Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  The office door opened, and we all stood more still and quiet than we had been. Hebbie came out with the manager behind her. I avoided her eyes as she walked away. I was next.

  “Christine?” the Arrival Manager said to me. We called her this—Arrival Manager—behind her back, because from the first she insisted on being called Claudia. Not Ms. Ricken or Miss Ricken or Mrs. Ricken, not Manager Ricken or even Manager Claudia. Not Madame Claudia, as many of the tourists called her. Claudia.

  “Myrna,” I said, following her in.

  Embarrassed shuffling of papers. “Muuurna...” Stretching out my name while she looked for my last name on her stack of files. Mother used to laugh when she heard Americans say my name. She said they missed the way your lip had to jut out into a tiny half-smile when you said Meer or Mere; as she called it, “the island y.” “The island y,” Troy had said, laughing, “is really a sarcastic sneer.”

  Claudia said my last name with the same drawn-out uhhh sound and with a question mark on the end of it: “Burre?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Claudia.”

  “Yes. Claudia.”

  “You were on the beach last Thursday? For the whole arrival demonstration?”

  She knew I was. I had to be at every arrival, according to my contract. And I turned in my time card with all the information from the week: when I was cleaning the rooms, when I was on the beach for the arrivals, when I was assisting with laundry. “Yes, Claudia.”

  “How many pennies did you receive?”

  “That one day?” Sometimes we had more than one arrival per day this time of year.

  “The afternoon boat arrival on Thursday. The jar was missing six pennies when the boat staff prepared for Friday’s arrival.”

  “I return the ones that are given to me by the tourists. I don’t count them.”

  “Guests.”

  “Guests. I don’t hand the pennies out.”

  “You don’t hand them—what do you mean?”

  She knew what I meant. There were no interviews like this with the boat staff members, who collected the money from the jar and handed them out on the boat. (Or with the guests, who could keep the pennies or throw them in the water for good luck; I was pretty sure I’d seen some thrown.) Waiting outside this beige door was a line of women only like me, “natives,” in our maid uniforms.

  Claudia closed her files, sighed loudly, and clasped her hands on top of the stack. She kept tucking a straw-colored strand of hair behind her ear, and it kept making its way forward again. Her hair and her skin and the beige shell she was wearing all blended together, her pale blue eyes popping out at me; the contrast was similar, it struck me, as the water to the sand just outside her office. I looked for tides in her eyes. They were ringed by pink. The wide center part in her hair looked like a dried-up riverbed. She looked tired. With the guests she always brightened up, even her faded grayish hair sparkling blonder from the reflection off the pool water.

  Her desk faced away from the window, leaving me the ocean view. I knew the setup wasn’t for me; this other side of the desk beautified for upper management or guests or both? Through the window, I could see most of the pool deck, the loungers all faced toward the pool. All turned away from the ocean view, which always surprised me, the way the brochures sold our blue seas. From where I sat, I could see the pool and the ocean in sequence, like two versions of one thing: the heated, simulated version and the rough, cold version that was too vast to see all at once.

  There was barely movement out there. Just acres of white skin, strung up in spandex, in various stages of sunburn and repose. Except for the one woman from B3. That woman with her sharp bracelets and elbows seemed softer somehow, reclining in her bathing suit, her thighs the shape of upside-down lungs. Pastel bag slumped under her chair. Her husband was on his side, seemingly fast asleep. Even from this distance the back of his neck looked like rare steak. I didn’t see the little boy or the girl who apparently was his nanny.

  Through Claudia’s closed window I could just faintly hear the tinny music still bobbing along. The only movement was a woman snorkeling in the pool, taking in the mural of a coral reef painted on the bottom. The resort used to offer boats to take tourists out to the reefs, but almost none of them wanted to dip into that cold water, real thing or not.

