Driftwood
Johnny “Lin” Lyncook looked out onto the bay where his daughter had disappeared two years earlier and asked himself what he could have done differently. Lodged in the sand next to him was a piece of driftwood so large that no one had ever tried to move it from the beach. Over the years, it grew roots into the hearts of the islanders who lived on the bay, who strolled by it daily, who embraced in its shadow, who could see it from way out on the water. Once in a while, a small piece of it would disappear overnight and show up in someone’s garden or on their veranda or on a glass-topped table. The beauty of a thing justified its plunder.
The monster driftwood still retained the shape of the tree base that it had been years before, only it had been washed and polished by the sea and beaten by storms and slow-cooked in the sun. It was already there when Lin arrived on the island with his parents and it was still there on the day that his daughter disappeared just shy of her eighteenth birthday. Lin’s daughter had been the color of that driftwood, her limbs strong like those of a tree, her face the kind that Little Man Henry had wanted to own.
The beauty of a thing justified its plunder.
Lin stood beside the driftwood now, his head clearer than it had been in years. He pulled off his sandals and walked to the water’s edge. He had never been the kind of man to doubt himself but now, that was all he did. He’d thought the passing of time would have helped, but still, he kept asking himself, what if he had done things differently? First, his girl’s mother had left him, and now his only child was dead. She had run off into the sea and drowned hardly four hours after being married to Little Man.
Everyone had seen how suddenly Little Man Henry began to wheeze and stagger before dropping his champagne flute and falling, facedown, onto the splintered glass, a line of froth issuing from his mouth. If he hadn’t been such a hateful man, people might have believed that he’d died of heart trouble at a precocious age, but no one doubted that Little Man had been murdered. So many people had wished so fervently for it. Lin wasn’t sorry to see Little Man go, but he didn’t want to believe that his daughter was responsible.
And yet Covey had fled the wedding hall as soon as her new husband had fallen to the ground. This, Lin recognized, seemed as good an admission of guilt as any. Two years had passed since Covey’s wedding dress had been found abandoned on the beach. In the first few days, the lack of a body had given Lin hope. Covey could have washed up unconscious on another shore, could have been trapped in an air pocket in a cave until low tide. But at this point, even Lin had to accept that he would never see his daughter again.
For all Lin knew it might only be a matter of time before Little Man Henry’s brother had him killed, but for now, he seemed to be more useful to the Henry family alive. Lin still owed money to them and he was still the best person to handle the shops, which now belonged to them. Lin had lost his businesses and his daughter and this suffering of his must have brought some measure of satisfaction to the Henrys.
Like it or not, many people believed that Covey had poisoned Little Man, and most people still avoided being too friendly with Lin. Only Pearl seemed not to worry how Little Man’s family would react. She still came to the house on Sunday afternoons and cooked for Lin, even though she had a job at the villa up on the hill.
Pearl barely spoke to Lin when she came to the house, but she’d walk into the kitchen as if nothing had changed. She always left him with oxtail stew or a pot of rice and peas and a bit of fried plantain, maybe callaloo, something that would last for a couple of days, since he never ate much. Lin realized that he’d known Pearl for as long as he’d known his own daughter, and while he knew little about her personal life, her absence from his daily routine deepened his sense of loss over Covey, if such a thing was possible.
If Lin had been a better man, he would have refused to let Covey marry Clarence Henry. But at what price, he wondered. He suspected that Little Man would have taken Covey anyway, and that would have been worse. His only child, defiled and left without a penny to her name. Maybe she was better off dead, after all. Maybe Lin, too, was better off dead. The sad truth was, if Lin had been a better man, he wouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with.
Lin took a deep breath and walked into the sea. He would go the way his daughter had gone. And if there was anything on the other side of this life, as so many people believed, Lin might even find his daughter there. He felt the sand under his feet, tasted the salt in his mouth. He tried to hold on to the image of his daughter as she might have been on one of her best days, so happy to be in the water that she would have done anything to get there. He tried to make this his last thought before he died.