A Hurricane Hits like a Bomb

Photo by Zayne Airall, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda.

The thing about water is it’s always coming and going. Laylani remembers sitting on the pier where Daddy anchored Maddie, his prized fishing boat, named for Mammy; watching the water, when she wasn’t watching for Daddy to come over the horizon. It was a necessary distraction because there was always the small fear that when Daddy left, he wouldn’t come back. It was the Life. Laylani knew that even before she knew her ABCs. The fear was a small one[,] though[,] because she had full faith that Daddy would come back. He always did. And the voice worrying that he wouldn’t was Mammy’s, even when Mammy was up at the house, too far away for even her voice to travel. Mammy had a big voice. Daddy used to tease that it was one of his favourite things about her, her big fish woman’s voice. He said they lived good because her “Gate your chub! Gate your snapper! Gate your hine! Dr. Fish and Old wife!” traveled further than any other fish woman’s and had music in it, “like Siren.”

Mammy didn’t take it as a compliment.

Laylani might not have had the words for it at the time, but she saw in her parents the yin and yang between endurance and enjoyment, and she knew which way she wanted to swing.

She would take a thousand days on the pier waiting for Daddy over one Saturday morning at Market with Mammy. 

Those days of waiting, Laylani sat, as below her the water danced constantly, her skinny legs dangling just above. Sometimes she’d catch sight of a jelly fish, pretty in pink, and deadly painful when it stung. Sometimes there’d be schools of baby fish, fish so small they were nothing but fish food themselves. Barracudas too, nobody’s prey and fearless enough to pull up to shore, cooping the fish guts they knew would be dumped there after a cleaning. Rather than upturn the bucket, Laylani would share out its contents like treats, enticing this or that one to come close. Daddy and Mammy agreed, a rare happening, that barracudas weren’t to be played with. Daddy, though, liked that Laylani wasn’t afraid of the sea and always promised to take her out to sea when she was older, though Mammy wouldn’t hear of it. “The sea is her legacy,” Daddy would say, “handed down from my great great great whoever gran, from all the way back in slavery time.” He was proud of the fact that his people had never done plantation work but Mammy said, what was the difference, a slave was a slave. Mammy fell into the Life from a little further up the road. She had more schooling than Daddy and kept their books. She liked marketing and bartering, and the social space that was the market, but hated the woman’s work of scaling and readying the fish, the rhysheness and repetition, as much as Laylani did. “Don’t fall for no fisherman, you hear me,” Mammy would say as the hand holding the knife moved furiously, fish scales flying everywhere. “Put book in your head.” 

Laylani, though, didn’t plan to fall for any man nor to be stuck with woman’s work; from the time she knew herself, she craved the freedom of a world in constant motion. 

Sitting on the pier waiting for Daddy was as close as she got to that world for the time being. 

The year she turned 11, it seemed even further away.

She had started bleeding. So that, though 11 was plenty old enough for Daddy to start taking her out to sea, if she was a boy, he grew skittish at the reminder that she was a girl, and Mammy had only planted her feet. “Woman don’t have no business on the water, just the scent alone will have shark on your tail.”

That wasn’t true. Sharks didn’t particularly care about human blood, Laylani knew that, and figured Mammy did too. She was just trying to scare her.

The shark talk might not have spooked her but the reminder that Laylani was a girl had certainly spooked Daddy. 

“Next time,” he said. 

Next time, next time, next time, and next time after that.

So, Laylani waited, and as she waited, her mind raced more and more with possibilities… like what if Daddy was waylaid by a mermaid and got tangled up or set adrift or… though Laylani knew he was too skilled and sharp for that. 

Maybe it was the bleeding that had her not herself.

Daddy always came back. He and Maddie appearing like ghostly shadows against the setting sun as it dipped below the horizon line, coming closer and closer, until they were close enough for her to help tie the boat to the wooden pier. She’d run back and forth with Daddy as he took the coolers heavy with his haul to the shed just off their kitchen where the deep freeze was.

Once, long ago, Daddy suggested Mammy clean the fish one time like his Mammy used to but he never brought it up after that. She would get to it in her time, and it was always in time so he minded his business and let her mind hers.