  The snorkeler walked slowly out of the shallow end and onto cement in all her gear: steel-colored hair wrapped around her ears and mask, each flipper dropping a short wall of water off its side. She was waving her hand around the same way she had yesterday, when she’d scraped it open on the bottom of the pool and emerged announcing to everyone and no one: “It is so real down there! I reached out to touch it!” She sent the AYS in a tizzy to find a bandage. I’d had a Band-Aid tucked into my apron for that night, but I knew I’d be caught out if a manager saw me touching a guest.

  But here I was anyway.

  “Have a seat,” Claudia said wearily, her eyes softening and meeting mine. She fixed me with the I-get-it-because-I’m-reallyyour-friend look management pulled out of their pockets.

  “Look. The international office makes me investigate if we are missing more than ten percent of any supply. Any supply. Five? Fine. I would look the other way. There have been many times—many times—that we were down one, two, three, four, five pennies, and we made do without reporting a thing. I don’t want to go through this any more than you do.”

  I could tell from the slump of her shoulders that she thought she meant what she was saying. Caught up against her will by the powers that be—and by whoever it was who started this whole thing by stealing or misplacing six pennies.

  You could have put six pennies in the jar instead of reporting it, I thought. You could have assumed the pennies were dropped in the sand and either told the main office that or gotten down on all fours and searched all day for them. You could have told the main office to get the sticks out of their asses. You could have stolen the pennies. But we both know you didn’t, because we both know that if someone really stole six pennies, that person really needed them.

  One of the AYS came in the office without knocking and didn’t even give me a glance. Started fighting with a filing cabinet, and Claudia handed him a tiny key over her shoulder. He unlocked the drawer and took out what looked like a brick of blank name tags. Handed her back the key, left without a word and with the door partly opened. I could feel the ears from the women still lined up in the hallway lean closer to the crack in the door.

  I said: “I carefully hold in my palm each penny that is handed to me. I put it safely in my pocket with my hand while I make the walk from the boat arrival location to the counter in the kitchen where the jar is placed. I cup my palm just so as I put the pennies back in the jar so that none can fall onto the floor. I give my bag to the guards every night when I leave so they can search it for anything they think I have stolen, and they hand it back and send me on my way.” I almost laughed at the thought of a guard finding a penny at the bottom of one of our bags and assuming it was trespassing there. Spare change wasn’t typical on this island.

  Claudia shuffled through her files, the desperate fidgeting of her fingers trying to get to the bottom of all of this and set things right. As though she wanted to dismiss me to go back to my work if I could just prove, beyond every shadow of a shadow of a doubt, that there was no possibility I took those coins. If one of us maids could just get her off the hook with the international office.

  From where I sat I could see only the black cardboard backs of her picture frames held in place by tiny metal arrows. The faces—of husband, kids, maybe aging parents with crow’s-feet smiles—only looked at her. Waiting for her, reminding her to resolve this nuisance and get home to her real life.

  She had, after all, dragged the whole family down here for this job. To this dusty place where they didn’t have the things they had at home and where they had a hell of a time getting used to the way our people lived. If it weren’t for the pool they got to use all
the time, and the financial opportunity in this international company that she was scrounging her way through with her tough, clean fingernails, that family would not even be putting up with all of this. I had heard it all, when the staff or their families came into Thiflae Bar. Had one or two too many, told us all how it was, this hard thing of keeping the place going, being here, whole family’s life on pause, so a resort could be pushed along. My nose wrinkled itself, as if the sour breath of the night’s last beer were in the room with us, right here with Claudia and me and her desk piled high with problems.

  She stood up from behind her desk, secured the door, and I found myself taking the seat she’d offered several minutes before. She stood above me, walking from one side of my chair to the other. Through the window I could see the sun starting to bleed out into the sky, its reflection muddling the resort’s famed turquoise water with a metallic pinkish edge. Out of place, the moon floated beyond like a memory of a cotton ball.

  Claudia’s hand was on the pocket of my uniform. I kept looking at the window. She ran her thumb over the knots of my resewn catches that spread like a rash down the front and sides of the skirt and apron. I felt her fingers skimming, connecting the dots that Mother had so carefully stitched for me. Mother stitching without ever questioning what it was that clawed at me, gnawed at the fabric that turned me, each day, into Maid. I sat still as one of the stones, speaking as little as they did.

