Life’s my oyster, and I’ma find a pearl today, for true.
I stand at the top of a cliff overlooking the north shore of my island home, St. Marcos. The sunrise is already toasting my face. The stiff breeze cools my skin and ruffles my hair, and the loamy scents of the rainforest tickle my nose. Yellow butterflies circle me, like a fluttering halo. I’m hiking to Horseshoe Bay with my best friend, Katie Kovacs. As she picks her way down the steep, rocky trail ahead of me, I have a bird’s-eye view of her floppy hat and long scarlet hair. Horseshoe Bay is one of her favorite places in the world, and this is a prime “just us girls” opportunity to discuss my dream that she’ll record my next album with me and that we’ll go out on tour together.
I float a lyric out on the wind, one from “Done Gone,” a song Katie helped write. “I was there, but now I’m not.”
Katie turns back to me and sings the next line in her high, twangy voice. “Done gone, done gone.”
“I’m the one who won’t be caught.” My hands get into the action, my long nails carving a hole in the sky as I automatically perform the number.
“Done gone, done gone.”
We harmonize on the chorus. “I’m done gone, done gone. Done gone, done gone. Baby I’m good and done gone, done gone.” The air between us vibrates as our voices weave together. They create something bigger and better than either alone, and something I’ve never found with another singer. My heart soars.
I continue with the next line, throwing some hip into it: “Now is here and here is now.” I wait for her “done gone, done gone,” but it doesn’t come. I stop. “What’s up?”
She doesn’t answer right away. In her silence, I pout for a quick selfie, mostly of my lips, that I text to my boyfriend, Collin, in New Mexico before I lose signal: Kiss these. I haven’t seen him since our trip to Canada with my parents a month ago, one we took after my breast scan came back clear in the wake of my cancer treatments last summer. I’m missing him something fierce. I slide the phone down my top and look up in time to see a surveyor flag with a small sign for the Horseshoe Bay Resort and Casino project beside it.
When Katie finally speaks, the wind whips her words back to me as if she’s in my ear. “It’s these developers. I wish they were done gone. They want to ruin the best place in the world. What gives them the right?” She stops, faces me, and plants her fists on her hips.
I’d rather wear Katie’s June Cleaver white eyelet top than talk about this no-win subject. Almost. I smooth my hot-pink Lycra bathing suit cover-up.
I shrug and throw a little island patois at her, hoping it will convey the authority of experience to Katie now. “It always this way. People come, try and take advantage of us locals and our island, beat they heads against the wall a few years. They ain’t nothing. They give up and move back to the States.” I switch back to Yank speak. “Present company excluded, of course.”
Katie is a Texas transplant. Growing up here, I was taught to speak the Queen’s proper English, but I learned to talk like an island girl in the thick native accent, too. It’s natural for me to blend like a chameleon with my audience, and I talk Continental with Katie most times, which we call “Yanking,” and slip back into my accent with locals or when I’m serving up what non-islanders expect. In other words, the public Ava, the singer and performer, speaks with the strongest accent I can muster.
Katie snorts and resumes her descent. “But the developers are locals. Bryant and Chuckie are doing this to their own island, their own people?”
She says it like she’s asking me to explain for Bryant and Chuckie Sylvain. I don’t know them to speak of—Bryant was about five years ahead of me in grade school and Chuckie is his older sister—so I can’t guess their motives. But I don’t need to speak, because Katie isn’t finished by a long shot.
“I want people to get upset about this. It’s like they don’t even care.” Her voice rises in volume and pitch, and it’s clear she means the people who don’t care are locals, like me. She’s wrong about that. I care. It’s just not the same being a continental transplant as it is being a bahn-yah local, born and raised on the island. You can’t replicate decades of personal history with a good heart and the deed to a house.
She trips over an exposed root and goes down.
It’s not a bad fall, but I rush to her. “You okay?” I scan her for injuries and don’t see any blood.
“I’m fine, except that they’re going to build a resort and casino in Horseshoe Bay, less than five miles from our house at Estate Annalise. It’s going to ruin everything I love about living out here. I just want to punch somebody.” She brushes soil off her knees and gets to her feet. “You live out here, too.”
By “here” she means the West End rainforest above the north shore, where her home is. But I don’t really live out here, not like she does. For her, the house was a saving grace, a place that brought her back to life after a very bad time. It’s a temporary solution for me. I did spend a few months house-sitting at Annalise a couple of years back, and now my daughter Ginger and I are staying in the bottom floor apartment there, with Katie and her husband, Nick, and their kids on the upper floors. I’ve just crash-landed back on St. Marcos after dumping my record label and quitting a national tour. Nick’s parents were living in the apartment, but they’re on a sailing trip around the world. Timing is everything. The Kovacs have given me a haven there to figure out my next move. But a couch crasher is not a homeowner, and the bond Katie shares with her house and the jumbie spirit that inhabits it compounds the situation. Because she does have a jumbie, a spirit, a ghost, one I’ve seen with my own eyes, one that even talks to her young son, Taylor.
