The Travellers and Other Stories (21 page)

Which was why she didn't mind that Cheryl didn't do things exactly the way she asked her to do them. It was why she didn't mind that Cheryl kept giving Bunny a bottle when every morning Nancy put out his red sippy cup next to the schedule she'd written out for the day for Cheryl to follow. Or that Cheryl put cereal in Bunny's bottle with his formula. Or that she had the TV on sometimes when Nancy came home in the evening. It was why she turned a blind eye when Cheryl took their best teaspoons to the park to give Bunny his banana instead of the plastic ones that were always left out on the counter next to the fruit bowl in the morning. It was why she voiced no objection when Cheryl purchased Bunny a hideous silky emerald-green sport-shirt with her own money and sometimes dressed him in it instead of in one of the little pastel polo shirts which lay washed and ironed and folded and stacked in two neat piles by Cheryl herself in Bunny's closet in accordance with Nancy's instructions.

Any time Nancy felt herself getting annoyed by any of these things, she told herself that they were not important, not in the great scheme of things. Bunny was happy, Bunny was safe. With all her heart she felt sure of that; that Cheryl would never, ever let any harm come to Bunny, or do anything to make him sad. Cheryl was stubborn about small things, like the spoons and not using the sippy cup; stubborn about doing things her own way, and her English wasn't great and probably she didn't talk to him enough, not as much as you were supposed to talk to a one-year-old, but she was vigilant and careful and very gentle, just like Iceline had been, and when Nancy pictured the future, nothing about it felt to her in any way precarious and Cheryl, in her thin washed-out T-shirts and her bright skirts, was always in it.

Bunny was already sleeping, that last Monday when Nancy arrived home. He lay draped and stretched out like a starfish high up on Cheryl's mountainous shoulder. He was newly-bathed and in his clean pyjamas with his fair hair smartly parted on one side the way it always was when Nancy walked in the door. Cheryl lifted him gently off her shoulder and placed him in Nancy's outstretched arms and then, in her slow imperfect English, she asked if Bunny could go home with her that night and sleep over with her. She'd bring him back in the morning.

Nancy was floored.

She'd never dreamed of Cheryl asking for such a thing.

Bunny, not be here? with them? for a whole night?

On the table in the hallway she saw that Cheryl had already got ready a supply of Bunny's things to take with her—two clean empty bottles, a tin of formula, four diapers in a Ziploc baggie, a packet of oatmeal cereal, the emerald-green shirt.

Nancy didn't know what to say.

She had a horror, a terror, of offending Cheryl, of making her think she wasn't trusted, of upsetting her so much with a refusal that in the morning she'd announce that she was leaving, she'd found another family to work for, another Bunny to take care of.

Nancy flailed for some sort of practical objection. Where would he sleep? Did Cheryl have a spare bedroom at her place? Did she possess a crib?

A vague picture came into Nancy's mind of a shabby apartment building, a corridor with a door at the end of it, and it occurred to her that she didn't actually know where Cheryl lived. It had always been enough that Cheryl arrived every morning at 6:45 on their doorstep and Nancy was embarrassed now, in the middle of this awkward and unexpected conversation, to ask.

Cheryl said she would make a nest for Bunny on the floor next to her bed out of pillows and blankets.

‘Oh I don't know, Cheryl,' said Nancy.

Still holding onto Bunny, she smoothed his soft hair with the palm of her hand and touched his cheek with her finger. ‘No,' she said. ‘No. I'm sorry, Cheryl, no.'

Cheryl's response was impossible to read. Her broad black face looked the same as always: placid, inscrutable, almost blank.

It's astonishing, really, the things Nancy and Beecham Clay never knew about their babysitter.

The things she never told them and the things they never felt the need to ask about—that her surname was Toussaint for example, and that she lived in a small dark room above the consignment store on Mamaroneck Avenue, and that she was twenty-five years old and had been born in 1975 in the Cité Soleil district of Port-au-Prince and that when she arrived in the United States in 1997 she'd left behind three children of her own.

