“Hey. It’s me.” I switch the receiver to my other hand. “It’s—hold on.” I crane my neck to glimpse the clock above the Departures screen. “It’s 5:40 a.m., Vancouver time.” I pause, listening to the stillness of my sister’s voicemail. “I’m about to board my flight. So, um, guess I’ll see you soon sis.” I sigh, no one there to meet my sound. “See you soon,” I say again, hanging up.
The little light clicks off as the flight attendant’s voice fills the cabin: “The captain has now turned off the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign . . .” I stare out the window, at the crisp white dents in sunlit clouds. I took out a line of credit for this. I hug my backpack against my chest. I don’t know how I’m going to pay it back. Daddy offered to help, but he’s sold the drapes, the couch, the living room table. Is jus’ me one, he said when I asked. The hallway mirror, the reclining chair–all gone. Wha mi need all dem someting fo? It’s just him one. My brother’s three years dead and my sister’s far away, back home. I looked around at the house thinning like the hair on Daddy’s head then told him no. Still a year left in college, I got a student line of credit. I’ll pay my own way.
The plane bounces twice, shaking me awake. My seatbelt digs into my hips as the cabin erupts in applause. We made it clapclap we’re here clapclap well done captain–thank you, thank you.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant says, “Air Jamaica is pleased to welcome you to Norman Manley International Airport.”
Outside my window, mountains rise in rich green swells against grey sky.
“The local time is 3:40 p.m.”
The grass, the mountains beyond—all so green like evergreens in spring. I turn to the woman next to me.
“Are we here?” I ask.
She laughs. “Where else would we be?”
I keep searching as people stand, overhead bins popping open. I’m here, back in Jamaica. I’m home. I gaze out the window at the passing trees, bright and rich like Grouse on a clear day. I can’t tell the difference anymore. It’s all the same green.
“You’re Jamaican?” the customs official says.
“Yes.”
“What part?” he says, rifling through my birth certificate and passport.
“What part am I Jamaican?” I glance at my arms and chest.
He looks up, adjusting a strap on his vest. “What part of Jamaica are you from?”
“Here,” I respond. “Kingston.”
It says so on my birth certificate, but he keeps watching me.
“Where do you live now?” he says.
“Canada.” Like it says in my passport.
“Why?” he says, still staring. He wants to hear me say it.
“Because that’s where my father took our family.”
“And your mother?”
I fidget with my backpack. “Dead.”
“How?”
“Sickle cell.” Like my brother.
“Where?”
“Here!” I exclaim. Exhaling hard, I smooth the front of my shirt to make myself calm. “Sorry. Here, in Kingston. Before we left eleven years ago.”
He keeps watching my lips move in proper English, my accent all dried up. He smirks. “Yuh sure is Jamaica yuh come from?” he says, stamping my passport then signalling to the next person in line.
Walking towards baggage claim, I stuff my passport into my backpack. Behind me, I hear the stamp-and-swoosh, stamp-and-swoosh of the customs official clearing the line. It doesn’t matter how I sound. I know where I’m from. Taking three long strides, I arrive at my carousel. I don’t see my sister. She said she’d meet me inside.
“Mek mi help yuh, missus.” A porter stands waiting in a black cap and maroon suit, his thin beard speckled grey.
I force a smile. “No thanks, I’m okay.”
“Yuh sure?” he says, smiling back.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Mek mi help yuh. Cheap! Cheapa dan all dem smaddy dem,” he says with a wink.
I glance at the other porters leaning against trolleys by the wall. He reaches out to take my backpack.
“I’m fine,” I say again, yanking it away.
“Miss–”
“No.”
He laughs me off like I’ve made an adorable mistake.
“Leave.” Glaring at him, I set my face into a hard frown. “Go!”
The other porters chuckle. Smile cracking, he straightens up. He’s taller than me, thinner, his arms too short for such a gangly body. I look at his hands, calloused and empty, then wonder if he’s ever held a passport. I wonder if in all his years of carrying American bags, British bags, if he’s ever packed up and carried his own. My suitcase arrives. He doesn’t budge as I lean down and take it off the line.
