WHEN MY MOTHER PASSED on, fully dressed, lying upon the bed she had shared with my father, no one was surprised. I sometimes think she willed her death. She was done with her life here and wanted nothing more than to join her husband. She left me her jewelry, the diamond earrings and brooch she’d slipped into the hem of her skirt, but everything else would belong to my husband’s nephew when he came, including her house and all of her belongings. I sneaked in one night and took some of my father’s maps of Paris, along with a silver pen he used. When I walked through my family’s darkened house I saw sparks in the palms of my hands, but when I tried to catch them, they vanished. If I’d ever been able to call spirits to me, that gift was lost to me now.
In the garden I thought I saw the lizard that had been Aaron’s pet years earlier, there beneath the bushes where the leaves were so dry they sounded like paper rustling. As I was leaving, something held me back. I turned and went to uproot the apple tree from its large ceramic pot, then dragged it along with me. I left a trail of dirt behind, and my arms were aching when I reached the little garden behind the store. I left the tree there for the boys to plant in the morning.
In the days that followed I accepted visitors who wished to pay their respects when they called on me with trays of food and sweets. I cannot say I felt true sorrow, and although I kept this to myself, my mother’s closest friend, Madame Halevy, threw me a look when she and her maid brought us dinner, chicken curry and sweet molasses bread and several mango and coconut pastries. “Try to pretend you understand grief,” Madame Halevy said in a pinched voice.
“You seem convinced you know so much more than I do,” I responded ungraciously.
“Think back to this moment when you’re my age,” Madame Halevy told me. “Then you’ll know the answer.”
I wrote to Aaron, and although I didn’t expect the courtesy of a letter, a few weeks after my mother’s death, one arrived. He sent his regrets regarding her passing in a single line. She was good to me when she didn’t have to be. The remainder of his brief letter concerned Jestine. I felt uncomfortable with the intimacy of his words. He missed her terribly, he wrote, and could not stomach his regret. In that way, my mother had ruined his life as well as mine. I stopped reading and brought the letter to Jestine. I sat outside while she took his letter into her bedchamber. After a while she came and joined me. I had glanced at enough of Aaron’s missive to know he had written that their daughter was well cared for, as beautiful a child as she was intelligent. As if that message would lift Jestine’s despair. Perhaps I acted wrongly, he had written, but I acted out of love, so that she might have a better life.
BY NOW IT WAS spring. It was the time when Jestine and I used to wait for the turtles to come to shore, but she had no interest. She didn’t care what happened on our island. She looked toward France, where her heart and soul resided. When we met in the late afternoons, leaving the children in Rosalie’s care, we often walked along the wharf. We watched the harbor, eyeing the ships as they came in, then we made our way home separately.
We spent our thirtieth birthdays together. We were nine months apart, but we took a day in the middle and used it for both of us. We cooked ourselves dinner at Jestine’s house, a child’s meal of fongee pudding and coconut cake, although we also drank plenty of rum in the hope that it would make the next year easier. We did not say aloud what we wished for, though we wished for the very same thing, to board one of those sailing ships and cross the ocean. Late in the evening, after we had had too much rum, Jestine wept for her daughter. I stayed with her until she fell asleep. I hadn’t realized how lonely it was in her house at night, like a ship lost at sea. When it was past midnight, I walked back to town, up the hill to the store. There was a certain freedom in being a widow. No one asked where I went or with whom I spent my time. Without my mother to keep an eye on me, I could do as I pleased. I wasn’t afraid to be alone on the road. There were bats in every tree, but I waved my hands and drove them away as if I were a spirit. I had been young only a moment ago. I imagined that in the blink of an eye I would be old, and my life would be over before I could make it my own. Perhaps my story would not end as I had planned. Or perhaps it would change into something I had never expected, so that years from now, looking back, I would realize just how little I’d known as a young woman, precisely as Madame Halevy had said.
chapter five
Mortal Love
Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas
1825
ABRAHAM GABRIEL FRÉDÉRIC PIZZARRO