Here Comes the Sun Page 6

  “I have to meet someone—” Margot says, pushing her leg inside her sheer stocking. It rips and she cusses under her breath.

  “Another man?” Horace asks. “Vat is he paying you? I can give more.”

  “No. It’s not a man.”

  “Then who is more important than me?”

  “My mother,” she lies. “I have to meet her somewhere.” She pulls up her skirt and hastily buttons her white shirt over her bra. Horace props himself up on an elbow and watches her. When she’s dressed, she walks over to the bed and kisses him on the forehead. Horace puts his hand at the back of her head and brings her closer. Without warning, he kisses her on the mouth. Margot pulls away a little. “Yuh acting like yuh won’t see me again, sweetness,” she says, holding his hand.

  “Okay,” he says finally. “It’s on ze table.” He gestures toward the fat leather wallet sitting on the computer desk. “Take it all.”

  Margot hesitates. She counts three hundred. The Germans tend to exchange their money for U.S. dollars. It’s the only currency accepted on the North Coast besides Jamaican dollars. Margot thanks him and hurries along, closing the door softly behind her.

  The sight of Margot sleeping with her thumb in her mouth raises something intense inside Verdene. Margot stirs, her eyes barely fluttering awake, though it’s noon. Her limbs are spread-eagled on the bed, sugar-brown skin on yellow sheets. St. Theresa’s church bell rings in on the hill, and Verdene, instead of making a sign of the cross like she learned to do as girl when she went to mass, looks down on the woman she loves and studies her. An open face that wears its emotions. Wounded and sensitive.

  She inhales deeply, the love swelling inside her lungs. Afraid she might combust, she exhales. She lowers the tray of breakfast food she cooked for Margot—fried dumplings, ackee, and saltfish, with a side of sliced pear—and glances at the wardrobe that holds two full-length mirrors. Verdene catches a reflection of herself holding the tray. At forty there are still glimpses of youth in the handsome face with sculpted features and eyes that blaze a startling black. She has gone gray early, a patch of silver surrounded by thick black curls. But since being with Margot she has regained a youthfulness that enables her to ease into laughter, fits of playfulness, and a sexuality that oozes from her without effort, without any fuss.

  She adjusts the tray on the small night table and reaches for the Holy Bible (just for a little Sunday devotion like Ella taught her), which is kept there like a secret inside the drawer. But the sight of her mother’s picture halts her movement. All the loveliness and life and breath seem to stop at the sight of Ella. Oh, dear Mama. Usually the picture is turned to face the wall when Margot sleeps over. Margot doesn’t like the idea of Verdene’s deceased mother staring at them in bed. Quite frankly, Verdene doesn’t mind. Her whole life she has lived in secrecy. Why be ashamed at this point in her own house—the house her mother left her? Nevertheless, she complies.

  Margot’s eyelashes flutter, her eyes opening to glance up at the wide expanse of the room and the sheet falling below her waist. Verdene blushes, as ashamed as a little girl who has just walked in on her mother having sex.

  “It’s okay,” Margot tells her, picking up the sheet to cover her breasts, suddenly self-conscious.

  “Brought you something,” Verdene says in the clipped British accent she adopted during her time living in London. It dances gaily with her Jamaican accent, so her intonations come out sounding proper—the kind of proper that makes people in River Bank just as curious as they are fearful of her. As a foreigner, or rather, a returning resident, she is untouchable.

  Margot grins as Verdene places the tray on the bed. “You don’t have to spoil me this way all the time, cooking breakfast and carrying it to the room.”

  “Are you saying you don’t like it?” Verdene asks.

  “I didn’t say that.” Margot laughs. Verdene laughs too, allowing her body to ripple with the effects of that pleasant itch in her belly. She pretends to turn away in defeat, but Margot leaps from the bed and pulls her back down, for a moment forgetting her nakedness. Verdene allows herself to fall, entangled between Margot’s legs. They remain like this, trembling in a fit of giggles. When the giggles subside a minute later, their breaths rise in the pleasant silence of the room, contained within its four walls. Verdene moves away slightly, aware of how close they are—Margot with no clothes on and Verdene in a T-shirt and the wraparound skirt she always wears around the house that reveals the golden flesh of her thighs when it parts.

