“Tell me.” Fraser sighs.
Ata sits and leans close, holding his hand between her palms, occasionally touching his straining chest. She felt some ancestral pull to him, like never before. He talks bad poetry, and had told her there is a piece of her in every island, in him, in the places she has ignored. “And don’t tell me — he makes you feel like a woman, a whole, real woman. Oh God, you’re having an affair. You went to write and horned Pierre instead.”
* * *
Pierre had driven the distance he usually complained about, to pick up Ata from Blanchisseuse. He couldn’t spend another night alone and didn’t think she should either. He went for her after work that day and they left soon after he got there, to beat the dying light on the road back down. She offered to drive but he didn’t let her.
She didn’t say a word, sitting in the cushy seat next to Pierre. He smelt the ocean in her, glanced at her burnt lips and feverish secret. “I guess you got some writing done. Any good?”
* * *
“This is the thing, Fraser. I feel terrible. But never so alive…”
Fraser’s eyes flutter closed.
“I’m sorry. Sorry.”
“Don’t be, Ata. Not for me.” His eyes stay closed. “These things happen in any relationship, and you and Pierre have gone through a lot … such differences. You must race and run and write, you must write. I’d like to…” He was giving in to sleep.
Ata feels his hand loosening but when she tries to slip hers out, he jerks, fighting it. “Go to sleep. Rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
* * *
Vernon’s shadow appears on the hot patio floor before he does. He swats at his ear, peers into the cool, dim room, and the soft rumble that comes from his throat sounds like a question.
“Yes, he sleeping,” Ata whispers, and steps out into the heat with him.
The nurse frowns, looking at Ata standing next to Vernon’s bare chest.
“Yuh get small,” he mumbles, and twists away when she looks at him curiously. “You lose some size. Why you get black so?”
Ata walks to the shade of the avocado tree with him, shocked at his many words and uncharacteristic boldness. “I went up on the North Coast.”
He smiles sideways and pulls out a crushed pack of cigarettes. “Real t’ings now going on,” he says, straightening and smoothing a Du Maurier. “He mudda ain’ coming again.”
“I know.”
“Alot’a dem ain’ go able hangle what will go down. E go get bad. Real nasty.”
Ata accepts one of the horrible-tasting cigarettes and he lights it for her, sucking in his smoke, hissing.
“I go be right here. I know dem nurses don’ like me but I staying right here. Is only if I have to go out for one’r two grocery and t’ing, then I come right back.”
These cigarettes have a cheap way of stinking up your mouth more than imported brands. The rank tobacco smell clung to your hands and clothes, rough and rumshoppy as its flavor in the back of your throat. “I don’t like these cigarettes,” she says as the smoke fingers the stiff, warm leaves around them.
Vernon comfortably rests his arm on a rough branch. “Heh. Fraser never like them neither. He does have all kind’a fancy ones inside there. When they finish and he have none, what yuh t’ink he calling for? Mines … He tell me he don’ want to stay alone.”
Fraser had told all of them that. And the shifts had started again, spread thinner this time as he frightened their nerves away, shrinking rapidly.
Zaboca. Avocado. Ata and Vernon gaze past the hanging fruit at the valley opening its mouth to the city. Their friend’s bones, they know, are showing now. He always used to go on about zaboca — calling it that because of the sexy zouk song and the fruit’s sensuality. Cursing its fattiness but groaning to eat it — silky creaminess, sliding yellow into green.
“I’ll go back in and check on him,” she says quietly.
“Make sure you eat too. You can’t ’ford to get more maggar.”
* * *
Terence came to visit later that day. He had lost some weight too but looked better for it. More handsome a little drawn, Fraser pointed out immediately.
Terence’s face, with all his goodness-clear eyes, hung from his shoulders, high above the bed. He looked like he was almost ducking from the low ceiling. The gold band was a bit loose on Terence’s finger now. He loomed over the bed, blocking most of the light from the window, bringing dusk too early into the room.
“Shall we move you to the living room? You up to it?” Ata asked Fraser.
“What a relief.”
They waved the nurse aside and helped Fraser up and onto his feet, holding on to his weak arms, a shoulder under his. Ata busied herself getting Terence a drink and tried to leave them alone, but Fraser asked her to stay.
The pain of the love between the two men squatted in the room, under the stupid candelabrum, a watery fat edema. It had sucked every ounce of pride and joy and gelled there, gray and wobbling like a great ball of snot. Ata focused on it and Fraser gazed at the handsome face of his lover. Terence couldn’t look at Fraser for long. Every time he glanced, Fraser’s thinning lips and sunken eyes lanced him. A ghoulish remnant of the flesh and blood he knew, but his mind and this emptiness and …
“Terence, this is your last visit. I have to ask you not to come anymore. Don’t come here anymore. We must say goodbye. I–I don’t want you to see me like this, or remember…”
Ata ran out of the room crying. Fraser in Terence’s arms like a child. Terence didn’t object, he just sat and held him, lifted him onto his great lap, and cradled Fraser while their sobs rocked them.
Salt stiffened Terence’s perfect features, when he finally walked out of there. Ata crawled into Fraser’s bed; he was tucked and peaceful. Beautiful sleep, come.
* * *
Ata dreams her lover’s arms and he whispers,
sky clear and baking a seaside day
but I will seek the comfort of a pommerac tree.
Red fruit dripping. Saline bag leaking. She wakes to a sticky feeling between her legs. Blood.
* * *
“Blood. Blood is what I see sometimes, in front’a me,” Sam say to his Queen.
She listening patiently as they drive.
“Blood.”
“But yuh daughter need to see you. De po child will start to think you don’ like her.”
“Mums, when I hold her, de last lil’ while, and I look at her good, I see blood. I telling you—” Sammy answer his phone straight up. “Yes. Yes, right now I dropping my Queen in town, then I can come for you. Yes.”
Mums don’t say nothing more all the way into town. She don’t know what else to say so she just hold on to what she knows best — patience, love, and love of God. The work must help him, and time, please God.
* * *
Father McBarnette say to Sammy, “When I said I have a trip for you, I mean a long one.”
“Tha’s okay.” Sam nods, looking around the inside the huge, empty cathedral. He had met Father by the side door and was up close, you could almost say, in the pulpit or what they call it. These Catholics have money, boy. Just the sheer size’a the place and the oldy design and windows and thing, like a antique jewelry. “How far you reaching?” he ask the priest. Sam looks at saddy, genkle Mudda Mary, then at Jesus, string up on he cross. Blood again. Dripping down the man face.
“Guapo,” Father McBarnette say.
“Guapo!” Sam echo loudly. “You know how far Guapo is? That is quite-o, quite-o, that is down in de back’a beyond, behind Gaw — sorry, sorry.”
Father smile.
“When you hear Penal, Father, you know that is country fuh-so. But Guapo, now, you have to go quite past Point Fortin, past La Brea—”