IT IS WITH PROFOUND SADNESS

by David Desjardins

         It’s Jacques Cousteau Day, according to the bucket list that my father has compiled for our St. Lucia vacation. I’m watching from the shade of a sea grape tree as he stands on tiptoes on Soufriére’s crowded dock, scouring the boat moorings for the sunny-faced captain he hired to take us snorkeling this morning. Wife Number Two stands next to him, consulting her cellphone, but I keep back, hoping no one will think the skinny blond girl draped in black is part of their group.

         We’ve just walked down from our hotel, dodging the deep culverts that line the streets of this fishing village. Along the way Wife Two insisted on stopping at almost every corner to photograph street peddlers, churches, flowering trees, a tumbledown cemetery — and to loudly discuss them with my father. Neither is at all embarrassed about being a tourist.

         Just as I slide my backpack from my shoulders, they spot their captain. His shaved dark-brown dome gleams in the sun, and his white shirt features an image of the island’s two signature mountains, the Pitons, one of which looms over the harbor behind him.

         My father passes our snorkel gear to the captain and helps Wife Two step into the pitching boat, but I still hang back. What can they do, really, if I simply refuse to climb aboard? Kiss the ninety bucks goodbye? I feel sure there is no way Number Two will let that happen. Still, there would be fuck all to pay later, count on that, so I step gingerly down and sit next to the cooler, wriggling my toes free from my flip-flops and dipping my fingers in the lapping water.

         Joining us in the small boat are two other passengers — older women, British, judging from their accents, which remind me of the BBC sitcoms my mom used to cackle at, even when the cancer took the joy out of nearly everything else. Unlike us, they are scuba divers – hardcore, judging from the patches sewn onto their dive bag: Blue Hole, Candyland, Shark Hole. The captain’s assistant, a muscular Rasta with dreads down to his waist, hauls the women’s tanks into the well near the outboard motor and then pulls the rubber bumpers back inside the boat. He sits in the stern behind me, and the captain stands up in front.

         “Ladies and sir, welcome aboard the Miss Ina. I am Rodney.” The captain has a megawatt smile, and he flashes it at us now. “Also have we Marlon, behind you, to assist today. We will be visiting for you one of St. Lucia’s finest reefs, on the far side of the Piton, right? On the way we stop at a bat cave just a bit north of Soufriére town. But for now, sit back, take a beer or water from the cooler there, and enjoy our views.”

         We set off, Marlon pointing the bow through the carpet of bright-yellow seaweed that hugs the shore before we break free into deeper waters. On the flight down here two days ago, I spied from my window seat long strands of this golden vegetation in the seas below, so long and thick they looked from above like unvisited desert islands, and I imagined walking their sands with a freedom that even now aches inside me like a drug, or a dream you wish you could float through forever. Free of Wife Two, of the cruel cliques of the other 17-year-old girls back at Shea High, free even of my father, despite all his good intentions.

         This “family” vacation is his idea. I can’t help cringing at the term, though I keep my eye-rolling to myself. If she’d gotten her way, I suspect Number Two would have left me back in Rhode Island to fend for myself during school vacation week, but my father would have none of that. He blames my old boyfriend, Daniel, for everything: the truancy, the drugs, the pregnancy. It isn’t in him to accept the truth: that Daniel did only what I told him to. “Wrapped around my finger,” just like in that song on my father’s oldies station. Anyway, as far as my father is concerned, there is no way I wasn’t accompanying them to St. Lucia, not with Daniel still lurking on the scene back home.

         Marlon points the boat across the harbor, hugging the island’s western shore, its deep-green tangle spilling over onto the rocky coastline. Marlon looks to be in his early 20s. He’s kind of hot; I like the way his dreadlocks snake across his broad shoulders. I had caught his reek of ganja, that delicious pungent skunkiness, and smiled at him as I boarded, but he didn’t smile back. His dark eyes would venture no higher than my waist. Even now he glares stonily at the dancing swells before us.