“Move, please,” I murmur, setting it on the ground then drawing up the handle.
He looks at the tag’s long ribbon, YVR stamped on its tail—signalling I’m a foreigner, I’m protected, I am the commodity that’s been lured here to spend and for him to serve. We both know what he has to say. “Yes, miss,” he says, swooshing out of my way.
Nearing the exit, I can’t hear the noise of Customs anymore. All I hear are suitcases clacking and the porters laughing as that one crosses the room, rubbing his beard and pretending he doesn’t notice them. I touch my face, cheeks bunched in a sly grin, realizing that even though I shouldn’t, I was born here so I know I shouldn’t, I’m laughing too.
Stepping into the muted daylight beyond the sliding doors, I cough then clutch my chest. The sudden change from air conditioning to humid wind makes me wheeze. Coughing still, I walk to the curb, the crumbling concrete giving way to pot-holed road. Next to me is a woman in a teal church dress yelling at a man tying suitcases to a car roof with pieces of twine. Across the street is a patty stand with a long long line, and next to it are men in mesh shirts leaning against a wire fence, blowing smoke through their noses as they puff and puff and children selling Pepsi and coconut water from beat-up coolers and porters pushing too-full trolleys behind white families, their skin garish against all the black and next to me a child with black arms and black hair and “Akúa!” and down the sidewalk black and behind me black and I look and I look and “Akúa!” someone’s calling my name as I pull my suitcase close, sneezing against the car exhaust and patties baking and peanuts roasting in the pit hitched to the bike parked behind Corollas packed with eight, ten passengers and tour buses boasting A/C destined for resorts behind policemen wielding batons move along move along as so many people, black, black, the sight of us filling me till bursting. My God, I’m home.
“Akúa!”
Blinking, I turn around, holding my backpack close.
Someone honks. “Chile, yuh hearin’ me?”
A few feet away, the exit doors slide open, rain clouds reflecting off the clear glass. I could go back. I could get on a plane and say nevermind, hiding my birth certificate in a place only I would know. A firm hand grabs my arm and spins me around.
“Akúa,” my sister says, “yuh comin’ in de car or what?”
My sister. Her hair falls in fat twists to shoulder length, silver hoops dangling from lobes scarred with keloided skin. She’s wearing a silver dress bunched up to one side in some style I’ve never seen. But her face, though, that same face: bushy brows angled high over my same cheeks, nose broad and royal above thick lips. She smiles, her lower lids bunching round her brown eyes like Bryson, like me. She’s lost weight.
“You’ve lost weight,” I tell her.
“No,” she says. “I’ve just grown up and stretched out.”
“Makes sense,” I respond. It’s been eleven years. Squaring up to her, I realize we’re the same height now. My neck tingles with memories of a childhood spent always looking up. “Is this the part where we do the tearful reunion?” I ask, trying to shake the tense quiet.
She chuckles, pulls me in for a hug. “Still trying to be the funny one.”
“Hi,” I murmur, smiling into her neck.
She rubs my back then holds me out to get a good look, studying me to see what’s different and what stayed the same. I lift up my arms, giving her clear view of my polo shirt and boot-cut jeans and braids pulled back in a messy bun. I still have a soft pooch that Daddy insists on calling my baby fat. I have two orbs of keloided skin, like Tamika, from when I was twelve and tried to pierce my ears myself. Giving me a proud pat, she pulls my bag to the car.
“What took you so long?” she says.
“Customs.” I shrug. “You know how it goes.”
“Customs?” she says, closing the car trunk. “But you’re Jamaican. Why dem giving yuh trouble?”
“That’s a good question,” I respond, sliding in to the passenger seat.
She starts the car as I lay my backpack across my lap. Turning the A/C to full blast, she cranes her neck to navigate out of the arrivals line-up.
“Tamika,” I murmur, unzipping my bag.
