Fingerprints of Previous Owners Read online

  Sometimes at night I’d realize I hadn’t spoken all day, and the first few words I’d try to say on the road or at home to my mother would come out hoarse. That whispery-ness reminded me of trying to draw words in the sand and having a letter erased by the wind before you even finished making it.

  At the end of each day I stood in line patiently and let the guards put their hands in my purse, and then I went home and made dinner with my mother out of whatever we could get from the nothing-nothing soil behind our house combined with whatever we could afford and was in stock at Miss Patrice’s store. And then I’d wash my uniform in the basin and put it out where I knew the sun would hit it first thing in the morning to at least make it not so damp when I put it on to go to work again the next day.

  Never got in trouble once. No green or yellow paper slips for me. In fact, used to keep others out of trouble, reminding Miss Philene to hide the cigarette smell and Myrna to hush out the obvious annoyance brimming in her eyes. But it’d been a length of time since Myr and I kept each other reminded at work.

  (Seeing her at work since was like when that gone boyfriend’s chewed pens surfaced in my purse, or like my father’s one outfit still on a hanger in Ma’s closet: the empty shape of the used-to-be right there inside your home. Long time now. The last time Myr was in our house, at our table, was the night we’d all heard about Troy. Once her ma finally fell asleep, she came straight to me and my ma. One point my ma opened the cabinet to give her water, and before she could even nudge Andre’s favorite pint glass aside to get Myr a water glass, Myrna bolted out her seat and off she went and didn’t come back to the house again ever. All these months and months and months.)

  All of a sudden last month I get written up by my manager, but she wouldn’t tell me any of the details of who complained about me. Someone, someone out there, said I was “disagreeable.” That’s all she told me. Her advice was to keep to myself. I didn’t know how to keep more to myself, since I don’t even talk to the other maids all that much. Even women I grew up with since we were the height of this bench: at work I just work, I don’t hang out with them talking away. I went home that night and studied my employee manual. What was going to happen to my mother if I lost my job and had to go back to the capital for work? With my brother already there, too? Knew stories of girls making good money there, doing some things I didn’t want to do. Some guys, too. Anything can sink down or rise up there. You didn’t know what could happen to you in that place. To change you. I mean, just look at Troy—a guy whose smile you could see all the way down the road—I never would’ve dreamed it.

  Keep myself to myself: all I can do in this world.

  I stayed up half the night studying that manual, all the little details that might flit out of your head while you’re focusing on the tasks of your job. Mainly I was focusing on the notes I’d taken during training, because those seemed to be the things they were emphasizing above the technical stuff printed in the manual. I’d written:

  Step aside when guests are in the hallway. Don’t just let them pass—don’t make them interact with you by making eye contact.

  Don’t knock and say “Room service.” If there is any sign guests are still in their rooms, come back another time.

  If the gate between the garbage area and the pool deck has come open, close it. Best to stand behind the gate so no one by the pool can see you as you close it, especially if you have an armful of garbage.

  Reading all these penciled notes in the darkness, two in the morning, tired like I am after any day, all of this starts to sound like crazy talk. Like the kind of stuff Myrna and I would laugh at up at Junkful; like the kind of stuff Lionel would scream out into the ocean in a dreamed-up voice to make us laugh more. And without Myrna to run it by, I start going in circles in my mind almost trying to invent a time I broke one of the rules so that I could understand what I did that didn’t agree with someone. Kept imagining some faceless person out there who could point to me and say there was some disagreement, something in my manner that suggested I wouldn’t do something I was supposed to. Something they wanted me to agree to.

  Then I started thinking of all the men the previous week, down from the international office to check on things but mostly to get red-faced drunk by the pool all day and night.

  Then I think of how I’d been following all the rules but some of them kept staring like they wanted eye contact or stepped out of the direction they were walking like they wanted me to be in their way. These weren’t regular guests; they were half guests and half people who worked here, ran it here, so they sometimes went in the halls that were “staff only” or in the garbage area. There was no way not to be seen or heard because they were coming in all your hiding spots.

  Times I felt eyes on me, like sensing a gecko in your room when you’re sleeping. But then I think how I just went on about my business through all of it.

  Then I think how Christine told me one of them smacked her on the bum when she was loading drinks on a cart in the back hall.

  Then I think how I saw Christine by the pool talking and laughing, but I don’t know if it was before or after the smack. (The bum smack, not the ring one. That hadn’t happened yet. Lord, I didn’t think we’d be counting them up.)

  Then I think there would be no way I’d be talking and laughing at work. No way I’d be by the pool unless a manager sent me there, which had never happened. (And after the last few days you won’t find me anywhere near that pool.) Tried to remember if any of those men in the hall or the garbage area had said anything, or gestured even, that I should be by the pool talking and laughing, too. Disagree with them just by doing what I always did: my job.

  Got about two hours of sleep that night. The sun wasn’t too strong that morning so my uniform felt damp under the arms and around the back zipper where the fabric is doubled over. Walked to work with my head cottony from sleepiness. Tight behind my knees from sitting instead of lying all night. When it’s cloudy things look dirtier around here. Smell dirtier, too, to me at least. Have to walk around smelling dirty all day long. Wet under the arms feels dirty, too, because how much is the clean wet from washing and how much is the dirty wet from sweating? Can’t breathe through your mouth all day long. Have to breathe in through your nose sometime. Hard to tell whether the dirty is me, too, or just all around me.

