“I’m sorry,” she says, and I don’t know if these are the last words she ever plans on speaking to me, but now I don’t think I would mind if they are.
“I was taken to the hospital for treatment for some time, and when I was released, I decided not to go back to the house with you and your father. I knew then that this wasn’t the life meant for me. I still know it now. Your father had Bernadette with another woman he loved, and I felt trapped. I couldn’t breathe. I left—traveled the world and saw such amazing things. Things I want you to see for yourself someday too, Caroline. And when I came back, I met Richard, and I hadn’t planned it at all, but I fell in love, and we got married. Katie is Richard’s daughter, so she’s my daughter now too. Katie is your stepsister.”
She watches me for a moment, her mouth opening and closing, like she isn’t sure if she should continue speaking or if she should wait for me to say something now.
“Do you love Katie more than you love me?”
“Love can’t be measured.”
“It can be when I’m your daughter.”
“I love you very much, Caroline.”
“Then why aren’t you living with me? Why aren’t you with my dad? Why are you with a new family?”
“I just wasn’t happy. I didn’t love your father, and he fell in love with another woman. I just wasn’t happy.”
I haven’t finished eating yet, and my mother once taught me it was wrong to waste good food on the plate, but I ignore that now and stand up from the table so fast that the chair almost falls to the ground. My mom takes my hand before I can run.
“I’ve thought of coming to see you countless times,” she says, “but I worried for myself—for my own health, worried that coming back would trigger something—and I worried about you too. I didn’t want to hurt you.” I yank my hand away from hers, and she lets go, but I stay standing at the table. “I’ve seen you,” she says. “I’ve seen you on Main Street and crossing the street to the church to go to school and whenever you’re walking past Frenchtown to get to waterfront.”
We’re quiet for a long while, and I hear rain lashing against the window, and my mother’s new husband has turned on a radio. I can hear it faintly in the background. It says that the tropical storm is moving faster than anyone has really expected, and that it’s quickly escalating. My mother tells me that she loves me, that she never stopped loving me.
Her new husband comes into the kitchen and invites me to stay a little longer, just to get to know everyone a little more—Katie wants to play board games with me, he says, but she’s too shy to ask—but I can’t imagine anything more painful than sitting here and pretending that my mother still loves me, that I’m a part of her new family, when in fact I’m only here because she and her new husband pity me. I tell them I have to go. Richard tells me he’ll drive me home, but I tell them no, and I run out before anyone can say anything else.
If you’d only understand, dear.
When I race out onto the porch, screen door slapping shut behind me, I see that Kalinda is no longer standing where I’d left her, and something about this is not so surprising, because part of me wonders if she’d ever really been there at all.
Nobody wants you anywhere.
I run down the dirt path and back into the street, paved ground so hard it sends shock waves up my legs and into my knees, and I hear someone calling my name, and far down the road I see a woman dressed in all black, but I don’t stop running, even then.
The streets are near empty. Men playing their dominoes are gone, and someone’s come and untied that dog from its chain. It’s started to rain harder, the kind of lashing rain that stings when it hits your skin. Rain soaks me through even more than when I was in the ocean. And it’s hot too—the unbearable kind of hot that makes it hard to breathe, and the wind blows into my face so hard I have to close my eyes, then it dies down, then it starts blowing again, like the island is breathing. One car comes by, slows down, and the man in the driving seat sticks his head out and yells at me to get home, I shouldn’t be out in the street like this when the storm is coming. He drives on. Another car passes and stops, and a woman asks me if I need a ride, and when I lie and say my house is on the corner, she nods and keeps going.
I jump into a taxi that only has one other passenger, and when I jump off and don’t pay, the driver doesn’t cuss me. Mister Lochana isn’t waiting for me on waterfront with his speedboat, so I get on the ferry to Water Island, which the ferry workers are saying will be the last ride for the day, since they’ll need to anchor their boat at the dock and hope the boat doesn’t end up in the middle of the road. Those workers don’t cuss me when I don’t pay, either; I guess because there’s a storm coming and no one wants to
