Here Comes the Sun (14 page)

Margot was thinking all this when Alphonso said to her, “
Why don't you come by later, and show me what you're good at?
”

And so, when the sun went down and the staff went home, he led her to the conference room—the only time she had ever seen the inside of it. She opened the folder in which she kept all her ideas for the hotel. Her hands shook a little as she showed him how she had designed the small surveys so that management could know what guests were responding to. But Alphonso wasn't interested in that. Instead, he watched her. She felt his eyes on her the whole time. When she finally gathered the courage to look at him, he leaned in and whispered, “
I didn't mean for you to show me all that about the hotel. I wanted you to show me what you're good at.
” Her first instinct was to slap him across the face and walk out the office; but Margot thought of Delores. The thought held her in place as Alphonso's hands traveled the width of her hips, pressing her into him. There, his lust grew forceful. He bent her over and she let him.
It's fah di bettah.
As he entered her, Alphonso breathed into the back of her neck. “
Now I know why he kept you around.
”

Margot responded by moving his hands to her breasts. The folder full of her ideas slipped from the desk and fell, papers sailing every which way. After a few minutes Alphonso came. He stood up and wiped himself clean with the handkerchief he carried in his left breast pocket. He tossed it in the bin with the condom. “
Jus' keep this between me and you,
” he said.

But Garfield—the security guard who probably heard movement in the conference room after hours, and who worked for forty years to prove himself in his old age as a noble guardsman who didn't deserve to be laid off without a pension—busted through the door holding a flashlight and a baton, only to behold the sight of Alphonso zipping up his pants and Margot leaning over the desk, her ass exposed. In exchange for silence, Garfield was given job security. A month later he died of a stroke. The secret didn't die with him.

In time she has pushed aside the things about Alphonso that make her cautious. His volcanic explosions when people dare question his authenticity as a Wellington, given his tendency to squander money, unlike his scrupulous predecessors. Already he has squandered the revenue from the coffee farms and rum estates, and has had to sell them. And since his family is currently threatening to take the hotels out his hands, he seeks to pull from every vault his father painstakingly hid from him before he died. When Alphonso came up empty-handed after being denied privilege to any more of his father's estate, he combusted: “
The bastard cared for his three
w
's. His wealth, his whores, and his whiskey.
” He was drunk. He smashed a rum bottle on the wall and splattered the expensive Persian rug in his villa with the brown liquid. He kept on looking at the wall as though he saw his father's shadow there, though it was his own.

Margot's distracted memories carry her from under the tree to the crafts market in town. She just needs a scrap of kindess before she can recover, formulate her next move. Though Delores is hardly compassionate, Margot looks for her inside the arcade. The instant reprieve from the heat, though small, is something she's grateful for. She hasn't visited the stall in a long time. John-John is sitting there hee-hawing about something, and Margot has a feeling that she's interrupting. Delores lifts her head and notices Margot, and something comes over her face. When John-John sees Margot, he too stops talking and suddenly becomes shy, lowering his head and regarding her through the lashes of his downcast eyes. “Hello, Margot,” he says boyishly.

“Wha'ppen John-John?”

“Nutten nah g'wan enuh,” John-John says, bringing Margot's focus back. He seems glad for the opportunity to talk to her. “Same ole, same ole . . . how about you? Yuh looking good.”

“Thanks, John-John,” Margot says in a noncommittal voice. She focuses on Delores and the impenetrable veil over her face.

John-John must sense this, because he picks up his box of crafts and heads to the exit, apologetic when he says to Margot, “I'll leave you ladies alone.” He bows slightly. “Likkle more, Mama Delores.”

“Likkle more,” Delores replies.

John-John stops at the exit as though he has forgotten something. He digs into his box and hands Margot a sculpted doctor bird. “Me did mek dis special fi you.”

“Thanks, John-John,” Margot says, holding on to the wooden bird as he hurries away.

Delores is chuckling to herself. “Him always did like yuh,” she says. “Only a idiot in love would give up something fah free when him can sell it to mek good money.” She sucks her teeth and fans herself with an old yellowing newspaper. “Lawd Jesas, what ah buffoon, eh?”

“I know.” Margot examines the beautiful bird. She traces the contours with her fingers, every ridge meticulously carved. “Poor t'ing.”