I don’t want to fight. I want to sing and talk about collaborating. We were great once, before Katie flaked on me for marriage and kids and I went solo. I want to be great together again.
Katie’s having none of it.
She speeds up, muttering. She doesn’t show her Irish temper often, but her steps are fast and heavy. I hurry after her, careful not to plant myself into the dirt like my friend. For someone who loves this part of the island and calls it her spiritual center, Katie sure isn’t taking the time to revel in its beauty this morning. She’s a black-and-white negative of her usual self. An especially strong gust rips her hat off, and I snatch it as it cartwheels through the air. Katie marches on, not waiting for me to return it to her or saying thank you.
I sigh, defeated out of my silence. “I do care. I am unhappy about this. I just don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
I hear her growl carried on the February trade winds, even though she’s ten yards ahead and doesn’t turn toward me. “You are bahn yah.” She pronounces it in the Local style and uses it correctly as a noun instead of as a verb phrase. “You can do a lot more than I can.”
I take advantage of a flat stretch of trail, trotting to catch up with her. My heart rate is high, which isn’t supposed to happen until the hike up. I’m tired all the time lately. I’ve let myself go some since leaving the tour. Late nights spent drinking aren’t helping, especially with my friend and stylist, Chen, on-island, with his pregnant wife, Drea, as our designated driver. They’re probably sleeping in. Chen is going to wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, damn him, despite doing rum shooters till the wee hours. I exaggerate my breathing, panting like an old dog on a sunny day, hoping Katie’ll take the hint. She doesn’t break stride or slow down one iota.
I put a hand on her shoulder—just my fingers, really—as gentle as the wings of the butterflies that circled my head earlier. “It won’t do any good. These things come, these things go. If I had a dime for every developer who tried to build an eyesore on our beaches and failed, I’d be a rich woman.”
“You are a rich woman.”
She’s right. As of late, I have a lot of money from music sales, live performances, and investments. But I think she’s misunderstanding me on purpose. “I’m just saying that developers don’t stand a chance. Things here, well, nothing ever moves forward.”
“I’d hardly call destruction of a natural wonder moving forward.”
Katie escapes my fingers. She’s not going to be talked down from this, and I don’t blame her, really. The Horseshoe Bay project has been fast-tracked for some reason. According to our online newspaper, the St. Marcos Source—not the pinnacle of journalism, but all we’ve got—the results of the soil testing only just submitted to the Department of Planning and Natural Resources are expected back any moment. That kind of speed will be a first for the DPNR. Applications usually languish in permitting and approvals until they wither and die. Someone must owe somebody a favor, or more likely, be getting a kickback for a rush job. The result will be the same. Once all the hands are greased, the fists will close.
“I love this place, too.”
I must not have said it with enough conviction. Katie turns to me. She keeps walking, backward down the trail. She’s going to fall again. I make a move to catch up with her, but her eyes arrest me.
“You are a local and a celebrity on this island. But not just on St. Marcos. You’re famous, Ava, everywhere. Use your star power. Call attention to this environmental crime. I’m not a local and, sadly, never will be. I can’t do it. All the environmentalists down here from the States protesting can’t do it. But you can. I’ve seen you throw . . . assets . . . in the face of men for years, before you ever hit it big, and it’s always worked. Get someone’s attention. Make this go away.”
Her words sting. I like the truth less at some times than at others. When I don’t answer immediately, Katie makes a disgusted sound and hurtles recklessly down the trail again. A feral cat with lion hair steps into the rutted two-track jeep trail between us. It locks eyes with me like it’s my spirit animal trying to pass a message or something. Only I don’t think spirit animals are part of my heritage: father from New Brunswick, Canada, and mother from the Bahamas. More like a little Lion of Judah hereabouts, symbol of Jah, the Rastafari sovereign Haile Selassie, and of strength, pride, and self-rule. We stay frozen in place for several long beats, then it flicks its tail and bounds into the tan tan bush.
“But I promised Collin—”
Katie throws her hands in the air. “What does my brother have to do with any of this?”
“I love your brother, and I promised him I’d tone myself down a little.” So to speak.
I never told her about my behavior when I was out on tour with Spikehead, or my confession to Collin. It’s too humiliating. My musical idol, Morris Francis, made a pass at me, and in a moment of heady pheromones and new-rock-star adrenaline, I all but did him in a hallway behind a concert stage. If Collin hadn’t showed up, I would have. I’m a flirt, and uncharitable folks call me oversexed, but I love Collin. I won’t ever put myself in a position like that again, where I can hurt him and might lose him. We’ve got a good thing. I promised myself this, and I promised him.
