brother is, how sweet his mom seems…I wonder why Dad ever came up here to mess with me and Ma.
If he hadn’t, he’d still be alive.
Junior’s mom waves goodbye to me and leaves the room. Junior is still smiling. “You know what you have to do now, right?”
I pull up the neck of my hoodie a little and try to hide the marks. Maybe I got them clinching? “What?”
“You have to put a line of salt down by your door so the soucouyant has to stop and count each grain. Then she can’t get back to her skin before the morning comes and she dies.”
“I heard you have to find the skin and put it in salt.” Did I read that in the soucouyant book or did I hear it in the roti shop?
“What? No. Trust me, I’m an expert.” He says it in this braggadocious way, but I can tell he’s joking. It’s another part of my brother that I file away. How easily he laughs and jokes around.
“Your mom seems nice.”
He gets shy all of a sudden. “Yeah, she alright.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About Dad. And how you couldn’t come to the service.”
“We didn’t find out until the day before. Man had two families. Nothing to be sorry about, really. Ma had a prayers for him here. I tried to call the phone to invite you, but it was turned off.”
Hindu prayers after someone’s death isn’t the same as a funeral, giving last rites to a body. It should have been here, for him. He should have been in Trinidad with these people who lived with him and loved him, instead of in Toronto with me and Ma. What was he doing with us, anyway, when he had Junior and his wife back home? It must have been some voodoo Ma put on him. Whether she wanted to or not.
“You gonna come and visit, right?”
I lift my shoulder and let it fall back. “I don’t know.”
“I understand,” says Junior, this new brother of mine. “Trinidad ain’t for everybody. When was the last time you came home?”
“When I was a kid. I barely remember it at all. It just felt that I didn’t belong there.”
He laughs. “You don’t have to belong to visit your brother.”
Now I’m laughing, too, even though I don’t know why. There’s something easy there, an easiness of the people, of life—
When you’re not busy getting kidnapped for ransom or murdered by gangsters or worn straight down to the bone by corrupt politicians.
—but it’s not mine. Easy doesn’t suit me particularly well, I don’t think. But I laugh with him anyway because he’s my brother and, right now, maybe I don’t feel so alone.
Junior goes quiet for a moment. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“What really happened that night?”
I know which night he’s talking about, but I still say it. “The night Dad died? It was raining. And the car…”
And I hear something. Something I shouldn’t. A footstep at the door.
I look up and see Ma’s face, staring at me from the hallway. She’s shocked. More than that, she’s angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so mad. She turns and leaves, her footsteps padding down the stairs. I don’t hear them like I usually do because somehow, somewhere, she learned how to sneak around a lot better.
And I’m scared, because she wasn’t supposed to hear me on the phone, talking about Dad.
Especially not talking to my brother about him.
twenty-four
Because I’m a coward and I don’t want to face Ma yet, I run a bath and pour some Epsom salt in to help with my sore muscles. Then look at the bag of salt and remember what Junior said. It sounds insane. If I was a mythical demon creature, I’d try to have a less common weakness. Like something you can’t buy at any grocery store, maybe?
Eventually, after my bath, I work up the courage to go downstairs. Ma’s on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the corner of the room. When she sees me in the doorway, she gets to her feet and pulls the latex gloves from her hands. “Come here.”
Like a zombie, I do. I stand in front of her with my hands curled into fists.
“Who were you talking to?” she says, her voice so quiet I almost want to lean in to hear her better. But even I know this is a bad idea.
“A friend.” I make this sound as breezy as I can, but I can tell right