SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEWHERE ELSE
by
Jenelle Jack Pierre
Published by Jenelle Jack Pierre at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Jenelle Jack Pierre
Cover photo: Portrait of a cute African American girl smiling on white © Yuri Arcurs; Licensed by Depositphotos
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing by the Author.
Someone Else, Somewhere Else
After our mother remarried, we moved into a dusty, blue and white house on the north side of the island. We were excited to live in a new village and change schools, and felt lucky that there were new friends to be made in the green house right next door. Kim, who was about ten, twelve-year-old Pete, and fifteen-year-old, Ariya. They marveled about the two of us being identical in every way, from the moles on our left cheeks to our tomboyish fondness for climbing trees. Whenever our mother came home from work and didn’t see us jumping rope outside, hanging around the kitchen, or watching television, she knew we’d be playing near the rabbit pen in our neighbor’s backyard or inside their house. We played cards with all our new friends, solved jigsaw puzzles or polished our fingernails with Kim, and ate up the food their mother, Candy, cooked for us.
Our mother had married again after ten years of raising us alone. We didn’t know too much about our father, only that he had left our mother when we were toddlers for a woman he’d met at the Blue Haven Hotel, where he worked as a bartender. Our stepfather was older than our mother and a construction manager. This meant he made good money on our developing island, Antigua, and courted our mother with flowers that were not picked but bought from a flower shop, long walks, dinners, and occasional gifts for us. Our stepfather had no children of his own and was kind to us. We overheard how good a man he must be on trips to the grocery store whenever our mother turned her back and we were left within listening distance of gossiping locals.
Now we were settled into our new home, according to Mother.
It was raining hard. At first there was only a sprinkle, then lightning flashed, and a downpour of rain beat against the roof. We sat in our neighbors’ living room and debated whether or not we should run through the thunderstorm to our house, but the good smells that came from Candy’s kitchen made our mouths water. We stayed put.
A pot clanged on the burner.
“Melt the butter to mix with the herbs,” Candy said to Ariya, who stopped what she was doing to retrieve the butter from the refrigerator. Ariya was tall and fine-boned, with large doe-eyes framed by long lashes. She moved about the one-story house with a self-possessed grace in her purple dress. We thought she would make a good model. She could sell anything but perfume, because she always had a smell: parsley, cilantro, chicken, goat, sour sop, shop cheese. She was her stepmother’s helper chef; she cut vegetables, strained rice, stirred sugar into a mug full of mauby, shelled peas, and completed chores around the house before she started her homework.
It was our weekly Xbox tournament, a part of the routine we’d drifted into at their house.
“All right!” Pete shouted. He jolted out of the chair and pumped his fist into the air when his car crossed the finish line first. Pete continued to shout, while Kim sat at our feet on the floor, looking at the screen and at our absorbed faces. Despite the noise, Ariya sat at the dining room table behind us, doing homework. It seemed to us that the family sat around us on the couch.
Though we were four years younger than Ariya, we’d watched teenagers before at an older cousin’s house. They talked on the phone, they texted their boyfriends, they watched movies on DVDs. Sometimes, they tidied up the house by wiping the table with a damp sponge after feeding us, removing the crumbs and ring spots from the bottom of our glasses. But we’d never seen any of them work like Ariya did.
Candy came out of her bedroom, planting her round body near the table. “Ariya, did you iron Kim’s uniform for tomorrow?”
“Not yet, Candy.” Ariya called everyone by their first name, except for her father, whom we saw if we stayed too late, and our mother was forced to call us home.
“Didn’t I ask you to do it yesterday?” We turned around, ignoring the high-pitched sound effects coming from the TV. Candy walked over to the table, wiping off the sweat that ran down her forehead with a rag. Ariya kept her eyes on her homework, and Candy nudged her upper arm.
“Yes.” We could see that Ariya breathed heavier.
Candy rested her hand at the table’s edge. “Then why hasn’t it been done?”
Kim and Pete kept their focus on the car racing game. Ariya sighed loudly, rolling her eyes, then scooted back her chair.
Candy pushed down heavily on her shoulder. “You getting fresh with me?” She leaned her neck forward so that the drop of sweat that trickled down the side of her face fell onto Ariya’s paper. “Did I just see you roll your eyes?”
