More than two hours passed before the light in Clive’s window finally went off. A few minutes later, the front door opened and he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He walked first to the bodega a few blocks away. He was inside for just a minute and emerged empty-handed. We headed south on New York Avenue, passing block after block of red-brick midrise apartment buildings, interrupted occasionally by a blip of row houses. Clive turned onto Nostrand at Avenue H. I expected him to loop back up after a few blocks as he often did, perhaps to stroll the lawns and brickery of Brooklyn College and then take Flatbush back to Farragut back to New York. But he continued south. We passed Avenues I, J, and K. At Avenue L we briefly left the city behind and entered a mirage-like stretch of Japanese car service centers—Acura, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai—which we exited to find ourselves deep in Jewish Midwood. Men draped in prayer shawls sporting enormous fur hats, girls in long dark dresses and black loafers crossing streets blanched white with salt. It was midafternoon. She was lying on the beach, sipping a Diet Coke in the sun. I wanted her to play with me, but I didn’t want to annoy her, so I didn’t ask, I waited. My, you a patient child.

We walked through Sheepshead Bay on Avenue U, then took Coney Island Avenue down into Brighton Beach. While the neighborhoods we traveled through each had their differentiating features—Hebrew giving way to Cyrillic on shop signs, Kosher then Georgian then Russian bakeries—it was the landscape’s repetitions that began to take hold of me, the endless cycling of deli, slice joint, Key Foods, MetroPCS, and the thousands of thousands of brick apartment buildings. The farther we walked, the more disoriented I became by the on and on and on of the borough, by its vast peripheries and the impossible number of people living their lives out past anyplace I had ever wondered about. We passed Avenues X, Y, Z. Neptune. We had been walking for nearly two hours. It seemed the brick apartment buildings would go on forever, and when we turned onto Oriental Boulevard and, after a few more minutes, found ourselves standing on the sand of what I now know to be Manhattan Beach, the sight of the ocean stretching before me was like stepping into a dream. I clung to the perimeter of the beach while Clive walked forward. The sand was a gray crescent, the sea a sheet of shale. A man in a parka sat on a bench, tossing shards of bread to the gulls. The sun was already beginning to go down. We were in the water, one last swim before the flight home the next day. The salt water stung then soothed the bites on my legs. Alison dove into the waves, surfacing and disappearing again and again. Clive stood at the water’s edge for a long time, staring out at the ocean.

Before he turned to go, he pulled something from the pocket of his jacket. From where I stood, it took some squinting to discern that it was a chocolate bar, which must be what he’d purchased at the bodega. He removed his gloves and unwrapped it. The sun set without fanfare, its weak light spilling briefly and colorlessly across the clouds. Clive ate the chocolate bar slowly, never turning from the water. Then he crumpled the wrapper, stuffed it in his pocket, and headed home.

How did I pick Saint X? Easy. I knew not a soul there and not a soul knew me. I had two suitcases and Sara. She was four months old, a scrawny babe with a head of dewy curls and an aroma like boiling milk turning to caramel. I wore the prettiest thing I owned, my floral dress and ivory pumps. The pumps had cut up my feet before Saint Kitts was even out of view, but so what? They would heal somewhere else, and that was all that mattered. I was seventeen.

When we debarked at Bendy Harbour, a gentleman in a linen suit offered to help me with my luggage. When he asked my name, I told him I was Agatha Lycott, which wasn’t true. All my life I had been Agatha Hodge, but over my dead body would I be her here, too. Lycott was the surname of a girl in the form above me at school. I always thought it elegant, the sort of name that, of course, belongs to somebody else. From that day forward it was mine and, above all, Sara’s. To anyone who asked, I told the story I had dreamed up awake and alone and growing bigger in the dark in my father’s house, about how my husband, a government minister, had died in a tragic automobile accident just weeks before our daughter’s birth. To make the story more convincing I told everyone I was twenty-four, though I was such a small thing I could more easily have passed for twelve.

