When you come from a place where the sun is always shining, no one expects you to be familiar with cold darkness. All you know is unrelenting yellow pouring over the sloping hills and punishing heat that cooks the gleaming marl-rubble streets beside your wooden house. When a Rasta man makes his way up the hill, gunslingers crunching against the marl, you decide you agree with the lyrics blasting from the boom box perched on his bare, sweaty shoulder. You set your elbow on the window sill and hum along, concluding that Chronixx and Protoje are right. You do like to live in the West Indies. You do enjoy the cool breeze and the warbling, bright-breasted birds. The roar of the foamy emerald waves crashing against the scorching shore still arouses your childhood nostalgia of church picnics on the beach.
But when you live in the hills, far from the tourist-studded sea, in this room, your waving, sunlit drapes mean nothing. You can’t think of the sea when your flaccid breasts and stretch-marked belly, still sadly sagging from childbirth, act as an affront to a polka dot bikini. With your matchbox-sized bedroom and your sky-high bills, no matter how much you squint, all you see is darkness. It’s only a matter of time before you take matters into your own hands. You make something for yourself.
Eunoia.
A word you’d swallowed whole from the moment it first sallied across the yellowed, dog-eared novel you’d read over and over while waiting for your husband to come home.
Eunoia - (n) A happy mental state.
You chew this meaning like cud, until the words sound funny in your head and grind up so fine that they become pointless. You want to believe, but you don’t get to wear the amber lenses that outsiders know so well. You don’t get powdered oceans with the soothing release of waves. You must make do with the whir of the Lasko standing fan in your face as you rock each boy, on the old wooden chair, year after year, until you all escape the throes of infancy.
It is that white noise that comes up from the ocean, that sound that this fan impersonates. It has come to live with you on this little island of your own, like a lullaby sung by a hoarse grandmother. That familiar white noise keeps whistling through your head, right up to this moment when it is interrupted by a wretched cough to the left, a ragged exhale to the right and a frustrated moan ahead of you.
“Go to sleep, Rohan.” You whisper You don’t know if it is desperation in hopes that your youngest won’t wake up. You’re surer that your voice has gone raspy from the scream building on the inside. The one you cannot let out. The one that barely squeaks out of your half-open mouth when you snore for two minutes at night before the baby’s wailing swallows it up. It swallows the scream that you suffocate with a smile, to make the children believe that all is well.
You eventually find out that children are not foolish. Over time, the little oracles read the tension in your neck, the irregular rate of your breathing, the slight tremor in your hands, the darkness of your eyes. They recognise the darkness that the light of their laughter cannot always reach, they acknowledge it like a classmate in a cohort with whom everyone politely refuses to play. They swear it off. It remains because you embrace it, dubbing it some sign of your conviction, to raise them strong enough, to foster in them laughter, to encourage light like fireflies from their bosoms—bright and ubiquitous—out into their clear futures.
Rohan is fidgeting. He is waving the thermometer in the air, the thermometer you spent half the savings on last month. It is an electronic one for accuracy or for whatever the sales assistant talked you into believing this time. It is a must-have. You pray each time that the shrill beep will strike a lucky number, that like a trill of magic it will break his fever. A wand to cancel a curse. But today you will remember that not every expensive thing is useful. Not every gamble pays off. It lands on the ground with a clatter and then a beep. You hope that it isn’t the last one it makes.
“It’s too hot outsiiiiiide.” Rohan bellows as loudly as any six-year-old might after a series of consecutive whines that “mean mommy” will not play with him. After he has sneezed a waterfall on you with a vengeance. After he has thrown two stuffed bears at you in quiet rage that you no longer look at him, the way that you gaze into the bright eyes of the new baby. Without guilt, on a good day, you let baby Stephan’s bubbly gurgles exfoliate your face.
Samuel is still moaning. He usually displays the stoic silence of the eldest child for the others. But now he can only lead by giving in to the pain now ravaging his body. He cannot move. Rohan is now tossing toy trucks at his brother’s seven-year-old frame. Rohan takes one pitiful breath before he finds strength to hurl another toy. The baby coughs again. You collapse, prostrate on the bed, the sweltering sunlight spilling like fresh honey all over your tanned arm. You acquiesce for a moment, wondering if your husband ever intends to return. It’s so bright that you almost miss the vibrating of the cellphone beside you. It remains face down so that your miserable children will stop complaining about the glare that it shoots into their eyes. You decide to answer this once. Surely, the caller must either be in a terrible bind. Not that you are in any position to help them. Thirteen missed calls. Your eyes widen and your heart races. They’re Vincent’s.
“Hello?” You breathe after punching a speed dial.
“Carla, you know I’m flying today. It’s not like you have to pick me up. I’ll get Dorothy to give me a ride. The least you could do is answer the phone. What have you been doing anyway? How are the boys?”
