The Bay
Until the bay became famous, they had it all to themselves.
Pull, pull, pull.
No self-respecting islander would go out there on a weekday without a boat or surfboard, only Covey and her friend Bunny.
Pull, pull, pull.
From time to time, the movie stars and writers who kept homes farther up the coast would come by with their glamorous friends and stretch out on the sand, but most afternoons, the beach was deserted when the girls arrived.
Pull, pull, pull.
On Sundays, Covey and Bunny behaved like the other fifteen-year-old girls, strolling along the shore in their matching two-piece swimsuits, poking sticks into beached jellyfish, burying each other up to their necks in sand, eating fresh snapper and cassava cakes cooked on an open fire by Fishie and his wife, and washing off their fingers in the breakers afterward.
Fishie was an institution around there. He’d been selling lunches made with his freshly caught fish since Covey’s and Bunny’s own fathers had been young boys. He’d seen Bunny’s father go to war for Britain and come back across the oceans to raise his two children, unlike some of the others who’d turned right around and gone back to England or Wales or what-have-you. He’d seen Covey’s pa grow from a skinny likkle ting, as he’d told Covey more than once with a chuckle, to a skinny big ting. And now, these boys were men, holding court around Fishie with bottles in their hands and arguing about the island’s independence from British rule.
Some weekends, when Covey’s pa wasn’t full of drink, he would drive the girls and their friends up the coast to the falls. They’d run under the cascade, yelping from the cold rush of the water. Look at me, Pa! Covey would shout. Look at me! It was a good day when she could get him to throw back his head in laughter and slap the side of his thigh. It was a good day when she could feel that she was still more important to Pa than a bunch of smelly roosters fighting to the death.
Then on weekdays, Covey and Bunny would pull on their swim caps and Covey would revert to her truest self.
Covey was in the water at the swim club when she first saw Bunny. Covey had been treading water, going over the lines of a passage she’d memorized to recite at school. Just then, Pa’s friend Uncle Leonard walked in with his daughter, Bunny.
Uncle Leonard let go of the girl’s arm and gave her a slight shove toward the instructor. Just concentrate, Bunny, he said, then walked away as Bunny took a few awkward steps forward. Covey had never seen her before, they went to different primary schools, but she had seen Uncle Leonard pull up to the house in his white van to pick up Pa. Back then, Mummy was still around and she’d heard Mummy kiss her teeth and mumble under her breath every time he and Pa drove off to the cockfights.
At the pool, Bunny did everything the instructor said with a worried look on her moon-shaped face. She didn’t have any of the basics but she caught on fast. Then one day, Bunny’s mother came to watch and she smiled. Covey and the other kids looked over at one another in surprise. Bunny had the brightest smile that any of them had ever seen on a girl. Not even Covey’s mother had teeth like that. As time went by, Covey saw that, apart from the smile, Bunny had something else. Once she started swimming, she never seemed to get tired.
Bunny started walking back with Covey to Covey’s house after swim club. The two of them would sit side by side at the table in the kitchen, legs swinging, tummies growling, as they waited for Pearl to slip them a piece of fried breadfruit or a hot, chewy dumpling while preparing the evening’s supper. If there was still some daylight left, they would run into the backyard to catch lizards and climb the enormous old almond tree, until Mummy called to them to come down.
Then Covey told Bunny she wanted to start training in the bay.
“But why?” Bunny said. “We have the pool.”
“You’ll see,” Covey said, and looked in the direction of the coast.
“But is it safe?”
Covey hesitated, but she could tell, from the gleam in Bunny’s eyes, that she didn’t really need to answer.
Their longest swims took place when their fathers were gone to the cockfights. Covey and Bunny would beg rides from the neighbor boys and head farther down the coast. While their fathers were wiping flecks of blood from their dollar bills, the girls were already on the sand, kicking off their shoes and stepping out of their dresses and plunging headfirst into the sapphire waves.
With Bunny, Covey no longer felt like an only child. She felt as though she’d found a sister on land and in the water. Covey was the faster swimmer of the two girls but Bunny could go forever, and she could navigate the straightest line in open water of all the swimmers Covey knew. If Covey moved like a dolphin, then Bunny was like one of those giant turtles you heard about that were capable of crossing the world without losing their way.