Mammy called Maddie Daddy’s Mistress. Mammy didn’t like the boat being named after her. Cut eye with Maddie like she would any other mistress if they happened to buck up in the market or somewhere. As much as she understood anything, Laylani understood that Mammy wasn’t really jealous of Maddie. She just didn’t like that the boat took Daddy away. But if Daddy didn’t go, they wouldn’t have food to eat, and being vex was just how Mammy let Daddy know that her heart was in his hand every time he went away. Daddy knew it too because “see a bring it back,” he would say, kissing her pout away and crooning “I’ll always come back to you,” as he slipped his ring back onto his finger. They disappeared into their room after that, and Laylani returned to the pier, though there was no one to watch for now that Daddy was home. 

Later, when the fish was cleaned, Daddy would pack some back in coolers and drive his pick-up to do drop offs at restaurant and hotel kitchens; sometimes even selling to the millionaire yachts, especially if he had managed to snag some lobster and shrimp. Laylani got to ride along with him if he managed to liberate her from fish scaling or market duty. 

Daddy was chatty on those long drives, painting a picture of himself as a boy tagging along with his daddy, stealing frying fish from out of his mammy pot. “You never get tired of the smell?” Laylani would ask, thinking how Mammy couldn’t stand the smell of fish, fresh or fried, she only endured it. “I could ever get tired of a scent sweet so?” Daddy asked.

In spite of Mammy’s distaste for the Life, Laylani would have said they were happy, and, without working out the particulars, could imagine telling her own child about tagging along with Daddy and the creative ways Mammy tried to make the fish less fishy. How some days she just threw up her hands and insisted on a family outing to Kentucky. And that on the days when Daddy just wanted old school fried fish, he did it himself, and was so good at it that man and cat came sniffing around in droves and made it into a proper Fish Fry. 

It all changed the year Laylani turned 11. 

Photo by Zayne Airall, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda.

No hurricane had been forecasted. Mammy wouldn’t have let Daddy go if so. The water had been extra quiet, though; maybe that should have been the warning. Though never still-still, it moved lazily. Another sign was the what ifs playing in Laylani’s mind like a movie marathon. Mammy told her not to eat so late but these weren’t just dreams they were also daymares.

And then…

“Hurricane ah come!” 

The alarm went up the noon after Daddy left. Except there was no alarm as such. The island hadn’t experienced a hurricane in so long, since her Daddy was a boy probably, that people didn’t take the Watch then Warning, when the fast-moving storm turned suddenly, too seriously; some even said they wanted it to come, so they could say they experienced one. 

“People can go ‘head make joke,” Mammy said, watching for the horizon and Daddy, from the kitchen window. “Long as they remember that wey laugh dey, cry dey.” Laylani knew Mammy was scared when she spoke like that outside of the Market setting. At home, church, and other places, Mammy was always “speak properly, speak properly,” the minute she caught Laylani relaxing her tongue.

The night before the storm, Laylani had dreamt of a barracuda as big and menacing as a shark following a trail of blood in the water; and had woken up just as it got ready to pounce. She wasn’t sure at what.

The hurricane was big, category 5, and moving fast. The government pre-emptively declared a state of emergency, sending out the defence force and police to shoo people home and herd those who needed herding into the shelters. Laylani and Mammy were made to go to the nearest school. “You too close to the coast, ma’am,” said the young uniformed man who must have been a trainee, the picture of patient and stressed in a single narrow body, as Mammy resisted. “Smadee goin’ have to come out here and rescue you when Daniel rip off yuh roof,” he said and it was that that got Mammy moving; she wouldn’t want to put anyone else at risk.

"Wind started picking up not two hours after they settled in, and the fast-moving hurricane, once it got there, took a piss on the island for three days straight."

As they hunkered at the school, everybody smelling everybody else’s mouths and armpits, barely daring to move, they listened to the wind as it tried to rip off the roof, the doors, the shutters, something jack! Mammy doled out homemade sun-dried fish snacks to the other children, as an older woman tried to distract them with ‘Nancy stories.  Everyone rationed the perishables they’d brought and shared with their neighbour to make it stretch. Still, they were almost all out by the time Daniel moved on. They had hardly moved from their cots in that time, prayers and catnaps. As stragglers had been brought in, the space had gotten tight-tight. 

On the second night Laylani woke up, running from a dream in which the barracuda shark had almost caught up to … she still didn’t know who, though she had her fears.

By the time she stumbled over someone and fell, she was awake enough to be embarrassed. And she had peed on herself. 