You bite your lip, carefully crafting your response. You’ve seen every hour of their suffocating nights. You have entertained their Roblox obsession. You have fallen asleep while they watched God-knows-what at 2 a.m. Your self-righteous, indignant claim that the TV will never babysit them floated over the sea of laundry in the living room and through the dusty window sills years ago. Your mother would have reminded you to feed them home-cooked meals to help them recover. Instead, the pizza boxes are sprawled on the floor. They jeer at you, as evidence that the boys had happily vetoed cleaning when you became too tired to police them. And too weary to do it yourself. These days you settle for clearing enough Legos, Nerf guns and throw cushions to avoid breaking your leg.
“They’re okay.” You decide. “I will take them out for some air.”
“All right. See you all soon. Dorothy will pick up the boys later and make sure they good, so don’t stay out too long.” His steady voice vanishes with a click.
You know better than to expect a “How are you?” It would be followed up with a “Take them to Dorothy if you’re that tired.” Dorothy is your husband’s sister. She does anything for family. She has four children for a good-for-nothing man who has run off with a high-brown, curly-haired tourist lady from the Virgin Islands. He does not remember his children now, but he is the type to still expect them to bury him after his tourist lady has sucked him dry. Nevertheless, Dorothy is running her legal practice. She is recovering from a back injury. She is always smiling. Her bright, pearl teeth open wide when she laughs, and her rotund breasts shake with humour as she sets her plump arms akimbo for support. So pleasant, everyone says. She is good to your boys.
But you do not want to bother her. You do not want to interrupt her feng shui with your chaos. You cannot keep up with the demands for oxtail soup that trail in with your boys after each visit with Aunt D. She is too full of advice. You do not want to hear Dorothy’s fifteenth angry rant about how silly it is to believe in the coronavirus. How her boys are never ill. How your boys have a little head cold and need some Vicks, Alcolado and a pot of hot water. How ground food—some good dasheen and tania—is all children need to be strong. How if you could mash some plantain and blend it up for the baby, he would not get sick while fighting every day to draw all the life out of your drooping breasts. How a little brown-skin girl like you—come from town side with a little linguistics degree, an office job that pays next to nothing and a ridiculous dream of running a bookshop—just “not sure ’bout life yet”. How if the children came over a little more often, they might pick up some manners like her boys—who score at the top of the class every term. Because boys need a firm hand. And yours are wanting. Don’t mind that there are only four children in each of their classes—that’s how uppity private schools are run, after all. Her boys are a shoo-in for scholarships to help them leave this backward island life behind and admit them to the great gates of the United States. They will do it without their useless father because of their mother.
You do not want to hear about how lucky you are that your husband devotes all his time to earning money on his long business trips to support your children. You do not want to hear her coo when your husband picks up the slack on the rare occasions that you cannot manage the thankless tasks you perform every day. You do not want to hear that you must visit more often and stop being a stranger. You do not want to hear, when you do visit, how much her mahogany centre table costs every time one of your own boys drags the doily off it, after cackling his way out of her kitchen with four of her homemade cookies. You do not have the energy to carry the weight of Dorothy’s glowering judgement. You do not want to bear witness to how easy Dorothy makes things look.
You learned long ago that complaints are for novices. You have learned to leave your limbs on autopilot as you tug a fresh T-shirt over Samuel’s head, or you squeeze Stephan’s blue booties on for the tenth time or beg Rohan to come and brush his teeth because it has been twenty-four hours. And you would certainly take the tantrum over him blowing swampy breath up your nose while clinging to your arm every night. You have learned to cycle through your days listening to the white noise in your head each time someone notices the bags under your eyes and jokes that those late nights with kids come after late nights of pleasure. Each time they whisper that if you enjoy having your legs in the air, then you should prepare to do it again to deal with childbirth.
You dwell in the white noise, each time Rohan screams at you to look at the television to see a cat falling into the tub, then rages that you missed it because you turned too slowly. You meditate there each time a stranger wants to tell you how beautiful your boys are, how much they must look like their father, because they certainly do not look like you. You wonder if it would be so bad if they did. You are gearing up to “stonewall” them upon your departure, your mind like a washing machine is rotating practiced smiles and responses when the inevitable questions and recommendations come.
You are hustling the boys out the door now. You are dreading it but as you gingerly tie the laces of each boy’s sneakers, you prepare yourself for a trip to the polyclinic. You brace yourself to hear Samuel grumble about being too old for PAW Patrol branded shoes and that he hopes his next pair will be more grown up. You wait for Rohan to lament the tightness on his feet. You resent that their next pairs must come from Dorothy, in the barrel in two months, and that Vincent will proudly pay her back. You wait for the tears to come as you stare at the tattered shoes, hoping that their tongues cough up a budget to help you please your children. When responses do not come, you usher the boys into the front of the house.
You almost stomp on the thermometer on your way out. For a moment you consider kicking your two-hundred-dollar investment aside. Your husband will explode when he finds out what you have done. You, who claims to be levelheaded and responsible. Perhaps this purchase is your small cry for help. Perhaps it will result in a quarrel. Perhaps you will both home in on each other’s flaws instead of trying to rectify the stagnant pool you both voluntarily sit in—a helmless, boatless marriage.