  “Hmm.” Her voice was calmer, surer. Her fidgeting had receded to allow the tide of power back into her voice and movements. “You put the coins in these pockets?” Her thumbnail scratched at some hooks of thread that hadn’t been pulled back through all the way. Hadn’t been reinforced.

  “Yes.”

  I could hear the music outside break off abruptly for the announcement that the dining room was open for dinner. The speaker’s vowels were flat, the words spreading out like water. That’s when I spotted the nanny and the little boy, coming back up from the shore. Sandy feet and ankles. The only two who hadn’t stayed up on the pool deck. From where they were standing, I knew she could see the break in the fence, where the dumpsters and trucks were, and I wondered if she noticed the division between the workers back there—no maids, since we were all in here, but the other workers, like Lem, in jumpsuits—and the AYS on the deck in their crisp white shorts and pastel shirts. Not just clothing different colors either. As they approached that nanny’s boss, the little boy’s mother, I saw the woman dig through her bag as if she’d misplaced something and then stand up and walk toward the doors to the lobby. (Was it that book that’d drawn Lionel’s eyes toward Mother, made him nudge the cover away from her?) Some of the AYS who circled endlessly between the bar and the pool deck fetching cocktails turned and watched her go through one of the doors.

  Claudia’s breath was close to my ear. My eyes left the window.

  “And it’s not possible,” she began, “that with all these tears all over this uniform—all over it—that some coins could have slipped through?”

  I felt her fingers on all the nubs of thread and fabric, scars of all the trips I’d made inland and back out. The claws of the haulback trying to keep me out, then trying to keep me in.

  “Catches in the material like this,” Claudia murmured. “Looks like...” Her eyes met mine, one eyebrow in a knowing arc. Some of the resort people around here, a few of them, knew the land. The plants. I felt goose pimples rise up all over my arms.

  She stepped away from me, and I looked back up at her. Behind her on the bulletin board were the season’s disciplinary write-ups, with a thumbtack staked through the stack. Lateness. Stealing (suspected). Stealing (confirmed). Guest Complaints/Service Negligence. Uniform Divergence. Trespassing.

  If she wrote me up for negligence (dropping the pennies) or divergence (tearing my uniform), I’d be better off than for trespassing, for which I’d have to meet with the security team and would almost certainly be fired anyway. And either way, fired or kept on, would be watched. An invisible but thick wall between me and the inland. If I forced her to keep going down the line of women, one of them would have to be written up for suspected stealing, since Claudia wouldn’t know how else to resolve this. And whoever it was would never be able to work at the resort again or at any of the resorts in the capital. Why we all lined up so nice and polite even when management got our names—or anything else—wrong. A list, a database, whatever it was that had its way of knowing spread across the ocean. Bad words swam fast.

  As they had with Miss Patrice’s husband. The resort didn’t like that he’d kept talking to people about the whole mess with the trees and the cabins and the storms. Especially when there was no need to be put in harm’s way, when he knew better and had said so. Probably couldn’t help himself, all that mix of sad and mad and crumpled men got. They also didn’t like that he’d kept insisting to be paid the consulting fees they’d promised, even if they’d ignored his advice. He had to go back to the capital for work, but that didn’t last long. He kept talking about what happened, and the resort badmouthed him in a way that, after a while, he couldn’t even get work on the capital. All the hotels that used to hire him for projects stopped. Some wouldn’t even see him when he came to ask for work, even people he’d worked with for years as their go-to man. And then That Storm came and tore his own roof off with his family inside.

  Thought of myself wandering the capital alone, no work to be had, while Mother rotted alone in our house. If we even still had a house.

  “Well, Murna? Possible?”

  I reached into my bag and spidered my hand for change. One dime. I put it on her desk. She shook her head slowly, still standing above me.