In a general way of course they understood that Cheryl was here for the money, pure and simple. In a general way they knew this was how things were, and even if they didn't dwell upon the details they probably had a fair idea that at the end of every week when she'd been paid, Cheryl walked out of their house and along Orienta Avenue and turned left onto the Post Road and walked the remaining hundred yards to the A&P where the Western Union counter was and dipped her hand into her cracked plastic purse and took out Nancy's envelope with the dollar bills inside, kept back what she needed for her own rent, and sent the rest home.

That last morning, Nancy was nervy and pale. She'd hardly slept, thinking about Cheryl's unexpected request, worrying about having refused it and yet still feeling she couldn't possibly agree to it. She kept looking at Cheryl as she went round collecting her things for the day—papers, briefcase, laptop, purse, coat—trying to figure out if Cheryl was upset or sulking. It was impossible to tell. Cheryl looked the same as she always did. She looked calm. She looked stolid. She looked heavy and reliable. Nancy hadn't said anything to Beecham about Cheryl wanting to borrow Bunny in case he got worked up about it, in case he said, ‘She asked you
what
?' and brought the whole thing up in front of Cheryl while they were getting ready to leave for the station and Cheryl was giving Bunny his breakfast.

Nancy found herself lingering longer than usual, beyond their normal deadline for heading out of the house to the car. She checked and re-checked the contents of her briefcase, her purse. She re-applied her lipstick. She stood looking at Cheryl mashing up Bunny's breakfast banana with a fork. Out in the driveway Beecham leaned on the horn and Nancy, feeling panicky and tearful and strange, wanted to say to Cheryl, ‘Please, Cheryl, don't leave us.'

The names of Cheryl's children were Stanley, Webster and Yolisha. Stanley was 8, Webster was 7 and Yolisha was 5 and Cheryl hadn't seen them in four years because if she ever went back home to Haiti to visit them she'd never get back in through immigration again.

‘I can't do this,' she'd said to her grandmother on the phone when she first arrived—when she first started housekeeping for Mrs. Landis in New Rochelle.

‘How are we going to live, baby, if you don't?' said her grandmother.

In the beginning, when Stanley was 4 and Webster was 3 and Yolisha was 1, she'd talked to her children once a month on the phone, but after the first few months they'd grown too shy to speak to a stranger. All Cheryl could hear when her grandmother put them on the line was their soft breathing and after a time she'd let them be, it seemed too hard a thing for them all.

Which was how, after Mrs. Landis went to live in the retirement home in Phoenix and Cheryl came to work for the Clays, she'd fallen in love with Bunny.

Little by little, she'd started to love him and now she couldn't stop. He had become essential to her. She had so much affection to bestow and her own children were there and Bunny was here and they'd forgotten her and Bunny hadn't and it was such a comfort to have him close, to have him cry for her when she stepped out of the room just for a moment to fetch something and had to sing to him from wherever she was in the house so he could hear her voice and know she was there; that she hadn't left him.

She couldn't help wanting to do things for him the way she'd done them for her own children, like putting cereal in his bottle even though she knew Mrs Clay didn't like it, or feeding him with the silver spoons from the velvet canteen in the dining room because they had a pattern of three small clubs like on a pack of cards and at home in Port-au-Prince they had a metal spoon that had just that same pattern on it that Stanley had liked to chew on when he had a tooth coming, the cold metal on his hot gums.

She couldn't help wanting to dress Bunny in the soft green sport-shirt she'd bought him instead of in the collared cotton tops he was supposed to wear. It was what she'd have dressed him in if he'd been hers. She hated the collared cotton tops, it was like dressing him in a cardboard box. It made her feel guilty, the nine dollars she'd spent to buy Bunny the shirt instead of sending every last cent home to her grandmother and Stanley and Webster and Yolisha, but the truth was she felt like she loved Bunny now as much as she loved her own children and sometimes it seemed to her that she loved him even more than she loved them. It made her feel guilty but she couldn't help it, and having lost her own children, it seemed to Cheryl that she could never, now, be made to give up Bunny. Having Bunny close did so much to fill up the big empty space in her heart that when 7:30 came round in the evening and Mrs. Clay came bursting in through the door and she had to hand Bunny over and say goodbye she could hardly stand it. He was the only thing that made it possible for her to do this, to live this way.