She doesn’t hear me, honking at a tour bus that cut her off. Riding their bumper, she yells something at them, something snarled and angry, patois weighing her words like layers of lichen. I have no idea what she’s saying.
“You have grey hairs,” I sputter, staring at the strands dipping in and out of her twists.
Still mad, she leans back into the car then responds to me in patois. I try to hear her, sensing the mood in the vibrations from her to me but not catching the meaning. I rub my ears, feeling like I’m listening through water. I don’t know what she’s saying. She notices my blank stare then exhales slow, giving herself a minute to let her voice adjust.
“Yes, thank you for reminding me of my age,” she says, “just what every woman wants to hear from her little sister.” She flashes her brights in the bus’s rear mirror then lets them go.
Am I Jamaican? I couldn’t understand her, my own sister born of the same blood. Fiddling with my backpack, I take out the box and hold it flush on my lap. “Tamika, look.”
“Look at what?” she says, indicating left but stuck at a red light.
I rub my hand over the dark wood. This box, I know. All this I’ve seen and heard cry and can still hear his voice, high-pitched and sweet. “Here he is, Tamika.” I put the box on her knee. “Here’s Bryson. I brought our brother home.”
She nearly killed us. In the few seconds between seeing the box and screeching to a stop, we nearly died. She looked down. She screamed. She jammed on the gas like she was losing all her blood through the soles of her feet, the full weight of her in just those five toes. I’d never seen her so pale. You ever seen that? All her colour–gone. You ever seen a black woman turn white as a ghost?
“Stop it,” Tamika hisses, her forehead on the steering wheel.
I keep laughing.
“Mi seh stop!” she yells.
The cars behind us keep honking, a few leaning out their windows to yell something dirty as they drive past. We nearly died. The insides of my thighs feel a little moist with something I shouldn’t say. I can’t help but laugh. Leaning over, I wind up Tamika’s window to muffle the sound of their slurs.
“You look like a ghost, you know that?” I settle back into my seat. “A black-white ghost.”
We’re facing a concrete barricade. Tamika managed to stop before ploughing right through.
“Why didn’t you come?” I ask her.
She kisses the lacquered grain of Bryson’s box in a gentle hello.
“His funeral,” I say a little louder. “Why didn’t you come?”
Saying nothing, she straightens up the car and pulls into early afternoon traffic. I called her after he died. She said she was sorry. I couldn’t stop crying. She said she was so, so sorry. I asked her when her flight would arrive, that I’d take Daddy’s car and pick her up. Static crackled through the phone, punctuating the long silence.
“Daddy would’ve paid for your ticket,” I tell her.
She’s as quiet now as she was then, pursing her lips as our mother sometimes would. Daddy made all his plans for our departure after Mummy’s death. He said we needed a new start, that it was what our mother wanted. Tamika asked him if he’d crawled into her grave and asked her himself.
“I would’ve paid for your ticket,” I murmur.
She laughs. “How?”
I was a freshman. I would’ve found a way–but I don’t bother explaining. Even if I’d bought it, she wouldn’t have come. When our father came home with the visas to leave, she barricaded herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out for three days. She was going to start sixth form right there, at home, like her and Mummy had planned. She’d gotten a scholarship. She’d already called and inquired about the fees for room and board.
“Why?” Daddy yelled, threatening to break down the door.
She wouldn’t answer him. All she did was slide her scholarship letter under the door, day after day, the seal on the top waxy and bright. Hampton School for Girls. Our mother went to Hampton so she was going too and that’s that. My father emptied the house around her, trying to smoke her out with silence. She sucked the smoke in and turned it back on us all. For eleven years, all I knew of my sister was her voice through the phone. But our brother had died. I thought he’d be enough to bridge this distance I didn’t understand.
