“Um, he met her on the rebound?” That was a phrase I’d learned from reading magazines.
“On the plane, he met her.” Dashay’s voice was so loud and so loaded with indignation that I wanted to shush her, fearful that she’d disturb my father. Then I wondered, could he be disturbed? Was he even conscious?
“Bennett, he took two steps back when he saw me, and that woman came two steps forward. ‘We have nothing to say to you.’” Dashay imitated the woman’s voice, high-pitched and squeaky as the voice of a cartoon mouse.
“‘But I have something to say to Bennett,’ I told her. And I told him, ‘I want to know why you left me.’”
“What did he say?”
“Not one word. He stood there. He had no expression on his face, and when I looked at him, his eyes went right through me. Then that woman shut the door.” Dashay poured two cups of tea, spilling some into the saucers. “It’s like she put a spell on him.”
We sipped our tea, and the sun turned the kitchen walls red, then golden. “I know I must have scared him, back in Jamaica, maybe even before that,” Dashay said. “All I wanted was to ask him why.”
Dr. Cho opened the door of my father’s room and came to the table. “Do I smell Earl Grey?”
Dashay poured her a cup, but she didn’t take it at once. “Come and see,” she said to me.
From her voice I knew things must be better, but still I hesitated. Then she took my hand and led me into the bedroom.
He lay on his back, his left arm connected to the IV tube, his chest connected by wires to a heart monitor. His eyes were closed, his face gaunt. I didn’t want to look.
“See the color in his face?” Dr. Cho whispered.
And it was true—his skin had lost the waxy quality it had the day before. But it still looked yellowish, and it still clung too tightly to his bones.
Then I saw the figure asleep in the chair at the foot of the bed. Mãe was curled into a semicircle, half-covered by an afghan, her long hair hiding her face. Seeing her there strengthened me, somehow.
I looked back at my father. His breathing was even, his hands lay unclenched at his sides. What had I expected—a complete recovery?
I spent my first spring break mostly reading, or walking on the beach with Dashay, eating her spicy cooking, and from time to time looking in on my father, whose illness made me too anxious to linger long.
Dr. Cho came and went, but Mãe stayed near him. She read to him—essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, mostly—even though we weren’t sure he could hear.
“Our strength grows out of our weakness,” she read one morning. “The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.”
(Later, at the school library, I read the rest of the essay, and I realized it was one she’d read to me only a week ago, to try to make me sleep. In times of trouble, Emerson always consoles and inspires.)
Dashay and I put on sunblock and headed for the shore. She was leaving the next day to drop me off at school, then go back to Sassa. This would be our last walk.
The wide white beach at Tybee was full of kite fliers that day, the kites’ colors vivid reds and yellows and greens against a Persian-blue sky. Dashay and I wore UVB-blocking sunglasses, but the intensity of the colors registered nonetheless. We had to be careful not to stay out too long, because the colors could overwhelm us, make us sick.
“I’m not cut out to be a doctor,” I said.
“No one said you have to be a doctor.” Dashay tied her sunhat more securely beneath her chin.
“I don’t like being around sickness.” It felt good to say that. I wouldn’t have dared, back at the cottage.
Above us the kites soared and dipped, hovered and fell, their ribbonlike tails leaving wakes.
“Dashay, do you think he’s going to get better?”
Dashay had tipped back her head to watch the kites. “I think everything that can be done for him is being done,” she said. “The one I’m worried about is your mother. Nobody’s making sure she eats and sleeps.”
We turned and headed back. As we walked, I found myself telling Dashay about the night in the swamp with Jacey, hearing the thing outside circle our tent. She listened closely, and when I finished, she said, “Rollin calf.”
“What?”
“It’s a kind of duppy, you know. A spirit who takes on the form of an animal. Sometimes an obeah man will summon the spirit from the graveyard, make it do his bidding. Other times, the rollin calf settles in at the roots of trees, waiting for some unlucky fool to come along. When he moves, you hear the chain around his neck.”
A few weeks ago I would have dismissed the rollin calf as a legend or superstition. But now I was prepared to believe.
“Why didn’t it harm us?”
Dashay picked up a small shell and put it in her pocket. “Don’t know. You stayed out of his way, and maybe he wasn’t coming for you, anyway. There’s a saying in Jamaica: ‘Duppy know who to frighten and who to tell good night.’”
We left the beach and approached the cottage. Dr. Cho’s car, a hybrid model, was parked in its driveway. As we came up the steps, my mother’s voice rang out above us: “What are you suggesting? That I tried to kill him?”
The two women stood in the kitchen, and neither looked up when we came in. The air glowed red with their hostility.
“The serum you gave him was tainted.” Dr. Cho’s voice was quiet, but it had an exaggerated precision to it that I’d never heard before. “I tested it. It’s loaded with quinine. Quinine can induce autoimmune hemolytic anemia.”
Mãe looked near exhaustion. Slowly, she shook her head. “It’s the same tonic he always takes. It’s custom-mixed by his assistant—her name is Mary Ellis Root. I called her, and she brought it over on the morning I left for Georgia.”