The New Moon's Arms Page 6

  The little girl squoonched herself down into a ball. With a crazy, yodelling scream, she sprang off the rock and cannonballed into the sea below. She popped up again, like the yellow almond fruit that floated when they fell into the sea. She gurgled at Chastity.

  Chastity stood. Just before she made the jump, she thought she saw a bunch of rounds lumps rising from the water, like heads. It startled her, threw her off her stride. She jumped anyway; just not as strongly as she’d planned. “Yaaahhhh!” she yelled. She flew through the air, then plunged down, down, down towards the blue, knowing that it would be all right, that she would rise up again, and her friend would make sure she was safe.

  What she hit was not water, but an outcropping of rock that was hidden just below the surface of the sea. The impact was brutal. Her whole body electrified with the shock of it; a jangling that made thought, even breath, impossible. Chastity didn’t know what happened from that moment until she awoke high up on the shore, well out of the way of the tide, in the lee of the sea grape bushes. Mumma was touching her shoulder and calling out her name. Mumma was crying softly. Chastity tried to lift her head, but the thrashing pain behind her eyes made her lay it back down onto the sand.

  “Oh, God, God,” her mother moaned. “She wake up. Chastity, you all right? What happened to you?”

  “Where’s the little girl?” Chastity whispered. She turned her head despite the pain.

  “We have to get you to hospital,” Mumma said. She bent and picked Chastity up.

  Weakly, Chastity held on around her mother’s neck. “Where’s the little girl?” she asked again. “The little blue girl.”

  Her mother was hurrying towards the house. “Where your clothes, child? What you were doing?”

  “I fell,” Chastity told her. Better not to say that she’d jumped. “Off that big rock.” She pointed at one of the large climbing rocks that were all over the beach.

  “After I told you not to come and play down by the water by yourself!”

  But she hadn’t been by herself. The little girl had been with her.

  “I only turned my back for two-twos!”

  Chastity whispered, “My head hurts.” She looked over her mother’s shoulder. There were footprints in the sand. They disappeared at the water line.

  There was something on her head. Chastity put her hand up to her forehead and pulled at the thing she found there. Her head hurt so much! Through half-closed eyes, she looked at what was in her hand: seaweed, loosely braided into a bandage. Its shiny brown leaves were bloody. It had been tied around her head, covering the big gash she could feel above her ear. Chastity probed the gash with her fingers, which came away sticky with her own blood. That was when she finally felt frightened, and clung to her mother, and started to cry.

  At the hospital, they said she had a mild concussion. They wouldn’t let her sleep all that night. Every time she was descending into blessed rest, a nurse or Dadda or Mumma would shake her awake. Her memories of that night were mostly of exhaustion, and crying, begging to be allowed to sleep. Towards morning, delirious with fatigue, she began to talk about the yellow girl with blue-y skin, and about the lobster that had wanted to eat her toes. She remembered Dadda, haggard from lack of sleep himself, whispering to her mother, “Hallucinations. Poor thing.” The hospital let her parents take her home that day, and she slept and slept until sunrise next morning. Her parents grounded her from the beach for a week, and forbade her to ever take her clothes off when she was outside in the open.

  She never saw the yellow-blue brown girl again.

  THE SUN DROVE BRIGHT SPLINTERS OF LIGHT THROUGH my half-open lids. “Ow! Shit.” I snapped my eyes shut again. Blind, I took stock. From the feel of rough stone under me, I was lying on the rock on the beach. Don’t tell me I passed out there drunk last night. How I could do something so stupid? Suppose the tide had come up and swept me away?

  It was certainly no longer night. The sun’s heat was searing my thighs and the side of my face. My mouth tasted like I’d been eating carrion. Hot buttered carrion. A kettle-drum orchestra was playing in my head. Off-key. My belly served me notice that it was disgusted with my behaviour, and that it was about to violently register its protest. I rolled onto my stomach just in time to puke over the side of the rock. The taste and smell were awful. Everything was awful. On my stomach, I rested my head back down on the too-hot rock. I was parched and woozy. The sweaty smell of the ocean was making me queasy. The coconut trees shook and rustled their laughter.

