He had not phoned to tell his mother he had found Maas Conrad. He wanted to see her face when he told her. Everything was going to be known and he was ready. Not everything good to know is good to talk, but it was now too late for silence. The old man could still die, not alone on jagged rock in the deep sea but a different kind of alone in a hospital bed, attended by nurses, the air humming with machines. Lloyd wished his grandfather had been all right, just needing some coconut water and food, and that a few months later they would have been at sea together, perhaps on the way to Tern Cay, and that never again would he have to sit on the wall at Gray Pond beach at night hoping to see Water Bird come out of the darkness.
The front door window was open and he could hear the voices of his father and his mother. They were arguing. He stood and listened but could not make out their words. Then his mother raised her voice, “You wut’less, gutless fool,” she said to Vernon Saunders. “Me did tell you long time, you shoulda make sure the old man dead. Me did tell you, the sea not go kill Conrad so damn easy.”
Mumma, Lloyd whispered. No, Mumma. In his mind he saw his mother’s rough hands and the gray hairs curling at her neck and he smelled the faintest trace of her cooking, but it was blown away by the rising wind. He turned his back on the small house in Bournemouth where he had spent all his young life and walked away.
37
Lloyd went back to the wall where he had watched and waited for his grandfather, staring out to sea. The low pressure gave him a headache and he wished the storm would come. The sky was full of wispy clouds, driven by a high wind, but on Gray Pond beach the air was still. He walked into the shallows, and the water of Kingston Harbour was warm around his ankles. He held his new shoes in one hand; he had nothing else, no money, no plan. School would start in a few weeks, but he was no longer a schoolboy. His eyes were dry.
He thought of the Kingston his grandfather would have come to when he made his journey from Treasure Beach with the grandmother he had never met, the woman who birthed Vernon Saunders all those decades ago. Perhaps Gramps had stood on this same beach and felt just as lost, just as adrift. He saw Middle Cay in his mind, crowded with shacks, and he saw the masked birds, holding their ground, fighting for space to live and rear their young among burning garbage. He saw the clean blue water of Portland Rock, full of sharks, and the long coastline from Portland Bight. He thought of Gramps roasting him a fish under the small mangrove tree on Tern Cay, telling him dolphin stories.
He walked out of the sea and brushed the wet sand off his feet. He put on his shoes. He would walk to the hospital if he had to, but he was pretty sure someone who had known him all his life would help him get there. Everyone who lived in Gray Pond would already know Maas Conrad had been found and was fighting for his life at the university hospital, rescued by his grandson. He would sit at Gramps’s bedside tonight, late as it was, and he would not leave his side. He was a boy who had stowed away on a Coast Guard boat and faced down a bad man. He had found his way to a rock in the open sea and brought his grandfather home. Neither security guard nor bossy nurse would be an obstacle. He would tell Gramps about his journey on the Surrey, about the woman who counted dolphins out at Portland Rock and the other one who came from foreign and studied them. Maybe he would even tell him about Black Crab. Maybe in his turn, he would hear the full story of how Maas Conrad came to be on Portland Rock without Water Bird, and perhaps he would come to know his mother and his father fully.
Tonight, Lloyd vowed, he would sit with his grandfather through the coming storm. Gramps’s body would heal, the doctors would make sure of it. They would leave the hospital, his grandfather would lean against him, he would hold the old man steady, and there would be many more sunrises at sea for them both.
Author’s Note
Gone to Drift is a work of fiction. Some of the Jamaican place names are real, but Gray Pond fishing beach is fictional. I’ve taken some liberties with the geographical details of features of the Treasure Beach area and the Pedro Bank. While it is true there are dolphin traders in some parts of the world, to the best of my knowledge there are none operating in Jamaican waters, where capturing wild dolphins remains illegal.
My thanks to my friends and family who continue to walk with me along this journey—especially to my first readers, Esther Figueroa, Celia Junor, and Fred Hanley. This is a better book because of you all. I thank Tony Tame for his help with fishing gear and journeys, Captain Dennis (Shaba) Abrahams for his rich and generous recollections of growing up in Treasure Beach, and Commander David Chin Fong of the Jamaica Defence Force Coast Guard, who allowed me to tour the Surrey and the Cagway Base. I thank Jaedon Lawe and Llewellyn Meggs for their video images of arriving at the Pedro Bank, and I’m grateful to Esther for her Pedro film footage, which set my imagination on fire for many months. Thanks to Nathalie Zenny for many Pedro stories and to Dr. Naomi Rose for her advice on dolphin biology and the dolphin trade—any errors are mine alone.
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