  “The missing coins are already reported. I can’t replace them.” Her fingers went back into my lap, pointing to each spike. I didn’t squirm; I would not squirm. “Well? Is it possible?”

  “Are you asking me if it is possible a uniform divergence could have caused the pennies to be accidentally lost?”

  “Yes.”

  Above my shoulder, Claudia’s blazer was drooping, too big. Like a kid playing at teacher. She looked tired, her cheeks creased like bundles of straw. I went through all the options again and again in my mind. She needed to settle this money thing before she could go home or else she’d spend the night on the phone with management, accused of not doing her job, of letting us natives take the dust from her pockets, as my dad used to say. If not me, she’d convince Miss Philene or Christine or Miss Vernie or someone else. Well, probably couldn’t convince Christine. But Miss Philene was now last in line, no one else to move on to after her. I tried to picture who else was waiting in line before I came in. Ticked off all the names of who would go home employed, not written up, with their water for the week. Claudia waited until I had conjured the others who were waiting. Aprons pristine compared with mine.

  “Aye,” I said.

  The rest of the line in the hall dispersed when they saw the yellow paper in my hand. Two weeks of overtime garbage duty without pay.

  Bench Story No. 10: Hebbie Whylly

  I have worked at this resort for four years. Full-time, four whole years, with almost no time off, even in those August heat weeks when we’re all soaking in island glue. Until today I’ve worked so many days in a row I couldn’t tell you the last chance I had time to climb in bed slowly before I was already asleep like the dead.

  My mother sent me to the capital for university—this before my brother went off to work there. I lived with my aunt and uncle: my father’s older sister who looks just like him, so folks say, since I don’t remember my father’s face. He went to the States when I was about three. Sent money back for a time and then didn’t.

  I came back from the capital even though a lot of my friends were staying there, finding jobs, liking the bustle of things. Like a museum with all those different faces to see every day. Especially to kids like us who came from the outer islands to the capital. I remember calling home, both my mother and Myrna—my then best frie
nd, none of you could forget—sharing the phone, and explaining what walking down the street was like in a place where you couldn’t count the steps to the next house or face or dog that you knew. Streets you had to wait and see whether it was all right to walk along singing to yourself. A little like the resort that way, since sometimes you had to be a little less yourself in the capital.

  Not all my friends there were from Cruffey, but they were all from outer islands. Capital kids didn’t really mix with us. Saw us as behind the times, ignorant. Called us “small islanders.” Didn’t think we could get our brains to soak in worldly things if we weren’t in the middle of them. One way to see things forgets the second way to see things. My friends from the outer islands seemed to know what I meant whenever I said that.

  I came home to my mother because even though her sister was here, her sister was getting sickly, too, and I thought they both needed me. So I came back here with my degree in music and business—double major, honors list—and I took the job I could find that would give me a paycheck each and every week. My boyfriend was in the capital, and he said we’d still visit each other a lot and figure it out in the long run, but pretty soon I didn’t hear from him so much. You didn’t know what could happen in the capital, all that could change in one sleeping’s time. But Myrna knows that. Miss Daphanie knows.

  My brother, Andre, pops in and out to visit, but not everyone comes back. Changes all of us, all our ties to one another. Right, Myr?

  Nothing I could do ’bout anything but do my best at my job. I did everything they told me to do. No one’s guest rooms were cleaner than mine. No one’s walks between the guest rooms and the laundry were quicker than mine. No one’s toilets shone like mine did. No one cleared away the buffet leftovers as quickly as I did. No one complained less about throwing all those piles of food in the garbage than I did. I kept my mouth shut while others asked the managers and the waiters if they could just take some of that unused food home—saying how many people it would feed if they could just pack up some of the food in their own paper and their own bags and transport it themselves, not asking the resort people to do anything except not insist it all get thrown away. No one’s mouth stayed quieter than mine, no one’s lips pressed together for as long as possible like some kind of test. No one’s tongue so at rest.