“Poor t'ing is right,” Delores says. “Remember how him used to bring yuh flowers he pick from s'maddy else yard?” Margot chuckles when she remembers this—John-John stealing flowers to give to her. “Both of oonuh was so young,” Delores continues, with the memory glistening in her eyes. “Him used to sit here an' wait on me, jus' so he could geet to yuh.” But the humor quickly disappears from Delores's face, wiped clean by a scowl. “If only he knew.”

“I guess you'd rather put me wid a man who was into fondling and fucking likkle girls?” Margot says, her voice conversational. She's been friendly with her mother, but the day's disappointment has her raw, prodding the wounds of her past. This painful fact has solidified into a rock she throws at her mother when it becomes too big, too heavy to carry alone.

Delores stops fanning. After a long pause, she braces herself into the chair, which creaks under her weight. “Why are you here?” Delores asks. “To tell me how me is a bad mother?” Delores's spit flies on Margot's face. Delores continues. “What should I have done, eh? Tell me!” Her eyes are bulging. “Didn't it put food on the table? Didn't it feed yuh? If yuh t'ink yuh bettah than dat—now dat you is Miss High 'an Mighty—then g'weh! G'long!”

Margot doesn't budge. She can't. “Ah want to talk to you,” she says. Her voice drops, giving in to a slight tremor.

Delores's eyes gleam like the edges of swords, her mouth twisted to the right side of her face. “'Bout what?”

“Ah don't know where to start.”

“Start somweh. Yuh wasting me time.” Delores starts fanning herself again, but before Margot can gather her thoughts, three tourists enter the stall. Delores's attitude changes. Margot steps aside and waits until her mother is done with them. Suddenly she's a pleasant woman, the type of woman Margot would've liked to get to know, or wanted as a mother—not the mother she grew up with, who was quick to anger and even quicker to trample Margot's self-esteem. Margot always wondered what it was about her that made her mother so angry. She wished she could make her mother happy the way these tourists do. The way Thandi does. “Yes, sweetie, ah can give yuh dat for a discounted price,” Delores says to the young American teen.

When the tourists leave, Delores goes back to being Delores. “So talk,” she says. “More people soon come an' me need fi sell.”

Margot treads lightly. “I'm seeing someone.” She clears her throat, feeling an overwhelming need to specify, if not for herself, then for Delores, whose eyes hold in them the question that Margot can never avoid. “A man.” It rolls off her tongue so easily, so naturally, so necessary.
A man
. Her mother's facial expression remains neutral, though Margot imagines the smirk behind the dark emotionless face.

“He's in di hotel business,” Margot continues. “A Wellington.”

“A Wellington?” Delores asks, her eyes wide. “What yuh doing wid ah Wellington?” she asks. “Since when those people commune wid di help? Don't you work fah dem?”

“He said he loves me,” Margot says, defensive. All she hopes for is Delores's grudging approval. “He's willing to leave his wife. And he's serious about it.”

“Oh?” Delores sits up straight and puts down the rolled-up newspaper she was using to fan with, a gleam finally creeping into her eyes, filling Margot with hope.

“So yuh get yuhself a
big
man.”

“Yes.”

“How yuh so ch'upid, gyal?”

Delores leans forward, her big arms flopping over her knees. Margot realizes that it wasn't pride she has seen in her mother's eyes, it was a sneer. A sneer that reveals the wide gap in her mother's teeth as she says, “My question to you,
Miss High an' Mighty
, is how ah man like dat can leave him pretty wife fi
s'maddy
like you? Yuh t'ink dem man deh want a black gyal pon dem arm in public? Dey like yuh to fuck. Not to marry. So know yuh place.”

Margot feels the sting of tears, but she narrows her eyes. She doesn't even want Alphonso. All Margot wants—now more than ever—is to prove her mother wrong.

M
argot bursts through Verdene's bedroom door and puts her palms against the woman's cheeks. Her lips trail Verdene's neck, her breasts. Verdene gasps in surprise, but slows Margot's fingers.

“Calm down, now. Why don't you sit down?”

Margot relents, resting her head against Verdene's before slumping onto the bed. “I wish things were different,” she says. Verdene is watching her, watching the storm of unknown origin rage across her face. “Don't you just wish things were different?” she asks.

“Many times,” Verdene says.

They peer at each other in the mirror.

“I don't think I can go on living like this,” Margot says.

