Locate?
“Who?” I asked, since no one seemed to want to clue me in.
No one said anything.
I turned to Sekou. If the adults weren’t going to answer me, then at least he would. But it was as if he were trying to get inside the wall, as stuffed into the corner as he was. And his eyes were glassy.
“Se?”
The only people who existed in this moment were me and Sekou. Me asking him the question and him trembling as his will to keep himself strong crumbled in front of me. The tears poolingin his eyes began to leak, and all he could do was shake his head, his lips smashed in a firm line as if he were fighting to keep them from spilling whatever news he had.
Sheriff Lyle cleared his throat and, in a voice filled with regret and without any of the humor and easy drawl he normally had, said, “Well, there’s been an accident.”
He hesitated and Nana prompted, “G’awn, Sheriff.”
Nana pulled away from Naira’s mother with one final pat of the shoulder, taking a few steps toward me. She didn’t reach for me, knowing her granddaughter more than anyone else. I didn’t need coddling right now, not in front of all of these people. I needed the truth.
He stepped forward, shoulders sagging and face full of pity. “Naira and a classmate were out boating during the night, and there was an accident. We think the boat may have run aground on some rocks in one of the inlets around Charleston and…” Lyle swallowed, casting a worried look at Naira’s parents, who were too dazed to be paying attention.
“We’re out looking for them, but they haven’t been found. Neither Naira or—”
“Luke.” His name choked up in my throat, bitter and vile.
Lyle nodded and surveyed the room, holding his hat out. “We are still looking, y’all. It’s not over.”
“Is this related at all to Brother Gilbert?” Elder Mabel asked from the back corner of the room.
Yes, Elder Gilbert. My head twisted to Nana Ama, whose face remained serene. I turned to Sheriff Lyle. He cleared his throat as DNR looked at him, confused.
“I’m sorry?” DNR said. “Who?”
“An island matter,” Nana Ama said smoothly, her tone commanding and ending that topic. “Continue.”
“The location of the boat, however, was pretty far out. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone to swim back in those conditions.”
It was like the DNR guy wasn’t talking about someone’s loved ones, like he was talking about a busted-up boat that didn’t have two people in it. Like he thought of Naira as a statistic. Another irresponsible kid. His lack of empathy had me seeing red. He was talking to us like we were a bunch of country bumpkins.
Lyle had to have caught the death stare I launched at Officer Buzz Cut because he cut in. “It’s still a rescue, everyone, okay? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Coast Guard is still out, and we need to let them do their jobs. We’re still looking. You know the coast is filled with inlets, and when the tide goes out, new patches of land emerge.”
“Only to be submerged again when the tide comes back in, though,” Buzz Cut returned. “Again, with the type of damage the boat sustained, and the fact they were so far out…”
The lump that had been in my throat had moved down, getting bigger and bigger. It had gone from a pebble to a stone to a boulder. There was so much damn anger. I let out something like a laugh and a sob, slapping my hand over my mouth to keep my emotions in check.Not here.I couldn’t unleash it here, in front of these people who were watching me. I swallowed it all down until there was nothing but dullness.
“You should check harder,” I said, because there was no way hewas going to give up that quick. Holding myself was so hard. I was supposed to be like Nana, calm and rational. Solution-oriented when all I wanted to do was destroy everything.
“She’s not about to be another missing Black girl that you just write off.”
I could imagine the stories he’d heard about the Isle. I could practically hear how they described us when there wasn’t anyone around to stop them. How they spouted stories of us practicing voodoo (an actual religion they wouldn’t even understand), or worse, devil worshipping, and running around like we were uncultured heathens. Like we were wild, how they thought of people from Africa. How they worked so hard to take all of this from us, couldn’t believe this Black family had managed to take and retain an entire island for their own use, and then built a world within a world on it. Thinking we had been the ones to steal, forgetting that if it hadn’t been for them and their greed, we would have never been here. They acted as if we didn’t know hard work. As if we hadn’t suffered. As if we weren’t suffering this very moment.
“It’s not about…” He tried explaining to a crowd who wouldn’t give him an inch, not even Lyle. “In the dark, it’s hard to tell the distance from water to land. And if one, or both of them, was injured and the other was trying to tow them in… with the currents and especially after a freak storm. There is practically no chance they could have swum to shore.”
Screw what he was saying. Naira could have made it. She could have made it back to land.
“We live on an island,” I said. “Grew up in the water. Naira is one of the best swimmers around.”
“Miss, swimming around an island’s shallow waters is a little different than swimming in pitch black in the middle of the Atlantic. There are too many factors they’d be up against. They could swallow so much seawater that it affects mental capacity. Exhaustion. Trauma from the accident. Marine life—”
The way he talked down to me stirred the monster in me. It threatened to come out, to tear the smug look off his face.