“Why didn’t you come?” I ask again. Still silence, so I ask again, and again, till she turns on the radio and switches to the news. We are sisters, not friends. Our shared blood means there is nothing here to earn, to covet, to lose. We will remain sisters no matter what happens, no matter what we do or don’t do or how many years we can withstand being apart. I want to scream but she isn’t going to answer me, so I clamp my lips shut against the angry weight of all my questions. She keeps driving, sighing with the relief of knowing I’m due no answers. My sister did not come to my brother’s funeral. That’s that.
“Where are we going?” I ask her.
As we drive along, I lift my left knee, then my right, feeling my sweaty skin slide all over the pleather car seat. I’m angry and I’m hot. The A/C’s on full blast and it’s starting to rain but I’m still so hot. My pits are soaked and my legs feel slimy and now we’re stuck in traffic. People pass us on the sidewalk as we wait behind cars backed up at a slow light.
They’re hot too, the pedestrians, holding plastic bags and backpacks as shields against the rain. And the drivers in front and beside us wipe condensation from the insides of their windshields, then use the same rag, the same yellow rag to cool their shiny brows. Our skin and the sky all weeping, puddles forming in the dips above collarbones and potholes in the road and I remember now, I remember how much I hate this city. Kingston can feel so deadening in the afternoon, heat sitting stagnant as though taunting a hurricane to blow it free. I crack a window to catch some breeze, smelling rotting trash and fruit ripening in stalls I can’t see. I hate this city, but the scent of sweet sop ripening in downtown heat still makes my stomach moan.
It’s always so hot so we build our banks and schools higher, higher, many-storey buildings stretching into the sky to catch wah breeze. And we zoom too fast down thoroughfares and pick-up-and-run across deadlocked streets and gogogo cars honking and people yelling we try to stir the air with the sheer force of our skin.
Beep!Beep! a horn goes in quick succession, implying Move nuh man!
Beepbeepbeep! another goes, saying ‘xcuse missus, move up a likkle an’ mek mi pass?
Beeeeeeeep! like Woi! Yuh try fi kill me? Tek time round dat cawna, sah. Mi dehya.
Beep beep with every honk of the beeeep Tamika too beepbeep announcing, I’m here.
I’m here, so don’t hit me. I’m here, so let me through. I’m here, so move up and make space. We continue down the street with the press and pause of traffic. We wait at stoplights and crosswalks, windshield wipers squealing in the rain. We hop over sodden grass and clogged drains, school khakis creeping muddy from the hemlines up. We run and we yell and we beep beep, announcing ourselves to the hills and gullies and thickening heat. We are here.
“How much farther?” I ask.
Tamika forces a chuckle. “Impatient like wha.”
We continue up, up, passing half-built houses with rebars turned black with rust. I turn to face her, my questions turned splinters burrowing deep into my insides. Leaning over, I kiss her on the cheek. She smiles then tugs on my braids, like she would when we were young. Silence fills the car like smoke, both of us choosing to let the moment pass.
We go then stop then go behind streetlights, the houses spreading farther and farther apart the more we drive. Tamika turns down a side street, pulls off the road then parks on a green bank. I turn to her. She smiles then turns the car off.
“Wait, so, we’re here?” I ask her.
She chuckles. “Excellent deduction, your highness.” Undoing her seatbelt, she slides the lockjaw into the grooves of the steering wheel then hops out of the car.
I look across the street at a series of houses, green roof then red roof then red roof, the first two with flowers and the third without. “Where are we?” I yell, climbing out of the car. “Where is this?”
“Lawd ‘ave mercy,” Tamika says, “do you really not remember?” She grabs her umbrella then crosses the street. “This is our old neighbourhood. I thought you’d want to see our house.”
I watch her walk ahead, umbrella spread out against the hot rain. I used to fantasize about coming back, about busting down the door then laying on the living room rug until the new owners left and my own family came home and we would run around and make all the rooms smell like us again. But now, standing on the side of the road, all I see are plain houses with clogged gutters and a stray cat strolling in between. I can’t tell the houses apart. Putting Bryson in my backpack then zipping it up quick, I follow Tamika up the road till she stops. She turns into the driveway of a one-storey house with faded red shingles above cream-coloured walls, front gate crumpled to one side in a mangled mess. Tamika climbs the stairs as I stand by the metal swing set, watching the wooden seat rock back and forth, back and forth.
