It was hard to explain what he felt for his grandmother and his new life in her home. He knew that things were better here. Her house was spotless. For breakfast there was fish and corn porridge or flour pap instead of Frosties with Nido. They went to St. George’s Anglican Church on Sundays. She filled a bath for him every evening, and with a rough cloth and a bar of Ivory soap she scrubbed him, a task she completed with an unceremonious physicality bereft of gentleness and harshness alike. He was required to make his bed each morning and read a psalm each evening, and even though he did not enjoy doing these things, he could feel the goodness of them.

At his mother’s house he did not have a proper bedtime. Often, she went out at night, and he stayed up, snacking on crisps and pitching marbles on the floor until the house grew dark and he dropped off to sleep. Sometimes he woke in the night to voices and unfamiliar laughter. He would stumble into the kitchen to find his mother and a few others sitting around the kitchen table with the kerosene lamp with the blue base at its center, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes whose smoke tickled his nostrils with its strange funk. “Come here, Big Man,” Vaughn would say if he was there. Clive would climb into his lap. “Thirsty?” Vaughn asked him once. Clive nodded. Vaughn handed him his glass. “Just a little sip, Big Man,” he said. Clive sputtered as the brown liquid burned down his throat. Vaughn clapped and laughed and patted him on the head. “Look at you, life of the party.”

Yet sometimes he ached for his mother’s house. He missed the way she kissed his fingers, one by one. Even when she’d been gone weeks, months, years, his fingertips still prickled with her love and her leaving. He missed the flowers from their yard that she picked and tucked into her hair; sometimes at night when she wasn’t around he went out into the yard in the moonlight and touched the flowers and imagined he was touching her. He missed going to the harbor with her at Christmastime, when the boat from Saint Croix brought ice to the island; on the pier, she would hold him up high above the crowd and he would watch as a man threw salt crystals into a machine, turned a crank, and churned out ice cream.

On Sunday evenings, nearly everyone in Bendy Harbour gathered at the home of the only family in the village with a generator and a television. They turned the television so that it faced the yard, and everyone sat outside together to watch. Usually he and his mother did not join their neighbors, so on Sunday nights Clive sat at home knowing everyone else was together without him. But once in a while they went, and he sat on his mother’s lap among all the people he had ever known and had never not known as the sun went down. They watched Rawhide and The Wild Wild West, cheered as Andre the Giant took on Killer Khan or Kamala. When the generator wound down for the night, someone would light a lamp, and the stories would begin. This was what Clive missed most: drifting to sleep in his mother’s arms as voices that were as familiar to him as his own skin conjured faraway, long-ago worlds.

There were stories about the men who had left the island at the beginning of the century and sailed to the Dominican Republic aboard the schooner Lady Ann to cut cane, or to Trinidad to work in the oil refineries, about fishermen and sailors and their trips to Aruba and Cuba and Cura?ao and the things they had seen—the port of Santo Domingo, the club Sans Souci and the Malecón in Havana. There was the story of a cane cutter who came upon a beautiful woman one night along a desolate stretch of road. The next thing he knew, he was waking up beneath a silk-cotton tree in the forest in broad daylight. His shoes were gone—his feet were caked in dirt and blood. When he finally found his way to a road, he discovered he had traveled some twenty kilometers from where he had been walking the night before—he had crossed mountains and rivers but remembered nothing.

There were stories about the Lady Ann—how when Jonathan Bell’s great-grandfather sailed the schooner back from Santo Domingo to see his dying father, it made the journey a day faster than ever before and he arrived just in time to kiss his father goodbye; of the salt she transported to Trinidad, and how, after the barrels had been unloaded, the deck glittered with fine white crystals like stars. There were stories about salt, how during the reaping months it was not uncommon to pull a cake heavier than a small child from the Thomasvale Pond. There was the story of Harlan Ghaut, who was walking the Old Vale Road past the salt pond when he saw a finned woman sunning herself on the rocks, or so he claimed. Harlan returned to the spot every day, but he never saw her again, until he returned late one night and found her perched on the rock, opening her fin and unfurling two human feet. Twenty years later, Harlan was sitting in his apartment in London watching television when this very same mermaid flashed across the screen.

