Bea Cannon - A Small Gray Dot

After I got back from Miami, I began trying again to reach the embassy in Kingston, and after a week I finally managed to get through. They couldn’t help, but transferred me to the American Citizens Services and a woman there said the place was in turmoil but she’d do the best she could to help me. I told her I was trying to find my Aunt and Uncle who had a ten a.m. flight out of Kingston on the day of the Event, and my sister and her husband with a flight scheduled for that evening. She said the airport was in the process of temporarily shutting down but promised to check with them and call me back when she could.

I wondered about that “temporarily”, if they thought the planes would be able to fly again, but I didn’t ask, and maybe they would.

She called back two days later. I could tell from her tone, before she even told me, that it was bad news. Missy and Jon caught an earlier flight, one that took off at five forty-five that morning and were in the air when the Event struck. She hadn’t been able to learn if Will’s parents were on the same flight but it made sense to me that they would’ve been. They’d been trying to get a flight together and likely found the earlier one had seats enough for them all.

The woman asked for my address and said she’d send some kind of affidavit. I didn’t think I needed it but I gave her the address, thanked her and hung up.

I didn’t try to find any more relatives.

Tremaine called me a couple of weeks later, and said he had his passport and ticket and would call when he got to Jamaica. He promised to look for Will’s parents, and my sister and her husband. I told him there was no need to do that and explained why. He offered his condolences before hanging up. Either conditions there were as bad as in the states or they were worse because I didn’t hear from him again.

In spite of assurances from the government that things would soon get better they didn’t.

I never believed they would.

LIKE MOST FOLK, I TRIED TO GET ON WITH living the reality of our changed world, which entailed dealing with the ongoing effects of the Event, the main one being fear it would happen again. Also, the riots and looting, and people attacking for no reason had to be avoided.

It was the end of September by the time I got back from finding Will, and I was sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d be returning to the classroom, perhaps after Thanksgiving and surely by January. Because of the upheaval, I knew it wouldn’t be soon, but once the riots were controlled, the schools would reopen and the kids would return. I knew children were lost in the Event, too, but people who still had them would want to send them to school. While I wasn’t looking forward to some of the young faces being missing, I was looking forward to getting back in the classroom.

While I was away looking for Will, the funeral home contacted Lowell and sent three death certificates. I stared at them for a long time. I felt I didn’t need them. I knew they were dead. Lowell said I should keep them just in case. That turned out to be good advice. It was also Lowell who suggested I check on my parents’ estate as I don’t think I would ever have thought to.

My parents had never been wealthy and they put both my sister and me through college and couldn’t do much saving until after I graduated, so I knew they didn’t have a lot. They’d been depending on their pensions and social security for retirement. The only thing they had of value was their house and an IRA account.

They started it about five years ago but had only been able to put any appreciable amount in since I graduated from college. It was what my father had called their dream trip money. They were going to visit Africa after they retired, and Missy and I had planned to help them out with that.

It turned out I was entitled to the little they had since Missy was also gone. As promised, the woman at the American Citizens Services in Jamaica sent the affidavit certifying Jonathan and Mississippi Adderman were aboard an airplane that crashed the morning of the Event, proof enough for acquiring a death certificate, which I needed in order to handle their estate.

When I got them, I stared at them for a while remembering my sister and brother-in-law. She and Jon married the year before and were planning to buy a house next year since they were finally in a position to start a family.

I didn’t want to think of might-have-beens so I busied myself with shutting down their apartment/studio, and their bank accounts. The studio contained Missy’s paintings and some of Jon’s since he was also an artist. I kept a few of Missy’s paintings including the one she did of Zoni, the rest I packed away and left at my parents’ house. Jon was from Virginia and both his parents died when he was young. I located the number and address for the grandmother who raised him and discovered she survived the Event.

I sent her Jon’s belongings and paintings – except the one he did of Missy. I found myself unable to part with that one. I also sent her the proceeds from Jon and Missy’s bank account, a no-brainer since she was an old lady on social security with no other means of support. Jon had been sending her money. The money in their accounts wouldn’t make her rich but did contain what they’d saved for the down payment on their house. She elicited my promise to come see her as soon as I could, a promise I’ve since kept.

I received the ten thousand dollars in my parents’ IRA, and the house plus their five-year old city cars. I sold the cars and there was no way I could live in the house, but nobody much was dealing in real estate at the time, so I sold everything from the house that I could and left the rest. I boarded it up though that probably wasn’t necessary. Their neighborhood was one in which no one had survived, and folk were not inclined to go there. I also sold Zoni’s car.

I didn’t go back to my grave-digging job. Instead, I lived on the proceeds from my parents’ IRA and the cash I got from selling the cars and other items, while I waited to get back to teaching. At least I’d have my students, and that would be a way to help me cope with my shattered life.

I was wrong. The schools didn’t resume at all that year. What was left of the local government informed us at the end of January, that there was no way to operate the schools. Due to the ongoing crisis, there were personnel and other shortages. There was also the excuse that they had yet to get an adequate count of kids, but what it boiled down to was both federal and state governments suspended funding for public education. It also meant that those of us who had never gotten our summer pay weren’t likely to ever get it.

They assured us this was only temporary, but it was a heavy blow. I’d naively believed that no matter what, the education of the young would restart as soon as possible. It wasn’t just local, either. No public schools opened anywhere. A few private ones did but those already had the teachers they needed, so they weren’t hiring.

Parents tried teaching their kids themselves but most weren’t prepared for it, and resources to help them with homeschooling were non-existent. The ones who could afford it hired tutors. At first, I tried to get a job tutoring but with teachers out of work all over – including college professors because the state universities also shut down – no one who could afford a tutor for their children wanted a third-year middle-school English teacher.

I tried to hire on at one of the facilities where the government sent the bulk of the children who’d lost their parents, but they weren’t interested in hiring a third-year teacher, either, so I began tutoring kids for folk who couldn’t afford to pay.