyed young man with hands like shovels, sitting behind the wheel of a car with a look of bliss on his face, holding—a huge pair of

panties?—to his nose; a totally mystifying shot of two young men and a woman, all quite fat, climbing out of the seal enclosure at the Zooquarium. They were naked.

How the hell he had gotten those pictures? For a moment, pride for my grandson quieted my guilt for not having helped him.

The announcer came back on screen, smiling a little and shuffling her notes.
“Stanley put the mini digital camera on his remote controlled glider with the help of a family friend, Mr. Hector Goonan.”

Oh, Ife. You came here knowing this had all happened.

“Stanley only meant to take daytime photographs for a science fair project, but one night he took the glider for a spin, just for a lark. Only a handful of the photos were good images, but a few of those were very good indeed. When Stanley realised what he had on his hands, he wisely sought the advice of another adult, his grandfather, Michael Jasper.”

“Oh, God. Michael’s mixed up into this, too?”

“Mr. Jasper sent copies of the images to us.”
And there he was on the screen.
“I’m very proud of my grandson,”
Michael said.
“He’s showed a lot of initiative in putting this project together.”

Agway stirred and woke.

“Clearly,”
said the announcer,
“the citizens of Cayaba have a very active night life indeed! The police will be investigating some of the instances of apparent mischief revealed by the photos. One question remains: is this photograph of the women swimming nude finally proof of the existence of fish people? Or is it just an example of the types of hijinks performed by some of the more boisterous visitors to Cayaba? We may never know. And perhaps, to keep Cayaba the beautiful mystery that she is, it’s best not to look too closely.”

Agway looked muzzily at the screen, just as they blew up the photo of the sea women to full size again. He gasped and reached a hand towards the screen. “Mamma,” he said quite clearly. He was not looking at me when he said it. Then he burst into tears.

It was like somebody had splashed cold water on me.

The photo had gone from the screen. The news continued. I got Agway’s attention. “Pet, is that your mother? Your mamma?”

“Jes!” he sobbed. “Mamma!” He said a long, mournful sentence in his language. I didn’t understand a word. Might be his mother, or a relative. Or it might only be that he’d seen home, and people who looked like sea people. He was tired, and probably in a bit of pain from the surgery. Maybe I could put him to sleep, and he would be fine in the morning. “You sure that was your mamma?”

He shrieked, “Mamma!” and arched his back like toddlers will do when they’re agitated. He kicked, too. Got me a good one in the thigh with the heel of his cast. I managed to hold on to him and get him upright again. Agway’s mother was alive?

“Who really wanted a black dolly to dress up and parade around and keep in a box?”

I went to the phone. Fumbling, I dialled Ife’s number. But I hung up on the first ring. Couldn’t face her. She wouldn’t understand about Agway, anyway.

I took a child from his family!

Gene’s cell went straight to voice mail. He was probably working tonight. “Gene, you have to help me,” I whimpered into the phone. “Agway’s mother not dead, I just saw her on the news in Stanley’s picture. We should find her. The sea woman. Give her back her boy. God, call me as soon as you get this, please?” I hung up the phone.

Agway had subsided into a low, bubbly sobbing. The woe on his face made me feel sick with guilt. “Pet, I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Three weeks since I’d found him. And he still cried himself to sleep nearly every night. Because of me. And what had his mother been going through, and the rest of his family, if he had any? All this time, they would have been thinking they’d lost him.

Lost.

He wasn’t lost! I’d
found
him; Maybe I could find his family, too. I had to do it. Had to bring his mother to him. Goddamned hot flashes could materialise a whole cashew grove, they could help me call one woman.

Couldn’t wait for Gene. I had to do this myself. I had made it wrong: I could make it right.

I hitched Agway up a little more comfortably on my hip. “We’re going to find your mother. Hear me? Going to get your mamma.”

He sniffled.

Mrs. Lessing had brought me a toddler life jacket that her great-grandson had outgrown. I picked it up and left the house with Agway. I had to jog through a light rain to get to the car. I drove us both towards the private slip where Dolorosse people kept their boats.