Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“You not going home?” Donna asked.

“Not just yet. You go ahead. I have some things to do here,” Phaedra said.

“All right, then. See you.” Then Donna turned and said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

“What do you mean? What are you sorry about?” Phaedra said sharply, on guard for any delayed condolences. She had had enough talk about her mother for one day.

“I didn’t mean for you to fight for me.”

“Oh,” Phaedra, said, relieved. “Donna?” Phaedra called after her friend, who she knew was rushing home to relieve her mother. “Thanks, y’hear?”

“Sure.”

Phaedra sat under the mango tree in the cemetery until she could feel dusk creep around her shoulders. She gathered the fallen mangoes and started sucking and biting at the fruit, until her tongue turned orange and her stomach gurgled a warning to stop. When she was done, she stretched out beneath the tree. Since her mother’s passing, sleep was Phaedra’s only refuge where talk and song and memories of her mother could not find her.

She woke up to her nemesis Angelique kneeling above her, shaking her shoulder.

“You don’t know mango will run your belly?”

“What?” Phaedra said, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her sticky fingers.

“You sit down here alone and eat off all these mangoes?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Angelique sat down next to Phaedra, and Phaedra felt her wavy hair touch her shoulder. Feeling its softness, Phaedra understood some part of why all the girls wanted to be like her. “Who don’t hear will feel. That’s what my mother says,” Angelique offered, stressing “mother.” And then, tugging at Phaedra’s grimy t-shirt, “Come.” This was the most Angelique would ever say about Avril’s passing. She was one of those rare humans who made it her business not to worry about the why or how of the way things were, but to accept them. It was this solid ground of meeting each other squarely, without pity or false knowing, that thawed and then prepared the ground for a friendship between Phaedra and Angelique.

But for now, it was enough for Phaedra to let Angelique help her up and then to walk home, where she knew that the news of her behavior had already reached.

• • •

SLEEP TOOK PHAEDRA TO its bosom and didn’t let go until the small hours of the morning, when she awoke sweating and dizzy. Hyacinth sat on the side of the bed, watching over her.

“Why are you up, Gran?” Phaedra asked once her eyes opened and adjusted to the dark.

“I was waiting to see what going to happen to you.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. You in here smelling like you eat every mango from here to Speightstown. And then I’m hearing that you were rolling around in the ground behind the church like a common so-and-so with one of the Saveur girls.”

“What?” Phaedra said again, and then she remembered everything: VBS, the tree, the fight, her naps, and the walk home that felt endless because she knew what was awaiting her on the other end.

“Why do I feel so hot?” Phaedra touched the back of her neck, which was soaked with sweat, and felt the places where her nightie clung to her.

“Tell me something, P. How many mangoes did you eat?”

“I don’t know. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.”

Hyacinth’s eyes widened and she pressed the back of her palm to Phaedra’s forehead.

“How do you feel?”

“Bad. Hot.”

“Oh, dear heart. Too much of even what you love can hurt you.”

“I have to use the bathroom,” Phaedra said, and made one of many trips down the hallway. Right before dawn, Phaedra started to cry, not for the pain that seized her belly or because of the chills, but because this was the first time she’d been sick and known that her mother could not comfort her, that she never would again.

“Granny?” she said.

“Yes, dear.”

“Could you sing that song Mommy used to sing when I was sick?”

“I don’t know which one you’re talking about, darling.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

Hyacinth decided that it was not the right time to put Phaedra in her place. “Sing a few lines for me and maybe I could pick up the tune.”

Phaedra closed her eyes to search her memory. She saw her mother then, moving around the apartment in Brooklyn, trying to make Phaedra comfortable while she wrestled her yearly bout with tonsillitis. She remembered Avril saying that her tonsils were so huge they looked more like extras from Stonehenge than something that belonged in her mouth. Phaedra saw her mother’s lips moving and felt her body relax, but she couldn’t make out the song. And then the memory was over, and she was back in her grandmother’s bed, a miserable, wet mess of a girl. “I can’t remember it,” she said, defeated.

“That’s all right. When the time comes that you really need it, you’ll find it.”

“But I need it now,” Phaedra whined.

“Cuhdear. What you need now is rest. Drink some water and let sleep take you,” Hyacinth said, pushing a glass to Phaedra’s lips.

Phaedra drank and then closed her eyes, willing the song and sleep back to her.

“Gran?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Where’s Dionne?”

“I haven’t seen her since morning.” Phaedra almost said something about Dionne’s plans with Saranne, but then she thought better of it.

THE BOTTOM OF THE SUN was kissing the top of the ocean when Dionne and Saranne rumbled up Bird Hill in Chad’s car. The car was incredibly old, not the slick roadster that Dionne had imagined when she first met him. Had she known what would happen that night, the way his car would wheeze on inclines and take curves on a precarious lean, she might not have dialed the number that he wrote on the inside of her wrist the day of the church picnic. All the way up the hill, Dionne, who hated heights, gripped the car door handle. Under her breath, she whispered: “Help us, Father, now and in our time of need, O Christ our Sanctifier and our Redeemer.” Two months of church in Bird Hill had taught her, at the very least, how to call upon the Lord.

Dionne hoped Chad would drop her off first, but the house Saranne shared with her aunt Trixie and her cousin Jean was before her grandmother’s. The whole ride, up until they’d reached St. George and needed her help with directions, Saranne slept bunched up in the backseat, her head draped over her wrists in a way that made her look more innocent than she was. Dionne was glad that the windows were down because Saranne stank of boys and vomit and the rounds of rum punch they’d downed.

When they dropped Saranne at her house, Dionne could see through the open door that the television was on, and Trixie was pacing in her housedress and hairnet. There were two reasons Trixie didn’t box down her niece right then and there — because Saranne stumbled inside and fell on top of her, heaping her foul breath on Trixie, and because she could hear Chad’s car engine idling outside. A lot of things could be said about Trixie, but one thing the hill women would say in her defense was that she was discreet. When the hill women’s husbands found themselves in need of Trixie’s services in the dry spells that followed the birth of children or the eventual hollowing out of desire between man and wife, Trixie’s tongue never wagged with news of their husbands’ indiscretions or the wild things they wanted, their wives refused, and she offered for a price. When Trixie traveled with her husband before he died, going on trips up to New York and even a cruise around the Caribbean to islands she’d only seen before on maps, she carefully studied the way that white people talked to their children. And so while she was not above giving a headstrong child a good thump, she did adhere to the principle of praising in public, reprimanding in private.