When we leave the beach, she takes my hand and walks me to waterfront, and stands there and watches me leave on Mister Lochana’s speedboat. I think about how I hope she can do that every afternoon—walk me to waterfront and say good-bye and watch me as if she’ll stand there until I’ve returned in the morning again. And then when we’ve both gotten old enough, maybe she can get onto Mister Lochana’s boat with me, and we can go to my home together, and she can live there with me until I’ve returned in the morning again.
The next morning, when I walk into the classroom, I expect to see her sitting in her seat, eagerly waiting for me in the same way that I’m eagerly waiting to see her, but she isn’t there.
You ain’t got no one to hold you.
And she doesn’t come, not even when the school bell rings. She’s never been late before, and others have noticed too. Heads turn to her empty seat. Missus Wilhelmina walks into the classroom and stands in the center, right in front of the blackboard, and announces that Kalinda won’t be a student here anymore.
You ain’t got no one to care.
That her family is taking her back to Barbados now.
And she promptly begins her lesson for the day.
Kalinda is gone. My mother is gone. I have no friends. I am all alone again, as it seems I always have been, and always will be, except for the woman in black, who I know will never leave.
I don’t even wait for the school day to end. I slip out of my seat and find myself in front of Kalinda’s house, shouting her name. “Kalinda! Kalinda!” There’s a rush of wind that carries my voice away, so I scream louder. “Kalinda Francis!”
Finally the door opens, and Kalinda stands on her porch above me like she wants to know who in the world could possibly be shouting like the devil. When she sees it’s me, she doesn’t look completely surprised. She’s only a little surprised. She leaves her porch and walks down the stairs where she says she finds herself sleeping at night, and opens the gate and stops right in front of me.
“I wasn’t planning on saying good-bye like this,” she tells me.
“You mean you weren’t planning on saying good-bye at all!”
“We had our good-bye yesterday.”
“Yesterday can’t count if only one person knows they’re saying good-bye.”
She seems to think about this for a moment. A hard breeze makes her locks swing through the air. “Maybe so,” she finally says, “but I thought it might be less painful this way. I hate saying good-byes, you know.”
For a moment, I can’t even look at her. I’m so furious that my hands are shaking. She said so many things to me, and she knew that she was leaving, so all those things were nothing but lies. I turn to the side so I can stare at her house instead. “When are you leaving?”
“In two days.”
“Then we have two days to find my mother.”
She gives me a funny look. “I can’t help you do that,” she says.
“You made me a promise.”
“Things have changed. I have to go to Barbados.”
“I expect you to keep that promise.”
“There’s a storm coming, you know,” she says.
I did not know, but I don’t care. I was born of a storm. Storms don’t scare me.
“We’ll both be in trouble,” she says.
I do know this, but I don’t care about that, either. I’m always in trouble.
Kalinda has run out of reasons to stay. I’ve finally turned back to her, and she’s looking at me now too.
“Please,” I say, so quiet I don’t think she’s even heard me.
But then she nods. “Okay. But if we’re going to go, we have to go now.”
That works just fine for me.
We don’t bring any clothes or any food. Kalinda doesn’t go back upstairs to her house, because if she does, then there’s a chance she won’t be able to leave again. So the two of us start walking right there and then.
I take out the photo, which now has a permanent home in my pocket, and as we walk I show it to Kalinda so she can also see its back.
“Fifty-five forty-five Mariendahl, nineteenth of September, nineteen seventy-four,” she reads. She flips it over and stares at the photo. “Is this where you’ll find your mother?”
“I think so,” I tell her.
“I think so too,” she says.
We will go to 5545 Mariendahl, but the sun is getting lower in the sky, and the mosquitoes are coming out to find us, and Kalinda says that nighttime is when the spirits will come out to find us too. Night is when the angriest ones come around, ready to get their revenge on anyone who is still alive. She says we need to find a place to hide, and then we will go to 5545 Mariendahl Road in the countryside first thing in the morning.
She takes us down to Havensight Dock, the dock where cruise ships let tourists on and off. Cruise ships pass by Water Island every morning. Their horns are my alarm clocks. At night, their lights glow like a thousand little suns. They are moving cities, the glass and steel compacted onto a single boat. Surrounding Havensight Dock are shops filled with tourist souvenirs: T-shirts reading I CAME, I SAW, I TOOK PICTURES! ST. THOMAS, USVI and photos of naked women on beaches and postcards with men with long locks, even longer than Kalinda’s, and chickens. I think that I once saw Mister Lochana on one of those postcards, and sometimes Oprah the donkey is featured too.
We walk through the stores, ignoring the angry eye the shopkeepers give us. They don’t like too many locals in their stores when they are trying to sell to tourists, and they