         From his seat up near the bow, my father catches my eye, his gaze seeming to inquire, as it has been doing constantly since we arrived: “What about this? You liking this?” Yesterday we visited a dormant volcano on the road outside Soufriére, the remains of which still bubble and belch at the end of a parking lot. “The world’s only drive-in volcano,” the sign advertised. Its rotten-egg smell made our faces crinkle, but even there, my father’s eyes sought mine: “What about this? You liking this?”

         Now he passes me a bottled water and cracks open a pair of Piton lagers for himself and Number Two. He holds out his beer for a toast — my stepmother and I tapping our bottles against his, but per settled custom, not against each other’s — and my father drains half his Piton in one gulp. He broadcasts a satisfied sigh.

         “So let’s see,” he glances at his watch, “right about now I could be lecturing Mr. Stairs for the hundredth time about the dangers of not flossing — but instead I just have to deal with all this.” He raises his beer again in a vague salute to the ocean, the green hills. “Tough life, huh?”

         Number Two reaches over and rubs his shoulders, and my father closes his eyes, stretching leisurely to enjoy it more fully, like a dog long accustomed to such attention from its master.

         “Well, Hon, you work hard and you deserve it.” Her fingers work the freckled skin that breaks like a wave upon the curve of his neck, skirting the skin tab on his shoulder that she is always after him about. “God knows we don’t make it easy on you sometimes.” Her gaze as she says this is focused somewhere offshore, but I know the remark is meant for me.

         Wife Two — Carolyn, really, but that is too close to my mother’s name for me to use more than I absolutely have to — came into my father’s orbit six months after his widowing a year and a half ago. Their relationship began with two hours of bridgework in my father’s chair, and culminated in a Las Vegas wedding three months later. I knew my father was not the type of man to stay unmarried very long — my mother, in the final days of her cancer, had warned me, without the slightest hint of bitterness, to expect my father to “rebound” quickly — but still I experienced Carolyn’s arrival as that of an invasive species, and a betrayal of my mother, all of which gave my grieving a bitter, guilty aftertaste.

         The Miss Ina’s engines cut to a low purr and Marlon lets the boat drift close to a vertical gouge in the volcanic rock wall towering above us. Inside the folds of stone are rows of tiny trembling figures, some hanging upside down, others flitting deeper into the shadows. This is the bat cave, a 40-foot-high slot that seems immune to the blinding Caribbean sun. It feels like a passage to something.

         Marlon revs the motor slightly to keep the boat from drifting into the rocks, and my father hums the “Jaws” theme – “Na-na na-na na-na na-na” – the bats, I guess, being an appropriate substitute for the menace of the shark. He pulls his cellphone from a backpack and tries to herd us all into a selfie grouping, but thankfully the phone slips from his fingers into his lap before he can snap it.

         In another 10 minutes we arrive at the dive site, which at this hour is still in the shade of Petit Piton, the more dramatic of the two peaks. The mountain’s steep sides, the captain tells us, continue underwater in coral formations that sink hundreds of feet deep.

         The plan, we are told, is for Rodney to dive the coral wall with the British women, while Carolyn, my father, and I snorkel the shallow reef closer to shore, supervised by Marlon from aboard the Miss Ina.

         I pull off my knee-length black T-shirt and reapply sunscreen everywhere I can reach. As I tug a pair of flippers over my sunburned toes, I turn to the tall Rasta behind me. The air is still, and again I catch his heady aroma, which makes me think of Daniel.

         “So...” I smile at him, “you’ll keep an eye on us?”

         Marlon spits into the water. “Don’t worry. I watch you.” He seems to be addressing the horizon. Again I note his scowl, his disengaged manner.

         When we have all put on our masks and snorkels, we slide off the boat, holding our masks tight to our faces as we’ve been instructed. The water is warmer than anything you find up north, bluer too. Once I am accustomed to my equipment and the rhythm of steady, deep breathing, I look about, a waterproof marine life ID card in my hand. Surrounding me are fields of brilliant mottled coral spotlighted by the sun’s piercing beams and a blizzard of fishes, some plodding, some darting. A trumpetfish drifts close, tricking me with its impersonation of a vertical strand of sea grass. Two juvenile angelfish, slashes of black and yellow, hurry past.