“Hello?” I yell.
Tamika disappears around the back of the house.
“Hello?” I call again.
I want to see who lives here, who now calls this place home. Daddy sold the house before we left. It was the only way he could afford to get us all on the plane. I press my forehead against a window to peer inside, but all I can see are red security grills and a white curtain pulled shut. From somewhere inside, I think I hear a soft click, like the sound of a TV being turned off.
“Akúa!” Tamika calls.
I follow her voice to the backyard.
“I don’t think they’re home,” she says.
“You know who lives here?”
She nods. “They let me walk through once, before they pulled up the flowers and gutted the front rooms.”
I stare at the windows, wondering if my bedroom is still a bedroom and what colour the walls are now.
“That’s where you fell when you were six,” Tamika says. She points to a large PVC pipe jutting from the top of the wall and curving down into a concrete slab on the ground.
“You used the pipe as a slide,” Tamika says, “which was fine. Saved Mummy and Daddy the trouble of having to expand the swingset. Then one day you fell. I don’t remember how, but you fell from the top and landed on your face and knocked out your two front teeth. No one would have cared, except they were your adult teeth. They had just finished coming in.” She pokes at my gums. I swat her away. “Mummy put your teeth in milk while I washed out your mouth and Daddy called around for a dentist. It was a Sunday. Do you know how hard it was to find a dentist on a Sunday?”
I stare at the spot where pipe meets ground, concrete giving way to weeds. I remember how upset Daddy was about my teeth, but I don’t remember the feeling of falling. All I remember is the pain.
“We should go,” Tamika says. “They’re not home. We need to leave before the neighbours think we’re here to break in.”
I gaze up at the house. This is a place that’s supposed to mean something, this squat little house with cracked tile stairs.
“Are they fun?” I ask Tamika.
“Hmm?”
“The people who live here. Are they fun?”
She chuckles. “They’re a family. This is their house. What does fun have to do with it?”
I gaze up at the roof. “I hope they’re fun.” This is a place that’s supposed to be deeper than feeling, stronger than blood. I hope the new family painted the walls orange, or red, and turned the bathroom into a closet and my bedroom into a disco. I hope they have a daughter, or a full-grown son. I hope they do backflips off that pipe that would put my sliding to shame.
“Come on,” Tamika says, walking back to the front of the house.
“I’ll meet you by the car,” I respond.
She nods then continues on. Once she’s round the corner, I flip the latch on Bryon’s box, opening it just wide enough to slip my hand inside. Daddy kept his room in Canada the same. The posters, the plastic figurines–they’re all still there. Running my tongue along my teeth, I sprinkle a few pinches of my brother on the cracked-up concrete. The dresser’s still stuffed full of his clothes, the handles covered in dust. It’s the only room our father hasn’t stripped to the bones. Spitting into my palm, I rub my hands together till his dust makes a soft paste.
“What’re you doing?” Tamika says. I hadn’t heard her come back.
Glancing over my shoulder, I hold up my hands.
“So you just,” she pauses, “just brought him with you?”
Turning back to face the house, I give her a small shrug. “I put him in my bag. I put my bag on the plane. That’s that.”
She comes a little closer. I open the box like she might join. She stops then turns around, standing guard around my privacy to do this thing she doesn’t understand. So I wipe him onto the pipe, against the wall, into the grass and dirt and remnants of my old blood. I hope the new family laughs. I hope the new family fights, screaming till hoarse. I hope they mistake these streaks for filth, hosing it off and washing him deep. And when they come laughing, ready to play, I hope my brother grows into thick weeds that will break their fall, bones intact.
Previously published in issue 57.2 of PRISM International. This is an excerpt from the novel, AKÚA THE SEA.
Image Credits: Bodo Tasche
