“You don’t live on Saint Thomas?”
“No. I live on Water Island.”
“But then how do you get to school?”
“There’s a speedboat I take every morning with a man named Mister Lochana.”
“Isn’t a trip across the ocean every morning tiring?”
“It can be, yes.”
“Does it feel like your heart is split between two homes? Between Saint Thomas and Water Island, I mean?”
I have to stop to think about this one, because I realize then that I don’t think of either Saint Thomas or Water Island as home. How can I? My mother isn’t on either island. I’m not expecting to think this, and before I know it, I can feel my eyes begin to sting and my vision become blurry as water leaks from my eyelashes. Kalinda sees, and most would be embarrassed to watch someone they don’t know so well begin to cry, and even I have to say that I probably would’ve looked away and pretended I didn’t notice, but Kalinda only grabs a napkin from her food tray and holds it out to me. She doesn’t ask another question. Only looks at me and waits for me to speak. But how do I begin to explain something like this? Having a mother that’s left me behind? Would Kalinda begin to accuse my mother of being a bad woman, the same way Anise does? Would Kalinda think I’d done something to deserve being deserted?
She sees that I don’t want to talk about it. She smiles, but the smile has changed. It’s not secretive anymore. It’s knowing. I think she likes what she knows.
I decide. Now is the time to ask. With my eyes still stinging and my nose all clogged, I say in a low voice, “Did you see her too?”
She turns her head to the side and squints her eyes. “What do you mean? See who?”
I stare at her. She just keeps watching and waiting and smiling.
And I don’t believe her. She’s smiling at me like she’s playing a game, and I don’t believe her. I know she saw that white woman too.
That day after school, Kalinda tells me she would like to show me her house, and even though Mister Lochana is usually waiting for me in the hot sun by waterfront as soon as the school day ends, I agree. We walk through Main Street, which only the oldest of old folks call Dronningen’s Gade. There’s a traffic jam longer than a slithering python, and I have to look where I’m going, because it’s easy to twist my foot on the broken cobblestone road. Tourists smelling like sweat and sunscreen swarm the street, standing desperately under the ice-cold air-conditioning of the jewelry stores.
Usually, I hate this walk more than anything else. Too many tourists to dodge and too many blaring horns and too much heat beating down from the blazing sun with absolutely no shade. But with Kalinda, it becomes a walk I could happily take every day for the rest of my life. I can barely get over the excitement, the thrill, of having someone walk beside me willingly with a smile on their face, speaking to me as one friend might speak to another. Is it too soon to consider Kalinda a friend? I hope it isn’t too soon at all—that maybe she’s even begun to consider me a friend too.
We reach the end of the crowded lane and walk to where the old market used to be.
“Do you see that man there?” she asks. I turn to look, but there are too many men sitting under the shade of a mahogany tree. “That man is Mister Thompson, and he lives in my neighborhood and plays an accordion and sings into all hours of the night. He makes my auntie cuss rotten because he keeps her up, but I like to sit outside on the front steps and listen to him until I fall asleep right there on the concrete, but I have to wake up before my auntie or my dad does, so they’ll never know I left my bed.”
“Why would you want to leave your bed to listen to that man play the accordion?” I ask, but then immediately regret it. Would she think I was being rude or mean? I have a way of asking things, a way of speaking—“combative,” Miss Joe calls it—because I always automatically assume everyone just wants to be in a fight with me, seeing that, so far in my life, most people have.
But Kalinda doesn’t seem offended at all. She shrugs. “Have you ever heard an accordion play?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“They’re not the prettiest instruments to listen to,” she says, “but I don’t like that there are some instruments that are considered prettier than others. I feel like those instruments are always listened to. Like the guitar or the piano. But it isn’t fair that they should be listened to all the time, only because someone has decided they’re prettier. The accordion has just as much sound. It’s different than the other instruments. I like that it’s different. That’s what makes it important.”
I can’t stop staring at her. “I think I might be the accordion.”
She laughs long and hard.
I can’t help but feel ashamed. I think she’s laughing at me. “Why’s that funny?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m only laughing because—well, I think I’m the accordion too,” she says.
I still don’t see why this is funny—and I don’t think she could be any further from an accordion. “You’re not an accordion,” I tell her. “You’re something else entirely. You’re—you’re the violin,” I say decidedly.
Her smile fades away. “Violins are so sad. I’d hate to be a violin.”
Yet I know with absolute certainty that this is