         Floating above this alien world, I feel immersed in it and yet separate. What delights me most – more even than the ridiculous-looking parrotfish that move like lumbering buses amid the coral – is the exquisite sense of aloneness I feel here, a solitude I’ve been yearning for since we landed on the island – actually, way before that. My father, for one, has been hovering over me for months now, ever since that day he drove me to the clinic in Providence. When the nurse wheeled me back out and I found him sitting there, thumbing through magazines aimlessly like the patients in his own waiting room, the look on his face was more devastating than the procedure itself had been. Months later, he is still giving me that look, which totally crushes me because he’s throwing himself under the bus, not me. During drop-offs at school, or as he watches me on the volleyball court from the stands, even as he muddles through the telling of one of his dumb dad jokes, I catch that wordless probing: “You okay?”

         Here, for once, it is me doing the hovering.

         I spot something squiggling far below me and swim forward to investigate: It’s some sort of eel or snake, fluttering in and about a grove of purple sea fans. I’m amazed to think that these creatures go about their business day after day, totally clueless about us humans. I feel myself transported back to long-ago summer days — what must I have been then, six? —when my mother would load a backpack full of soft pastel sticks and drawing pads and drive the two of us out to the woods surrounding Olney Pond. We would wander till she found just the right glade in just the right light, where she’d settle down to draw the water, framed at the bottom by the forest and at the top by the sky, leaving me to wander the woods nearby on my own and entertain myself by turning over stones and surprising all kinds of squirming things living their hidden lives. Every five minutes I’d run back to my mother’s blanket, some odd thing in hand to show off. My mother would always react with just the right note of astonishment at these discoveries, and remembering this now, I feel the loneliness returning.

         Out of the corner of my eye I see Wife Two dive down a few feet to point out something to my father, and a cold murky hand seems to clutch my stomach. I swim back to the boat.

         Marlon takes my flippers and helps me up the ladder.

         “You okay?” Even as he speaks he keeps his eyes trained beyond my shoulder.

         “God!” I wail. “Not you too!”

         He looks at me for the first time, and I throw my mask and snorkel at the backpack. Marlon shrugs, unimpressed by my hissy fit, and turns back to watch the water. He must be accustomed to worse antics among his customers.

         I shiver in the sunlight, then lurch toward the cooler, pulling out a Piton and twisting off its cap. I stare at Marlon, daring him to comment, but he has resumed his vigil.

         I don’t even like beer, but I drink quickly, wanting badly some kind of release or ruin. I watch the two snorkels move in sync above the water, my father and Wife Two investigating wonders together, first this way, then that, like dancers attentive to their partner’s dips and pivots. Their movements are graceful and grotesque at the same time, and again I feel that cold hand. How can he be with that woman? How can they pretend that life goes on? It doesn’t go on, I think, draining the beer and taking another from the cooler. It ends and ends, and never stops ending.

         I force myself to stop looking at them, turning toward Marlon, who stands there keeping his watch, one foot on the gunwale, his balance perfect in the bobbing vessel. The muscles in his legs pulse in response to each small pitch of the boat, and again I am reminded of Daniel, his dark eyes, his puppy-dog devotion, and the soft edges of the hours we spent together before it all came crashing down.

         “So what else can you get on this island, Marlon?” I say, keeping my eyes on the bottle in my hand. “I mean, if you don’t like drinking beer or... whatever.” I pause, feeling like an idiot, but figure, fuck it. “You know, something to smoke.”

         Marlon’s face tightens as if at some private joke, not a smile but maybe as close to one as he ever allows himself.

         “That's some kouyontwi, don’t tell me.” He reaches down and pulls the cord on the outboard, and the boat putters over toward my father and Wife Two.

