Hurricane Child Read online

  I don’t know what they have planned, but I’m no coward, so I go right down that aisle out the back door and into the hot courtyard. A half circle is waiting for me like a mob that’s ready to burn me at the stake. They’re all holding stones.

  “Why don’t you have a mom anymore, Caroline?” a girl asks. I know her well. Anise Fowler. Her hair is ironed straight, and some days I think I can still smell it burning. Her nails are always painted because her mom takes her to the spa. Today they’re scarlet red.

  She’s waiting for me to speak. They’re all waiting for me.

  “I still have a mom,” I tell them.

  “Heard she ran off with another man.”

  I don’t know if she actually heard that, or if she’s just making it up. “She didn’t,” I say.

  “You’re gonna be just like her,” Anise says. “You’re gonna run off with some man.”

  “Same way your mom did?” I ask, since this is openly spread knowledge—something that everyone whispers, because they heard it from their parents, though no one ever says it to Anise’s face.

  Anise’s smile twitches. She doesn’t need to give a signal. They all know to start throwing the rocks right then and there. They’re small enough that they won’t kill me, but chunks of mud dirties my white-collared shirt, and sharp pebbles scratch my ears and my cheeks and my knees and my hands when I reach out to protect my eyes. Anise is aiming right for my eyes.

  When they run out of rocks, I look at my hands. Both are speckled red, and points of blood start to rise and dry. I look at those smiling faces all around me, and I reach down for the rocks at my feet and I pick them up and throw them as hard as I can at each and every one of them, even the ones who’d only been watching. They scream and scatter except for Anise, and I pick up the biggest rock I can find and aim it right at her head. It knocks her above her eye, and she falls to the ground.

  Three teachers, with Missus Wilhelmina right up front, come hurrying into the courtyard. Piles of dirt and rocks everywhere, and me in the middle, with my hair sticking out of its braids and dirt all down my front and little children pointing at me, telling those teachers I’m the one who threw the rocks.

  “I will not force you to leave this school, Miss Murphy,” the principal says. I’m sitting on my hands in her cramped, sweltering office, which has shelves covering every wall, each stuffed with piles of books and loose papers looking ready to whip around the room in a windstorm. There are so many books and papers I’m afraid they’re all going to come crashing down on my head. The principal doesn’t seem to be scared at all. Miss Joe is her name, and she only ever calls students by their last names, because she says then we will know we are destined for excellence, though I’m not sure what my last name has to do with anything.

  “I believe that you are an angry little girl, and that you’re angry because you’ve been hurt, and that you need help to overcome this pain, and so I could not force you to leave this school with a good conscience. However,” she says, “you now have two strikes against you. If you do something like this again, I’m afraid I will have no choice.”

  There’s a spider inspecting its web up in the corner of her office. Miss Joe stands from her seat with difficulty, since the books are everywhere, teetering on the edge of her desk and their shelves and threatening to fall to the floor. She carefully comes to a stop beside me and my chair.

  “Every little girl needs her mother,” she says, and that’s all she says about that before she pulls out a book from her shelf. I don’t know how she knows where to find it, but her hand shoots straight for it and yanks it out of its pile. The book has a purple leather cover with a gold hibiscus flower embossed on the front. She flips through it, tears out a few pages, then hands the book to me. It has fancy paper that is thick and yellow, with golden flowers designed in the corners. I decide it’s the prettiest paper I’ve ever seen.

  “You should write letters to your mother,” she says, “and one day—if you do meet her again—you can decide whether you would like to give these letters to her or not.”

  I take the journal and say thank you, because my ma always taught me to say thank you if anyone ever gave me something, but I already know I won’t be writing a single word on any of this paper. It’s the first gift I’ve gotten from someone who is not my mom or my dad, and I plan on keeping it preserved on my nightstand, pretty paper untouched.

  Miss Joe smiles. “Just don’t throw any more stones,” she tells me.

  One day before the stone throwing, I sat by myself in the classroom of precise desks and chalk dust, and I sat alone during lunch too, just like I always have, in the small, hot cafeteria of sticky tiles and plastic tables stained with spilled fruit juice, and with wood slave salamanders with their translucent skin letting anyone see their guts as they skittered across window screens. I watched the students who would not come near me or look at me because I got so many bum smackings and because I asked too many questions in class and because I knew too many answers too. They never paid me any mind. I might as well have been invisible, because everyone else would always walk right by, laughing and teasing each other and going to sit at the tables where they always sat. No one would ever say, “Come and join us, Caroline,” so I would then spend the rest of the lunch period feeling sorry for myself and trying to remember that the lonely children like me are the ones who grow up to be someone that everyone wishes they could be.

  One day after the stone throwing, nothing has really changed, except now those children watch me watching them. They lean into their friends to say something and then their friend laughs. Anise sits on the other side of the cafeteria, but I can hear her voice over the hum of talk.

  “That Caroline Murphy is a female dog,” she says, except she doesn’t say female dog, but the rude word my mom would’ve slapped me silly for saying. “Look what she did to my head. I had to get stitches, and now they say there will be a scar. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re not raised the right way.” And her friends tsk and shake their heads the same way they’ve seen their mothers do over meals of lemongrass tea and salt fish and fungi.

  There is one girl who watches me watching her, but she does not look at me in the angry way everyone else does. She is white, and she is Anise’s friend and sits at the table where Anise sits, but I’ve never seen her speak before in my life. I think she might be deaf, or mute, or chooses not to say a single word, the same way the Chief refuses to speak in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I only know about because it’s one of the books my mom read aloud for me at night, me curled up next to her in her soft bed, always begging for her to keep reading even after her voice was scratchy and hoarse, and hating my dad whenever he opened the door and told me to go to my own room because he wanted to sleep.

