JESSIE MAYERS
I dreamed that all my teeth fell out. They dropped from my mouth, shattering into jagged porcelain pieces onto the earth below my suspended feet. When my mouth was a hole that sucked in my lips, I drifted down, almost touching the ground. When I woke up, aside from the familiar numbness of an unburied navel string, there was a jagged awareness grating through me. It was the knowing that Joseline had died. My phone rang. Gerald, Joseline’s brother, was calling. Before he could speak, I told him, ‘I know. Booked my flight already. Arriving at three this afternoon.’ He stayed silent with the quietness of a man who hated taking the initiative on anything. I told him to close all the doors and windows of the family house where Joseline died.
I packed my funeral clothes: white pants, white shirt, white panties, white bra. She’d want me to wear black. I didn’t eat breakfast. No time. The middle-aged Uber driver offered to take my bag, but I lugged it into the backseat with me, denting the leather seats with the wheels. He kept his eyes on the road, his stubbly jowls twitching in disapproval, smelling of the bitter bark of a wenge tree with roots holding fast to undiscovered cobalt.
The airport was busy. Joseline chose the wrong day to die. I strode towards the airline counter, ignoring the cut-eye looks from the long line of passengers sucking their teeth. Caribbean people. I’ll see some of them on the plane. Accepting that my stay here was over, I dropped my passport with its how-many-years-overstayed visa onto the counter, resigning myself to squatting in another country after my tête-à-tête with Joseline. The check-in agent hid her thoughts behind a polite smile, a thin, hardy-looking woman who favoured a guayacán bush, one that clung to the banks of the Río Bravo, its outstretched limbs reaching toward the south. I grabbed my boarding pass from her and ran toward the security check.
My leg bounced, at times hitting the back of the seat in front of me, causing its occupant to glance back. Their irritation was noted, and mine was growing the longer the plane stayed grounded. I needed to get to the family house. The couple across the aisle was talking about me. They were speaking kwéyòl, assuming I was some tourist or detached diaspora child who wasn’t taught the language. If it’s one thing Joseline gave me, aside from a bad attitude, it was kwéyòl skills that could soothe a baby to sleep or eviscerate any ego. The woman glared at me, shaking as she spoke, like the wind rattling the brittle leaves of a tropical pine. Her partner spared me a passing glance, remaining subdued like a lone sea grass bed waving in the current. I wonder what they saw when they looked at me. A cloud in the sky? A body suspended? Nothing? Away from the crushing closeness of city dwelling, the numbness I felt in my core strengthened into a gnawing emptiness.
We were in the air now, flying over the Caribbean Sea. I hogged the window seat, forehead pressed against the glass, watching the sargassum seaweed drift on the water like streaks of old curry oil. It was midday. Joseline would’ve been up for hours having completed her morning chores. She’d awake in the morning dark, make her bed, pick lime leaves to boil into lòjet, then drop herself into her rocking chair, releasing a hard sigh of ‘Yes, Father Lord, give me the strength. Thank you, Jesus,’ and drink the steaming tea with tightened lips. The lòjet warming her belly, she’d sweep the dirt in the front yard, gathering small pebbles, leaves, and the mawez from the night before. A practice of physical and spiritual purity, removing things seen and unseen. Even after moving away years ago, I knew Joseline had maintained this routine, and the only thing that stopped it was her death.
Gerald picked me up from the airport. There were no hugs of grief shared between us. I had to ask him to open the trunk so I could deposit my bag. Tall and quiet, he moved with no urgency. I sighed out my irritation, watching him stroll to the back of the vehicle with the unbothered countenance of an ill-mannered child. The skin on his face was rutted, resembling the bark of a campeche tree that grew in soil that had trembled under the teetering footsteps of squatters who grew in confidence over the passing years until the land was theirs. We were silent on the drive to the house. He drove up the single lane cobbled with fallen mangoes that burst beneath the wheels. The smell of rot was heavy and sickening. I held my breath until Gerald parked in front of the house. It looked the same. Neat and clean.
‘Do what you have to do before sunset. People coming for the wake,’ he said before driving off.
I slunk through the front door, shutting it behind me. The air inside was stifling, a roiling heat waiting to escape. Gerald had taken care to ensure that all openings in the house were shut. A scratching noise drew me along the corridor into the kitchen. I turned the corner and paused. Joseline was standing before the sink, peeling green figs. No one could kalé fig like Joseline. She held the fig and sliced its green jacket, wedging her thumb into the slit and sliding it around until the skin detached from the starchy white crescent. Clean and flayed, she plopped it into a pan of water.
Joseline turned around, watching me in anticipation. ‘Open the damn door, child.’
‘I thought death would make you more reasonable,’ I eased my way into the kitchen, my body tense and sweaty.
Joseline sucked her teeth. ‘The dead have more will than the living.’