         I don’t know Creole but I am unfazed. “Come on, Marlon, you know what I’m talking about. Right?”

         He doesn’t answer. Maybe he gets dozens of these requests from bored teenage tourists. He pulls the boat up alongside my father and waits for him or Carolyn to look up. When she surfaces, he waves and yells, “All okay? We leaving now.”

         He waits by the ladder, and before they draw near, he says, without looking at me, “See the bar across from the dock. Maybe I be there for you.”

         I pour the remains of my Piton overboard and hide the empties in my backpack. My father and Wife Two climb aboard, toweling their heads and burbling over the marine life they’ve just seen. I put on my sunglasses and try to grunt appreciatively.

         We retrieve the Brits, who join in the recounting of undersea adventures. My father passes another bottled water my way. “How about you, Hon?”

         “Oh, you know: one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” He tilts his head, not getting the joke. Maybe it was only my mother who’d read the Seuss book to me.

         “No, it was great, really.” I take a deep drink.

         Back in Soufriére, we return our snorkel gear to the dive shop and begin the slog uphill to our hotel. I wait till we’ve nearly arrived before I stop dead in my tracks. I pat down my pockets and fish around in my backpack, my father and Wife Two eyeing me quizzically.

         “Oh my God!” I summon a panicked, flustered look. “I think I left my phone back there, maybe in the shop. Let me run back, real quick. You guys go on. I’ll meet you at the hotel.”

         I walk back to the dock, my body slightly buzzing with that anticipation I’ve come to feel whenever marijuana is in the offing. The tavern that Marlon must have been referring to is like many we’ve seen already in St. Lucia: wide-open in front, with the bar reaching almost onto the sidewalk, and deep and dark inside, like a garage. Four men — St. Lucians, I’d guess — sit at the bar around a tiny wall of domino tiles, a small bottle of rum nearly drained before them. I walk past their stares into the gloomy interior and squint, thinking I might find Marlon at a table, but the rest of the room is empty.

         I turn to the men. “I'm waiting for someone. Can I just sit here, maybe, at this table?”

         I pull up a chair next to a wobbly square-top table, lay my elbows on its sticky surface before quickly pulling them back. One of the men stands and walks behind the bar. He brings a glass of ice water to me, then rejoins his friends. Behind their dark silhouettes I can see people on the street hurrying through fluorescent sunshine.

         Peeling open my wallet, I count my Eastern Caribbean dollars: a twenty and two fives. I have no idea how many sodas that will buy here, never mind how many blunts. Images of marine life — turtles, fish — dot the banknotes, along with the face of some blinged-up queen staring out at me, George Washington-like. The royal gaze is focused and dreamy at the same time. Funny how people can look right at you and still not see you.

         Gradually I become aware of a low buzzing coming from the wall: a TV, the sound low. A banner at the bottom of the screen proclaims “HTS St. Lucia Death Announcements,” and a woman reads a long script of text in English that appears next to a photo of a man with a Mona Lisa smile. The narrator’s voice is solemn, but still has the pleasing lilt that I hear in the speech of every St. Lucian I’ve met so far.

         “It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of our beloved Burnett Marcellin, who passed away January 29th in Castries at the age of 49,” the speaker says. “He leaves to mourn...” and here she proceeds to narrate a long list of brothers, sisters, children, nephews, nieces, in-laws, cousins, friends, co-workers, and more. Finally, funeral arrangements are given, and the narrator concludes, “May his soul rest in the Lord's abundant peace.”

         More announcements follow: a 56-year-old cab driver, a slew of eighty-year-olds, a 17-year-old girl whose smile reminds me of a classmate’s. At first I occasionally check the bar’s entrance for Marlon, but soon find myself unable to look away from the TV. When the mischievous face of a 6-year-old boy appears, I feel overwhelmed: This boy, this scamp with ears like two car doors left ajar...  dead, really?