  “I have to go back to the kitchen,” Verdene says, untangling herself. “You must be hungry. Eat.”

  She pulls herself away and Margot lets her. Margot reaches for the cover again as if to hide. Verdene knows that she slept in the nude hoping Verdene would come into the room during the night and slip under the covers. But that didn’t happen.

  “Can’t we just—”

  “Not until you’re ready,” Verdene quips, sensing where the conversation is headed.

  “Ready? I’ve been ready,” Margot says.

  Verdene looks down at her hand on the doorknob. She’s squeezing it and letting it go. Her knuckles are shiny like marbles under her skin. “I don’t want what happened last time to happen again,” Verdene finally says in a whisper that comes off like a sigh. “I just can’t—”

  “I already apologized. What else yuh want me to do?” Margot grabs a pillow from the foot of the bed and puts it between her legs. It’s another habit of hers, as persistent as the urge to bite her nails.

  “Sweetheart,” Verdene says, more softly. “I can’t push you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Margot moves the pillow and sheet away from her body and gets up from the bed. She moves closer and pushes Verdene against the door. It closes behind her. Up close her eyes are a pair of glistening onyx like the stone Margot gave her. Margot takes Verdene’s hands into hers. “I’m ready.”

  Verdene fights the urge to follow her to the bed, for deep down she knows, for her, sex is a drug. She’s tempted to let Margot do to her whatever she wants. But what happens afterward? It’s the after that Verdene fears more than anything else. What if Margot’s renewed willingness to be seduced is nothing but curiosity?

  She remembers how Margot leapt off the bed in the middle of their lovemaking the first time, and wept. When they began seeing each other, Margot refused to do anything more than kiss and cuddle. She wanted to be courted first. So Verdene acquiesced, grateful for Margot’s insistence that they should know and explore each other in other ways. But after six months of waiting, Verdene had enough. She made her move and Margot gave in, though reluctantly. She wept as if lamenting every wrong done to her in her life. She wept as though their intimacy were happening against her will. She stayed, but she wept. Verdene, stunned, asked if Margot was all right. Margot responded by shaking her head, her body trembling and shuddering. “I’ve never felt this way with anyone,” Margot said.

  “It’s okay, Margot. It’s okay.”

  “It’s like that dream where I’m drowning.”

  “You’re not drowning, baby.”

  “I have no control whatsoever.”

  “Just let go.”

  But Margot wasn’t ready to see herself this way, wasn’t ready to give herself this label. She told Verdene that when she saw Verdene at the market after her years away, Margot began to understand something about herself. Margot described it in detail: How she gasped, because Verdene snatched her breath away. How she was transfixed by Verdene’s smooth, peanut-butter skin against the sea-green dress. How she was taken by the dark unruly mass of hair with the patch of white in front. How the vision of her perfect silhouette convinced Margot she was in need of something else at the market—more cyan pepper, pimento seeds, more soursop, lime, and cauliflower, more ginger, cocoa, and yam. But the more Margot added to her already full basket, following Verdene down an aisle of vendors, the more she realized what she was really in need of.

  Verdene herself rememb
ered only the market vendors. How they watched her, turning to give her their full unfriendly stares. One by one they scrunched their noses as though the smells from the nearby fish market had finally gotten to them after thirty years of selling. Verdene, pretending to be untroubled by this, filled her basket with fruits, handed crisp bills to hesitant hands, and left. But once outside the market, she suddenly turned her head sharply to the right, meeting Margot’s stare.

  Months later Verdene was pulling a weeping Margot into her arms to comfort her. But Margot jumped up, got dressed, and fled as if Ella had stepped from the photo and chased her from the house. She ran all the way home in the pitch-blackness of the night.

  Verdene leans in to kiss Margot on the base of her neck, then on her mouth.

  “I’m ready,” Margot repeats, her eyes caressing Verdene’s face. They are a deeper brown than her skin, with the sun in their centers.

  “No, Margot. Don’t confuse desire for love. Maybe for you this is a—”

  “I’m not confusing anything. I know what I want.”