Mammy was gentle with her, though, as she let her use the last of their bottled water to clean up, dumping the pissy underthings into a plastic bag she stuck at the bottom of the duffel she had hastily packed before they left home for the shelter. 

“I heard Daddy,” Laylani whispered.

Mammy didn’t react.

“Is he the barracuda-shark was after, not me.”

“Hush now,” was all Mammy said.

And she did.

The hurricane Watch, much less Warning, hadn’t yet been announced when Daddy went out to sea before sun broke the day before the storm, with enough journey cakes and dried fish to last him for days. He could still have picked up the news on the radio, or maybe sniffed it out like the seasoned seaman he was, but probably, like most, he didn’t take it seriously. 

Maybe he had already lit up the doobie he packed for nights when he wanted to lay back and gander at the stars. Mammy warned him time and again that it wasn’t safe but he always snuck some anyway, reassuring her that he knew the sea better even than her face and he knew her face better than his own. “Besides, I have to bring your heart back to you, ent? And you holding something for me.”  Mammy would soften at that and, time allowing, they might make one last trip to the bedroom before he left. Laylani would be down on the pier ready to help him push off.

That was the last time Laylani saw Daddy. In person, that is; he dream her for a time after that. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her, and her mind grew calmer at this sense that he was watching over her while she slept. When he finally left, that’s when Laylani cried. 

They had moved straight from the shelter to Mammy’s parents. It was supposed to be until the relief money came in to help with repairs to the house, but it never did, and then Mammy got a job at a law office in the city. They were so far inland, Laylani couldn’t even hear the sea much less see it. “Daddy won’t know where to find me?” she bawled. And Mammy told her she was too big for all that. But even as she scolded, Mammy’s hand was warm and heavy on Laylani’s shoulder, squeezing, rubbing. She didn’t stop crying until Mammy gave her Daddy wedding ring. He always took it off when he went to sea; Mammy would give it back to him when he gave her back her heart. 

It hit Laylani then that Mammy’s heart was lost forever at sea, no Daddy even to lay to rest, and this time when she cried it was a quiet kind of crying and she pulled Mammy in. She understood how much Mammy needed the comfort when she didn’t pull away. They curled up there wrapped up in each other in Mammy’s childhood bed. Mammy never returned to the inflatable bed jammed against the door at night.

They didn’t stay with Mammy’s parents forever. Mammy’s Mammy complained about the smell of the fry fish Mammy insisted on making all the time. The house they moved into had a little pond with tilapia in it nearby and sometimes they spent time together sitting quietly there, their lines dropped, awaiting the tug that would signal a catch. They didn’t catch much but they came to like the time together anyway.

Later, when she was older and close to graduating secondary school, Laylani started taking the bus out to the coast. First time she did it, Mammy almost sent police after her but after she explained, told her “just tell me”. She wasn’t worried that Laylani was going to drown herself or anything but still, “you’re not a big woman.”

Laylani knew that. In fact, she never felt smaller than when she walked past where their house still stood. Sort of. It looked like a bomb had been dropped on it; roof ripped off, one side blasted out, neglected and empty of even squatters or livestock.

She beelined for the pier. It wasn’t sturdy like before but she still stepped on it and sat, on a hope and a prayer. She trusted the water still, in spite of everything. It wasn’t the water’s fault; it was Daniel who had taken her father away. Maybe. That’s what the death certificate said anyway. There was no way to know for sure, but 1 + 1 make two.

“It looked like a bomb had been dropped on it; roof ripped off, one side blasted out, neglected and empty of even squatters or livestock.”

So much had changed since Daniel blew up her family’s life but the water was still the same, still coming and going. That’s why she came here. She supposed any stretch of the island’s coastline would do. But their bit of coast down a dead-end road from the village, camouflaged by mangrove, sea grape, and other shrubbery, had felt special. It felt special still, as Laylani sat with her foot submerged ankle-deep in the lightly rippling water.

Despite Mammy’s initial fears, Laylani didn’t come here to die – though she sometimes caught visions of how Maddie had been tossed by the storm until She landed upside down, Daddy who only moments ago had been floating in the stars, now sinking, sinking, sinking, but not afraid. Laylani came here because it was where she felt closest to him and she wanted to pack in as much time with him as she could. She would be finishing school soon and she still wanted to go the places the water went, just not on a fish boat.