         On the day my mother’s body was carried into church, I could not cry. My sorrow and anger had become a tangled barb, and in church that anger boiled over: Who were these pallbearers pawing my mother’s casket? What was their grief to mine? And the cousins and aunts and uncles who sobbed two rows behind me, where had they been all these last months of my mother’s sickness? I felt elbowed aside by their tears, my closeness to my mom no more than ashes under my feet.

         Watching the names of these St. Lucians scroll past, I find myself remembering even farther back – to trips to movie theaters with my mother, and how I would always get exasperated at her insistence on sitting attentively through the very last of the credits. The other theatergoers would have long filed out and the ushers sweeping up spilled popcorn, and still my mother would sit there, sometimes reverently, other times making corny comments about the gaffer or the dolly grip. I would give her my evil eye, but my mother would just say, “All these people, honey, they’re part of the movie.”

         A sappy organ solo follows the last of the death notices. Finally drained and my eyes raw, I touch a damp napkin to each before drinking down my water and bringing the empty glass back to the bar.

         “Thank you.”

         Outside I spot Marlon huddled on the corner with other young men. Whatever I imagined just minutes ago that he could offer me, I can’t find it in me now to seek. Our eyes meet as I pass, but neither of us speaks.

         Halfway back to the hotel the sky darkens and looses a drenching rain. I clench my toes to keep from walking out of my flip-flops. Up in Rhode Island, I always flee such downpours, my body crunched in a hunchbacked scuttle, but now I stroll unhurried, like the St. Lucians do. At one busy intersection I pause to close my eyes and lift my chin to the deluge.

         I can sense the passersby skimming past me, like a river dividing around a solitary boulder. The rain grows even more thunderous, slapping the pavement, and the torrent hurries down the road to the harbor, sweeping with it palm fronds and crushed juice cartons. After a minute, I begin walking again, but slowly: I don’t want to run into my father and his inquiring looks – “You OK?” – not just yet.

         On my right, I pass dive shops and souvenir stores, and I think of the fish and the coral and the quiet that I swam through earlier. Through the open door of a jewelry shop I spy a tourist being helped at a counter. Something about her makes me pause. A whiff of patchouli and a Bob Marley song draw me in. It’s a hippie-dippie shop, the kind my classmates and I almost always roll our eyes at, the kind my mother favored.

         The customer is wearing some sort of kimono, loose and brightly colored, and is tucking her purchase into her purse. I join her at the display case and look down at its terrain of splashy pendants and earrings. There are parrotfish pins and barrettes studded with angelfish and other pretty things that steal their form from the ocean bed.

         I can feel the woman’s eyes on me, but I don’t return her look. She’s wearing an old-person perfume that I haven’t inhaled in a long time, and I don’t want any conversation to interrupt the spell that I feel settling on me – on my face, my shoulders, my fingertips. In a large mirror behind the counter I can see our reflections: two strangers, one an aging flower child, radiating maternal feeling, the other a pale goth punk, carefully ignoring her elder’s intimate gaze. The woman seems sad at the sight of this black-robed, red-eyed, dripping-wet teenager; she’s barely able to keep from hugging the girl.

         The sales clerk asks if I want a closer look at anything in the case. I don’t want to disappoint her, but I stumble over what to choose. The woman next to me taps on the glass.

         “Maybe this one here?” She seems to be talking to both of us.

         The clerk pulls out a necklace of tiny shells, each hand-painted with shades of blue and green, hands it to me, and places a two-sided makeup mirror atop the case. I hesitate, and the woman next to me takes the necklace and places it around my neck, gently lifting the damp strands of my blond hair so she can attach the clasp.

        She smiles and shifts the mirror toward me, alternating its two surfaces. The necklace is beautiful, I have to admit;, its shells shimmer like beads of water clinging to my black T-shirt. But I don’t recognize myself. Who is this shabby girl, washed out and spent, so angry at her reflection, so fierce, so close and yet so far away.

David Desjardins is a writer with roots in Rhode Island, and has worked at The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Ruminate, Roanoke Review, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Arlington, Mass. with his wife.