Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

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.