She smiles at me. “Do you have any dreams, Caroline?”
I might as well be mute, like Marie Antoinette and the Chief, because I don’t say anything for a long time, and I can’t think of anything to say for as long a time either, but Kalinda doesn’t speak and doesn’t look like she plans on speaking until I give her an answer. At first this is even more nerve-racking than if she’d been watching me impatiently, wondering whether she’d chosen a fool for her newest friend—but then her open stare and knowing smile lets me see that she doesn’t mind at all, and she’d be happy sitting with me for the rest of the afternoon in silence, if that’s what I chose to do.
“My mother,” I finally say. The words come from my mouth without me even thinking of this as the answer. “I want to find my mother.”
She seems a little surprised. Her smile fades away and she sits straighter, her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, like she’s sitting in church. “Where did your mother go?” she asks, so quietly she might as well be whispering.
The words are too painful to say aloud. I feel a burning in my throat. I’m too ashamed to look Kalinda in the eye.
She puts her hand on top of mine. It’s still warm. I know she doesn’t mean to take my hand in the same way the two women earlier did, but it’s still comforting, after she’d yanked her hand away from mine before.
“You don’t have to be afraid to tell me,” Kalinda tells me. “You could admit that you were sent to hell and you escaped, and I wouldn’t have any judgment toward you.”
I believe her. I’m still afraid, though, because I think I might have more than enough judgment for myself. It feels like I’ve done something so horrible that my own mom had to get up and leave me. I take a breath and speak the words: “One year and three months ago, my mother left home.”
Kalinda is nodding, her hand still on top of mine. “Why did she leave?”
I shake my head. My eyes are starting to sting with salt water. The ocean is made of salt water, and I wonder for a moment if it’s possible that we were actually born of the sea and crawled ourselves onto these islands.
“I don’t know why she left,” I say. “I think it’s possible that she doesn’t love me anymore, and so she felt she had to go.”
Kalinda seems to listen with all her heart, eyes shining bright. “I don’t see how that could be possible at all,” she says. “There isn’t anything about you that would make me feel that you aren’t someone to love.”
She takes her hand away, and barely gives my heart a moment to stop beating before she says, “My mother stayed in Barbados as well. When she told me she was staying, months before we were supposed to leave, I thought that it was because she didn’t love me either. And I’m still afraid this is true, sometimes. She says that it’s because we can’t all afford to go, and so my brothers and sisters stayed with her, while I’m here with my father. I still wonder if she chose to send me away because she doesn’t love me.”
“That’s not possible,” I tell her. “It’s impossible not to love someone like you.”
She laughs. “Thank you, Caroline.”
She smiles and jiggles her feet as she looks at me. “Even though I’ve only known you for one day, I now think of you as my friend,” Kalinda tells me. “I don’t choose my friends easily.” She uses her adult voice, so I know that she’s very serious.
I don’t tell her that this means more to me than anything anyone has ever told me, because she’s now the first friend I’ve ever had who wasn’t my mother, and the only friend I’ve ever had since my mother left me. That would be too embarrassing to admit. So instead I tell her, “You’re my friend now too.”
“Are you still looking for her?” she asks. “Your mother, I mean.”
I’m always looking for her. Walking down the road, every woman I see with honey-brown skin makes my heart beat harder and my throat close up so I can’t swallow, can’t breathe—and then the woman turns around and I see it’s not my ma at all, and I could cry from disappointment.
“No.” I didn’t plan to lie, but that’s what I do anyway. “No,” I say again, “I’m not still looking for her.” Maybe it’s only fair that I’ve lied, since Kalinda won’t tell me the truth about the things no one else can see. Now we’re even.
Though I’m not sure I want us to be.
I can always feel the woman in black near. A shadow going in and out, like a candle’s flame flickering in the breeze. It’s impossible, isn’t it? But I always feel her there, watching me. Who is she? And what does she want to tell me? Because that’s one thing I’m sure of. She’s trying to let me know something.
The woman in black is waiting for me when I get home. Even though I’d had one of the best afternoons of my life at Kalinda’s house, I can already start to feel the whispers inside my mind, questioning if I really love my mom at all, if I can so easily forget about her for the promise of a new friend. I begin to question if I deserve my mother’s love, if I can so easily treat her this way, so easily forget all about her. And so I begin to question if I even really deserve to be loved at all—and if I don’t deserve to be loved, then perhaps I don’t deserve to be alive.
I don’t think adults expect that anyone who is twelve years old and shouldn’t have any worries
