The Star Side of Bird Hill (4 page)

“Of course she will, of course,” Dionne said.

Dionne pulled Phaedra close and felt her sister's tears start as a pulsing in her chest. As Dionne held her, Phaedra smelled her sister's new scent, a combination of salt from the corn curls she was always eating, sticky fruit juice, and something else, something their mother smelled like, neither entirely sour nor exactly sweet. Held in her sister's embrace, Phaedra was reminded of a picture where Dionne was holding her on her hip. She was two and Dionne was eight, and you could tell that Phaedra was too heavy, but Dionne was determined to carry her. Avril was in the background of the photo, staring off into the distance, transported. Phaedra always thought it was strange that she'd only seen pictures of Dionne holding her, never her mother. But she still knew what being held by her mother felt like. At least she thought she remembered.

“If she's coming, why doesn't she at least call or send a letter?” Phaedra said.

“Mommy is very busy. She's looking for work and a new apartment for us, one with a window seat like you like.”

Phaedra smiled, remembering the bay window where she sat daydreaming after school until her mother yelled at her to change into her home clothes.

“How do you know that?”

“Granny gets letters from her every week, and she reads them to me.”

“Why just you? How come nobody ever tells me anything? And if Mommy's sending you letters, how come I've never seen any of them?” Phaedra asked.

“Because you whine like that,” Dionne said. She walked out of the bathroom in a huff.

Phaedra watched her sister as she left, the lavish spread of flesh between her thighs and lower back, her hair that had become unruly, the thick curls standing up and off her head before sticking straight out over her neck. The windows of her sister's openness were getting smaller and smaller with each passing day.

Phaedra stopped for a moment to consider what her sister had said about their mother, the way she had insisted Avril was not an absent mother but a busy one. She wondered whether there was a difference and, finding no distinction she could discern, focused on the relief of finally using the bathroom instead.

IN
BROOKLYN,
Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like love for her country, and she wanted at the very least to keep up with what was going on there. Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meetings of the old boys' and old girls' clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church
basements in Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call “this man country.” In the same way that Avril had never been a good West Indian girl when she was home, she was not a good West Indian woman abroad, not given to cultivating a desire for and a connection to home that smacked of devotion. Still, she told Dionne and Phaedra that no matter what she felt about Bird Hill, it was important that they spend time with their grandmother, and get to know the place without which they would still be specks in God's eye.

Phaedra got her sense of what it might mean to go home one evening in Brooklyn. She was seven when she made the mistake of complaining about having to eat chicken for dinner every night. Avril's eyes turned from their usual doe brown to the shiny black beads they became under the influence of brandy or the winds of a changing mood. “You think life's hard here? Try life at home,” she said.

Phaedra knew better than to respond to what she knew was not a question. She went back to pushing withered chicken strips around on her plate. And then she felt her chair give way beneath her. Suddenly, she was on the floor and the full heat of her mother's rage was on top of her. Avril hovered over Phaedra, seething, trying to decide what to do with her.

“You think people at home eat meat every day?” Avril asked. She dragged Phaedra down their apartment's long hallway, holding her by the flesh at the top of her right arm,
talking the whole way. “You want to go home to live with Granny? Let's send you home and see if you like it there.”

Avril flipped on the light in the girls' bedroom and rifled around in their closet for suitcases. Phaedra didn't dare offer to help by telling her mother that they were stored beneath the bunk beds. Avril found one eventually, a red valise coated in a thick layer of dust.

“Let's see what you should bring. You'll only need light clothes there,” Avril said.

She climbed a step stool and pulled down the bin with Phaedra's and Dionne's summer clothes, then emptied its contents into the suitcase and zipped it closed.

“You want to go home?”

“No, Mommy,” Phaedra said, hoping her lesson would end there.

“Too late now,” Avril said. She shoved the suitcase toward Phaedra, then unlocked the door to the apartment. Avril pushed Phaedra and the suitcase into the cold hallway, all the while repeating her classic line, “Who don't hear will feel.”

“Please, Mommy, I'll be good, just let me come inside,” Phaedra said to the closed door, even after she'd heard her mother turn up the volume on the television to drown out her noise.

Phaedra stood at the doorway for the better part of an hour, shivering. Neighbors—a man with a pregnant wife who looked like she was about to give birth to a fully grown person any day—passed by. The man asked if she was OK and
Phaedra just nodded at the wonder of his wife's belly and turned toward the door to hide the holey shorts and thin tank top her mother had pushed her outside in. Phaedra sat down on the suitcase. Each time she heard the strains of the elevator, she prayed that no one would get off on their floor.