  Marie is her name, but everyone calls her Marie Antoinette because she’s white. She has yellow hair and blue eyes and looks the way the rest of the world thinks everyone should always look, since people with yellow hair and blue eyes are supposed to be more beautiful than anyone else, even though no one can see that they were brainwashed into thinking only yellow hair and blue eyes are beautiful, on account of the fact that people with yellow hair and blue eyes did the brainwashing themselves, so the moment I saw Marie I decided I didn’t like her, since everyone automatically likes her for looking the way she does, and everyone automatically hates me for looking the way I do.

  I still don’t like her, but while Anise is talking loud, Marie Antoinette keeps looking at me silently, and every time our eyes meet she looks back down at the table again. She looks again at me, and then again and again, until by the end of lunch, I’ve caught her looking at me nearly sixteen times. That’s a lot of times to look at someone, so I figure she must want something from me. I decide to ask her about it directly, instead of spending the rest of the day wondering.

  “Hello,” I tell Marie in the hallway. My hands are shaking, so I clasp them behind my back where no one will see. Anise is close enough to spit
in my face, and she might just do it too, after she’s done twisting up her face in shock and disgust.

  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 the house with rain and wind that blew the kitchen window right inside and brought the sea up into our house so the water was near up to a grown man’s knees, and whenever I asked my ma, she said she was more than positive that it wasn’t just a hurricane but a water sprout too, a twister born on the ocean and flying up onto land to die, same way some insects are born and die all in the same second sometimes.

  She’d clench her hands. My dad, my mother said, was stuck down the road, hiding with one of the old women under her kitchen sink, but the second the water twister stopped roaring, he leapt up and ran through that storm to find us—both my mom and me sitting in a tub of bloody water. Even though it was a whole month early, I might as well have been in her stomach a year, I was so big and loud, wailing over the wind and rain. Almost like I didn’t really belong in this world. Hurricane just tore me from the spirit world and spat me out into this one instead. She’d kiss my cheek and touch my hair.

  My mom never told me what it means to be a Hurricane Child. She never put that in her story. But I hear what it means when the old women from down the road come by, from their dead friend who whispers it under her breath. That it’s a curse, being born during a hurricane. I won’t have an inch of luck for the rest of my days, and sadness will follow me wherever I go.

  And he called you little sorrow.

  Well, I step on that curse and spit on it too.

  I don’t need this world’s luck to live. I don’t even need anyone to like me.

  I’ve just got to focus on one thing: finding my ma. That’s all I’ll ever need.

  My ma and I would sometimes sing at the top of our lungs like we didn’t care if everyone in the world could hear us, and together, we would sing calypso and soca and old-time reggae, but alone, she would sing her softer songs.

  Why you wanna fly, Blackbird?

  I don’t know anything about blackbirds, because I’ve never seen one with my own eyes, but I know that I am one all the same. When we sang as loud as we could, my mom would pick me up and swing me over her head and I would scream and we’d both near fall with laughing. Knew I’d never be loved again as much as when I was loved by my mother. Never be loved that way again.

  The very last time my mother was not so close to me that she could touch, but she was still closer than she is now, is when she was sending those postcards. And I think that maybe the very last postcard she sent is exactly where she is now.

  My father did not throw those postcards away. I know that he has stored them in a room that no one sleeps in, beside the gardening tools and old books, stacks of picture books and board books that my mother used to read to me. There are bins of unused cards. She used to buy cards in advance and would collect HAPPY BIRTHDAY cards and CONGRATULATIONS! cards and I’M SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS cards so she would always be prepared for a forgotten birthday or an unexpected passing.

  The bins are filled with these cards, but I don’t see my mother’s postcards anywhere, so I look and look and look and uproot the bins, and when I’ve gone through every single last card, I look inside the picture books too, in case the cards have been used as bookmarks, and I look behind the
gardening tools and inside the cupboards and try not to cry with how frustrated I am. My hands are covered with paper cuts. And finally, I sit back and admit that the postcards are nowhere to be found.

  My father appears behind me, concern on his face. “Caroline, what’re you doing?”

  I wasn’t expecting him, and he’s scared me so much that my heart is beating like a hummingbird’s wings and is warm in my chest, the way it is when I suddenly shoot up in my bed, awake with fear from a nightmare. “I’m looking for something.”

  “I can see that. What’re you looking for?”

  I hesitate. If I told him, would he realize I’m looking for my mom? Or would he simply show me where he’s stored the postcards?

  I decide to take a risk. “I’m looking for the postcards Ma used to send us.”

  “Oh.” He crosses his arms. “Why would you want those?”

  I open my mouth, and a lie slips out before I’ve even had a chance to think of one. “I have a school project about world geography, and I thought I would choose one of the countries she traveled to.”

  “Oh,” he says again. “Well, I threw those cards away a long time ago.”

  I try to stop the disappointment that crashes down around me, but I must not do a very good job, because my father gives me a smile and helps me to my feet. “I have some ideas for countries to do a project on,” he says. “There are many countries I’ve been to.”

  This isn’t something I knew about my father. I’ve known my father my entire life, and he knew me even before my life began, so it’s a funny notion, that I still have to get to know him.

  Missus Wilhelmina’s classroom is alight with excitement the next morning. That kind of excitement never bodes well for me. Usually the heads bent together and sharp spikes of laughter mean that Anise has something planned. I step inside, expecting everyone to start throwing books at my head, but I breathe with relief when their gazes barely flicker to me. Breathe with relief—that almost makes me sound afraid. I hate being afraid. I hate being a coward. I decide I’ll never breathe with relief again.