Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,40
so to Junior, up in my bedroom. We’re on video chat, which we’ve started to do. It’s pretty late but Ma is at work and I don’t know where Ravi is, so it feels safe to talk to him.
He’s wearing a bright blue T-shirt and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He looks so much like Dad, way more than me. I don’t know what he was talking about with my fight video.
Junior and his uncle on his mom’s side run Dad’s garage now, in Trinidad. After a while of talking about that and his plans to go to university in the fall, I ask Junior about the time about a year ago when Dad was attacked.
“Everyone was gone from the garage for the night and Dad was just coming out from upstairs—”
“Upstairs?”
“Yeah, there’s an apartment above the garage.”
“So he was on the second floor?” I hadn’t heard that part. I thought he was attacked right outside the garage.
“Yeah. The man was trying to drag him down the stairs to the car, but Dad had a wrench on him and got in a few knocks. Still, he said he almost fell down those concrete steps and broke his neck. We went to the hospital with him, me and Mom. The man busted up his eye real good, but he wasn’t getting in nobody’s car. They kidnap you like that down here, get your family to pay the money to get you back. Sometimes they pay the money and you don’t come back.”
“So he was at the top of the stairs when he was attacked? Why didn’t the attacker wait until he got down the stairs?”
Junior shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“What did Dad say about it?”
“He didn’t say anything. But he was real careful after that. He thought they would go after me or Mommy next, but they never did. Everybody knows everybody in this place. It’s hard if you not from around here to get away with anything. Only time anybody free up is at Carnival.”
It doesn’t make sense that someone would try to attack him from the top of the stairs, right? Not when you could fall so easily. I don’t want to think this, I really don’t, but what if that was the whole reason for the attack? Columbus said that you wouldn’t get the insurance money if someone died during a murder. But you would if it was an accident.
Like a fall down some concrete steps.
I’m so lost in thought that it takes me a moment to realize that Junior is still talking about Carnival, about J’ouvert last year and how much fun it was. “If you want to come back for Carnival next year, I’ll take you. My friends have a band, so we can get a costume and everything for you if you want. You ever play Mas in Toronto?”
Me, play masquerade in bright, bejewelled underwear? There’s a Caribbean festival in Toronto every summer, but you’ll never catch me there. I shake my head, but I say I’ll think about it anyway.
Then something unexpected happens.
His mother comes in. Junior doesn’t look embarrassed or hide or anything. He turns the screen toward her so that she can see me. “Is that Trisha?” she asks.
I wave at her. She looks so different from that time she came to the house after Dad’s funeral, when her hair was all wild and she looked like she was going mad with grief. Now, she seems…really, really nice. She’s got this kind, open face. I can almost read every thought on it. If you’ve ever summoned up an image of a perfect wife from Trinidad, she would be it.
Right now, Dad’s perfect wife is staring at my neck. “Soucouyant biting you,” she says.
“What?”
“Soucouyant come at night, you know? Shed she skin, turn into a vampire and bite people.” She points to my throat, where the base of my neck meets my collarbone. There are some scratches there that have scarred in a way that almost look like freckles. One of them is even fresh.
I don’t remember how I got these scratches but they must have been from training. “But that’s…that’s a story.”
“Ma, stop it,” Junior says. He grins and it’s like watching Dad. That’s why they call him Junior, I guess. He’s a little Dad, everyone’s pride and joy. That smile and the way his eyes crinkle when he does it. Dad didn’t smile like that often toward the end because he and Mom were complicated. But seeing how happy my