Ariya bowed her head. Her face looked almost scared as she sat stiffly. “No,” she lied.
Candy’s hand remained on Ariya’s shoulder, like an eagle holding its catch. Suddenly, she turned toward us and loosened her grip. We glanced at one another as we quickly turned back toward the television. “Finish your homework, then get it done,” we heard her say.
“It’s always been like that. Candy favors her own children before anything or anyone else. Never mind the fact that Ariya was in her dad’s life before any of them came along,” our stepfather said, lifting his stout shoulders in a shrug. “The girl looks just like her mother, Bambi eyes and all. It’s a constant reminder ─.” Our mother clapped her hands together as if killing a mosquito. Our stepfather glanced at her, at the eyebrow that arched on her face and within a split second took its natural place, and he grew silent. We sat in the living room, raindrops sliding down the windows outside, and wondered about this reminder. We knew not to ask. The best thing for us to do was to wait: read, sit in various chairs, finish math problems, and social studies assignments in silence. The answer would come once our mother thought we weren’t listening. And it did, because gossiping with the phone cord wrapped around her pointer finger while swinging her right leg was one of our mother’s favorite past-times.
“I don’t believe it,” she said to the invisible babbler on the other line. “The village must’ve talked about that for days.” She tapped the cigarette butt on the ashtray, before taking another puff and squinting her eyes against the smoke. “I didn’t know all of this. So he was sleeping with Candy and his wife really didn’t know? My goodness.” Mother shook her head.
“I thought she had known about the affair. You know us women, accepting anything as long as our husbands come back home.” Mother listened attentively, then nodded. “How old was Ariya when her dad left?” She opened her mouth wide in surprise, then said, “Too bad the child’s mom got sick. I wonder if it was lovesickness that did her in?” We heard the dull laughter coming from inside the phone. “Girl, don’t laugh. Every bread has its cheese.” Mother shook her head. “Poor girl.”
We lay in bed that night, the air dry, our covers pushed below our feet. Moonlight peeked through the window, casting a spurt of random light onto our closet door. We wore frowns because of what we’d heard, because of the questions floating about in our heads.
The next day, we walked over to our neighbor’s house by cutting through the avocado trees in our backyard, our rubber slippers clapping against our feet. Ariya was behind the house, clothespins clipped onto her purple dress as she hung out the laundry.
We waved to her.
“Hey, you two.” She kept on picking up clothes. “What are ya’ll up to?”
“Nothing,” we replied.
“Ya’ll want to have some fun?”
We nodded our heads.
“Let’s see which one of you can hang up these clothes the fastest.” It didn’t sound like a good time to us, but we moved around her, ready to help, pretending to be in on this game. “I’m only kidding,” Ariya said. “I don’t think either of you could reach this clothesline anyway.”
Our shortness came from our dad, along with our big ears. Our mom had told us that he was so short he barely reached her shoulders. Our mom loved looking up at our stepfather whenever they stood next to each other. We could tell because she smiled more then.
“Ah, kids.” Ariya shook her head and looked up, which caused us to look to the heavens with her. The sun was out, but the clouds had fattened in a darkening sky. “I hope it doesn’t start raining. All week there’s been rain. I don’t want to have to run back outside to take these clothes off the line.” She pushed the basket of wet clothes to the right with her foot. “You two can go inside.”
We left our slippers on the bottom step by the back door and joined the others. We played the usual video games, taking turns two at a time, until the sun had long given way to early, rainy season darkness. While we were playing, Kim ran out of the house to chase away the noisy yellow and brown chicks that belonged to the neighbor’s house on their left. As she returned, she shouted, “Henry is missing!” Henry was the family’s pet rabbit. Seemingly uninterested, Pete held onto the game controller, but when Kim started crying, he said we’d make a search.
The two of us got up from the sofa and marched dutifully behind our friends. We’d been anticipating that one of us would finally beat Pete in the tournament, but Kim’s rabbit was more important. Outside, it was darker than we’d expected. We went to our house for flashlights while Kim and Pete got two more from their father’s tool shed. As we began the search, crickets, hidden in a mass of bushes, chirped their mating calls. Blackness surrounded us, except for the four points of light beaming around the ground, searching for some sign of the missing rabbit.