  Chapter Three

  Felt a burn to go inland that night, since I’d be working overtime and probably couldn’t get up there again for two whole weeks.

  I still didn’t know what that first building I’d found even was. It had taken me months to cut a trail to and around the wall ruins I’d located. All I knew was that I had cut through the brush to stone, made out what was left of a corner of a building. Smooth in places, stones pushing out in others. A horizontal plank of lignum vitae wood, our hardest wood that never crumbled, showing where a window used to wait for ghosts—I couldn’t imagine them as people—to pass through day after day after day. So grown over with brush I hadn’t yet worked around to see if the other two walls still stood. Cacti arms burst through the window like warnings. I went back up to that point over and over, letting myself realize each time I’d found more than border walls—finally! But there was no way to figure out where I was on the estate, and it would take a lot more work to get inside, figure out the building’s function. And if I figured it out, what would I do?

  The sun was getting ready to sink, stretching a gray veil over everything I was trying to see. I should be getting home to Mother, eat dinner with her before two weeks of not. But... I reached out to run my hand along the wall I’d found, letting my fingers travel across where the stone went from rough to smooth and back to rough. My finger caught on a deeper groove, followed it in different directions until I was kneeling, and I was certain it was a diamond shape. Didn’t care about the nettles moving in close to my shoulders, my neck, my face, as I leaned in to press with both hands and get my eyes as close as they would go.

  Definitely a diamond. Sm
aller than the platter I was carrying that morning, lines not quite as thick as my pinkie. Pretty exact shape to seem an accident of time or of anything else. Inside the diamond, more lines harder to make sense of. Looked in the dimness like a dropped bundle of twigs. I ran my fingers through and through. Felt like a bundle of tiny sticks, too. But maybe arranged—not time cracking or an animal gnashing or branches scratching. No: etched in by a person’s hand.

  The veil got thicker, and I knew I had to head down, home. Walked slowly, looking at my fingers, which had now traveled the same lines as fingers of people I’d never know. Felt through the veins in my arms the pressure they put against the stones.

  Troy had called home when an art exhibit from the States came through the capital. How much he wanted to run his fingers over the globby ebbs and thinning bays of van Gogh’s paint, he’d said. Guards and velvet ropes between him and that paint. Haulback and cacti and overtime between me and the next corner of building.

  I used my left hand to protect my face from the brambles, and with my right I kept the machete close to my knees like a shield since bleeding there would stain my uniform. My uniform was filthy. I could even feel the dust on my face, a skin on top of skin. If I kept my face still, it wouldn’t break up too much. I eventually reached the road, feeling low. Weeks of no-pay overtime rummaging with the garbage; manager onto my haulback threads. And who knew how much farther I could chop my way through before the rainy season would come around all over again, brush closing in on all I’d cut away. Blocking my view of what I’d just found. Once I got down and let the bend of the road guide me home, I was still reluctant to step too far out of the brush, didn’t want anyone to see my scraped-up ankles, ask me where I’d been.

  When I got in sight of home, I saw Lionel’s truck out front. Guessed he gave Mother a ride home from the Jamboree. Inside he was sitting with her at the table, in my seat. Mother in hers. The two of them were drinking tea, Lionel’s braids swinging as he sipped, stopped, sipped. I wondered which leaves Mother’d plucked from behind the house today without thinking the way I’d come to: letting a bit of the inland seep into us. Troy’s and Dad’s place settings there as usual, chairs empty. When Mother wasn’t in the room I sometimes sat in them.

  I fell back onto the old loveseat I used to sleep on, wedged in next to the table, and the three of us stared up at the window to avoid looking at the extra place settings. Mother had made a curtain out of dish towels, stamped with the resort’s sunset insignia. I would dry the dishes with them, and then I would hang them back on the window. We had stuff all over the house, small as it was, marked with that sunset. All of it fished out of the dump by Lionel. He was thinking, I could bet, about who he could recirculate some of our dishes to since we didn’t need those extra two settings. He’d been the one to give them to us way back when our old ones chipped too much.

  Lionel glanced at his watch. He knew I’d gotten off work two hours ago. Couldn’t imagine the hollering if he knew where I’d been. Though he wouldn’t be near as angry as Mother if she knew. I couldn’t help but picture her inland, side by side with me as I fought to get deeper and deeper still.

  Mother picked up an empty glass and lifted her arms in an annoyed shrug. I could hear her voice asking, You didn’t get the water, Myrna? She had always pronounced my name Myr-na! Like she was always telling me no.

  “Bayard said he’d bring the water for you, because he has to drive by the resort in the morning anyway,” I said.

  She nodded. Mood I was in, wondered why Lionel hadn’t thought to get it for me when he was nearby that afternoon—he’d been too busy chatting up tourists.

