“And you’re not an accordion,” she tells me. “You’re a drum.”
She watches me, waiting for my response, but I have no words—I only know suddenly that I want to take her hand, and so I do. I take her hand with my sweaty palm, and her fingers feel burning hot in my own, like she has a fever, and she immediately tugs her hand away from mine, surprised. I’m surprised too, that she wouldn’t let me keep her hand in mine—and I feel the shame even hotter than the sun—but Kalinda doesn’t say anything about it. She instead points behind me to a store, and we walk into the fresh, air-conditioned store that sells seashells for earrings and thin tie-dyed dresses that make me feel like I’m under the sea with all the swirling colors of fish and coral and clear blue water and seaweed.
“Do you like any of these earrings?” she asks me.
I don’t actually like jewelry very much, but I’m afraid to tell her this, especially after she’s taken her hand from mine. Will she think I’m strange, that I’m a girl who doesn’t like jewelry? Maybe, since she’s said she likes accordions, she won’t mind.
“Which one is your favorite?”
I hesitate. “I don’t like earrings very much.”
She seems surprised. “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like earrings. But I think that’s okay. Do you like any of these shells?”
I point out one shell that is flat and has waves and looks like a fan, with a soft pink underbelly where a pearl might have once been found. “I can’t buy this for you,” Kalinda says, “but I’ll try to find a shell that’s even better than this one.”
This will be the second gift I’ve ever received from someone who is not my mother or my father. I think it might be a gift of pity, because she knows I have no other friends. I know immediately I want to give something to her too, though I have no idea what. I decide I’ve never had such a good time before in my life, but then I feel guilty for thinking something like that, after all the good times I’d spent with my mother.
Just as we’re walking, I see two women holding hands. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen two women holding hands like that. Girls my age, like Kalinda and me, hold hands all the time to show that they care for each other. (I realize with a pang that perhaps Kalinda didn’t want to hold my hand because she doesn’t care for me at all.) But grown women, even older than Miss Joe and Missus Wilhelmina and my mom? I’ve never seen anything like that before.
The two women are both white tourists and old, with sagging skin and too-short shorts showing off their blue veins. People turn their heads to stare, but those two women don’t seem to mind at all. They just keep on walking and holding hands and smiling at one another.
Kalinda sees them holding hands. “Disgusting,” she says. “They can’t see they’re both women?” She laughs. “Does one of them think that she’s a man?” She laughs again.
My heart falls. I don’t know why it would. Maybe because I would like to hold Kalinda’s hand too, and I know now that we never will—not in the way these two women do. I’d thought, since she’d said everything she did about Mister Thompson and his accordion … but maybe that was a silly thing to think.
I make myself laugh. “How can they not? I can see they’re women, just by standing all the way over here. How can they not know they’re women?”
But Kalinda’s past laughing now. “I think it’s gross. It’s wrong.” She says it loudly, just as we pass the two old women still holding each other’s hands, as they pause to look at jewelry in a window. One woman hears and looks at me and Kalinda with a frown, but not the sort of frown Missus Wilhelmina has for me when I’m in trouble—but the saddest frown I’ve seen from an adult. Like she might begin to cry right then and there.
She’s still looking at us when I tell Kalinda, “I agree.”
Kalinda gives me a smile that warms my chest, but I look back to the older white woman and have to look away again, because I see she’s even closer to crying now, and a part of me would like to join her.
Kalinda’s house is past Main Street and beside a large cemetery. Whitewashed cement blocks carrying the dead are stacked on top of one another, building a graveyard city that’s bleached like bones in the sun. We pass the children’s grave with the overflowing brown and crispy flowers, fluttering in the wind like cockroach wings. I keep my hands behind my back, since the ghosts of children have been known to bite off fingers, or so I’ve been told.
Kalinda tells me a story. “When I was six years old, I watched a girl die. We were in church, and she collapsed in the pew, and her father held her and her mother screamed and a man who had once studied medicine rushed to her, but before he even reached her, it was too late. That was the day I stopped being a child,” she says. “Adults—my parents, my teachers—they look at me and see a little girl who knows nothing about life and death, someone they need to protect … but now that I’ve seen death with my own eyes, they have nothing to protect me from anymore.”
When I look at her, for a moment it feels like I might as well be looking at a mirror, and not even that, because I feel like I know her more than I even know myself.
“There was once a man that lived on top of the hill on Water Island,” I tell her. “He died in a fire, after fireworks