We pass the remains of a sugar mill. Vines snake their way between its rocks, and the walls are crumbling onto the forest floor. Sometimes we stop here. It’s a peaceful spot. Staring up to the sky from inside the mill reminds me that a hundred and fifty years ago I might have worked as a slave at a place like this, and I feel grateful to be alive now and not then. But Katie and I don’t stop here today.
The silence between us thickens. My mind returns to the mill and the people who worked it, whether they wanted to or not. Slavery. There are all kinds. I might not have been owned by a plantation, but haven’t I been enslaved? To the white priest who defiled my young body. To the boyfriend who used me up while he took his freedoms. To Venus, where people controlled me and took my money. Of course, I see the difference. I have personal freedoms, and that is everything. They’re what made it possible to free myself, every time.
The realization has a strange effect on me, and I revel in it for a moment: I freed myself. And I don’t ever want to be owned again. I’m free. The thought makes me giddy. Even with Katie’s sour mood, I’m young, alive, and free. I lift my arms and twirl once, then break into a few dance steps.
The wind carries the sound of heavy breathing up the trail, warning that someone is coming. I trade dancing for normal walking. A man appears. He looks wild—sweaty, disheveled, dirty—but most people do after a round trip on foot to Horseshoe Bay. He’s carrying a heavy-duty fishing rod and a tackle box with a decal of the Big Apple. His eyes are on the ground, and when he glances up, he’s almost upon us. He jumps back. He’s wearing beat-up horn-rimmed glasses instead of sunglasses, which is odd, and if I’m not mistaken, his eyes are green, which is unusual for someone as black as he is.
But I recognize him. I first saw him last spring when he stripped and bathed in the harbor outside of the Boardwalk Bar & Grill in broad daylight. He’s been a fixture in the town of Taino in the last year, the latest in a long history of the St. Marcos homeless. Some burned-out on drugs and alcohol past the point of no return, others mentally ill. People call him Dexter. I don’t know if that’s his real name or if it’s short for Poindexter, because of his glasses. I also don’t know where he got the fancy fishing equipment or how he got all the way out here from town. It’s a good ten miles, much of it hilly and densely forested.
“Good morning, good morning,” I say, holding up a we come in peace hand.
“H-h-hello.” His eyes dart between Katie and me.
His stench reaches me, and I put a hand over my mouth and nose and pretend to cough.
“Beautiful day.” Katie flashes him a Julia Roberts smile and passes by.
I follow my friend, shivering a little when I near Dexter. It reminds me of how I felt as a child when my ultra-Catholic mommy made me step over her voodoo priestess grandmother’s grave three times, to protect me from becoming inhabited by her spirit. I don’t think it worked—I grew up more like Erzulie than the Virgin Mary. I like to think of religion as an all-you-can-eat buffet with a wide variety of entrees to choose from. Voodoo, Rastafarianism, my beloved Roman deities, and, very occasionally, Catholicism.
We no longer hear him or smell him, thanks to the wind, once we’re on his downhill side. I glance back, and he’s disappeared, I assume up the trail. Again, I shiver.
We make a last turn, and steep and rocky gives way to sloped and green. Thick bush and forest is replaced by waist-high guinea grass on either side of the rutted two-track jeep trail we’ve been following. The road disappears as it makes the final descent to the beach. The sky is cloudless. January brought rains that broke a nine-month drought, but February has been nothing but bright blue so far.
Today, birds of prey dot the sky. Cormorants. Seagulls. Frigates. The only time I see birds gathered like this is when a tourist scatters a picnic lunch at the water’s edge or a fishing boat is bringing in its catch. Few people deep-sea fish this close to the north side of the island, though, because the underwater hazards and the angry strength of water against rock cliffs is too risky.
I hasten my pace, overtaking Katie and surging ahead of her.
“What’s gotten into you, speed demon?” Katie says.
When I glance back at her, her eyes are on the ground.
“Look.” I point at the horizon.
She squints, her nose crinkled under oversized sunglasses that she wears for extra protection around her eyes. I realize I’m still holding her hat. I walk back to her and jam it on her head, pulling the brim down. I slide the clasp up until it bumps into her chin. She’s already pink from the brief exposure to morning sun.
“What’s a nice Irish girl like you doing in a place like this?” I step back from her, gesture toward the beach again. “Let’s give the environment, world peace, and hunger a rest and go see what the birds are so interested in.”
She doesn’t answer, but the lines around her mouth soften. I hold out my hand and she takes it. We stop talking and simply let it be.
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