  “Oh, God, beg you, do,” I muttered, “please let death come and take me this minute. I think is the only thing that will remove this taste from out my mouth.”

  I’d glimpsed something when I leaned over the side of the rock. What?

  Gingerly, I lifted my head and looked again.

  You know what? People really do go cold with fright. There was a thing washed up on the sand, not too far from my rock. It was completely covered in seaweed, except for a brown hand poking through. I was down off the rock and moving in that direction before I knew it.

  I stubbed my toe against something. I gave a yip of fear and leapt back. But it was no torn-off limb. It was my bottle, half-buried in the sand.

  It could stay right there. Would be a cold day in hell before I could stand the smell of alcohol again.

  The hand sticking out of the bladderwrack shroud was a child’s. My gut twisted again. I dropped to my knees and vomited into the sand.

  I had another look. The still-wet seaweed glistened. I reached out a finger. My skin crawled. I couldn’t bring myself to touch the body. There was a piece of sea grape root sticking out of the sand not far away. I crawled over, wrenched it free, brought it back. I took a deep, shuddering breath and extended the stick. The tip of it trembled so wildly that it took a second before I could aim it. I made the tip of the stick touch one end of the seaweed lump. The opposite of where I figured its head was, if it still had a…no. I wasn’t going to think about that. My stomach agreed that it was a subject best left unexplored.

  All I could feel was springy seaweed. Maybe I hadn’t pressed hard enough with the stick. I breathed again—a gasp, really—and poked a little deeper this time.

  The body moved. This time, I jumped back about eight feet. My bladder gave a little squirt.

  Now a small groan came from inside the seaweed. How badly had the sea broken the person inside?

  The child moved slowly, pushed a second arm and a leg through the seaweed. At least those were working. That got me past fear. I rushed to the child’s side, started pulling the seaweed off it. “Are you hurt?” I said. “You all right?”

  It was a boy, a little brown boy. He looked about two, maybe three years old. His clothing had been torn off by the sea, and his hair was a mess: shells and sand matted in it. And it was long so like a girl’s.

  He started a thin, hiccoughing sob. I dragged the rest of the seaweed off him. He was cut and bruised all over. His ankle was puffy and discoloured. I touched it, and he screamed with pain. He looked at me with liquid eyes, his small brown face a mask of misery. He reached for his injured leg, and moaned when his own touch hurt.

  He needed a hospital. And damn it all to hell, I didn’t have my cell phone. Nobody else around to help me. People didn’t come out to this beach plenty; too rocky, and the sand brown with mud from the mangroves.

  There was an emergency phone installed near the middle of the beach. I couldn’t leave him here, alone and scared, while I went for help. Maybe I could move him? But suppose he had a broken rib and I made it worse by picking him up? I cursed myself for not bringing my cell phone. He was crying, his open mouth downturned and the sides of his tongue curling up, like babies’ tongues do.

  “Help!” I scanned the beach, the bushes. Still nobody.

  I would have to move him. “I going to pick you up, okay? I’ll be real careful.”

  “Hello, hie!” someone shouted. “You need help?” A man was clambering out of the water.

  �
�Yes, please! This child—he’s hurt!”

  “I coming!” He was big. Had a kind of mixed look to him; black and Indian, maybe. He was wearing a garish red and black wetsuit and carrying a snorkel and fins. His thick middle jounced a little as he ran. He stopped in front of us, panting.

  “You have a cell phone?” I asked him. Lots of tourists carried their valuables in waterproof pouches when they dove. “We have to call Emergency.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, no.” He knelt in the sand, reached for the groaning child.

  “Careful,” I told him. “I think his ankle break. I don’t want to move him. You will stay and watch him while I go to the emergency phone? It’s just over there.”