  “Do you?”

  Margot drops her gaze.

  “Just as I thought,” Verdene says softly, swallowing the edge in her voice. She gently pushes Margot off and cuffs her wrists with her hands. “I have something on the stove. I don’t want it to burn. My mother left me that pot.”

  Verdene looks out the window of her kitchen and watches people go by dressed in their Sunday best—men wearing their good button-up shirts and shiny black pants ironed too many times. Women in their church hats and bright pastel colors, Bibles clutched in their hands like purses, each pausing to make a sign of the cross as they pass by the house. Verdene rolls her fists, her nails digging deeply inside her palms until the violent tremor rumbling inside her subsides. Sunday is the only day of the week that these people take the liberty to parade in front of her property, dressed in their holier-than-thou costumes. Verdene pauses in the stillness of the kitchen, turning on the faucet full blast to take her mind off them. But then she sees Miss Gracie, the old woman who lives next door. Her bearded chin is thrust forward, jutting from beneath the broad white hat that covers the rest of her face; her wilted body that once towered over men and women in River Bank is draped in an off-white dress with lace trimmings. A very handsome young man, whose face Verdene doesn’t recognize, is walking next to her, supporting her weight as though the woman cannot walk herself. She too stops to make the sign of the cross as she passes by Verdene’s house, instructing the reluctant young man to do the same. Had she been holding something other than her Bible, she would’ve flung it. Like that tree limb she wrapped in a bloodied cloth and threw in Verdene’s yard last week.

  “The blood of Jesus is upon you!” she had yelled with crazed eyes. It was as though she dared Verdene to say something. But Verdene remained on her veranda, stunned silent.

  Before the tree limb it was a beheaded fowl that she left on Verdene’s front steps. Verdene didn’t see the woman do it, but she knew. Four Sundays ago Verdene found the body of a dead dog on her property. Since Verdene moved back from London there had been a total of four dead mongrel dogs found in her yard, their brown decaying bodies infested by flies. The incidents happened in spurts as though the perpetrator were operating on some kind of algorithm. The first time coincided with the first night Margot stayed over. A Saturday night. Verdene had woken up that Sunday morning to the slaughtered animal’s blood trailing her walkway to the veranda. The blood was smeared across the doorposts and columns. And on the veranda grill and the gate. The blood of Jesus be upon you! was scrawled on the wall on both sides of the house.

  Those were the same words the old woman had uttered just days before to Verdene. Verdene did not have it in her then to do anything about the incident. What could she have done? Her first instinct was to call the police. But they would hear her accent and want her to pay them something extra to track down the perpetrator. Her next instinct was to march next door, through the lush banana leaves that separated her house from the old woman’s, but Miss Gracie might have gone off, drawing more unnecessary attention to Verdene. The old woman is senile, but it would still be her words against Verdene’s. So Verdene cleaned up the mess herself. She fetched the shovel and silver bucket. She did so as quietly as possible, since she didn’t want to wake Margot. The night before they had sipped tea and lounged in the living room—Margot on the sofa and Verdene on the floor mat—a good distance between them. It occurred to Verdene then, as she stood on the veranda with the pail and shovel, that while they talked that night, someone was violating her property. Someone who could have seen them.

  That bloody morning she made her way toward the garden, though a steady stream of churchgoers were passing by. She waved at them, bowing her head reverently just like her mother had taught her to do. “Always be nice and cordial . . .” Ella used to quip, aware of the neighbors’ eagle-eyes, especially the women’s, when she returned with all her foreign dresses. And so, like her mother, Verdene waved, her arm a windshield wiper that smeared their frowning faces. She put on her best smile stretched across her face like a taut elastic band, barely touching her eyes. The churchgoers gathered speed, and once they passed, Verdene picked up the dead animal from the flower bed with the shovel. Margot appeared in the window, her face like a full moon, with the curtains hiding the rest of her body. Verdene lowered the shovel. She saw the terror in Margot’s eyes and forced herself to keep digging a hole by the soursop tree. The same place she would put all the other carcasses.