Phaedra's tears had dried by the time Avril finally came to the door to let her back in. Avril didn't say anything, not about dinner or what she'd done. From then, it was impossible to separate the idea of going to Barbados from the stark memory of Avril's anger. Bird Hill was for Phaedra, at first, as much a place to be banished to as a place to call home.

For Avril, the island loomed large whenever a tropical storm bore down on the Caribbean, and she called Hyacinth to make sure one of the young fellas battened down the windows, and she and the girls watched anxiously as the hurricane turned colors on the television news and usually spared the island. It was there when Barbados Independence Day came and with it a feast of Bajan food and overly enthusiastic greetings at their church's Saturday night dinner dance and Sunday service, celebrations Avril and the girls had missed since Avril took to her bed. It was there in the
Nation
, the Bajan newspaper Avril bought each weekend from the newsstand on Nostrand Avenue and read with more regularity than the local newspaper, piling issues high before using them to pack away dishes and the few fine things they had left for their imminent move.

As Avril became more lethargic, her commitment to
moving out of their apartment, which she more often than not referred to as “this stinking place,” became more strident. Sometimes, when she couldn't hold sleep long enough to find rest, Avril would go through fits of packing, never mind that she'd done nothing to find a new apartment besides saying that she wanted one, and despite the fact that being packed with nowhere to go was at best delusional, and at worst depressing. For Avril, staying on the move, or assuring herself that she would be leaving soon, was one way of trying to outrun her feelings.

Like many of the other West Indian women she knew in passing—because Avril was not the kind for fast friendships—upon moving to the States, she had gone from being a teacher at home to becoming a nurse there. She'd started working at Kings County, the city hospital just a few blocks away from the apartment she shared with Errol and the girls. Avril ended up at St. Vincent's after Phaedra started day care. In the time she was there, seven years in total, Avril saw the hospital go from treating people with what they were calling GRID, or gay-related immune deficiency, to calling what consumed them AIDS, and the thing that caused it HIV. Regardless of what its name was, Avril witnessed the way the disease tore down young men in the prime of their lives who checked into the hospital, once, twice, maybe more often for the frequent fliers, and then never checked out again.

As Avril got pulled deeper into her work at St. Vincent's, Errol—who had always wanted nothing less than his wife's
full attention, who was the kind of man who would have taken pride in having a wife who didn't need to work, who couldn't understand why she would want to leave her good-good house to put herself in the company of men he considered less than dogs—had questioned how she could choose her work over her family. What he'd said actually, in the argument that Avril understood as the point of no return, was, “I don't know how you expect me to trust a woman who would risk bringing that nasty disease home to her husband and her two young kids.” And it was this misunderstanding, and not Errol's empty dreams or Avril's foolishness in following him, that undid them in the end. Avril, for all her faults, was nothing if not someone who wanted to be devoted to family, and she knew that she couldn't love anyone who only saw the ways she fell short, and not her desire to be a good mother and wife. Errol, for his part, not hearing a response to his question, which was really, “How much do you love us?” knew that it really was over, that she would keep choosing her work and the sadness and stress it brought her over him and the girls.

If Avril made any good friends since leaving her best friend, Jean, and Mrs. Loving behind in Bird Hill, at least one of them was death. Some men passed after just a few days of struggling against the disease on the ward where she worked, which was nicknamed the Sevens. Avril felt each of their deaths keenly. But during the late-night and early morning shifts that she worked, she also felt a sense of purpose, a feeling of working against something that she still believed could be defeated.
Besides, being surrounded by the remains of other people's lives in the hospital made it a fitting place to mourn the person she thought she'd become in the States, the family she thought she would have, the husband she thought would love her unconditionally, the children she thought she would raise.

Avril wondered sometimes if she wouldn't have preferred teaching rude American children in the public schools, or wiping old people's behinds in a nursing home, but once she'd committed to her work, she couldn't stop. It was her gumption (and being told that she couldn't do it by a coworker at Kings County who was a refugee from the death and dying at St. Vincent's) that drove her right into the open arms of the plague. There were the men, some with their rooms fitted out like the Waldorf, others with little more than the clothes on their back, some with so many piercings and tattoos it was hard to make out the contours of their skin. There were their chosen families of friends—lovers and madmen, Avril liked to call them. There was one couple she remembered, two women who looked more like boys, who would come after late nights of clubbing and climb into bed with their friend, a dancer who was larger than life onstage, they said, but never agile enough to navigate the wires and tubes that engulfed him.