“What are you saying?” Verdene sits up against the headboard. Margot studies her face to see if the answer she hopes to find is there. But all she sees is concern and confusion just above Verdene's eyebrows.

“If you love me, then why haven't you offered to sell this house so that we can have a fresh start? You know. In an area where we can—”

Verdene cuts her off. “It's not that simple, Margot.”

“Why not? What do you have to lose by selling this house? It's not like you have anything left here. We can build something together.”

“It's all I have left of my mother.” Verdene looks at the picture of her mother that sits on the small table, facing the wall—the only picture she kept out. She reaches over and turns the picture around.

“So I'm best kept as a secret?” Margot asks quietly, turning away from the smiling Miss Ella.

Verdene allows the question to fall between them before she says, “You're fooling yourself if you think things would be any different in another neighborhood. It's still Jamaica.”

“Then why don't you take me with you to London so that we could have a life outside of this?”

“You've never been willing to leave River Bank.” Verdene moves to the edge of the bed. “You're the one always talking about your sister and how you have to be here for her.”

Margot walks to the rocking chair for her bag. Verdene has a point. Thandi needs her. But that was not what she wanted to hear. Alphonso would never choose her, and maybe she can never choose Verdene. She has been wasting time vacillating between two secret lives. She wonders if what she feels—and has always felt—for Verdene is nothing more than a spell, something temporarily debilitating like a gigantic wave in the ocean. She has to break the water's surface. Swim back to shore. She cannot afford to be controlled.

“I have to go,” Margot says. She kisses Verdene goodbye on the mouth.

“When will I see you again?” Verdene asks.

“I don't know.”

9

T
HANDI GOES OUTSIDE TO THE BACKYARD WITH HER SKETCHPAD
. The grass is knee-high, neglected. The sun peers through the branches of the trees. Two roosters that escaped the neighbor's yard high-step toward the side of the shack. The old tire tied to the tree where Little Richie likes to sit swings by itself as though a ghost is pushing it. Thandi tries to sketch whatever she sees, but every time an image appears on the page, she rips it out and balls it inside her fists. Nothing looks or feels right. By the time she's halfway through ripping page after page out of her book, she's ready to scream into the open air. Her frustration threatens to break free and shatter to pieces the image she has struggled so hard to uphold. But this backyard is too small. The web of branches above her head might contain her frustrated scream. The sleeping dogs might holler at it. The chickens will halt, one leg suspended like the breaths of the nearby washerwomen, who might wonder about the commotion and come running.

Finally, she decides that her growing discomfort might have to do with the plastic that Miss Ruby meticulously wrapped around her limbs and torso. She makes her way back inside, takes it off, and slips a modest yellow dress over a tank top and a pair of shorts—since she has to wash her slip. She grabs her sketchpad and leaves, passing Grandma Merle, who is sitting stiff-necked on the wooden chair; and Miss Francis and Miss Louise, who wave. The hum of their voices washes her back. “
Is where she going in di hot sun dressed like dat? Shouldn't she be in school?
”

She hurries along to the river, passing by the bathers who have their clothes spread out on the rocks. She makes her way to where the boats are tied up. The construction workers with their tools aren't on site today. There is a sign that reads
NO TRESPASSING
on the beach right where Thandi used to play as a child, which was once an extension of River Bank. The hotels are building along the coastlines. Slowly but surely they are coming, like a dark sea. Little Bay, which used to be two towns over from River Bank, was the first to go. Just five years ago the people of Little Bay left in droves, forced out of their homes and into the streets. It was all over the news when it happened, since the people—out of anger—ended up blocking roads with planks and tires and burning them. In the past, developers would wait for landslides and other natural disasters to do their dirty work. But when tourism became the bread and butter for the island's economy, the developers and the government alike became ravenous, indifferent. In retaliation, people stole concrete blocks and cement and zinc from the new developments to rebuild homes in other places, but their pilfering brought soldiers with rifles and tear gas. The developers won the fight, and the people scattered like roaches. Some came to River Bank begging to be taken in, some fled to other parishes. Those who could not bear the stress of uprooting all their belongings to start a new life roamed the streets and mumbled to themselves. It was as though their own land had turned on them—swallowed up their homes and livestock and produce and spat out the remains. By the time the workmen arrived in River Bank, Little Bay had been long forgotten.