Out in the driveway Beecham leaned again on the horn and Nancy, finally, picked up her briefcase and her coat and her big leather purse. She kissed Bunny. She breathed in his sweet milky perfume and gave Cheryl her biggest warmest smile and told them both to have a great day and then she left.

In the kitchen, Cheryl put Bunny in his high chair with a rice cake and took out the trash. She emptied the coffee filter and wiped down the machine and put the butter and the milk and the big carton of juice back in the fridge and ran the dishes under warm water and placed them in the dishwasher. She wiped Bunny's face and hands and lifted him up out of his highchair and tickled his belly and kissed his soft corn-coloured hair and tipped him upside-down till he chortled and squealed with pleasure and told him he was her Big Boy and then she took him onto the couch where they snuggled up to watch a little early morning television and then she took him upstairs for his morning nap. It always amazed her, how he could be so sleepy so soon after he woke up. None of her own children had ever been like that. Today it was barely nine thirty and Bunny was already sucking his thumb and drifting off.

She settled him in his crib, stood over him, singing and murmuring to him until his eyes closed and his wet thumb had fallen out of his mouth. She told herself not to think about yesterday and Mrs. Clay saying she couldn't keep him for the night. Softly, she closed his door and came back downstairs and went into the basement and put on a load of laundry and came back up into the kitchen and ironed the bed linen that was waiting from yesterday and then she went back upstairs and made Nancy's and Beecham's bed and checked on Bunny and stood looking at him a while and then she came back down again and went into the den to tidy up and it was on the TV.

It was there the moment she went into the den, the silent puff-and-fall of the buildings. First one, then the other.

And after that, everything a strange kind of dream—

Mr. Clay's brother Robert coming from Rhode Island and staying in the guest bedroom and going into the city every day and coming back in the evenings, grey dust in his hair and in his eyelashes. Mr. Clay's brother Robert going back to Rhode Island. Mrs. Clay's sister Barbara and her husband arriving from Madison, Wisconsin, Mrs. Clay's sister hugging Cheryl, the two of them crying in each other's arms.

All the packing. Mrs. Clay's sister saying the journey back would take them sixteen hours.

Cheryl thinking that ‘them' meant her too. Their big blue car, leaving. His golden head.

Cheryl standing in front of the Clays' locked house, then walking slowly along the curving tree-lined avenue down to the Post Road and turning right towards the harbour. The masts of the boats tinkling softly against each other, the harbour water dark and still.

Stanley, Webster and Yolisha looking out at her from behind a plastic window in her wallet, remote and unfamiliar. She still had Bunny's smell with her, in her clothes and in her skin, his warm cereal perfume. She still had his sturdy weight in her lap, his sleeping cheek in the hollow above her collarbone. She counted the money she had left from her last week's wages, seventeen dollars and some change. She put the change in the pocket of her skirt and folded the bills and tucked them back in her wallet behind her children. Overhead a plane dropped down into the re-opened airport, then another and another and another, their lights bright in the sky.

In the morning she'd start looking for a new family.

MIRACLE AT HAWK'S BAY

MATTHEW HIGH. WE
knew it would be him. Even before Hannah turned him over, we just knew it.

It was Annie who saw him from the road. ‘Look,' she said, and when she pointed at the dark shape out there in the shallow water, there was only one thought in all our heads—please God, let it not be him. Let it be any of the others but not him, not Matthew High.

At the beginning of the marshes we took off our boots and our stockings and hitched up our skirts and ran along the high grassy mounds above the channels, hopping over the gaps where you could hear the creep of the tide trickling in and filling them up. He was out on the sand, and even though we all knew it would be Matthew, when we were quite close Annie said, ‘Who is it?' because the truth was we couldn't tell for sure. Even then, from the look and shape of him, all blobby and blown-up, it might have been someone else. He was lying on his front in just a shirt which was up over his head in a sodden lump of cloth. We went towards him through the shallow water and stood around him like a kind of crescent moon with our backs to the sea, and I remember feeling the water lapping at my heels, thinking that if we all stood aside now and went back the way we'd come the water would rise and cover him again and take him back and Bella High would never have to know. I looked at Annie and Hannah to see if they were thinking the same thing but I couldn't tell. Their eyes were down, looking at the dark and swollen body of Matthew High.