The Grandmother

The thing turned its head toward the tree where the girls were hiding.

It knew they were there. It had always known.

But it didn’t come for them. Not yet.

Instead, it looked at the ring in its too-long fingers and spoke again, the words landing in all three of their heads at once like cold water poured down the back of the neck:

Tell the grandmother I found what she lost.

And tell her I’m keeping it.

She knows why.

Then the figure turned and walked, unhurried, into the dark between the stalls — and was gone the way smoke is gone, not by leaving but by stopping being there.

The scratching from inside the Harrinarine stall stopped.

The market went quiet.

Reyah was the first to move. She grabbed Simone’s wrist and pulled. Simone grabbed Anya’s wrist. Anya did not need pulling. The three of them ran.

They ran through the dark grass of the Savannah, past the bandstand, past the closed sno-cone cart, past the streetlight that had been broken for two years. They ran across Queen’s Park West and through the gate that wasn’t really a gate, only a gap in the chain-link fence. They ran down Cipriani Boulevard with the streetlamps making yellow circles on the pavement and their sneakers slapping flat against the concrete. They ran past the empty taxi stand and the closed bakery and the dog who was always tied up outside the rumshop and who barked at every car that passed but did not bark at them, because the dog could see the look on their faces and the dog had sense.

They didn’t stop running until they reached Anya’s grandmother’s house.

The porch light was on.

The porch light was on.

Anya’s grandmother did not leave the porch light on at midnight. She had never, in all the years Anya had lived with her, left the porch light on at midnight. Electricity cost money and grandmothers did not waste it.

The door opened before Anya touched it.

Her grandmother was standing in the doorway. She was still in her nightdress, the cotton one with the small flowers, the one she had been wearing for as long as Anya could remember. Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare.

She was not surprised to see them.

She took one look at their faces — Anya’s open mouth, Simone’s hands shaking, Reyah for once unable to find a single word — and she said:

“You saw her.”

Not a question.

Anya tried to speak. Nothing came out.

Her grandmother stepped back from the doorway and held the door open.

“Inside,” she said. “All three of you. Now. Before she follows.”

They went inside.

The house smelled like the candle her grandmother burned for the patron saint of safe travels, the small white one that lived on the shelf above the kitchen sink and was only lit when somebody had to go somewhere her grandmother was worried about. The candle was lit now. It had been lit, Anya realised, before they arrived.

Her grandmother closed the door behind them. She slid the bolt. Then she did something Anya had never seen her do — she took a piece of chalk from the little tin on the table by the door and drew a small mark on the doorframe. A line. A circle. A line through the circle.

She did the same thing at the kitchen window. And the bedroom window. And the bathroom window. She did not explain.

The girls watched her. None of them sat down.

When she had finished, she came back to the front room and looked at them.

“Sit,” she said.

They sat.

She did not sit. She stood in front of them, her hands at her sides, and Anya saw — for the first time in her life — that her grandmother was old. Not old the way grandmothers were always old. Old the way mountains were old. Old the way things were that had outlasted other things.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said.

Anya tried.

She told her grandmother about the Harrinarines. The lockbox. The ring. The boy in the blue cap. The ordinary woman who had hired him. The scratching from inside the closed stall. The figure that walked too smoothly. The neck that turned too far. The mouth with too many teeth.

She told her grandmother that the figure had reached through the metal cover.

She told her grandmother that the figure had spoken in their heads.

She told her grandmother what the figure had said.

When she got to the part about the message — Tell the grandmother I found what she lost. And tell her I’m keeping it. She knows why — her grandmother closed her eyes.

She did not open them for a long moment.

When she opened them, they were wet.

“Grandma?” Anya said.

Her grandmother did not answer.

She walked to the cabinet under the window — the heavy mahogany one that had been her own mother’s, the one that nobody was allowed to open, the one that had been there since before Anya was born and was full, Anya had always assumed, of old papers and saucers and the kind of china you used for visitors who never visited.

She unlocked it.

She reached inside. Her hand came out holding a small wooden box. The wood was dark and the corners were soft with age. There was a brass clasp on the front. The clasp was closed.

She set the box on the coffee table in front of the girls.

She sat down across from them.

Then she said, in a voice that was lower and harder than Anya had ever heard her use:

“I am going to tell you three things. And then we are going to decide together what to do. Because what you saw tonight — she has been looking for me for fifty years. And now she knows where I am.”

The girls did not move.

The candle on the kitchen shelf flickered, though the windows were closed and there was no breeze.

“The first thing,” her grandmother said, “is that what you saw tonight is real. It is not a story. It is not a metaphor. It is not the kind of thing the radio talks about and the priests pretend not to believe in. It is real and it has a name, and the name is older than this island.”

She did not say the name.

“The second thing,” she said, “is that she did not come for the ring. She did not come for the recipe book or the cricket photograph. Those were what she took. That is not the same as what she came for. She took those things to send me a message. The message is the taking, not the thing.”

Simone was the one who spoke. Her voice was steady. Simone’s voice was always steady.

“What did she come for?”

Anya’s grandmother looked at Simone. Then at Reyah. Then, longest, at Anya.

“The third thing,” she said, “is what she came for. And I cannot tell you yet. Not because I do not want to. Because if I say it out loud in this house tonight, I make it more real, and tonight she is already too real. I will tell you tomorrow. In daylight. At Maracas, where she does not like to go.”

She reached out and put her hand on top of the wooden box.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you bring your notebooks. You bring your shoes that you can run in. You bring everything you remember. And we begin.”

“Begin what?” Reyah asked.

Anya’s grandmother almost smiled. Not quite.

“What you started tonight,” she said. “Without knowing you were starting it. There is no going back to last week. I am sorry, bétés. I tried to keep this from you. The taking of the ring was her way of telling me I had failed.”

She stood up.

She blew out the candle.

The room did not go dark — the lamp by the door was still on — but the shadows shifted somehow, and Anya felt, briefly, that the house was smaller than it had been a moment before. Or that something outside the house was larger.

“Sleep here tonight,” her grandmother said. “All three of you. In Anya’s room. Together. Do not open the windows. Do not answer if you hear someone you know calling from the street. And whatever you do —”

She looked at each of them in turn.

“Do not tell her your name. If she speaks in your head again. Do not tell her your name.”

She left them sitting on the couch with the wooden box on the table between them and the chalk marks drying on the doorframe and the smell of the blown-out candle in the air.

None of them slept.

But none of them spoke either.

They sat together, three girls in a dark front room in Woodbrook, and they waited for morning.

And outside, somewhere in the long shadow of the Savannah, something with too many teeth was walking very slowly. Not toward them. Not yet.

But not away.