He does not know what you are about to do with his children, but you are more afraid of losing a chance to nurse them back to health than you are of Vincent’s brewing reprimands about how you could possibly let his children get this unwell. You hook Stephan’s arm in the crook of your own and yoke the remaining children to your waist and left hand. You then guide the tangled human chain down the dusty street to the bus stop. You keep your thoughts to yourself about the missing car. Your husband had instructed you to leave it with Dorothy until his return because gas was becoming impossible to afford. You glance at your phone before setting off. Dorothy is calling. You ignore it.
You seat the children on the big, old, yellow bus. You go to the doctor. You sit through the litany of complaints and unending exchanges of slaps and whines among the siblings. You grind your teeth as the line, more akin to a crowd before the judgement seat, hardly dwindles in two hours. Eventually, you actually get to the doctor. You gather a prescription and medication. You nod at each heartfelt concern the pediatrician voices for your boys.
“Dehydration,” she mutters with sloping doe eyes, brimming with pity. “They’ll need intravenous treatment. Just some saline.”
You sit through three sets of squirming and screaming. It does not matter that you regale them with your own brave-faced experiences. Nothing will convince your boys to willingly have a needle shoved into their veins. Stephan, of course, does not let his brothers one-up him with tears, although his oral medication went down minutes before.
Throughout the course of the day, you present your trained smile for three versions of the same pointless interrogation—by a lady from church, a girl you used to go to high school with and a woman from the PTA. You distribute two sets of cheese sandwiches accompanied by two apple box juices, shove a bottle of pumped milk into the noisy chasm of Stephan’s mouth, and swallow your spit for lunch. You are on your way back to the bus stop now, counting ten cent pieces to make the fare. You walk slowly to accommodate the loosening, weakened straps of your sandals from one of the Syrian stores in town. The children are obediently hinged upon your pink flamenco skirt tail. They are too tired to do otherwise.
The bus is here. You ask Samuel to hold his baby brother so that you can help Rohan up the steps and into the vehicle. Rohan is squalling about a toy he has forgotten at the doctor’s office and stretching against you like a thin star across the doorway of the bus. Stephan is bawling in Samuel’s arms for what you can only imagine is milk straight from the “bubub” as it cannot be a wet nappy. You have already changed him twice.
Somebody in the background is stressing in a gruff voice that you are moving too slowly. Someone else is murmuring that these single mothers really get themselves in over their heads. The grumbling continues. You do not know when those voices switch from impatience to panic. The white noise is humming, and your thought laundry is spinning faster than you can manage. You are not sure which boy keeps screaming, “Mommy!” The white noise whirs like a hurricane. You are not sure when all the voices join the thought laundry. You are not sure when everything stops.
When you awaken, voices pick up where they have left off. There are overlapping utterances. Noise without meaning. Voices without words. You do not know where you are, but you feel enough biting cold between your legs to know you are in a dress. Perhaps a nightgown? Regardless, it does not belong to you. The bandana you had wrapped your hair in to hide the fact that you had not styled it in weeks is missing. Your thick, messy kinks stick out in every direction.
You try to lift your hand then feel the world forcing it back down. Your head is as dense as stone. At least your eyes are as foggy as they’ve always been. You tense, too tired to cry. You’re faced with the reality that if you die, life will go on without you. The spaces you once filled will be glossed over and lost in the stream of eternity. Nice words will be sung over your head and meaningless remarks will accompany them. And after all that—you cannot afford to die when you simply do not have enough money to bury yourself. If Vincent heard you going on about death, he would roll his eyes and ask you if you must always be this dramatic.
Your eyes clear for a moment to greet those of a man you do not know yet is saying something about being lucky to get you to the emergency room. You think you hear someone saying something about needing to take matters into his own hands because she’s just not as responsible as she needs to be.
“You need to take better care of yourself, Carla. Somebody said they saw you wandering about barefoot with my children on the road. Carla. You going off or what? They soon call the madhouse for you. In fact, I going get Dorothy to call she psychiatrist friend.” You know you hear him this time, but his voice is distant, disembodied. Is he reprimanding you? Is he concerned? Is he simply role playing so that the nurses swoon because somehow this girl snagged such a composed man?
You cannot tell. You cannot protest like you usually do. You are not convinced anyone will listen if you do. You are ready to bet any quantity of money (yes, the money that you don’t have!) that the “somebody” who saw you was Dorothy.
Your lips feel the same way your feet do when you sit on the toilet for too long. Your whole body feels a variation of this. You are not sure if your hands are balled into the fists that you wish them to be. Fists protect you and take tight control of the situation. Fists to hit anyone who dares to separate you from your beloved children. Fists to give you a brief respite, to make you look braver as you lie here beneath the dim, pale luminescence of the buzzing, white ceiling lights. You shudder in this sterile tundra, wishing for a moment for the morning’s sun. That Caribbean radiance, that burnishing heat, that paradisial yellow. You’re squinting because you know it is dark. You try to place a picture in your mind—a gleaming idyll, where you wake up to your loyal spouse and the gorgeous children who have his face. Yes, you’re sure that this is eunoia. But then—you ask yourself—why does it feel like hell?