We went to the rabbit’s pen. We noticed Pete’s football underneath the pen and suddenly felt suspicious of him, glancing at each other with raised eyebrows. When he saw it, he picked it up and threw it by the house. “Who was the last person to feed Henry?” we asked.
“I think it was Ariya’s turn,” Kim said.
“I asked Pete to feed him today,” Ariya said from the porch.
“But I forgot about it,” Pete replied, shrugging.
We did not believe him. Ariya sighed, disappearing into the house to check the curried goat simmering on the stove. Kim’s skinny arm pointed the flashlight at nothing in particular as we tramped around the night-dew damp grass. We shined our flashlights along the grass surrounding the pen. Pete stopped aiming his flashlight near the bushes and angled it toward our faces. “Stop,” he shouted. We stood in place; maybe he’d heard movement in the grass. Instead, he turned off the flashlight then clicked it back on, laughing.
We sucked our teeth at our disgust with Pete for getting our hopes up that Henry had been found. There was more sucking of teeth from the opened kitchen window. Pete’s flashlight continued searching near the edges of the tall grass growing behind the house. We pointed ours at the rabbit’s cage, but there was still no life behind the wood and wire door. “Let’s give up,” Pete said, finally. “He’s gone.”
At last everyone plopped down in front of the television to watch the channel 6 news. Kim and Pete argued about Henry, then about who would be the water carrier that weekend during the village soccer match. Apparently tired, Kim got up to go to her room. We gathered up our things and said goodbye.
When we got home, our stepfather was in the living room reading a book. He had left bags of potato chips and box juices on the table for us. “Good evening,” we said to him, before diving into our snacks. By now we were accustomed to seeing him sitting in his favorite recliner when we came home.
“Hey, girls. Had fun next door?”
We shook our heads yes.
He folded the top corner of the page he was reading. “After the two of you finish your snacks, set the table. Your mother’s bringing takeout, but I figured you two might be hungry.” He went to the kitchen and took a can of strawberry Fresca out of the refrigerator. After we’d finished slurping up our juices and setting the table, we listened as he told us about the Falkland Islands. Our stepfather often told us interesting facts from whatever book he was reading at the moment. We spent time talking about different places, gardens, insects, sports, the design of buildings, all stuff that seemed to fascinate him. Stuff that he knew fascinated us.
“Stay home,” said our mother from her cell phone the next afternoon when we got home from school. “You guys are spending a lot of time by that house. You can go over, but not so much.” We glanced at one another, frowning. She told us that a customer was waiting to use the women’s fitting room. “I’ll see you around seven,” she said. After she hung up, we ventured our separate ways around the house, looking for something to do.
A few days passed, and we got used to spending more time at home. Then one afternoon we heard Candy’s high-pitched voice calling from outside. “Deloris?”
Our mother froze, her arms against the edge of the dining room table, her hands above the pieces to her jigsaw puzzle of a stone castle. She waited to see if she would be called again. “Deloris?” She made a face, set the puzzle piece down onto the heavily polished table and went to the front porch. We followed her but remained in the background.
Our mother put on a smile, and we wondered about her apparent dislike of our friends’ mother. “Candy. How’s everything?”
“I’m here, busy as usual. You know how it is with kids to take care of.”
Mother nodded in agreement.
“I haven’t seen your girls in days though.”
Mother put up her hand like a traffic cop. “I didn’t want their playing by you to become too much of a habit. I wouldn’t want to hear that you’re tiring of them.”
Candy touched her heart with a surprised expression on her face. “Deloris, you know that I wouldn’t badmouth people behind their backs. Anyway, I could never get tired of your little angels.”
Mother crossed her arm over her chest and began massaging her left shoulder. “Maybe not.”
“Absolutely not.”
Our mother paused, then dropped her arm to her side, and even though we were behind her, we knew that she smiled. Candy said that she’d come over to find out if we could go fishing with them in about an hour. Her kids wanted our company, and could our mother pack soda and paper cups? Pete would call us when they were settled in the van. After agreeing, our mother told us to go change our clothes.
When we came back into the kitchen for our supplies, we overheard her telling our stepfather how strange it was that some people were not kind to blood, but to water.
Our stepfather turned to us. “Have fun, girls.”
