LITMIR.BIZ

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started collecting in my gut and wanted to come out of my mouth as something nasty, like telling Lem I had more fun by myself than I ever did with him. Wanted to shoot the sourness at Lionel, too, embarrass him about the way he was always running to get messed up with any girl at all set foot on this island from somewhere else. Couldn’t even be bothered with Christine and her tune. I took a sip of water and tried to shut off the trickle of meanness.

      “Man, Lem,” I said. “We haven’t even been out together in a month.”

      He looked at me for a long time. “Sorry ’bout your pa, anyway,” he said, and he walked away. Lionel was sucking down his beer, his eyebrows raised, whole forehead in a smirk.

      “What?” I demanded, and Lionel shrugged.

      “Nothing. Lem’s a nice guy, that’s all.” The two of them hadn’t ever been close when we were younger, but with Lem on the resort’s garbage crew and Lionel at the dump, they’d worked themselves up some kind of friendship.

      “I’m just so tired of all this. Of everyone.”

      I stared at the glass of water Mr. Ken had put in my hand. A bottle broke behind me, and Christine seemed to laugh and shriek at the same time. Then her voice and Lionel’s started braiding together until I couldn’t make out anything they were saying, but the sounds were there, just nudging against my ears but not going in. Lots of shuffling behind me, too, like everyone had started dancing or moving in some game, but I just kept staring at my own hands.

      When I looked up the room seemed shadowy, like a smudgy black-and-white photocopy of itself. Everyone was mulling about more slo-wly, transparent, as if I could see them but through them, only the bottoms of their feet looking heavy and solid. Everyone looking like glass but their feet lined with iron. I stopped hearing the sounds of the conversations in the room and just heard a white-noise sound like the wind or the waves coming in. Like none of this was real, but there was something just beyond. Just under us. Not like a bogeyman either, but something calling me to come see. Like I would come to feel about my dad’s gravestone: calling me even if the ground it marked was full of dirt, empty of him.

      “I’m going home.”

      Whatever Lionel said in response sounded too far away.

      But I didn’t go home. I’d left both machetes at the bar with Lionel, and it was dark out, but I found myself pushing through the bushes, arms raised up, the way I’d seen tourists wade deeper into the pool, shuddering at the chill.

      I was trying to follow the stone walls again through the tangled brush that clawed and scraped and twined and wrapped and pricked and caught. The stone walls were meant to keep the cattle in, not the slaves. That was done in other ways. The oval shoreline looped around us all.

      It kept me in, too. A year ago I’d been planning to finally get off the island, looking into art history at the university, but then Troy went off, and now Dad was gone, and with all of it there was no way I could leave Mother. I’d never be going. Just walking the oval my whole life. (Always ovals, never perfect circles. Circles smooth and calm; ovals warped by some force. Those months with Lem he was shaving his head smooth, and my hands would absentmindedly run over and over the oval of it. While his fingers scrambled, and when he found the right spot, slowed and stayed, until my mind burst in shards of light. Now my brain was already different, held a thickness.)

      No going off the island for me. Going inland, back in time, instead. These stones my ancestors—and almost everyone’s ancestors on this island—had quarried and carried and packed in place, like planting gravestones. (Each of them known as Cruffey’s soand-so: the same seven letters painted on Mr. Harper’s old rickety boat, the same surname so many on this island—this Cruffey Island—had, including my own mother’s family.)

      That first night inland—more than a year ago—I thought the wall ruins would keep me on a path. I ended up lost in the dark, cowering, sweeping fire ants from my ankles and then from my hands and cursing myself for being dumb enough to try to go in without the right supplies, without even a flashlight. Imagined them telling Mother they found me, and where, both stupid and dead, so soon after Dad’s heart attack. I’d have to wait until the sun came up to move or risk getting in deeper. Crouched until the feeling in my ankles disappeared. Thought about Mr. Harper’s half-leg. Anyone ever ask what happened to it, folks would nod up at the hump of the inland and say nothing but Stones.

      I didn’t know how long it’d been when all of a sudden I heard a car going by and realized, like a fool, I wasn’t all that far off the road after all. I ended up crawling toward the sound until I felt the pavement beneath my hands and pulled myself up to walk along the road. A bloody, bitten mess.

      When I finally got home, deep in the night, I went through the motions my body had always known. Skipped the broken step; pulled the doorknob up just so to make the key catch; rattled it four times before turning all the way; turned back just a tick and heard the tiny click. Did it all without waking Mother. But my body felt different, heavier.

      After that night I went up only if I could make it back out before the sun went down. But I went up as often as I could, most days for a year. Always had Dad’s machete by my side; after that night at Thiflae, Lionel had returned it to its place with the other tools in our shed. I started in the same place every time—by the low, stooped tree—so I could keep working on the trail I was making, and I hid the machete far enough in no one else would find it. Took it back to Dad’s old shed when it needed sharpening. Mother must’ve thought how much I was missing him, with how often I was in that shed, his old mill file in my hand going up and down the blade.

       Chapter Two

      Furnace Island: I sneered every time I walked under the resort sign, tying my apron strings at the last possible second before the managers considered me “at work” on their island: this landscaped bite of our oval that existed one hour ahead of the rest of us so that some tourists wouldn’t have to adjust quite as much to the different time zone. Only advantage was I got off work one hour before Mother expected me: one hour to trek inland. Lionel laughed each time he saw me in the evening: “Out of the furnace, into the—what’s worse than a furnace?” Guessed most folks I knew would think the inland was worse, but no one knew I went up there.

      My ID tag said nothing but Maid. But it was also my job to be silent and visible only when the tourists wanted to see me. “At work” meant not just a place or time. A being, a not being.

      Mother would scoff: “Life is work, Myrna.” Mother in the yard tending the garden. Mother struggling up from tending the garden. Mother in the kitchen fixing meals with her rewards from the garden. Doing the wash for Miss Patrice in exchange for some credit at the store. Packing up what we didn’t use from the garden and carrying a box on her hip around to Bayard’s house, where he’d trade for meat and milk. Mother drying the sisal rope in the dirt alongside the house. Braiding it once it was dry. Selling lengths of that rope at the Straw Market, to tourists only, since everyone else around here knew the rope wasn’t so strong now that her hands were older. Mother trawling the beach from the sun’s first streak in the sky until her stomach was too empty to keep on, eyes cast down for unbroken shells the tourists might buy. Walking home with her skirt pulled into a bowl full of shells, hands raw. After eating a little, Mother flagging friends’ cars on the road to drop her at a different stretch of beach where another harvest of shells awaited. Mother on her knees washing out shells in a metal tub. D-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk, d-thonk as they hit the sides. This, for hours, before any shells we’d clean out for dinner. Her knees stiff as bark by nightfall. Mother walking the road, back and forth, back and forth, seeking out the most vibrant buds that would open the next morning. Standing outside the resort’s snack bar area, colorful island weeds clutched in her hands and propped in jars at her feet. A cardboard sign resting against her legs: Tourists: Buy Native Island Wildflowers for 50 cents a bunch. U.S. coins and other OK. Mother at work.

      But never setting foot inside the resort to work, I reminded myself—reassured myself—each time I arrived at the gate.

      The

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