What We Hold In Our Hands Read Online Free PDF Page B

complained of at the boys’ school where she taught art and gym.
    I don’t know where I’ll end up—waving whitely underwater like a shipwrecked captain, my overall straps snagged on a coral fan, or floating free with a fish’s tail and a mermaid’s flowing hair. Or in my mother’s arms, warmed and revived, returned from the dead.
    One day in science class, Miss Reese told us about hurricanes, how the warmer the air, the more pressure and speed they could build. How it wasn’t fair that they were all named after women. While she talked, I could smell the salty, sulphurous ocean, and feel the wave wrap around me, stealing my breath.
    â€œSusan, are you okay?” Miss Reese’s voice seemed to enter my ears through the echoing cavern of a conch shell. “You’re white as a ghost,” she said. “Jane, take her to sick bay.”
    Jane grabbed my hand, yanking me from my chair. My legs shook, and my ears still hummed with the conch’s swirling sound.
    My mother’s strong, warm hands grip my ankles. She pulls one way, while the ocean pulls the other, a tug-of-war over my young, vulnerable bones and slight, soft flesh. My lungs fill with water.
    Legs wobbling, I leaned against Jane’s sturdy shoulder.
    â€œIf you’re faking…” she hissed into my echoing ear.
    In sickbay, the nurse stuck a thermometer into my mouth and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. Jane stood watching. If I was sick, she’d be the one to divulge the details at recess, everyone leaning in close. If I wasn’t sick, she’d tell that too, after she pushed me around for a while at the edge of the playing field.
    The nurse pressed the cold face of a stethoscope against my skin. “Back to class with you,” she told Jane.
    Calling my mother at work, she said, “Susan has a fever and her chest sounds full.” Then, dangling the stethoscope from one finger, “I suppose she can rest here for the afternoon, but she should see a doctor as soon as possible.”
    The doctor said I had pneumonia.
    â€œHow long will she have to stay home?” my mother asked.
    I knew she was thinking of the days she’d miss at work. She had little patience for illness. Only my father could interrupt the proper pace of her days with impunity.
    The pain in my chest eased a little at the prospect of missing school, but after a few days at home, I languished in bed, wondering what games Jane and her friends were playing at recess, and what new marvels of science Miss Reese had disclosed.
    As much as I claim to have hated school, I felt acknowledged there. The teachers could be counted on to yell at me or send me to the office, the girls relied on to tease me and sneak mouldy sandwiches into my desk. The bells always rang on time, the days ended, and, after some name-calling or shunning at the bus stop, I found my way home, where I was, for the most part, left alone.
    My parents never took me to the beach again, although I went there with my grandparents whenever they visited from Canada. My mother and father were either working or immersed in bottomless talks about his business woes. Throughout my childhood, he started one business after another while the money he’d inherited from his parents swirled away. He sold Persian rugs imported from a distributor in New York, but the prices he had to charge were too high and the demand on the island too small. He tried his hand at T -shirts and souvenirs, but could not withstand the fierce and entrenched competition. He thought the restaurant business might be his calling, but he was too ambitious—linen tablecloths, French waiters, steaks imported fresh from Alberta, white asparagus from Belgium.
    One Sunday when I was ten, my parents occupied a bench in the Botanical Gardens, jawing over my father’s failing souvenir store, while I chased peacocks, which flew to the top of the arbour and teased me with hints of