Our mother rubbed his back. “Don’t come back without any fish,” she said, winking.
The brakes to our neighbors’ van made a soft screeching noise, and we ran down our front steps when we heard it. Pete took the soda bottles and cups and loaded them beside the snacks in the trunk, while we climbed into the back. We imagined coming home with fresh fish, then pictured our mother standing over a pan of hot oil, frying up dinner. “Where’s Ariya?” we asked.
“She’s home,” Pete replied. He moved his pinky finger around in his ears, then examined it, wiping wax onto his orange shirt.
Candy pulled down the visor on the passenger side and looked at us through the mirror. “There are a few things she has to do for tomorrow.”
We smiled politely in response.
Fishing is fun once you catch something. We didn’t, but our friends’ father gave us five perch he’d caught to take home to our mother. When we drove up the small hill to their driveway, Ariya was on the porch sitting next to a man. We’d never seen him before, though Kim had told us one evening while we painted our nails that Ariya wasn’t at home, because she was at her boyfriend’s house. He looked older than her, with the beginnings of a beard on a pointy chin. Ariya smiled and watched him closely as he talked, but when she saw the van, her eyes seemed to go dim.
The man eased out of the chair, and Ariya looked down into her lap, away from Candy’s glare. The man bounded down the steps, giving a friendly wave.
“This is what she’s doing when we’re out, entertaining boys,” Candy huffed.
Pete snickered.
The van was parked and the ignition turned off.
“Okay, you guys. It was a fun trip,” said Candy.
We got the signal. “Goodbye,” we said and walked across the yard, looking over our shoulders.
Ariya sat on the concrete steps peeling boiled potatoes when we showed up after school the next day. She wore her usual purple dress, but had a thin sweater over it. We kept her company for awhile, and she described how to make mashed potatoes from scratch. “It’s always good to know how to cook,” she said. “Have you ever fried chicken?”
“No,” we said.
“Do you know how to boil rice?”
“No.” We glanced at one another reluctantly.
Ariya twisted her mouth to the side in thought. “What about boiling an egg?”
Yes, we knew how to boil the perfect egg. Thirteen minutes in the pot. We wondered if we didn’t have cooking skills because we were tomboys. We stood there wide-eyed, our scalps shining with hair grease our mother had rubbed between each cornrow braid that morning. Honestly, we were more interested in eating than learning how to cook, but for some reason, we soaked in every word Ariya said.
She watched us, then scraped the peeler against the potato’s skin. “Learning how to cook will come in time. I had to learn young. Ya’ll don’t have to worry so much.” She glanced up, giving us a small smile, and we inched nearer to her, wanting to give her our attention. Our mother hadn’t taught us much about cooking. She said she preferred us to stay out of the kitchen so we wouldn’t drop hot cooking spoons on the floor or burn ourselves, but we knew it was mostly because we never listened to her instructions.
The sun felt hot on our skin. Flies buzzed around the bowl in Ariya’s lap. “Shoo.” She fanned her arms. Part of the sweater shifted to one side, exposing a red mark on her shoulder, and she hurriedly adjusted it, glancing at us sideways. The red mark made us watch her more closely; there was something different about her today. She sighed. “Kim’s got a new puzzle. It might be the same one that ya’ll told her your mom has added to her collection. It’s five thousand pieces,” she said, her eyes wandering around our faces. Sometimes she looked at us directly, but most of the time her gaze was averted. “Go check it out.”
We ignored her suggestion and asked about the bruise. How did she get it? Did she bump into a wall? Did she fall down? We leaned into her more closely, the closest we’d ever been. The sweater had slid down again, and we inspected the bruise’s deep color, and the bump that marked her flesh: maybe she had been beaten. Our eyes began to tear up, because it looked serious.
“It’s nothing,” Ariya replied, but her expression seemed sad. “You know, Henry’s still missing. Maybe everyone can help look for him again.”
Ignoring what she’d just said, we moved to either side of her, glancing at one another. We wanted to give her a hug.
“Did you get a whipping from your mom?” one of us whispered.
Ariya snorted. “What mom?” She pushed her rough feet into her slippers. “Sometimes I wish that I was someone else, somewhere else.” She crossed her legs at her ankles.