  “Yes. But we have to move him anyway. He too close to the water line.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s all right. We will take care of his spine. We could brace him on this.” He held out one of his fins, turned it over to its flat back. Yes, it was almost as long as the little boy. I got down as low as I could—blasted knee!—and helped the man slide the fin underneath the child’s back. “You take his head,” he said. Together we picked the boy up. He screamed.

  “Sorry, baby,” I said. “We only trying to help.” We carried him out of the way of the water and set him back down in the sand.

  “Go and phone,” the man said. As I was running away, he shouted, “I’m Hector! Goonan!”

  God, yes. Should have asked him for his name. Like I couldn’t do anything right today.

  The emergency phone was protected in its own small shelter safely away from the tide line. Seemed to take forever to get there. My lungs started to burn. It was like breathing glass. I kept going. I was nearly weeping by the time I reached the phone. I picked up the receiver and waited the few seconds of forever until the call rang through.

  “Coast Guard. What is your emergency?”

  I started to babble, gasping for air: child, storm, hurt, please.

  “Slow down, ma’am. Is the child breathing?”

  “Yes. I think his leg break.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes. He’s bawling. And he have cuts all over his body.”

  “Stay on the line, please, ma’am. You going to hear me talking to someone else. I’m dispatching them to come and get you.”

  “All right.” Fuck, what was the name of this beach? How was I going to direct them?

  I heard the dispatcher talking, and the crackly voice of a man responding via some kind of machine. She told them which phone my call had come from. Of course! They could trace us that way. I breathed a little easier. Crackle-crackle, said the other voice.

  “Ma’am?” The dispatcher was back on the line.

  “I’m here.”

  “The Dolorosse paramedics are on their way.”

  “Yes, I know them.” It’s them had answered my call when I found Dadda on Thursday.

  “Is the child with you?”

  “No, he’s where I found him, over near the end of the beach. Somebody’s with him.”

  “Which end of the beach, ma’am? Northeast or southwest?”

  My mind went blank. “I can’t… I don’t…”

  “Ma’am, take a deep breath. They know the island good. They will find him. Any landmarks where he is?”

  “Ahm…yes. A big, flat rock. About waist height. Wide enough for somebody to fall aslee…the mangroves!” Only one end of the beach had mangroves.

  “He’s near the end where the mangroves are? By a big, flat rock about waist high?”

  “Yes.” At least part of my brain was working.

  “All right. I will tell the paramedics that. Hold again, please.” I heard her talking to the paramedics. Then, from the road I couldn’t see because of the wall of sea grapes, came the wahwah of the ambulance going by, and the popcorn sound of tyres on gravel. They were going the right way.

  The dispatcher came back on the line. “They going to reach in another minute,” she said.

  “Okay. Thank you—”

  “No, don’t hang up!”

  “But I have to go back to him!”

  “Please stay in telephone contact with me until Jerry and Pam-

  ela tell me they find him.”

  “You right. That make sense.”

  “You doing good.” Her voice had gentled. “That little boy is lucky you found him.”

  “Heh. I guess sometimes when you find Calamity, it’s a good thing.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Never mind. They reach yet?”

  “Not quite…” The crackle of the radio call interrupted her. I wished I could understand what they were saying.

  “They have located the patient, ma’am. They want me to tell you that from the racket he’s making, his lungs are probably fine.”

  I managed to laugh a little. Now that I knew the child was getting help, reaction was setting in. My whole body shook. My sunburned face and leg were screaming at me.

  “There’s a Coast Guard speedboat waiting at the dock to take him to hospital.”

  “Already?”

  “Two minutes three seconds from Cayaba to Dolorosse,” she said proudly. “You could go back now.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.” I hung up the phone and began the walk back. The drums inside my head had changed to a chorus of gongs. Two minutes, three seconds. Took almost half hour by waterbus. I stopped to wait for a bout of the spins to pass, then kept walking.