‘Where is it?’ I demanded. Of course, she wanted to leave. To escape. To avoid me. She glared. A hard stare that she had perfected in life, even when she knew she was wrong. Joseline never averted her gaze, but I saw the fear. Her eyes were alight with the façade of stubborn confidence, but there was an uncertain twitching of her lip. I admired her disgusting dedication.
‘They had a time when I thought you was smart,’ she sniffed, turning back to her green figs. ‘Watch you now; big woman coming and talk to me about schupidness.’
‘Tell me where to find it.’
‘No.’
‘Tell me where it is!’
‘You were never supposed to born here,’ she said. Her words were accented by the jerking movements of undressing the green fig. ‘I try hard, but you drop right there on the floor.’ Without looking up, she pointed the knife towards a spot down the corridor. ‘Almost as if you wanted to make one with the floor…’
She muttered that last part, so I barely heard her. This characteristic, poor projection, when she believed her words were of grave importance, irritated me. I didn’t have time to listen to Joseline not answer my questions. I turned my back to hers. Her bedroom was opposite the kitchen. An orange gleam from the late afternoon sunlight lit the room. Joseline’s bed was outfitted with the sheet set I had sent three years ago. It was the only useful thing I could think of to send after I strained to pay my rent. I could see the imprint of where her body had lain. It made a shallow valley in the sheets, and the light made it seem like Joseline’s shadow lingered there.
A glance behind me confirmed Joseline had followed me. Water droplets leapt from her fisted hands, making furtive teardrops on the front of her white cotton dress.
Her words were thorny with conviction. ‘You should learn to leave things how they are.’
I ignored her and entered the room. ‘Sometimes I think you were happy seeing me struggle. Not attached to anything.’
Everything was in its place: the white Bible, open and dissected by a chipped metal bookmark with a tasselled string; the bedroom slippers near the bed that Joseline always wore because she refused to walk barefoot; the rocking chair positioned at a companiable angle toward the only window through which Joseline would spy on me to make sure I never wandered into the tall campeche trees at the border of the land; the chest of drawers lined with porcelain animal figurines I was never allowed to touch but did anyway, breaking off a few legs or ears that made Joseline beat me; and the stuffed armoire, filled with old clothes, a broken television, and other items, the catalyst for a fight we had six years ago after I tried to persuade her to declutter. I never visited Joseline after that.
‘As I die, you will appreciate what I do,’ Joseline called after me.
It shouldn’t have been too difficult to find it. But it was. I had tried many times before, but Joseline knew how to keep secrets. I approached the bed and removed the sheets.
Without looking up, I asked, ‘What do you see when you see me?’
Joseline gave her stare again. ‘A rude, hard-head child.’
I flipped the mattress over, tracing its underside for any openings or incisions. My eyes squinted, looking for any restitched seams.
‘People do things out of obligation for their children. Things they know will be good for them. Seems you didn’t give a shit about that.’
Joseline sucked her teeth in reprimand. ‘When you make children, you will know why I do what I do. And you will do the same thing.’
‘I’ll never have children.’
‘Big woman like you, with job making money, better off than me, and I raise you. You have no worries. At least I had reason to not –’
‘You showed me all I need to know not to,’ I grunted in anger, ripping open a promising seam only to find nothing. ‘And “reason to not” what?’
‘When you old in a house by yourself, you’ll suck salt,’ she grumbled, ignoring my question.
Dropping the mattress, I began lifting the bed boards. ‘Maybe dying alone is better than forcing someone who hates me to care for me.’
‘When you dying alone, lying in your shit, you realise is alone you alone for true and that is dying before dying.’
‘You never wanted me here anyway,’ I mumbled.
‘Even so,’ Joseline sniffed as she looked away. ‘I do what I know was good for you.’
I looked at the exposed bed boards. The floor below was empty. I moved on to the chest of drawers until it was gutted, its drawers open like lolling tongues. All of Joseline’s clothes were strewn on the floor. I sifted through each garment, pressed my hands against the bottoms of all the drawers and craned my neck to search their undersides. Nothing. My focus shifted to the armoire.
After an hour of rifling through Joseline’s things, I sat on the floor below the window, my head against the wall. The room was overwhelmingly cluttered now. I hadn’t found it. In a way, I didn’t even know what I was looking for, but I’d know it if I saw it. The sun was setting. People would be arriving soon. I’d have to open the door, and Joseline would slip away for good.
‘How does it feel?’ I asked, looking up at her.
She leaned against the doorframe, tutting as she surveyed my mess. ‘Not everybody connection is a good thing.’
‘Don’t tell me about everybody. Tell me about yours,’ I snapped. I had never asked anyone this before, choosing to keep my abnormality a secret.
Joseline cleared her throat, ‘I tell you, I didn’t want you to born here.’
‘I’m tired of you telling me –’
‘Shut your mouth. Open your damn ears and let me talk.’
Her words clamped my lips. I swallowed my retort, schooling my face into an indifferent mask to hide my impatience.