“Like the people on TV?” one of us asked.
Ariya scanned her hands, then began cleaning underneath her thumbnail. She looked up. “Not exactly.” She continued to clean her fingernails.
We wanted to understand what she’d meant and guessed again. Sometimes people mistook one of us for the other, and we played along, we told her. And sometimes our mother or stepfather called us to pack away the dishes, dust the furniture, or sweep the yard, and we wished we were somewhere else so we didn’t have to answer.
“Hmmm.” Ariya’s smile was faint. “Bright girls.” She gazed dreamily somewhere into the space between us, then shook her head as if she’d been speaking to herself. “Anyway, I’m fine,” she said, raising her voice.
We knew that she was lying, but we didn’t dare say so. It was pointless; the beating had already been given. We wanted to know if it was possibly over the rabbit. “No.” Ariya got up and climbed the steps into the kitchen; we followed her, but turned in the direction of the living room to join her brother and sister.
That night our mother let us eat dinner with Ariya’s family, including her Daddy, but Ariya only nibbled at her food. She cupped her chin with her palm and asked to be excused, then went to her bedroom.
“Don’t fall asleep in there,” Candy called after her, “dishes to wash.”
The next morning, the phone rang as we were getting dressed. We heard our mother put her cup of coffee down on the kitchen counter before answering it. After a moment, she asked, “Who, Ariya?” There was silence and we waited impatiently to hear her response. “No, I didn’t hear anything last night,” she said at last. We finished putting on our uniforms and went into the kitchen for breakfast. “Sure, of course,” said Mother. She nodded her head with a concerned expression then hung up.
“What’s wrong?” our stepfather asked as Mother looked us over.
“When you kids come home from school, you need to stay here or play in the backyard after homework is done.” She scratched her oily hair and let out a sigh. “I guess Ariya finally got fed up,” she said to our stepfather.
He leaned back in his chair like they shared a secret.
“Ariya’s gone. She ran away,” said our mother. She picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee. “And she got, ” She glanced at us, then turned to our stepfather. “She apparently spent a little too much time with that fellow from the next village. Another young girl with another mouth to feed.”
“Well, I’ll be,” our stepfather replied. He whistled. “I wonder what the poor girl’s going to do now?”
Mother shook her head then, a loose roller dangling. “I wonder what they’re going to do now?” she asked back, tilting her head toward our neighbor’s house.
That night, we thought about where Ariya might be and why she wanted to leave home. As we lay there, we whispered to each other, wondering whether she was okay.
When the rain started, we hoped even harder that wherever Ariya was, she was safe.
It didn’t enter our minds that Ariya might have left Candy’s house because it had never been a home to her. That though our family could talk to one another, and we two could talk to one another, maybe Ariya had never had anyone. Years later, we would think of her at the most unexpected moments. When we picked up a bunch of parsley in the market and sniffed it, trying to decide on its freshness. Or when we were squeezing the extra water out of a wet towel, or a pair of jeans, as we hung laundry on the clothesline. We knew that many of our questions would never be answered. Still, we wondered as we labored what it must’ve felt like for Ariya to be doing a woman’s work as a girl. And what she thought about when she looked pensively into the distance that last time we saw her. We wondered if it was the luck of the draw that our mother picked someone who cared about us. And whether our lives could have been Ariya’s with a flip of a coin.
After the rain stopped that night and the full moon came out, we fell asleep praying for her happiness.
When we got home from school the next afternoon, our stepfather was there, having worked a half-day. “We’re going fishing at Dickenson Bay when homework is done,” he said.
Excited to fish, we hurried through our assignments , multiplication problems, French vocabulary words, fill-in-the-blank sentences about Antigua’s government. Then we piled into the back of his car. We really wanted to catch some fish this time, imagining the perch we were going to catch at the bay, already seeing the salt and pepper that our mother would shake onto each fish before she threw them into the hot pan of bubbling oil.
The car moved slowly down the dusty hill, past younger children playing at the side of the road by parked vehicles. That’s when we saw it, the brown spot on the forehead of the gray rabbit. It stuck its head out from behind the front tire of a red truck and its whiskers shifted before it hopped forward a little more, showing us half its body. It’ll never go back home, we said to each other. Not when it can hop around and be free.
THE END
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