Marie looks surprised also. She nods her head at me.
“I wondered if you would like to take a walk after school,” I tell her, since I know she lives in Frenchtown, where a lot of white people live on Saint Thomas, which is right next to waterfront.
Marie hesitates, then looks at Anise and her other friends, then looks at me again and shakes her head. She walks away, and Anise laughs loudly, then begins to demand to her friends, “What does she think she’s doing? Who does she think she is?” And even then, though Marie smiles with the rest of them, I see her looking down the hall at me, over her shoulder, like she’s trying to telepathically send me a message, but I’m just not tuned into the right station to hear it.
When I get home, my dad still hasn’t returned from work. I toe off my shoes and socks and leave them in a pile by my bedroom door like I always do, and I see the journal that Miss Joe gave me yesterday on my nightstand. I pick it up, thinking that maybe I will write a letter to my mom after all—but then I throw it as hard as I can, so hard that it knocks into a lamp that my mother said was exquisitely beautiful the second she saw it, and bought it immediately, and surprised me when she took it to my room instead of placing it on display in the living room for everyone to see. The lamp crashes to the floor into a million little pieces, so tiny that parts have become powder.
I could fall to my knees and cry right then, but crying won’t do a single thing, so instead, I run out of the house, screen door slapping shut behind me, and run barefoot through the brown salt water, splashing over roots and cutting my toes on stones, until I reach my father’s blue boat. I take a deep breath and heave and yank and tug until my arms feel like water and my legs buckle beneath me, and I’m sweating in the evening heat, and mosquitoes get tangled in my hair, but I don’t stop until that boat is sitting right side up again. I take another breath and push and push and push until it’s right there by the water’s edge. I don’t know where I’m going, don’t know where my mom is, but it doesn’t matter—I decide the waves will take me to her. I leap inside and feel the water bob me up and down, up and down. And just as I grab the paddles, I see her sitting there—sitting across from me like an old friend whose name I don’t recall.
She has eyes shining like two full moons in her face, but everything else is black, and I can’t really see her at all, as though she only ever exists in the corner of my eye—and she’s gone the moment I turn my head to get a good look at her.
I sit there, listening to the gentle plunk of water smacking the bottom of the boat, looking out at the ocean that has opened itself before me, still and flat like black glass. She’s already gone, but I whisper, “Is that you, Mom?”
Nothing answers but the trade winds rustling through my hair. The woman in black is long gone, but I can still feel her near me. I hear my father shouting my name. “Caroline! Caroline! Caroooline!”
I jump out of the boat, feet sinking into the salt water and sand that sting the cuts on my toes, and push the boat back through the mud of the dead mangrove, until it finds solid dirt again. By the time I wander back to my father’s house, I’m covered in mud and tears. He’s waiting on the top of the stairs, light of the house shining through the screen door. I think he will yell at me, and for a moment, he probably thinks the same—but then he sees me and opens his arms to me and holds me, smoothing down my hair almost the same way my mom would have done. He doesn’t hold me until I ask him to let go, but I still can’t help but love him for it.
And I feel bad, because I know I’m going to leave him here in this house by himself, same way my ma left the two of us.
I am a Hurricane Child. It doesn’t mean anything special, except that I was born during a hurricane. My ma told me this story at least once a month, but sometimes twice, whenever she was extra in love with me, in a mood where her love was so big I was scared she’d crush me with it, and she wanted to share that love with me by remembering my birth, so I had the story practically memorized—not only the words, but even when she would pause and close her eyes and let her mouth twist into a smile.
It was her favorite story to tell. She wasn’t expecting me that night, but same way you can’t always expect someone to just up and die and leave this world, I jumped right into it a whole month early. She’d smile. My dad, being a good man, was down the road helping the old women tie down their roofs and board up their windows, and even though technology existed, sometimes Water Island might as well have been stuck in the old world with a magic barrier keeping everyone and everything out, so even though my ma screamed and screamed and screamed, not a soul heard her.
She filled the bathtub with warm water and lowered herself into it, and she was there in that water while the storm spun into the islands faster than anyone expected, lashing