  Mother’s fingernails were cut too low. I could see red lines between the nails and nail beds, like the leftover imprint of blood. I counted the hours she’d worked that day. And she got dinner ready while I was inland and now ready to lie about it like someone possessed. And now: two weeks without me home to help with dinner, but not a cent more coming home with me. Lionel turned to me, ready to speak up, and I felt relieved to look away from her hands.

  “Myr,” he said, excited. “Garrett got a cow caught in his barbed wire fence. He found it this morning. Says it’s yours. I figured I’d take you over in the truck. Uncle Q said he could store it all for you in his freezer once we get it broken down.”

  Every once in a while someone still told me they saw a glimpse of one of our cows, threatening a massive car accident by thundering across the night road like a shadowy nightmare you couldn’t quite hold in your mind. I always thought that one day, wandering inland as much as I did, I’d come upon one. But no one had ever caught one, and I’d never come across one myself.

  Mother urged us to get going by standing up, letting Lionel help wrap her in the cardigan that’d been hanging on the back of her chair.

  Back before she retired, my mother was the junior high math teacher. I sat in the row of desks by the window, second chair from the front of the room. She had long talks with me the summer before I started junior high, about what it would be like to be in my own parent’s class. I half listened. I’d known every teacher I’d had my whole life in one familiar way or another: my aunt or cousin or so-and-so’s mother or father or grandfather. But she kept telling me it would be different. And I wasn’t so hooked in by math, finding my eyes tracking toward the windows as if I couldn’t control them. So we devised a way to communicate, both so she could find ways to say I’m your mother! in the middle of class and to keep me focusing on her, not the windows. Mother almost always wore that cardigan during class, with the drawstring hanging off the bottom corners that she never tied. One night we measured the strings and notched them with a red marker. In class she would wrap it in two-inch sections around her wrist to send me messages. Two inches, right: Pay attention! Two inches, left: I love you. Four inches, right: Start dinner when you get home. Four inches, left: This is a very hard lesson; don’t get frustrated. Six inches, right: This class is getting on my nerves today. Six inches, left: Guess what I’m thinking. It was hard for me to see the teacher in her anymore, but sometimes, like this, she would take up a sleeve edge of a cardigan and wrap it around her finger or her wrist or the pinkish heel of her hand. I stared, measuring, wondering if she was marking out a message for me or if it was just an absentminded motion. The inches of the fabric an alphabet we’d forgotten or the mindless fiddling of an old lady who was tired?

  Garrett’s was way down on the south side of the island, so I told Mother not to wait up for me. If it got late, to get to bed.

  She watched Lionel and me walk toward the truck, along the edge of what used to be a clearing for the cows. Stretch of land so overgrown I couldn’t remember the borders where Dad’s machete had switched away the brush.

  Once we were on the road, Lionel told me about chatting with B3, as if I didn’t know. He brought his hands off the steering wheel, stiffened into a T, and I knew he’d set up a tour of the island for the American woman, which made me smirk. We’d see if he took her anywhere near his house at the dump after all. I wanted to ask about that book, but I didn’t dare with my uniform already a terrain of suspicion.

  When I didn’t answer except for a shrug, he turned on the questions about where I’d been after work. I thought about making up a story of hanging around with a friend, but who would I have been with, now that I was steering clear of Hebbie? Instead I just pretended the wind was too loud for me to hear. He started yelling, and he knew I could hear over it and over the crunkling of rocks beneath the truck’s wheels. I shrugged.

  “Ah, OK then.”

  He looked at my legs, the little tags of skin yanked up by the haulback. Scruffy-looking beneath the uniform I’d been trying so hard to keep neat. Scruffy Cruffey: that’s what we used to call this island when we were kids. I almost smiled, thinking of that.

  “What, you tumbling around with Lem again?”

  Then it was my turn to scream, about how a man only thought anyone could be interested in anything if it had to do with a ma
n. Even a man a year in the past.

  “Just kidding you. Gee.”

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way, the sounds of the truck coming up out of the darkness. I looked toward the water as we passed Junkful Beach, breathing in its salty luck.

  Lionel and I had a tradition since we were teenagers. Troy used to go with us, too, and whoever else we passed on the road who had the time. We went to this beach, the worst on the island, the one that faced east and got hit by the open Atlantic’s winds and covered in the ocean’s trash. Flotsam like a disease.

  The tradition went way back, since when Dad used to tell us about the boats that would try to come in on that side of the island. They’d all get wrecked on the barrier reef, the crew usually panicking and leaving everything behind as they swam for shore. He was just a kid, but he’d swam out with his dad and older brothers to the broken boats and loaded up on the supplies: whatever they could carry while swimming. Which he said was quite a bit, since the currents would sweep you back to shore like a twig. And those currents carried lots of stuff to the beach, too, stuff no one even had to hold onto. Lucky, lucky, lucky, he used to call this beach—though the tourists avoided its garbage-strewn and branch-filled sands, its weedy braids of seaweed that got stuck between your toes. But we kids knew it was lucky to go collect the junk. Didn’t swim out—none of us strong in the water—but didn’t need to, just salvaged what washed up. Delivered what we found to someone who could use it. Made room for more luck.