There were stories about Janet and Alice and Carla and Camille, the great storms that had leveled the island before Clive was born—how roofs lifted off houses and people looked up from their beds into the skies of heaven, how cars spun like bottles in the streets, how the wind stripped houses clean of their paint, and how the paint, carried on gale winds, could cut you up like glass. The sinking of the Lady Ann in Britannia Bay.

Then there was the story Clive loved best, the one he begged his mother to tell as she tucked him in, about a long-haired woman with hooves for feet who lived on Faraway Cay.

“Is she real?” Clive would ask.

“For true. Your Great-Aunt Ruth got lured away by she. Poof. Vanish like so.”

(“Ha!” his grandmother snorted when he asked if she believed Ruth had been taken by the woman on Faraway Cay. “I believe your auntie had she reasons to get lost; that’s what I believe.”) His grandmother did not tell stories. With her, the world was just itself.

His mother had been gone less than a year when the island’s first ice plant opened. You could buy a twenty-kilo block of it; men churned ice cream and shaved ice on the pier year-round. You no longer had to wait for the boat from Saint Croix at Christmastime, and you quickly forgot what a wonder it had once been to sit on the pier, your feet dangling over the flickering sea, and taste the coldness of ice cream while the sun beat hot on your shoulders. Not long after that, electricity came to the island’s villages. Soon, lots of people had televisions and the gatherings and the stories ceased. Next the telephone wires went up. In no time, Mayfair Road was paved, and then Investiture Boulevard, and soon all the streets in the Basin. Then the resorts came, and with them the tourists, and everything changed.

And so, for Clive, the sleepy, magical feeling of childhood was inextricably bound up with the island as it was before—with the smell of kerosene and the sounds of stories in the dark—which were, in turn, bound up with his mother. And as the years passed without her she became, like his father, a disquieting emptiness right at the center of him where he thought there should have been sadness.

HORATIO BYRD Primary was three times the size of Bendy Harbour Primary, where Clive had attended first grade. It was a low, horseshoe-shaped concrete building painted white with blue trim. On the inside of the horseshoe, children ran and shrieked across the packed-dirt schoolyard. Clive tugged at the collar of his polo.

“Stop that,” his grandmother said.

He didn’t know how she saw—she wasn’t even looking at him. He stopped.

“Go on,” she said.

He took a few shuffling steps forward. When he turned to look back at her, she was already halfway across the yard. He watched as she strode in her black shoes through the gate and out of sight.

The classroom was not so different from the first-grade room at Bendy Harbour. The long wooden tables were the same. The girls wore the same jumpers and blouses, only here they were maroon and pink instead of green and white. The boys all wore pink polos and maroon trousers like him, though the other boys did not have their shirts buttoned to the top. He wanted to loosen his but didn’t dare. Somehow, his grandmother would know. On the wall above the blackboard there was even the same illustrated alphabet: a balloon for B, a goat for G, an igloo for I, and, his favorite, a mermaid for M. He looked at the familiar picture, the pink and green scales of the mermaid’s tail, her hair swirling around her head in curlicues, and felt calm.

The teacher, a tall, kind-faced woman named Miss Forsyth, took attendance.

“Annmarie Bell.”

“Present.”

“Don Claxton.”

“Present.”

“Damien Fleming.”

“Present.”

As she made her way steadily and inexorably through the alphabet, his mouth grew dry until it stuck together, teeth to tongue to roof.

“Edwin Hastie.”

Silence.

“Edwin Hastie?”

A boy in the last row shot up as if he’d just jolted awake. “Yes!” Everybody tittered.

“Yes what, Mr. Hastie?”

“Yes, I be present.”

“I am present.”

“I hope so, Miss Forsyth. You is our teacher.”

The class broke into laughter. Clive laughed, too, though his was a nervous laughter; his turn was still coming.

“Sara Lycott,” Miss Forsyth said, cutting off the ruckus like thwacking a weed with a scythe.

“Present, Miss Forsyth.”

“Daphne Nelsen.”

“Present.”

“Desmond Phillips.”

“Present.”

“Ron Rawlins.”

“Present.”

“Clive Richardson.”

He opened his mouth, but his throat wrung itself up. His ears went hot, as if pricked by bees.

“P-p-p-”

Thirty pairs of eyes converged on him.