When she enters, you see her mother Vera’s wide, obstinate mouth, her large, slightly bulbous hazel eyes, her flaring nostrils. You can sense immediately, before she even speaks, that she also has her mother’s brutal tongue. You are intimidated. She has a look that says she is a frayed rope one tug away from snapping, and it occurs to you to wonder if, when you tell her the truth, she will kill you. In that moment, your death—your real death—flashes in your mind.
You have never had a premonition before, but now the certainty of it causes you to slump forward in your wheelchair. You have a vision of a woman supporting your weight as you make your way up the flight of stairs, bringing you all the way to the top, and then just letting you go, as if she’d just remembered she was supposed to be somewhere else.
Your daughter, who moments before had introduced herself as Irene, the name you gave her, bends down and asks, “You alright, Mr. Solomon?” You sit up straight, or as straight as an old man with scoliosis and arthritis can, and say, “You can call me Stanford.”
* * *
Now let’s say you are a thirty-seven-year-old home health aide named Irene whose father faked his own death, but you don’t know it yet. Today is the day he will tell you. All you know is that he died when you were very young. You have no memory of him whatsoever. You recognize his face only as a young man in photographs. Though your mother always told you your father was timid and spineless, in one photo you remember a square-jawed man with reddish hair, face lightly freckled, dressed in a police uniform, one hand on his gun, his eyes so astute and focused it felt like they were alive and could see into you. You don’t recognize that face when you meet the old man who is your new client, for his red hair is white, and as far as you know, aging after death is impossible.
You do think it’s strange that this man called the agency and asked for you by name. He claimed another client recommended you, which you find unlikely. You do your job, but you don’t make much effort to be nice. You’ve lived in America for seven years and the only reason you came here at all, the only reason you agreed to do this miserable job in the U.S., was to get away from your family. Your brother and your mother. It seems ironic that you spend your time caring for other people’s parents, when you couldn’t stand the thought of doing so for your own.
Your husband left you and went back to Jamaica after the first month in Miami, but you stayed because you have two children who you’d sworn to keep away from the cancer that raised you. Instead you moved to Brooklyn where you had a childhood friend to help you. But Vera, your mother, died just a year later. Sometimes you regret not waiting. You would at least have inherited her house if you’d stayed in Jamaica. Now you are living in a basement apartment with your two kids, working nine hours a day, six days a week, changing colostomy bags and spoon-feeding strangers to stay afloat.
You misunderstand the look the old man gives you when you introduce yourself. You worry that he’s another pervert, that he’ll sneak pinches when your back is turned or when you’re on your knees, bent over cleaning. It happens so often you’re not even surprised anymore. You are grateful that he’s in a wheelchair—at least he can’t sneak up on you—although it means you’ll probably have to help him to the toilet. You might have to pull down his pants for him, which can lead to all kinds of undesirable propositions.
You are scrutinizing his features, speculating what kind of man you have in front of you, when the image of your father, dressed in a tweed suit, too hot for the Caribbean, that he had specially made for his journey away from you, flashes in your mind, but you don’t know why. It is the only photo you have of the two of you. He is standing under a mango tree with you in his arms. That tree became your favorite growing up. That tree became your father. Whenever you sat under that tree, you asked for things, and even though you rarely got them, you still imagined he could hear you.
It’s always been clear to you that your father’s death was the dividing line between hell and heaven. Even if you do not remember much about those days or years before he left, you know you had seen your mother smile, you carry the physical memory of being picked up and held, you swear there was laughter. Before he died, you didn’t know what it meant to be mishandled, to be jerked, to be shoved, to be slapped, to be pinched or even choked by her. You know because you remember the first time Vera did each of these things to you. Each time, afterward, you sat under the mango tree and asked the man in the picture who you thought was dead and therefore held some supernatural power to please protect you. He never did. Today you will finally know why.
You have always wondered who you’d be, where you would be, if he’d never left, if he had lived. You don’t think you would have run away from home and down the aisle with the first man who stood in front of you. Later, after he reveals his true identity to you, if you were to “accidentally” let him fall down the stairs, knowing the life you’ve lived, a life he caused, would anyone blame you?
* * *
Never mind. Instead, you are a thirty-four-year-old heroin addict named Estelle Solomon whose father once faked his own death. He did it before he had you, but you don’t know it yet. Today is the day that he’ll tell you. Sometime in the late afternoon. For now, you are lying, unaware, on a daybed in the basement of your family’s Harlem brownstone, where you’ve lived for the last eight years, since a judge made your parents the legal guardians of your daughter. You had begged your father to let you and Caren move into the garden apartment, right above you, because it has windows. But he screamed, “Is what you need windows fah? Why, when you spend fi yuh whole life asleep?” Instead, they kept your daughter upstairs with them and left you to stay in the basement. Your father seems determined to keep you alive but just as eager to bury you.
You weren’t always such an embarrassment. You worked very hard to become one.
You have been an addict for many years now. But before your mother died, you were also an artist. You could still hustle. You were taking and selling pictures. Occasionally, someone would put your photos on display in a café or a small gallery. Every once in a while you sold something, made a little money, and even came home and gave it to your father, telling him to buy something nice for your daughter with the money your art made you. He would never take it. Worse, he would throw it down on the floor in front of you, so both he and your mother would have to watch you gather the scattered bills from all over the room.
“After me nuh know where that money come from. Me nuh wan’ know what someone like you have fi do to come by it.”
Someone like you. He stopped short of calling you a whore for the sake of your mother. But you could feel how badly he wanted to.
You have always sensed a lie behind your parents’ words, have always suspected that their Jamaica was a place that did not exist. You have always wondered why they never chose, in all these years, to return to that island so perfect. Instead it was always the right weapon to throw in your face, always the only answer to their problems, their main problem always being you.
When you were younger, you would scream back at them that if in Jamaica, the daughters were pure, saved themselves until marriage, stood by their mother’s side every day in the kitchen and watched them cook, brought their father his slippers when he got home from the store, went to church every Sunday, never refused to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the table before a meal, didn’t proclaim themselves agnostics, wanted to be wives instead of artists, always agreed to stack canned food on the shelves of their father’s store after school, didn’t stand under the streetlights at night talking to boys from the block, did their own laundry and their father’s too, did not jump between their parents and cuss their father out every time he raised his voice at their mother, did not promise to kill their father if he dared threaten—only threatened—to one day slap their mother in the face. If in Jamaica, daughters did not run away from home and return pregnant by a man twice their age, did not go out partying instead of staying home with their newborn child, did not walk down the street in skirts so short they barely covered their pum-pum, did not make their mother cry and waste away with worry, never did drugs and if they did, were never so weak that they would become addicted. If in Jamaica, daughters were churned out of factories without the slightest defect, why the fuck didn’t they just go back there and leave you alone?