“We have to go to the hole,” Kalinda says. I know she’s right, so I start off for the black iron fence. Kalinda runs faster than me and gets to the iguana hole first. There’s a yelling. The security guard, hand over his bleeding nose, stumbles down the stairs and makes his way toward us.
Both Kalinda and I dive through the hole, scratching ourselves up on the rocks and getting my shirt and skirt caked with dirt. Kalinda rushes forward and jumps onto a taxi, and she grabs my hand and pulls me up. We look back at the black iron gate and the condos. The security guard has just reached the fence.
It takes us a moment, but when the taxi reaches waterfront, the two of us start laughing. We laugh so hard that we get tears in our eyes. The other passengers just watch us all the way into the countryside.
The wind is stronger. The sky is gray. Water begins to fall to the ground in great big plops. The woman driving the taxi stops under a swinging streetlight, and me and Kalinda jump off without paying. She calls out to us, but she doesn’t cuss us like I thought she would. She tells us to get home soon.
“There’s a tropical storm coming,” she says. “Haven’t you heard?”
Kalinda and I stand on the side of the road, and the water begins to fall harder, soaking my shirt and lashing my face. She takes my hand.
“Are you nervous?”
I nod.
“Are you scared?”
I nod again.
She takes a deep breath. “I am too.”
“Why would you be scared?” She wasn’t the one meeting her mom for the first time in over a year.
“I’m scared because I have something to tell you,” she says. She takes my other hand. “I’m sorry for the way I hurt you, Caroline.”
“You already said that you were sorry.”
“It hurt me, to see that I was hurting you. And more than that: I was afraid of the truth.”
I don’t let myself breathe or speak. If I do, I’m afraid Kalinda will blow away on the breeze. It’s only because Kalinda watches me like she wants me to speak that I make myself say, “And what is the truth?”
She looks at me like she isn’t planning on saying it, because I should know what the truth is, and maybe I should, and maybe I do—but then she decides to say it out loud anyway. “I feel the same way about you too.” She’s still holding my hand, and I don’t know what to say, but I’m also afraid that she’s going to let go, so I grip her fingers in mine even tighter. She keeps speaking. “I was afraid to, because I’ve been told it’s wrong, but you’re right—I don’t want to think that way, just because someone said it’s so. I know the truth. I love you.”
She continues to talk—tells me how much the letter really meant to her, that she’d taken the journal home to read it over and over, and how she would like nothing more than to marry me too, one day when we’re old enough. I’m still not sure if I can completely believe her, but I see the way her eyes watch me with all the grave seriousness of the entire world, and I know she means every word. I could almost cry.
Kalinda tells me that we have to keep moving, before it starts to rain, so we climb the steep hills and jump over gates and barricades and walk through the yards of abandoned houses, whitewashed and glowing under the blinding sun, still shining through the clouds. My leg gets caught on a wire as I climb over a fence, cutting me sharp. Kalinda doesn’t notice, and I decide not to tell her. We walk down the street, my loafers sinking into the moist dirt. Guinea grass and brush slices my shins. Cars pass by. Kalinda and I walk silently side by side.
We’re in the countryside, with the hillsides that go up and back down like roller-coaster rides, and from where we can see all the islands spread out before us like we own the entire world. Missus Wilhelmina would say that it’s blasphemy to think something like that, when clearly the world belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. We can see black clouds moving in fast from the east, so we speed up our walk.
I have trouble remembering what day it is. It’s been one full night since my father has seen me. I know he has to be worried, and I do feel very bad, but I need to go to 5545 Mariendahl Road, or I’m afraid I’ll never want to try to find my mom again. I’ll just let myself sink back into the life I had before, and I’ll decide that I don’t need to find my mother anymore, because I’ll simply be too afraid to try, so I need to do it now, before I decide to never attempt to find her again.
We walk into the back roads and into
