The first night the visitors are on Water Island, I go for a walk so I can see them in the house they rented behind the hill. Before I can even get close, that girl sees me from the porch. She watches me good until I leave again.
The girl with my dad’s nose starts coming down the road. She has skin that’s honey brown like my dad’s too. She’ll just stand in the shade of the kenep trees, watching me whenever I leave for Mister Lochana’s. I don’t say anything about her to my dad, but one day she’s standing directly outside my house. Her legs are covered in red mosquito bites, and her teeth are too big for her mouth.
“Hello,” she says. “My name is Bernadette.”
I decide that I don’t like Bernadette very much. “Why would I want to know something like that?”
“Your name is Caroline.”
Now she has my attention. “Who told you that?”
She doesn’t answer me. She continues to stare with her eyes that seem to get bigger in her face, like inflating balloons. She leans down to scratch at a mosquito bite.
“You shouldn’t scratch,” I tell her.
“But it itches.”
I just cross my arms. She tells me her birthday, which is the same day my mom left me to travel halfway across the world one year and three months ago, and that she came here to meet my father, who she says is also her father. I run away from her before she can think of another word to say to me, slamming shut the screen door so hard it bounces open again.
Inside my house, I keep looking at my dad, expecting him to say something about the visitors—but he just keeps sighing like he’s a man who knows that death is coming, just a few more years, nothing he can do about it now.
“Daddy,” I tell him, because I always call him Daddy to his face so he’ll think I love him more than I really do, “who is the girl who moved into the house behind the hill?”
He sighs again, like me being in front of him is bringing death even faster. I don’t think he wants to speak to me about Bernadette.
“Daddy,” I say again, “do you know where my ma is?”
This makes him look at me in a way I’ve never seen him look at me before. Like I am no longer the little girl he would toss into the air and catch again, or the little girl he would perform magic tricks for, holding a ball in his hand one second and then revealing an empty palm the next, or the little girl he would take out on his boat so we could get lost in the sea and the stars. No—now he looks at me like he has realized I am no longer a child at all. This is a realization I had many years ago, when Water Island was set on fire, but I’ve never showed the truth to him before. I’m showing it to him now. Just by asking him such a question, I can see that my pa has realized I’m not a little girl.
I ask him again. “Where is my mom?”
My mother always sent us postcards of the cities she had gone to, so I never had to ask where she was—it was written there for us to see. After the postcards stopped coming, I was too angry to ask. But I’m asking now—again, a third time, to be sure he’s heard me. “Where’s my mom?”
Except this time, I’ve also added a word I should never use when speaking to my father, not when he’s the man that’s partly responsible for my existence, the reason I even get to be here speaking and breathing. He slaps my cheek with a quickness and looks just as shocked as I do, and in that moment I decide I want nothing more to do with my father—nothing more to do with him ever again.
Days go by where I don’t speak. I will not answer my father when he tells me good evening after I’ve returned home from school. Missus Wilhelmina is glad for my silence in her classroom, and the other students were never speaking to me anyway. I only ever bother to nod my head politely to Mister Lochana in the early mornings. We zoom across the clear water, and overhead the birds fly, and there are sea turtles too, drifting through the clouds.
As a deaf man might have better eyesight, or a blind man can hear so much more, I feel an extra sense growing. One where I can know another person’s thoughts or feelings without them ever having to open their mouths. Such as when the sunlight glints in Marie Antoinette’s yellow hair, and Anise looks at her with the anger of a cat being woken from a nap, or when Missus Wilhelmina stares out the window while we do our quiet reading, and she looks as though she might be a bird that can take flight at any moment, escaping into the endless blue sky. I decide that I like my silence, and that maybe I should run away to become a monk so I will never have to speak to anyone ever again.
But then Miss Joe calls me into her office during lunchtime that very day, and I know she’ll expect me to break my vow.
“How are you doing today, Miss Murphy?” she asks.
I don’t speak.
She turns her head to the side inquisitively over her tall pile of books. It almost looks like she’s a child who decided to build herself a fort. “Are you all right, Miss Murphy?”
Here, I nod my head.
She takes a breath, her shoulders raised into a shrug. “Well, I must say, I’m worried about