And then there was that man's lover, a tall man with gorgeous dark skin the color of eggplant who put her in mind of Jean. Because he reminded her so much of Jean, when he looked confused about how to keep up with the regimen of
meds the doctor prescribed when he took his lover home to die, Avril gave him her home phone number. And so she was the first one he told that the symptoms that had cropped up in his lover now had come to wreak havoc on his body too.

The night he called was a night like any other night; the girls were doing their homework at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Avril had made dinner, and it was Phaedra, who was usually the sweeter of her two girls, who asked her why they always had to eat the same thing. Avril had not quite landed at home yet; she was still in the world of the ward, the tubes and the flickering lights that she knew would go out for the one person whom she'd allowed to become a sort of friend, when she heard Phaedra's question. She was angry, and that was why she came down on her child, talking so hard and fast about what home would be like, because what she really wanted more than anything at that moment was to go home to her own mother, to be held by Hyacinth, to be told that the death that had come to sit down beside her would eventually take its leave and go. What Avril wanted more than anything then was the gift of a gentle lie, someone to tell her that her friend would beat this, unlike so many others who had not. Not finding someone who would do her that small favor, she turned to destroy the closest, smallest thing outside herself, which just happened to be Phaedra.

After that night, the sadness that had been crouching at the corner of Avril's eyes consumed her face, and then her body. She called in sick to work the next day and never went back. And then she was down. Without the daily dramas of
either the hospital or the hill, Avril was floating, anchorless. A kind of freedom she'd always wanted, but didn't know what to do with when it came.

“Just like my Jean, he was,” Avril would say over and over again.

Dionne knew that a cup of milky black tea could calm her mother. And so she'd brewed countless cups until the box of PG Tips was empty and there was no money to buy more.

“Just like him,” Avril kept saying. And then, “You remember Jean?” she'd ask Dionne. At first, Dionne would shake her head. But Avril insisted that Jean had held her when she was a baby, that he'd come to visit and she'd laughed and played patty-cake with him until Jean's arms were tired. Eventually Dionne went along, repeating stories Avril had told her about Jean, because it made her mother smile, and Dionne had learned that some things were worth the price of dishonesty.

Once Avril was home for good, anything that was out of its designated place would be lost to Avril's packing fervor. And it was for this reason that Dionne pared down her clothes to just a few items. She hid them beneath her bed because she knew Avril wouldn't trouble them there—three pairs of jeans and five tops, a few dresses, two pairs of shorts, two bras, and seven panties. The danger was not in loving something too much, Dionne thought, but in loving anything more than what you could carry in your pocket or on your back. Dionne had learned to make the objects of her affection small—designer
jeans, a certain kind of pencil whose eraser released a scent when you used it, a new lipstick.

Loving another person, she knew well from watching and knowing Avril, was the most dangerous thing of all. Loving a country besides the one you lived in was a recipe for heartache.

For Dionne, Barbados was at best an inconvenience. As far as she was concerned, being born in Barbados had never benefited her in any particular way. She did know that Barbados was the one thing that her crazy mother and absent father had in common. Which is to say that for Dionne, Barbados was at the root of what she thought was wrong with her family, and not anywhere she wanted to spend an extended period of time.

Dionne once had another idea entirely about how she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday. She and her best friend in Brooklyn, Taneisha, had their hearts set on a party hall on Church Avenue. Everybody was going to be there: Taneisha's Trinidadian cousins and uncles and sisters, their friends from school (mostly Taneisha's), and Darren, the boy who Dionne had been going with since he'd moved up from Jamaica three years before.

Dionne was drawn into the school yard romance with Darren by girls who said “it would be cute if y'all went together” because of the way that Dionne's chestnut skin played off Darren's hazelnut eyes, the same eyes that had every girl from Vandeveer to Erasmus fantasizing about Darren looking at them. As Dionne got to know Darren on their bus rides home together, her affection for him had deepened, fulfilling the
vain promise that had brought them together. Since she'd arrived in Barbados, Dionne thought of Darren often in spite of herself, though she knew that attachment was the first step on the road to disappointment.