  “Please,” Verdene had said, pushing Margot away gently when she came up behind Verdene inside the house that morning, “give me a moment.” She leaned against the kitchen sink, her back toward Margot. Following the huge silence between them, Verdene told Margot, “It will always be like this. This life. With me.” Verdene’s back was still turned. As she awaited Margot’s response, she closed her eyes to keep back the burning tears that had welled up. She sucked on her lips, almost tasting the kiss they had shared the night before. Their first. But Margot didn’t respond. Not immediately. And though she held Verdene from behind, her body warming Verdene’s, her face resting in the crook of Verdene’s neck, Verdene sensed her reserve, felt her leave the room, the footsteps receding, a door closing softly.

  It’s ironic how she had wanted Margot out the picture when she first met her. During her second year at university, Verdene had come home to find a girl sitting on the sofa in her mother’s living room. The girl was probably ten years old at the time, with long, skinny legs that were ashy with too many scratches. They were hanging off the couch, swaying back and forth. The girl’s hair was uncombed and the pale dress she wore was soiled with dirt. Verdene wondered if her mother had rescued a stray. As a schoolteacher, Ella was inclined to take in neighborhood children and tutor them. When Verdene looked closer at the small brown face flanked by a mass of unruly hair like a sunflower, she realized the little girl was none other than Delores’s daughter. Verdene didn’t know the little girl’s name then, but she had seen Delores with her a few times, the both of them walking to town with goods to sell. They lived in a small boarded-up house not too far from Verdene and her mother. Margot’s Uncle Winston—an old classmate of Verdene’s—was a street boy who gambled, smoked weed, and chased after young girls. He was the one who knocked-up Rose, Miss Gracie’s daughter. Ella, out of the kindness of her heart, volunteered to look after Margot when her mother and grandmother weren’t around.

  Verdene was jealous of the girl at first. It had always been Verdene and Ella against the world, when Ella wasn’t too busy working to be in her husband’s good graces. But when he died, Ella grieved as though he were the best man to ever walk the earth. Sometimes the grieving turned to anger directed at Verdene for not respecting the man who helped to bring her into this world. Ella, who was probably lonely after the death of her husband and Verdene’s departure to the university, did not mind Margot keeping her company. Verdene found Margot a little precocious. She followed Verdene
around the house when Verdene came home on weekends from school (out of obligation) and asked about everything under the sun. And Verdene, who was then busy juggling exams, the pressures of being away at university and barely passing chemistry (her major), paid the girl no mind. Though Margot was bright, Verdene felt in her heart that she was Delores’s problem. Why should Ella be in charge of this woman’s child? Ella gave the girl extra lessons, since at ten years old she was only reading at a second-grade level.

  “Mama, it’s not your duty to fix someone else’s child,” Verdene said to her mother. “Let Delores tek care ah her own child.”

  But Ella wouldn’t listen. She was taken with the child, calling her Little Margot. Ella gave Little Margot Verdene’s old clothes to wear. They were nice dresses that Ella had to take in, stitching up the sides, adjusting the hems, adding extra buttonholes and buttons, whatever she could do to make the dresses fit Little Margot’s tiny frame.

  Then one day, Verdene saw Margot crouched in a corner, crying in front of Mr. Levy’s shop. Verdene stopped to help her, imagining the girl had lost her money or fallen and bruised some part of her. “What’s the mattah?” she asked. Little Margot sniffled and told her that some children in her school were calling her Maggot instead of Margot.

  “Dey say ah dirty an’ smell bad.” The little girl was shaking as she told Verdene this, her bony shoulders shuddering, her chest heaving. Verdene didn’t know what to do. She rested her hand on the girl’s shoulder, and Little Margot looked up into Verdene’s face, her eyes large and watery, the pupils expanding into a well into which Verdene fell. Her fall was deep, endless; one that stirred her womb with a possessiveness, a feral instinct to hunt Little Margot’s bullies down.

  Every time Verdene had to leave for university, Margot cried. Ella would have to appease the girl with promises. “She’ll be back to see us next week, dear.” Then, peering at Verdene, Ella’s eyes would hold in them those very questions. “Right, darling? You’ll be back to see yuh dear mother next week, right?”