‘My grandmother father own the land first,’ she tapped her nail against the doorframe. Tap, tap, tap, she accented her words with that measured rhythm as if pinning them into the wood. ‘He build his shack and stay on the land so long not even Government could move him. Everybody that born here, their navel string bury over there.’
I didn’t have to guess where she meant. Her eyes looked out through the window above my head at the copse of campeche trees.
‘Time pass and as if nobody cannot leave the land. You see anybody in this family do anything?’
‘Cousin Christy doing well,’ I interrupted.
‘That side of the family doh bury theres here.’ Joseline dismissed me with a twitch of her lip. ‘Anyways, watch Gerald. I love my brother, but he lazy. My mother-mother was so. I hated that woman. She was a poor pity. Stupid. Weak.’
Joseline was deep in her storytelling. She looked like a little girl in her knee-length nightdress. For the first time, I noticed her bare feet, small and shuffling as she spoke.
‘I know Gerald would be too lazy to make child, and I say the stagnation ending with me, too. I leave here once, you know,’ she remarked, a tight smile tugging at her lips. ‘My mother-mother throw words for me. She say something will bring me back here. She was right. You… you was a floops—a mistake. I doh bury yours because if you had touch ground here, you will never leave.’
Joseline’s rigid confidence had fallen. Her frantic eyes searched my face. I would’ve thought that her discomfort would’ve comforted me. A younger me would’ve relished this moment. But I couldn’t. Joseline was hurting, and I felt compassion.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I whispered, afraid to break the soft silence.
‘Times come and I wanted to. I was afraid you’d still decide to bury it here… anywhere.’
‘But it would have been my choice.’
Joseline looked away. ‘Choose now if you want. Is good I not alive to know.’
A laugh burst from my lips. I did not stop until I was sobbing through gasps of breath. It was almost a relief to return to Joseline’s selfish ways after her uncharacteristic openness. I gathered myself off the floor. Outside, the blue dark was encroaching on the sunset. People will be here soon. I had to release Joseline.
My belly ached in disappointment as I stepped over the accumulation of Joseline’s lifetime. I shouldn’t have expected anything more. I was almost at the door when I slipped on a pile of scattered cassette tapes. My knee wobbled in middle-aged protest. I grabbed onto the upended mattress to try to slow my fall. I landed with a hollow thud, and the mattress, along with the pillows and bundled-up sheets, fell onto me. I lay stunned under the embarrassing heap.
‘If you was drinking the sea moss I had send for you, your knee would never give way,’ Joseline tutted.
Rolling my eyes, I shoved the pile off me. As I transferred my weight to my hands to heave myself up, I felt something pressing into my hand. It wasn’t solid, but it was firm enough to keep its shape. My hand rested on one of the pillows. I lifted it, but there was nothing underneath. Pressing into its centre, I felt something inside.
‘Stop,’ Joseline warned.
I stripped off the pillowcase and ripped through the pillow with the chipped Bible bookmark, digging through the brown, frothy feathers until my fingers curled around something. After dusting away the lint and feathers, I held a small package enclosed in a clear sandwich bag. I undid the knot and removed a small bundle of soft, knitted baby socks. Inside was yellowed tissue paper, still fragrant with scented talcum powder. My hands shook as I unwrapped the tissue. There it was, grey and white dusted. Disintegrating remnants of umbilical cord clinging to a cord clamp.
‘Look it now,’ Joseline was giving me a hard stare, but her turned-down lips revealed her sadness. ‘Choose if you want to touch ground or not.’
Maybe I didn’t need to bury it after all; I had lived this long without it. Joseline’s story made sense, and I understood why she did what she did. It still stung, and I couldn’t dispel my curiosity about what it would feel like. I could make that choice. I stared at the tiny cord clamp and the grey flesh that still clung to it. Could this even make a connection?
Headlights shone coming up the driveway. They would be here in minutes, and I had to let Joseline go.
‘Thank you, Joseline,’ I said, returning her gaze. Joseline didn’t reply, and I didn’t need her to. We left the room, passed the quiet kitchen with its lingering smell of green figs and up the corridor toward the front door. Joseline stood behind me, feet shuffling in whispers against the floorboards. My hand hesitated on the doorknob, but there was no use keeping her any longer. I opened the door. The house sighed as the hot air rushed to meet the night, loud with the whistling of frogs. Stepping aside, I gave Joseline space to walk out. She was over the threshold before I could release a trembling breath. It appeared that her feet were not touching the ground, as if scorning the soil she had swept for a lifetime. She never turned back, but my gaze remained on the taciturn tilt of her shoulders until she passed the campeche trees before disappearing into the dark.
A flash of headlights hit my eyes, causing me to squint, and the tears I hadn’t realised I was holding back glinted in the oncoming light. I stood in the doorway, clutching the crumbling remains of the only connection I had to this land… to Joseline, as the line of distant relatives parked in the front yard. There was a tugging feeling in my gut. Different to my usual numbness. A concentration of feelings that made me see Joseline. Fallible. Mother. Broken child. Perhaps I will wear black to her funeral.