  When I reached back to the little boy, the two paramedics were kneeling beside him in the sand. They had put some kind of contraption under him; like a slotted spoon with no handle. He had a hard plastic collar around his neck. The man who had helped us—Hector?—was holding the boy’s head in his two hands, keeping it still. Everybody was wearing blue rubber gloves. The boy looked so frightened! “It’s all right, small one,” said Mr. Goonan. “Everything going to be all right.” He had long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Why a perfectly good-looking man would go and do that kind of stupidness?

  Jerry looked up and saw me. “Hey, Miz L.”

  “He hurt bad?” I asked. “His neck?”

  “The collar, you mean? Just a precaution. Pam, hand me the stethoscope there, nuh?”

  The child, sobbing, said something. I didn’t recognise the language.

  Pamela got the stethoscope out of the black doctor bag sitting on the sand and handed it to Jerry. She looked off. Stone-faced, like jumbie walking on her grave. Pam was a strapping red woman with light brown skin. Not this morning, though. Her face was yellow, bloodless.

  Jerry listened to the boy’s chest, handed the stethoscope back to Pamela. “You check his pulse yet?” he asked her.

  “Sorry.” With two fingers, she touched the boy’s wrist like she was touching a whip snake. “You want me to check his pupils, too?”

  “No. Nothing wrong with them. Small and reactive. Miz L., you the one who found him, right?”

  I told him what had happened. As I talked to him, he put his hands around the child’s hips, pressed his thumbs towards each other. He started working his way down the child’s good leg. “Hector, you okay there?” he asked.

  “Doing fine.”

  Pamela said, “Pulse is regular and full at 115, BP 94/80, resps 24, SpO2 100 percent. You want the monitor on?”

  “Nah. We can do that later. Either of you know this boy? You ever see him around the island?”

  I said no. Hector told them he wasn’t from Dolorosse. Pamela asked, “Either of you recognise what language he speaking?”

  Jerry sighed, gave her a hard look. “I recognise it. I don’t understand it, but I hear it before. He don’t have aphasia.”

  Pamela pressed her lips together. She didn’t reply. Jerry was feeling the thigh of the boy’s damaged leg now. “You say he was unconscious when you found him?” he asked me. “When he woke up, he vomited?”

  “No, but I di… I don’t think so. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  Jerry was close to the boy’
s knee. The child got agitated. He was complaining, saying the same words over and over. Jerry said, “Hector, most likely I’ll hurt him when I touch his lower leg. Make sure you don’t let his head move.”

  “All right.”

  “I going to work as fast as I can. Miz L., I need you to hold his torso for me.”

  “You sure you don’t want Pamela to do it?”

  “No. You the one who found him. He might remember that. And the two of you keep talking to him, all right? Look in his eyes and reassure him. Say anything you want; look like he can’t understand you anyway. But keep your tone of voice calm and soothing.”

  “All right.” I moved in to brace the child’s torso. I smiled at him. He stared at me, took a shivering breath. His eyes flickered. I said sweetly, “You having a rassclaat of a morning, nuh true? Poor babbins.”

  Hector’s startled eyes met mine. I shrugged one shoulder. He smiled.

  Suddenly the boy screamed, tried to arch his back. I held him.

  “I nearly finish,” Jerry told us. “Allyou doing good.”

  The child screamed again, then burst into tears. “Look at me,” I said. “Look.” He did, his eyes wild and clouded. I sang,

  Jane and Louisa will soon come home,

  Soon come home, soon come home.

  Hector joined in with me:

  Jane and Louisa will soon come home,

  Into this beautiful garden.

  The boy’s sobbing trailed into whimpering. Hector went right into

  Mosquito one, mosquito two,

  Mosquito jump in a hot callaloo.

  I made a kissy face at the child. “Old Hector’s so silly, nuh true?” I cooed. “Everbody know it’s ‘mosquito jump in the old man’s shoe.’???”

  Hector snorted.

  “All right, I finish,” Jerry told us. “Keep holding him, though. That will help him stay calm. Pam, look like a tib fracture. He got good sensation in the toes, good cap refill. You want to do the splint?”

  Silence.