But this one’s cousin on Saint Kitts knew that one’s friend on Saint X, and so on. I had been on the island less than a month the first time I told my story and was met with suspicion rather than compassion. The rumors trailed me even here, to this sand-and-rock speck where they make their curry with vulgar quantities of allspice and where not even the teachers speak properly.

You can never start over. They will not permit it, neither the ones who shun you nor the ones who are kind to you so they may lord their kindness over you. In the end they are all after the same thing, all so very curious to know the truth about the origins of the daughter of that skinny little Kittitian sket. I will not give them the satisfaction, though the truth would make them beg for my forgiveness. I will carry the secret of Sara’s paternity to my grave.

Before Sara was born, I imagined that my love for my child would be a sweet blooming inside of me. I was desperate to have someone to love this way, desperate for love to swoop in and soften my sharp edges. But there are other kinds of love. What I got instead was a love that filled and terrified me, a love I knew as intimately as my own body; it was my mother’s love for me, a thing I never, ever wanted.

When Sara told me she was pregnant, I knew I had been na?ve to think a new name would be enough to put an end to the passing down of this broken mother’s love. I never should have let her leave the house so angry that day, the day she brought Clive Richardson home. “Wait! Don’t go! Sara, I love you. Sara, forgive me. Sara, my child.”

At night, I plead into the darkness, hoping with the force of my love to undo the past so she may begin again.

But answer me this: If I’m such a sket, then why have I been lonely every day of my life?

SNOW

AFTER THEY FOUND THE GIRL, Clive became untouchable. When he was released from prison he tried to return to his life, but Don and Des closed ranks. Even Arthur wouldn’t touch him. He couldn’t find work, not cutting grass, not even scrubbing toilets at Papa Mango’s. He and Edwin kept their distance from one another. As far as he knew, Edwin had also been shut out of polite society, but it was different for him. He hadn’t been to prison, for one thing. He didn’t have a family to support, for another.

For weeks after his release, Clive went to Sara’s house and begged to see his son. But Agatha wouldn’t let him past the front door. Finally, one day, he waited down the road until he saw Agatha go out. Then he went up the front walkway. “Please, Sara! Let me talk to you!” he shouted as he pounded on the door. He didn’t care who saw.

The door swung open. “Hush,” Sara scolded. “You’ll wake him.”

He told her everything he had planned during his time in Her Majesty’s Prison. He was sorry. He would do whatever it took to make it up to her. He would quit drinking and smoking. He had messed up and he knew it, but he would fix it.

“And what kind of mum would I be if I let you into my boy’s life after this mess?”

“But I’m innocent! I swear it! Don’t you believe me, Sara?”

“It doesn’t matter what you are,” she snapped. “Innocent, guilty, can’t you see? It’s all spoiled.”

“I know it must seem that way right now. But with time, maybe—”

She shook her head. She had her hand on the door, ready to close it.

“Please,” he begged.

She paused. She smiled a small, sad smile. “You know, I think you’re the only person who was ever really sweet to me,” she said. Then she closed the door.

GROWING UP, Clive had known more than a few people who had returned to the island from abroad, and it was from them, long before he ever thought their stories would be relevant to his own life, that he learned what it meant to leave home. Almost all of these people had gone either to New York or London, though he knew a few who’d gone elsewhere—to Glasgow, Birmingham, Toronto, Miami. A few years before he left, a boy who’d been three forms above him at Everett Lyle Secondary flew off to Houston, but last Clive heard he, too, had washed up in New York.

For most of his childhood, New York and London were roughly interchangeable to Clive, big, gleaming cities, more Dominicans and Haitians in New York, more Jamaicans in London. But when Keithley returned from London with his wife and the baby boy who was destined to die on the soccer pitch behind Horatio Byrd, he began to understand that the people who returned from New York and those who returned from London had changed in distinct ways. Though Keithley had left home determined never to return, he appeared relieved to be back, and this seemed the case for many people returned from London. It was true they had failed to do what they had set out to do, to build a big life away. But in London it had become plain that this plan was na?ve and misguided. The city had taught them that the big life was nothing but the delusion of a person from nowhere who didn’t know any better. They rarely spoke of their time away.